Comparisons always cut both ways. You’re saying both those things, even if you only wanted to say one.

I’ll take the explanation though.

It cuts both ways in you. You read both things when one was written, for an internal reason. That’s an important distinction. Otherwise there would be no way to say one thing without implying another. Human speech can generate lots of collateral associations, but all of them live in the mind of a listener. “Assume good faith”.

A good writer predicts and suppresses associations in advance, but it’s not always feasible. The main issue itt is that skewed associations are its own topic.

In me and anyone else exposed to Russian propaganda, which is probably just about everyone.

But in this case it’s also the literal meaning. You can’t say (or imply) that A is just as bad as B without also saying that B is no worse than A. Call it the anti-symmetric property of partial orderings if that helps.

> But in this case it’s also the literal meaning. You can’t say (or imply) that A is just as bad as B without also saying that B is no worse than A.

Wrong on two counts.

1. These kinds of comparisons hone in on the thing the two things have in common. Invading places. This goes back to my “salient commonality” point. Which you rejected. But now you’re back to claiming that a comparison makes things equal. They don’t. They show that two things have two specific things in common.

2. “You’re saying both those things”, referring to my second thing “it’s okay that Russia did it!” (the wrong interpretation). Somehow you’ve gone from “these two things are just as bad” (covered by (1)) to “therefore Russia doing it is okay”. I still can’t make sense of that.

> Call it the anti-symmetric property of partial orderings if that helps.

Dressing it up in fancy language doesn’t make it true.

> Comparisons always cut both ways. You’re saying both those things, even if you only wanted to say one.

I can’t coax your interpretation into the correct lane. Even when they are so obviously wrong.