Immediately, researchers noticed a rush of neural activity in the caudate nucleus. This is the part of the brain known to process rewards.

However, they wanted to know one more thing: Does revenge keep rewarding? The Long-Term Effects of Revenge Creating and accusing the Other, the enemy is part of the political practice in Sri Lanka. Rulers speak of imperialist conspiracy, Tamil separatism, Muslim Wahabism, NGO betrayals, Christian conversions or what not. They make ‘others’ monsters ready to pounce on the hapless majority, destroy them and conquer Sri Lanka. Ece Temelkuran, author of Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now, has pointed out that the west has been used to thinking they’re more advanced than the rest of the world. But the recent slide towards populism shows that we’re actually behind countries like her native Turkey, and are being offered a glimpse of our near-future. In Together, she shows how resisting this rise of polarisation and hatred means adopting a new mindset – reacquainting ourselves with community, finding better strategies than anger, and learning to have faith rather than easily undermined hope. Temelkuran’s work cuts through easy reactions like cynicism and rage, and shows us how to engage again. There is a healthy way to deal with these feelings that can help you heal and give your brain the same amount of rewards without the consequences. Healthy Revenge I came away from Moises Naim’s latest book, The Revenge of Power, feeling like I had a better grasp of the causes and consequences of the craziness of politics over the last few years – Brexit, Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, internet trolls and disinformation, Q-Anon and all the rest.Naim describes how politics has devolved into pure spectacle and has now blurred the lines between entertainment and politics. Naim points to Berlusconi of Italy and Trump of the U.S. as examples of leaders who are more style than substance. Naim offers his readers a simple premise. There has been a global shift toward autocracy around the world in the last 20 years. According to Naim, this drifting away from democracy and into autocracy has been accomplished without one war or battle. The transition from liberal democracies to autocracies that disguise themselves as democratic institutions has been dramatic. Argentina, Brazil, Hungary, Philippines, Poland, and Turkey are all examples of nations that had subverted democracy for subterranean autocracy. An urgent, thrilling, and original look at the future of democracy that illuminates one of the most important battles of our time: the future of freedom and how to contain and defeat the autocrats mushrooming around the world. Revenge re-opens and aggravates your emotional wounds. Even though you might be tempted to punish a wrong, you end up punishing yourself because you can’t heal. Third is Africa. His two cautionary tales are Trump and Putin, with a side of Brexit. On digital politics in Africa, he seems unaware of the great work of Nanjala Nyabola – his main source seems to be the Economist!

It is easy to forget that early in Joe Biden’s presidency he made a bridge-building overture to Vladimir Putin. During the 2020 campaign, Biden barely mentioned Russia as a geopolitical rival to the US. China hogged all the attention. At the Geneva summit with his Russian counterpart in June 2021, the US president went to great lengths to massage Putin’s ego, even calling Russia a great power. The Revenge of Power is wide-ranging in scope, providing insights into our current crisis without trying to ferret out a single cause of democratic decline.…filled with illustrative histories of various autocrats and the ways they honed their craft in their rise to power.” — Washington Post There is no doubt that that India under him belongs to the list of the three P autocrats that I described in The Revenge of Power. if that's the case, what we are seeing is an autocrat being very careful and keeping equal distancing from both the United States. India needs a relationship with the United States, but India also wants to be close to Russia for a variety of reasons. So that's why we haven't seen a stronger statement on the part of president Modi or the Indian government. Moisés Naím: Maximize and minimize are extreme words, I would not use them. I can use and I can accept that sanctions will hurt the Russian economy, and will have dire consequences for the Russian populations. I am worried about first how really severe are these-- Until now we have seen announcements. Some of these announcements are very specific and the names and are quite concrete but they say there's more coming. There is a long list of possible of the sanctions that we know exists, that we know have been considered that have not been announced.

Anyone can write about studies. Anyone can make bullet points. But not everyone can share stories. Not everyone can do original research. Not everyone can have cool videos. The result, in Naim’s view, is a hollowing out of democracy. ‘Political parties may survive in some form, the way vestigial wings do on flightless birds’. Ditto other ‘old institutions’ – legal, media, and social – ‘that once mediated between citizens and rulers’. An authoritative and intelligent portrait of the global spread of authoritarianism and its dangers...what sets [this] work apart from books like Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth is its unusually comprehensive armada of facts about the international drift over the past two decades toward authoritarian leaders, whether old-style dictators like Kim Jong Un or nominally elected presidents like Vladimir Putin.” —Kirkus There are countries where criminals are no longer underground but very much above ground and in the highest places of power. Since the 1970s, Sri Lanka has also joined the club or the mafia of such countries. A good example of where it started is when JR made the notorious criminal, Gonawala Sunil, a Justice of the Peace after pardoning and releasing the latter from prison! We have a person convicted of “ Kappan” as the Chief Whip of the government and most others are all thieves or at least collaborators of thieves. It is not for nothing that people call them Ali Baba and the 225 thieves. In this case, the consequences of Russia’s blunder in Ukraine — and the west’s unexpectedly unified response — are likely to reverberate for years, if not decades. Sixteen months into Russia’s “special military operation”, the world is at greater risk of great power conflict than since the most dangerous points of the cold war.