When you have a small elite, they don’t need to collude, they just develop a common climate of thought and common understanding of the future.

What pains me to think about - that these people are really brilliant for the most part, those whose names I know. Even Steve Jobs. And they were brilliant still for a few years after getting significant power.

That power still corrupted them, and this amount of “brilliant” is like a whole era, a whole phenomenon of humanity, being proven wrong.

Early 90s Apple is very nice to learn about, and early 90s Microsoft was powerful, but not evil yet, and early 90s Oracle was a really good company. And remember what Google was in its early years, they seemed the front line of the new age of openness and freedom. I won’t say anything good about early Facebook, but apparently it too managed to be good for someone.

So much for corporate propaganda.

Zelensky is a bit like a CEO presenting his company’s prospects. He was talking like this two years ago, too.

I personally think he’s not wrong. Just - until Kremlin gang’s members and their families are being caught and jailed\deported all over the globe, or at least in NATO countries, this is all bullshit. Well, maybe after failing in Ukraine they’ll attack some smaller and weaker country, just to show themselves they can defeat someone. And maybe they’ll try again.

In any case - yes, that leadership keeps Russia weak, inefficient, dependent, but as everyone can see, it’s also capable of destruction on scale too big to allow. So maybe some optimism should be applied and the goal be for Russia’s regime to change and for it to have a democracy that may make its potential useful for everyone around. The “keeping it weak” approach, after all, has already led to Putin.

Source for what you said?..

Yes, impeding something is ultimately an increase in cost. That’s how it works.

The right-wing shift is part of a global failure of established governments.

Yes! Thank you.

Just as the next left-wing shift won’t be a result of humanity getting smarter somehow, it will be a result of right-wing policies failing. And that shift won’t lead to any improvement either.

It’s a pendulum.

People are willing to tolerate a failing system longer, when it aligns on surface with their own views. This is similar to people on the right defending Pinochet and death squadrons.

And people on the left 20 years ago would defend a lot of things about USSR or Che Gevara or stuff like this, even not being tankies.

Tribalism leads to degeneracy.