Whhooooaaa......I outlasted Putin? WTF!??!!!? Now I know the world has gone to hell.

I'm sad to see him go, truly.

#Free Putin!!!!!

Multis are multis.

"What always bugged me as someone who tended to agree with Putin more than most is that people would automatically discount anything he had to say because of who he was. "

Actually, I discounted things he said becuase he *very* often lied, mistated information, contorted information, used blatantly faulty logic, etc etc etc. He twisted and perverted history. The things he claimed to hate in one statement he would praise in the next (depending on who did the thing he claimed to hate/love). There were a thousand reason to discount everything Putin said for every thousand posts he made.

But I'm still sad to see him go.

If multis are multis then all ducks are the same. If all ducks are the same, there should be no second chances for anyone, or a second chance for everyone ever banned, and this isn't the case.

These recent bans are not all the same, and not the same as a typical cheating ban.

They shouldn't be treated the same, and they aren't nearly as solid as a cheating ban.

Chaqa - people come, people go. Such is life. Let it go, bro...

Draug wasn't banned for multis, but he tried to circumvent it with multis, as if they were hard to catch or something because he thinks he's better than us. In that way, yeah, he's like other multis. If it were a first offense, I would venture to say he would be forgiven, like most other first time offenders, but given that it was far beyond his first offense, it was an immediate ban and continued ban, like other multis.

Had to respect him when he was on, like all of us he was pure BS at other times. Smart guy though.

Define "smart"?

Someone who could use his intellect to confuse and befuddle others and make it difficult to divorce the two or three points coming at you in a coherent manner.

smart (adj.): see Putin33

DUH, it's right there in the Putinary

Good riddance.

Carazy - I disgree - what you are describing is less "Putin is smart" and more "the people that fell for his lies are ignorant....". There is a massive qualitative difference....

Putin33 brought a lot of life to the forum. He wholeheartedly embraced the negative aspects of his world view, from dictators to censorship; it made you wonder how he could really want what he wanted, but there's no accounting for taste. His inability to compromise on anything, or break ranks with an ally, was frustrating; however once you stopped trying to obtain a compromise, it's all cool. It's good to have some left-field ideas around.

I suspect Putin33's pathological inability to give ground on anything caught the mods in a private argument that was going to take forever and get no place. I don't see anything in the forum, from him, that's even a fraction of what a lot of other people here do. Nor was he a mapleleaf-style troll (how is mapleleaf not banned, voluntary exile aside?) Is frustrating the mods a bannable offense now? If he couldn't promise to refrain from insults, he should just get the 2-week or whatever silence as and when the rules were broken, not this "3-strikes life sentence" nonsense.

I wish he wasn't banned.

I think it's safe to say that I fought with Putin as bitterly and, this summer during certain "events," fierce and probably angrily as anyone here...

If he meant the things he said,
If he does stand by Putin, Stalin, Assad, the Kims (let me list his rogues gallery once more),
If he really does think that "Conquest is Peace," and terrorism justified,
If he really doesn't think Antisemitism is a major problem now,
If he honestly thinks the Beatles were culturally insignificant, and Shakespeare rubbish...

Then I stand by that bitterness--if that's who he really is, then I didn't like the real Putin, and was frankly and oftentimes disgusted by him.

But I still wish her were here...not out of any respect for his views, but simply because he argued them so long and with a queer cold passion all his own, that he really DID add something to the site. I may not have liked the something...but it WAS a something, and something very distinct...

And I think I speak for more than just myself when I say that disagreeing so ardently with Putin's views have certainly helped me flesh out my own as a result.

We had that long, long, LONG and heated exchange across several different threads during the Israeli/Hamas War this summer...and while I still disagree with just about everything he said and how he framed and viewed everything, not many people would be willing to battle it out for literally hundreds of posts over at least half a dozen threads, day after day, week after week. I don't know if that's commendable commitment or condemnable stubbornness...

But love it or hate it, it DID color the site for a week or two there, and even if you hate it when the site's clogged with non-Diplomacy threads, and even more so when it's filled with bile-spewing political debates, that's still part of what makes WebDip WebDip, that we do and always HAVE had those debates, and been able to feel one another out over the issues of the day that are actually pressing and really do matter (that and gauging whether the Kinks are better than the Beatles, of course.)

And now an important--if for my part much-loathed--part of that is lost.

If those were his real views, then I still hate him...

But self-destructive or no, Ahab's a little emptier and lonelier without that damned White Whale.

:/

You know how other forums, boring-as-shit forums, don't have a Putin33 on their site? This forum is more like that now.

Good riddance. He was and is a genuinely terrible person. While obviously educated, he was more of a bullshit artist than anything else.

Did he really do anything to merit a ban? I don't know. If the mods didn't ban him when he posted pictures of beheadings in Bosnia to support his abominable argument that only Croatians committed atrocities and Serbs never orchestrated a genocide, then I can't think of what he could have done lately to support a ban.

But I don't care. Putin33 can go jump in lake.

That's awfully "ends justify the means" authoritarian of you.

No, it's very "I don't like him, so don't care whether what happened was 'fair'" of me.

Is there a difference?

A clear one. Justification to me is irrelevant.

This guy denied that a genocide that happened barely twenty years ago even occurred. Fuck him.

Yes, one leads to imperialism and the other leads to genocide.

I miss nonchalantly calling him putain

Justification to you is irrelevant. You just wanted him gone, regardless of how it was done.

I didn't want him gone. But I'm not going to pretend I'm sad he is or criticize how it happened. He's an awful person.

The indignation on both sides of this above argument...a fitting tribute to Putin, lol...

Now, who's up for breaking into a Red Army-style chorus of Friendship and Labor? :p

(Though if he did deny that genocide...I'm not surprised, but yeah, gotta side with Invictus on the anger there.)

Nobody denies that he had some issues, but so do tons of other people on this forum and nobody advocates banning them. Let's focus on remembering the guy rather than flinging shit at him while he's down and unable to defend himself.

Funny thing, though, is that is is beginning to look like a game website around here.

I flung shit when he was here, and I'll do it now. I won't pretend I liked him.