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Inspired by a comment from Pineapple Stu on the American Politics thread... how would you rank this list of madmen in terms of most maniacal and diabolical to least? Any why :)
Trump
Putin
Netanyahu
Ali Khameini
Kim Jong
Xi
Modi
Erdogan
Ortega
Maduro
Others? I am light on my list of African madmen who will destroy the world, given that their world was already destroyed.
The President of Turkmenistan (I think his son is technically in charge now) is bat**** crazy. Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow
You'd have to add the Saudi royal family to the list also - ostensibly cosy with the West, but all the while using their oil revenues to finance mosques promoting their particularly fundamentalist branch of Islam.
Probably Orban and Lukashenko would go in too - albeit they're more pawns than major pieces I feel. Aliyev in Azerbaijan as well - nice little bit of ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh lately, and the story of Gurgen Margaryan's murder in Budapest by an Azeri officer whose freedom was later bought and whose back-pay was restored is a particularly nasty one.
Definitely the Saudis. A concerning reach into Europe too, through the likes of moderate (but poor) countries like North Macedonia and Kosovo.
I can't quite work out where to put Trump in that list. Netanyahu and Putin are up at the top for me in terms of direct impact for obvious reasons, but the Saudis are more subtle and the subtle trolls are often the most dangerous ones. Is Trump just a callous, self-centred idiot who's only interested in money? I can't quite tell.
Right now I think Netanyahu is number 1, then Putin and Trump as an enabler. But in terms of a direct threat to western civilisation, I think the Saudis have the potential to rank higher.
Ali Khamenei, Kim and so on are nut jobs but really their influence is a step down - and I think there's hope in Iran in that popular feeling is against him, albeit as we say with the hijab protests, the police are still quite powerful.
Thanks for entertaining this, all. Good call on Al Saud not sure how I missed them/him.
Stu, I actually was having the same trouble in terms of the top 3-5 mad lads which is why I threw it up here! I’d agree on the placings you’ve come up with too! It was quite sobering coming up with that list of psychopaths (plus the additions) and realizing that Trump is probably not even close to the most dangerous/problemstic.
I know this is obvious of the dead crazies (and not uncommon) but anyone ever watch any of those YouTube videos on how insane Gaddafi got over time?
The Legion of female bodyguards aside. His original manifesto back in the day kinda makes some sense. By the end with the plastic surgery without anesthesia...
But that surgeon was from Brazil and saw many of Gaddafi's people on his compound and even some hookers and didn't meet one Libyan. All the people around him were from other countries. He was paranoid of the ENTIRE population of 7.3 million ppl.
AND the compound was relatively big but not so big, and none of the servants or "workers" on the compound actually knew where he even lived in there.
That's the mild stuff.