> Russia’s economy is smaller than Canada’s and per capita it’s citizens are poorer than Poles.

> Russia is not a world power and hasn’t been for a while.

IIRC, they know that. That's why one of their main foreign policy objectives is to sow division and discord. Russia is weak compared to NATO as a whole, but it's strong compared to most individual NATO countries.

Depends on how you measure power. In this context, I think military power, Russia is the most formidable force in the eastern hemisphere.

Russia has the ambition to be great again. And nukes.

And it is actually very sad, lots of their working class, really believe that Putin actually is successfully pulling it off.

You could say the same about America and Trump. The masses always will consume the propaganda, I don't see how this will ever be eliminated. Rather than sad, it's just part of the system. How can we improve the results? Is there a systems-thinking approach that takes this into account and bends it toward positive ends?

The difference is that US arguably has long been "great": great educational institution, great high-tech corps, great cinema etc.

Preach.

This is a scary situation.

And I believe HN/Ycombinator cater to the crowd that actually has the ability to disrupt this status quo. People that can really change things for the better.

Let's turn this ship around. Solving this problem can be how SV rewrites it's history to become known for more than attention draining and advertising schemes.

It was clear to me why people voted for trump the first time round. (Although, many experts believe it was more about voting against Clinton than for trump.)

He was an outsider/wildcard/Maverick and perceived smart businessman so his promises to clean up the corruption seemed more plausible than the entrenched status quo.

Now that his lack of business acumen, lack of general intelligence, non-existent diplomacy, zero empathy, and pure personal greed mixed with nepotism and corruption has been laid bare, I understand those who plan to vote for him next time round very little except through the lens of identity politics and hate/racism/xenophobia/epistemonophobia.

There's a really good lens for understanding this called Spiral Dynamics, a scientific model of the evolution/development of consciousness which is the work of Clare Graves.

If you understand that Trump is at the red/orange level of consciousness, and so is a huge chunk of the American population, it's obvious why they will vote for him.

The stage red / stage orange worldview is pretty clearly what conservative Americans operate on, (and many are very on stage blue also).

The majority of liberal Americans are operating on stages orange and green.

And these are still all tier 1 of 2 tiers in the model.

They still have nuclear weapons. And they have enough propaganda / hybrid war capability to get Trump elected. Maybe not a world superpower but dangerous nonetheless.

I'm more interested in why Russia still tries to continue Cold War and fight the West. Contrary to what many Russians believe (or at least what they write online), West is not out to get them - other than to sell them shitty products made in China with crazy markup and make them watch internet ads.

Meanwhile China is slowly taking over Siberia with all the mineral and material goodies and they aren't doing anything about that.

Almost like it's more about pretending than about actual power.

As much as I abhor Putin, he sort of has a point, if you look at the geopolitical history since the breakup of the Soviet Union. At the time, the US and western Europe were quick to bring many of the former republics into their fold, then into NATO (despite promising not to do so), which Putin sees as an affront and a threat to Russia's sovereignty, which in turn is why he finally invaded Ukraine (twice!) as well as Georgia: He will not tolerate NATO at his doorstep.

As for why Putin still sees the West as the enemy, I don't think we can analyze Putin outside the context of the Soviet Union. He doesn't quite want to bring it back, but it's abundantly clear from his statements that he's never abandoned the idea that Russia has a claim to Eastern Europe (if not outright as its ruler, then certainly as a cultural protector), that he sees Western culture as encroaching on Russia's. From his perspective the West is out to get Russia. That's a legitimate geopolitical concern, of course; all states desire to protect their sovereignty and sphere of influence. What's unusual is that Russia has been able to wield so much military and cultural power relative to its small size, which is why we're even talking about it. I think it's incredibly scary just how much better Putin is at playing this game than the seemingly gullible Western powers.

Where it gets tricky is Putin's other side as a cold-hearted authoritarian gangster keeping a tenuous network of equally gangster oligarchs in place. If Russia ever becomes democratic and its judicial system restored, Putin would end up going the way of Saddam Hussein. (He's not going to get the Idi Amin treatment.) So you can't see Putin's political moves exclusively through the lens of statesmanship either; in choosing to be a ruthless kleptocrat, he's ruled out the possibility of a peaceful succession, and that's yet another complex factor driving the fate of Russia.

What do you think about the idea that it's all about Putin's revenge on USA for the attempted assassination?

Um, what attempted assassination?

I think what's really going on is the usual. If you're stealing your country blind, manufacture foreign enemies and blame them, so the people at home think you're a hero instead of a villain.

I was wrong about attempted assassination, was thinking of Bush's: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/clinton-punishes...