Spies are a curse on Russia.
They put all their effort into spying on countries rather than developing their own industries.
They are not in the least an incompetent people. But they are governed incompetently.
This is such a good point.
Putin’s supporters here and elsewhere like to emphasize that Putin brought Russia back from the depths of the 1990s and his authoritarian governance through vote-rigging and assassinations and so on are just the price to be paid for stable progress.
But the measure of success is not where Russia is now versus where it was when Putin took power.
The proper measure is what did Putin achieve given what he had to work with?
Russia’s greatest resource is not its oil and gas and other mineral assets. It is Russia’s people.
Putin isn’t working with the population of Somalia. He was given a highly literate, intelligent population with a culture that highly values science and technology as his resource and he failed utterly to even begin to realize the potential of his people.
Putin is a failure in so many ways.
They’re a curse on America, Israel, Europe, everywhere. So are nuclear bombs, wars, fossil fuels (but not because of global warming, which is BS), etc. We live in an imperfect world, and efforts to perfect it are slow and cumbersome, and marred by bad faith and mendacity, and all of these things remain necessary evils for the foreseeable future.
Bigotry, class envy, fanaticism, etc., are evils of choice. And some choose to wallow in them, along with sexual perversion, corruption of children, political corruption, etc. No need to name names, I think.