Are the following bolded quotes Russophobic?

[TheReckoning]

     I don't really support Russia's invasion and am praying for peace to be restored to Ukraine. At the same time, I generally find myself more aligned with Russia's values than with America's ones and that makes it hard for me to assign much value to America's side in the overarching geopolitical rivalry. I guess I could be called pro-Russia, though I am not sure if that applies to the question the OP is asking.

Glad to hear you support the the values of jailing and murdering political opponents, allowing gay people to be sent to concentration camps and banning any discussion of LGBTQ people in the media. You must really hate your country if you support that over it.

     Not what I said at all, but I entirely expected that "being more aligned with Russia's values" would be read as "uncritically supportive of the current regime", as if Russia had no existence or meaning beyond Vladimir Putin.

Well why don’t you tell us what these “Russian values” you support are? Because by saying you prefer Russian values to your own country’s, I can only conclude that you hate freedom, democracy, peace and justice.

[HisGrace]

Sounds accurate to me

[Hindsight was 2020]

I mean this was Pit’s answer

    Snip

Snip

     Snip

Well why don’t you tell us what these “Russian values” you support are? Because by saying you prefer Russian values to your own country’s, I can only conclude that you hate freedom, democracy, peace and justice.

     I don't believe that Western secularism is sufficient to prevent the rise of immorality and that a superior system of government is a confessional state founded in the doctrines of the Orthodox Church. Obviously Russia is not such a confessional state today, but it is hard to deny that Russia is a closer fit for such a bill than the United States is.

This is a paragraph that doesn't say anything concrete. What exactly do you prefer in Russia over the secularist US? Be honest- is it the deep loathing of gay people? Or the sexism?

     It is exactly as concrete as it needs to be, because it points to the actual basis on which moral judgments properly should be made. If you want to ignore that and practice amateur psychoanalysis on someone you don't know except through a computer screen, that's your business.

Kinda hard not to see that as Pit saying he’s likes the authoritarian/jailing gay people thing they got going on

[Electric Circus]

PiT's responses seem awfully credulous with respect to (A) the relationship between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Russian state and (B) the way in which Russia tries to present itself to certain international audiences.

I would have asked him about this rather than getting snarky and inadvertently conceding to a particular conception of "Russia's values." I have engaged with PiT enough on this website to know that I would get an honest response, whether I liked it or not.

I don't like it when someone pretends to be in conversation with another person when they're really just there to humiliate them in front of others. It's especially unhelpful when you fear that said person is radicalizing.

As a side note, Putin's latest major speech somewhat undermines the point that Russia is a reliable bulwark against creeping Western secularism (or however you prefer to put it):

Our soldiers and officers - Christians and Muslims, Buddhists and followers of Judaism, representatives of different ethnic groups, cultures, regions, in fact, have proven better than a thousand words that the centuries-old cohesion and unity of the people of Russia is a colossal, invincible force. All together, shoulder to shoulder, they fight for one common Motherland.

I'm not pointing this out to suggest that Vladimir Putin is about to slap a COEXIST sticker on his car's bumper, but because this tells you something about Late Stage Putinism and its priorities. Younger Russians are more religiously and ethnically diverse than older Russians, and the Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine are even more diverse.

[Hindsight was 2020]

PiT's responses seem awfully credulous with respect to (A) the relationship between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Russian state and (B) the way in which Russia tries to present itself to certain international audiences.

I would have asked him about this rather than getting snarky and inadvertently conceding to a particular conception of "Russia's values." I have engaged with PiT enough on this website to know that I would get an honest response, whether I liked it or not.

I don't like it when someone pretends to be in conversation with another person when they're really just there to humiliate them in front of others. It's especially unhelpful when you fear that said person is radicalizing.

As a side note, Putin's latest major speech somewhat undermines the point that Russia is a reliable bulwark against creeping Western secularism (or however you prefer to put it):

Our soldiers and officers - Christians and Muslims, Buddhists and followers of Judaism, representatives of different ethnic groups, cultures, regions, in fact, have proven better than a thousand words that the centuries-old cohesion and unity of the people of Russia is a colossal, invincible force. All together, shoulder to shoulder, they fight for one common Motherland.

I'm not pointing this out to suggest that Vladimir Putin is about to slap a COEXIST sticker on his car's bumper, but because this tells you something about Late Stage Putinism and its priorities. Younger Russians are more religiously and ethnically diverse than older Russians, and the Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine are even more diverse.

I don’t think it was unfair snark, it is really hard to not read the later stuff Pit said in the thread and not conclude that Alcibiades was correct from the onset. I mean how is “I don't believe that Western secularism is sufficient to prevent the rise of immorality” not sounding like a call for a authoritarian theocratic regime?

[Electric Circus]

I don’t think it was unfair snark, it is really hard to not read the later stuff Pit said in the thread and not conclude that Alcibiades was correct from the onset. I mean how is “I don't believe that Western secularism is sufficient to prevent the rise of immorality” not sounding like a call for a authoritarian theocratic regime?

This wasn't some random pro-Russian troll who showed up to cause trouble. PiT is a longtime poster, and someone who has remained capable of having a respectful conversation even as his politics have changed. His comments in that thread are disturbing, but he's not endorsing mass political executions and concentration camps.

That's secondary to the main point, which is that apologists for the Russian government should not be treated as arbiters of Russian values by virtue of their support for this war.

[Alcibiades]

I suppose I should say that there is one important point I didn’t mention in the quoted exchange which I would wish to make now. I presume that what PiT was getting at with his praise for ‘Russian values’ was something like that Russia better represents what, in the American parlance, are called ‘traditional family values’ than Western liberal democratic societies. But Russia has some of the highest abortion and divorce rates in the world, higher in both instances than any country in Western Europe or North America. If there is to be any mileage to social conservatism as a serious ideology beyond mere unthinking bigotry and reaction, then it must surely be found in its promoting strong families and communities, as against the kind of dysfunction and atomisation that is perhaps more prevalent in Russia than any other society.

Once we have subtracted the realities of modern Russia represented by the aforementioned statistics from any claim it has to being a model for resisting ‘the rise of immorality’ as encouraged by ‘Western secularism’, then, even on a maximally charitable construal of PiT’s argument (and this is not easy, for what strikes me most rereading that exchange is his evasiveness), it is hard to see what could possibly be left apart from praise for the deplorable attitudes towards, for instance, homosexuality and domestic violence which are both officially endorsed by the Russian state and shared by much of the populace.

[Upper Canada Tory]

I am not sure what 'Russophobic' means is this context, but those quotes certainly did not imply a bigotry or ethnic hatred of Russians.

PiT said he had a preference for Russia in the geopolitical rivalry due to 'Russian values' - if you are saying you sympathize with one side geopolitically, you are talking about political values, not cultural ones.

Russia is an authoritarian state that has committed the human rights abuses discussed in the reply, so it's hard not to see that is having a preference for a more authoritarian system (maybe not supportive of all the human rights abuses per se, but at the very least the system of government that produced them).

I'm aware there are people who refer to Russia's collectivism and social conservatism as values they would like to emulate, but I am not sure why that means you would need to side with Russia in a geopolitical rivalry, as those are cultural. (Maybe one could infer that those cultural values contribute to Russia having an authoritarian government - but if you make that connection and support those values, you probably want the authoritarian government as well).