Is Vladimir Putin an Aspie?

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You made that up. I was just theorizing on where the notion that he has Aspergers might have come from.

Sorry, but it certainly sounded as if you were saying the CIA was trying to embarrass Putin or make him look bad. Certainly, the American right has been embracing Putin, even back in the Obama years.

I was. Why wouldn't they?

Last edited by EzraS on 26 Jan 2020, 3:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

My heart belooongs to Vladdy!

Perhaps so. Though the right today tends to call such anti-Putin operations uncalled for, all the while denying that Putin the spymaster is busy trying to destroy us.

He will only destroy us if enough of us cannot be assimilated. So you see, the right will end up saving 327 million people.

I’m not sure if destroying the US/the west in general is what Putin’s after: I find the idea he’s out to
a) sew chaos and intensify partisanship and division.
b) be seen to be doing so: I wouldn’t rule out Kremlin organised disinformation exaggerating their role in the 2016’s US election & UK referendum.
In order to get
c) the appearance of far greater Kremlin power and influence than is really the case, whilst also discrediting democracy (the whole Clinton emails/Trump campaign foreknowledge thing basically guaranteed a controversial presidency mired in doubt as to electoral probity regardless of who won)
Leading to
d) Putin looks like a strong powerful statesman rebuilding Russian might and thus you (the Russian people) should continue to support/tolerate his rule.

Plus Masha Gessen’s point: Putin has personal beef with Clinton over her policy lead visa viz Ukraine.

I doubt very much that, from a Kremlin perspective, Trump is anything more than a useful idiot who can be relied upon to screw up on his own terms without orders or collaboration.

Ditto Johnson & co. over here.

(Where’s the emoji for smacking forehead against a wall when you need it?)

Here you go

cheers!

For clarity I think Putins aims are to keep himself and his mates in the Kremlin, reassert Russian influence in Syria, dismember Ukraine and the Caucasus to Russian territorial advantage and finally soften up the EU to make ready for a reintegration if some at least of the former Warsaw Pact in the medium-long term future (second half of the 2020’s maybe?)
Everything else is smokescreen and distraction to keep us & our leaders eyes off these balls until they can’t stop him.

On the original subject of Putin - AS:
Why when focusing on speculative diagnosis of persons with great influence in modern Russian history does Karl Marx never come up?
Read Das Kapital a few years ago... and several other of his writings and I think a stronger case could be made for him than for either Putin or Stalin.
Just a thought

Putin himself uses similar disinformation against domestic political opponents. Or he used to do that back when Russia still pretended to be democratic, and still had respectable looking elections.

You could imagine our CIA trying to spread rumors that Putin does stuff that J. Edgar Hoover really DID do in private( dress up in drag, and go to all male parties) to discredit him with his own people. So instead of going the gender bending route they might conceivably go the mentally disabled route instead, and spread rumors that Putin is secretly Rain Man, or Sheldon Leonard, in some kind of bid to undermine the Moscow strong man.

But both things: that our CIA is making up dirt, or that Putin really is aspie, are pure speculation. But I doubt that either thing is true. Like I said above Putin is an assassin type, with ice water in his veins. More obviously a sociopath than an aspie. I suppose that aspie could also be a sociopath. But I doubt that an aspie could make it through KGB agent training. Though I am sure that, like our CIA, there are aspies employed in quietscholarly type behind the scenes work at the KGB (mapping, data gathering, mixing chemicals for poisons, etc).

Karl Marx was a scholarly librarian type. Its not as jarringly inconsistent for him to have been an aspie as it is for a former KGB agent to be an aspie. But just because its not jarringly inconsistent for someone to be aspie -that's not evidence of them being an aspie. I don't know of any evidence from Marx's personal life that he was particular autistic in behavior. I don't see how he was anymore aspie than Adam Smith, Keynes, Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman, or any other economics thinker.

Yeah, I agree on Putin if we want to speculatively medicalise his behaviour sociopath is the best fit: but I suspect that that is partly a result of being head of they particular type of state he’s head overseeing they territory and cultures it is, with the interests and problems that entails: and the inherited institutional legacy of the Czars and Stalin as his principle operational tools. He may not have been born sociopathic, but is situation demands that he develop the capacity to act like it to survive...

And I mentioned Marx half serious and half in jest: some things about his life & writings superficially fit, but others don’t fit at all... so probably not.

I read the first message in this thread and then I googled Putin Asperger's.

There is absolutely no evidence that Putin has Asperger's. He was a KGB operative. The social skills required to do that and to ascend politically are beyond the scope of anyone with Asperger's.

Before any of you start up with how people with Asperger's can do anything or should not be limited, Asperger's is an impairment in being able to decode non-verbals and interpersonal communication. Those are requirements to ascend in a tough political environment.


Also, this article said that Asperger's could be diagnosed with a brain scan. https://www.forbes.com/sites/fayeflam/2 ... 531f26af3c

That is not true at all.

Putin has the exact opposite of whatever we, those of us with Asperger's, have.

Nyet

He has admitted in non-western interviews that his aim is to take down America as a world power. If that isn't destroying my country, it's pretty close.
Putin's held a grudge against the US for winning the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and is determined to get his revenge.

I do not worry much about Putin because he has been in power forever, is old as dirt now and still has not done anything close to taking down America. He has gotten past the point of put up or shut up. If Adolf had taken that long to get the ball rolling Poland would not have been invaded until 1959 or later.

At one time, the notion of allowing themselves to be assimilated by the Russians or anyone would have been supposedly unthinkable for the American right.