I have to agree with the sentiment expressed by the social media posts shown in the article. If your country’s electricity infrastructure is so fragile that a monkey could take it offline then it’s probably time to take a hard look at investing in improving its resilience.

I want to add a third thing to this list:

3. Feeling left behind by mainstream political parties.

The parties in power surely pay lip service to the issues that concern the young but very rarely do they actually do anything about it.

I don’t think anything I say will convince you, so I will make no further attempt to do so.

This comment is concerning. People believe things for a reason and to dismiss them as “cockamamie nonsense” is beyond useless; it’s damaging.

For one, to believe that is to close one’s eyes to the reasons that people are behaving in this way. They’re not insane and if you want to simply assume that they behave this way because they are insane then you will make no progress at all in stopping the far-right from seizing more and more power while you’re left wondering why a greater and greater number of your countrymen are acting “insane”.

Venezuelan immigrants in the US are sympathetic to the rhetoric of Trump and other right-wing figures because the authoritarian Maduro regime in Venezuela is strongly associated with socialism. It is under the banner of socialism that Maduro has destroyed Venezuela’s democracy and economy, so the strong dislike of anything even slightly resembling what was presented as “socialism” to them in Venezuela is a reactionary one.

There is a reason for people voting the way they do. And if you can understand the reason that things are the way they are, you can work to change them.

Machiavelli wrote about this. People don’t need to love you for your power to be secure, and in fact, it’s far preferable to be respected because people fear you than to be respected because people love you.

I’ve heard it said before that most of China’s geopolitical strategies can be explained with two statements:

1. War is bad for business.
2. China is big on business.