No, -istan is not always pejorative. See, Nassim Taleb's concept of Extremistan. I've used "Nerdistan" positively. People find "VC-istan" pejorative because th

No, -istan is not always pejorative. See, Nassim Taleb's concept of Extremistan. I've used "Nerdistan" positively. People find "VC-istan" pejorative because they're all aware of (as you put it well) "the terrible, backward, self-serving state of things." I've heard people read into the term, as a comment on VC-istan as somewhat like a feudal, ex-Soviet state. That works, but it wasn't what I intended. I was just using "stan", originally, to describe something in few syllables.