• Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
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      edit-2
      10 months ago

      You seem to think that German politicians have some “secret calculations”, but there aren’t

      Of course there are and it's ridiculous to claim otherwise. Every politician (hell, every individual) considers the effects of their words and what they say or don't say is influenced by that. This is a basic fundamental truth, literally nothing you say could convince me it's wrong lol. Maybe you misunderstood what I meant? That's the only reason I could imagine you disagreeing with it.

      Germany’s position on sanctioning Russian gas was heavily reliant on the following two papers that were published in early March 2022

      I don't read German, unfortunately. Think tanks have the same incentives to say things people want to hear as anybody else, so it doesn't mean much to me regardless. None of this stuff is what I look at to draw conclusions from which is why I think our approaches are just fundamentally incompatible. All the evidence you've presented can be explained by my narrative just as well as yours.

      It’s just plain old political and bureaucratic processes based on faulty assumptions of a complex scenario.

      I think I'd be more receptive towards your argument if you were claiming like, they thought the threat of sanctions would be painful enough to deter Russia from crossing the West due to the influence of Russian capitalists. But it would take extraordinary evidence to convince me that everyone essentially just forgot that China exists. It's very obvious to me (and was at the time) that sanctions alone would not cause Russia to collapse and I am unwilling to accept that policy makers with access to much more information and intelligence than me could be so much dumber than me, when more plausible explanations exist.

      Sanctions didn't even bring down Afghanistan, nobody seriously believed they'd bring down Russia, it's absurd on its face.