Ya'll got any of that... global warming?
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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They don't care about "the natural world", except insofar that they enjoy being in nature and they don't think that the living standards of the swinish multitude justifies a diminution of their own pleasures. They do not regard "humans" as a cancer, they regard other people as a cancer. The non-elites.
Oh, I definitely don't think they're very smart. It's just that there is one set of reasons that they have for stuff, and another that they sell to the populace. "Your living standards need to decrease so that we have higher standard relative to you" isn't going to cut it, so they invent phony narratives.
Elites are the most immoral and unscrupulous people around, which is how they got to be elites. Even if they inherited wealth, they also inherited the immoral and unscrupulous genes from the people who got to where they were by nefarious means.
As if they have any actual power. They are but pawns of the elites, as "leaders" everywhere are. You yourself pointed out that Putin is constrained by elite opinion. And that's a "dictator"! How much more would that be true in a "democracy".
I'm not asserting any 'secret group'. Fact is that if you have money, then you have power. Fact is that lobbies, MNOs and NGOs have a lot of power. Fact is that the interests of these people differ markedly from ours.
And preferably have a regression in living standards. There is a quote in Nineteen Eighty Four where Orwell says that Inner Party members did not have great living standards, but that because everyone else was miserable, even small comforts granted all the more social standing.
I agree, and think that is the root of it. As their main hobby, these rich elites primarily travel to exotic places of natural beauty and think "wow these filthy humans are destroying all this".
I do think they look down on humans. If anything, they see themselves as something special and greater than an ordinary human. Some might have some self-hatred but this just fuels their liberal virtue signaling more.
I'm sure that's true sometimes, but a lot of the time they actually believe their own bullshit.
He might be constrained, but he is the lease constrained person in russia in terms of wielding power. It's just very rare historically to have a person who is almost completely devoid of constraint like Stalin or Mao.
Biden does have a lot of power. Sure, it's less than Putin compared to his countrymen, but Biden is still individually the most powerful person in America.
I don't think any liberal has self-hatred. Rather, they attack white people so that they appear to be "one of the good ones". These people really have no elevated motives beyond self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement.
A while back, the EU was proposing a tax on aviation. Guess what was exempted. Their private jets. I mean, there may be idiots among the elites who actually believe it, but even if they did believe this stuff, they would not be supporting the specific policies unless they were to their benefit.
Only ordinary people who support this grift do so against their self-interest.
Even Stalin and Mao were plenty constrained. According to Kotkin, Stalin solidified his position post-Ryutin by implementing what all the elites wanted (collectivization) and none were able to actually accomplished. Mao faced a lot of backlash after the Secret Speech, and especially after the Great Leap Forward, which is why he started the Cultural Revolution - which was a true revolution in the sense that Mao instrumentalized the people in order to increase his own power.
Now image if something hit Putin on the head, and he announced that he was going to withdraw from all of 'Ukraine' and give Rostov to 'Ukraine' as reparations. What do you think would happen? He would be assassinated within 24 hours, and all these promises would be repudiated, because he does not actually hold power. All leaders are balancers between various forces of the elites, in order to maintain their own independence and whatever power they have - which is never enormous.
This is at least my take. You will have to admit that who holds power, how, and how much is extremely opaque. It's never who holds power on paper.
Holding 1.2% of the power would make you the most powerful person in America. Is that amount of power significant? No, because it is outweighed of the 98.8% that the rest of the elites hold.
I don't believe that at all. Putting aside the silly Rostov thing you threw in to rig the hypothetical, if Putin simply said "war is over, we will withdraw to the prewar borders and leave Crimea/Donbas" he would receive broad support from both his people as well as the elites.
Putin is dragging his elites along grudgingly into this war, and pushing their limits. The Russian elite don't want this war and hope it will be over ASAP. While they won't be happy with a national humiliation, if that means an end to sanctions and if it means they can play in their private jets and yachts in Europe again, they'll be happy.
The far right in Russia is very weak, and quite a lot of them are dead now, since those are the type of people who would have volunteered last year.
I wanted to make the treason as plainly obvious as possible. What you describe would certainly lead to his fall, and quite possibly to his death a la Beria, who was thought by the Politburo to have pulled a similar stunt (causing the German uprising with his liberalization).
Question: do you think the bureaucracy, the army and the FSB are going to be happy at that? The oligarchs don't have any power anymore. That's one of the good things Putin did. The security forces are in charge.