Have politicians and oligarchs always been this fucking pathetic, or is this new? It's hard to take evil people seriously when they act like this, and I'm 99% sure that's why they do it. It's performative, it gives them plausible deniability, "they're not evil, they're just stupid." They're underestimated and downplayed, just another distraction.

You know? Maybe they're not innately evil and are "just" stupid, but there comes a point at which willful refusal to learn and active choices to cling to decisions and mindsets that hurt and exploit and kill people for personal gain becomes indistinguishable. You can be stupid AND evil, even if there's no such thing as a magical gene that makes people automatically invariably evil.

Obscene wealth, on the other hand, doesn't 100% invariably guarantee being heartlessly cruel but the odds are extremely high.

And the odds of any person who continues to live ever finally having something get through to them enough to start learning better and improving on any issue are never technically zero... but the odds for the richest tyrants are astronomically slim for every individual issue and inconceivably near-zero to come around on every big thing. The cost in lives and livelihood is of far bigger and more immediate concern than the fact that any one tyrant "could" theoretically learn better someday.

There are hypothetical timelines where any of these bastards never became evil, but we don't live in those timelines. There are hypothetical futures where any of them have such profoundly life-changing experiences that they turn around and start pouring out the hoarded wealth to try to make amends, but we can worry about those futures if we ever see one.

"No one is inherently immutably evil" and "there are people who by all metrics are still evil right here and now" are coexisting statements. And when faced with people who want you or your friends and neighbors dead, whether or not they have the technical capacity to not want people dead is frankly fucking irrelevant.