and one of the first things Zalensky did was crack down on that.

Rather replace Russia-dependent corruption with more generalized corruption.

for freedom and democracy. Supposedly what the alliance exists for.

What? It’s been founded by a bunch of colonial nations (not ex-colonial at that point) still from time to time fighting colonial wars with war crimes and such. It has Turkey of all genocidal bastards as an important member.

The only reason for its existence was accumulating power. Well, as with all alliances.

Of course, kinda motivated by USSR redesigning its ground forces for capturing large parts of the world after they’ve been nuked. I’m not joking, that’s the reason ex-Soviet militaries so terribly suck at actually fighting - they are sort of a different mechanism, more like huge mobile garrisons to deploy in wastelands. Their analog of western ground forces was, say, VDV in Russia ; which is why despite nominally having the narrow function of paradropped assault troops, they’ve been used for every kind of thing important.

But corruption is present in all countries, including the NATO members, so that’d be a bit hypocritical,

Yes, and also weird.

I don’t think the decision was ever on the table.

Yes, when after 2 years of war and hundreds of thousands dead they meet and sign something about “discussing help to Ukraine” in case fighting gets more intensive by not clear which criterion - it means Ukraine is not becoming a member.

About “irreversible path” - they’ve said such things about Georgia too. Ivanishvili’s party is not good, but there’s been plenty of time before they started acting like now.

Also Gecko’s development is led by people thinking that it being usable outside of Firefox\Thunderbird is a bad thing. There was a time when Gnome’s browser was based on Gecko, not WebKit. And in general it’s influenced by bad practices.

SerenityOS is an amazing project, of course. To do so much work for something completely disconnected from the wider FOSS ecosystem, and with such results.

So it’s cool that they’ve decided to split off the browser as its own project.

It’s a text generator. All these people, were they to live in Antiquity, would jump ship to ship trying to visit every oracle and prophet in the Mediterranean asking questions about universe and seeking deep meaning in short texts of the Chinese fortune cookie kind.

The NKVD was a tool of the Russian Soviets to police itself. So, less a contract between citizens than between party bosses.

NKVD means “People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs”. And in Stalin’s era they still retained the pretense of a democracy on new principles from the 20s.

But Soviet police were far closer to the ideal community policing model than their Western peers, simply because they weren’t built atop the framework of plantation overseers, slave catchers, and anti-indigenious paramilitary.

No. If you ever learn Russian well enough … I actually don’t know what specifically to recommend you. Vysotsky’s songs? It’s just everything you read that will communicate some idea of how it all worked.

Soviet “militia” (it was called that, but in fact it was police, of course) was quite similar to all three things you’ve mentioned.

Also NKVD was both what later became KGB and what later became MVD (after Stalin and Beria USSR had sort of a moment of epiphany, not complete, but hundreds of thousands of people were released from prison camps, hundreds of thousands rehabilitated postmortem, and it was said publicly and officially that such things shouldn’t happen again), so it included both people in black leather coats who’d come at night and people in white coats who’d regulate road traffic and catch small time thieves at day. With pretty similar methods between them.

Imagine if German police under Nazis and Gestapo were one and the same organization administratively. There’d be more “cultural exchange” than there was in reality.

Pick up a copy of Fanshen (Chinese Cultural Revolution, not Russian Stalinist era, but it’s the same through line). The social transition from a country of sovereign landlords to egalitarian policing was rocky, but it was real and significant.

I will, but my knowledge of Stalinism is closer to the root, and Russian is my first language, so I don’t think this will be useful for that kind of example.

The difference between a plantation overseer and a union rep is significant primarily because of who they answer to.

Since USSR came into this discussion, official unions in USSR made that difference very small. Their main activities were about organizing demonstrations on all the important days, though. And also the usual Soviet organization stuff - distribution of some goods via that organization to its members (like some fruit which would rarely be seen in some specific area due to Soviet logistics being not very good), sending children of some members to some kinda better summer camps or some competitions, all that.

I agree it’s an unsolved problem, but have you contracted police to, well, police your area? Had Soviet citizens contract NKVD?

It’s rather between the two. In fact it’s a mechanism imposed on you with power, but there’s a lot of effort to conceal it as an imperfect market.

Yes, thank you for explaining the same thing politely, I had a slight hangover yesterday.

The problem is with unneeded people making unneeded decisions for you anonymously (for them), centrally and obviously with no transparency.

The advantages of the Internet as it came into existence for us were disadvantages for some people. Trapping people inside social media with one entry point and having the actual communication there allows for control which the initial architecture was intended to make hard.

It wastes shadowbanned person’s time, so it’s not.

Similar to vote obfuscation.

Which sucks just as badly.

The whole problem with shadowbans is that they are not very easy to prove (without cooperation from Meta). One can be shadowbanned from one area (by geolocation), but not from another. One can be shadowbanned for some users but not for other. The decisions here can be made based on any kind of data and frankly Meta has a lot to make it efficient and yet hard to prove.

Shadowbans should just be illegal as a thing, first, and second, some of the arguments against him from the article are negligible.

I just don’t get you people hating him more than the two main candidates. It seems being a murderer is a lesser problem than being a nutcase for you.

I mean, yeah. If you read something about gnostic non-Christian versions of Judaism existent at that time, you might notice that the whole idea of him is reminiscent of what a gnostic cult believer should be himself.

The part about being a higher entity clothed in human existence which should remember itself, drop those clothes and ascend.

Probably grew out of some story of “the guy who actually managed to do that”, ha-ha, which somehow blended with a few real figures.

EDIT: Now when I think about it, makes Jedi religion in Star Wars seem even more Christian. Especially if we count various concepts (Journal of the Whills) and branches existent in the EU (Living Force, Potentium and what not).

We are finally coming to comprehend how our brains work, and how intelligent systems generally work at any scale, in any ecosystem.

Who told you that?

(If you don’t mean ML-based things fallaciously called “AI”, then ignore this)

XMPP is not from Google. They just successfully pulled an EEE.

I didn’t quite imagine Japanese to be the Wookies of our world, but the surprise is welcome.

EDIT: Oh, but then Corellians made lots of wooden stuff too.

What did you not understand? A pistol is a gun, a rifle is a gun, a Soviet D-20 howitzer is a gun.

You can’t be that stupid to call somebody a hypocrite for supporting carry of weapons for self-defense because they ran from a mass shooter with a rifle. People usually don’t carry rifles for self-defense.

A person who stakes their reputation on the phrase “An Armed Society Is A Polite Society” fleeing said armed society for their lack of politeness establishes a certain hypocrisy.

Of course not.

A handgun compares to a rifle like a dagger to a sword.

I can do that in Russian too. I can’t do the former in English.

There are plenty of things possible in one language and not (yet\anymore) in another. I don’t see what does this have to do with any kind of demonization. Maybe for people knowing only one language, which, yes, is more common for English speakers than I’d like to think.

I suppose a speaker of Finnish would have something to enlighten us about some languages being in some regards inferior to his own, too. Or a speaker of Icelandic. Or maybe even Persian. There are languages having dozens of words to distinguish shades\textures of snow or sand, or not having future tense.

I think they are joking.

That said, правда (“truth” as something you believe to be true) and истина (“truth” as objective truth) are different words in Russian, but not having that distinction in a language doesn’t prevent its speakers from making it.