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Comment by benterix | Hacker News Reader

> It's not just their leadership. It's the nation.

I completely disagree. I know anecdata is useless but since you are generalizing I can as well add that all Russians I met, without exception, are normal people who just want to live a normal life, not to kill. And then there is the smaller violent part that is happy to mug, beat, and kill others, including their own people. What I can agree is that Russia has quite a problem with this "pat B" of their population because of systemic issues. But generalizing it like this, on the whole nation, is just like saying that violence has gender, rich people are bad and so on.

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The issue with Russians as a nation comes from the fact that they dream of their great great empire. Collapse of Soviet Union was a mistake. Their mindset is similar to MAGA in that sense. Make Russia great again.

Next time you meet a Russian again ask about what they think about Russian Empire. Or who gets to keep Crimea.

This is the nature of polarization. Of course you will find many Russians that are hard nationalists and you will also find many that prefer open societies and chances are that the likelihood of you encountering one or the other depends on your social bubble

The right question isn't "do you want your country to be greater", it is "do you think it's something worth starting a war over".

Have a look what normal Russians are saying:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuZEvNlpKxg

It's by a guy who works for BBC and basically translates bits of Russian papers on his channel everyday.

Nations have a tipping point where the violent minority can take power if there are enough of them. "Enough" might be only 10%. So a nation with 10% violent people is violent, while a nation with 9% violent people is peaceful.

It would be very hard to notice the difference between 10% and 9% by just meeting people. You'd have to meet and evaluate 1000s to measure it accurately enough. But you sure do notice the difference as a neighboring country when the tanks roll in.

So you do sometimes have to say things about nations despite it only reflecting a statistically small difference in people.

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