> Putin is intelligent, no doubt

Russia was a super power with some of the best engineers in the world. Today it needs to use war to keep another Slav country on its side. Even the UK keeps the commonwealth in place even with very diverse countries that used to be forced colonies.

To not have a conscience does not make you intelligent. Russia should be economically and socially way more developed that it currently is. To sell gas is not high tech.

> There needs to be liability established for publishing private and personal information;

Europe has the General Data Protection Regulation.

Is not that the nord stream 2 pipeline? Germany was able to buy Russian gas without problem. Why build the new pipe?

It seems that Germany thought that Russia was a rational player interested in growing their economy, but it seems that it was just power play for personal aspirations.

That happened in the Spanish civil war. Guernica famous painting depicts the bombing by Italian and German aviation of the city of Guernica.

The United Kingdom didn't wanted to be part of it, thou.

Ironically, I think that more countries intervention would have make the Spanish war bloodier but it could have stopped World War II.

"Learned helplessness is behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control."

The key part is beyond their control. As a society we are being trained to see software beyond our control. "The algorithm" decides. Many non software engineers fail to see that behind each software decision there is a company that can change it.

Learned helplessness is dangerous even just because improvement becomes impossible when people just accepts software like if it was the physical laws of the universe.