You’re absolutely laughable

From a communist.

as I said I disengaged with you already

That’s called a paradox.

I’m the only one who provided source information instead of “vibes-based” analysis.

You are not. There’s information and there’s confirmation. There’s data and there are checksums.

I noticed already, hence me disengaging.

Since you haven’t yet done that, this should probably have some deep meaning.

During the nearly 200 years

I specifically said between 1905 and 1914, as in between the first revolution and wartime laws. Most of the 200 years Russia was basically a slaver society, but not as different in that from, say, Austria, as stereotypes might suggest.

Most people couldn’t read, and there was a ton of censorship for those that could.

Less than Soviet censorship. Imperial censorship was reactive, something published could be forbidden after it was published. Soviet censorship was proactive, nothing could be published without being vetted by censors.

Serfdom wasn’t abolished until the 1860s and most people still largely lived on farms through the end of the 1800s.

A country being mostly agrarian doesn’t by itself say much about freedom.

The abolition of serfdom created a land-owning peasant class (kulaks),

That’s Stalinist mythology. In fact there was a more US south-like dynamic, with plenty of poor farm workers from liberated serfs and farm owners hiring them, mostly nobility, but also, yes, more well-off farmers.

and that land was stripped from them by Stalin.

Land was stripped from everyone having some land. People could be punished for growing something to eat on a small space like suburb lawn in an American movie.

So there was a period of 50-60 years where a substantial portion (but still <20%) owned land, and even fewer could read amd write.

If you mention “kulaks”, then people classified as that in Stalin’s times formed a much bigger proportion of population.

Going back to pre-Stalin government (say, Duma under Nicholas II) might actually be worse than the current status quo.

No, you don’t realize the difference. A working absolutism with working democratic mechanisms, even if subordinate to absolutism, is better than a facade for a bunch of thieves Russia has now.

In any case one can’t just go back to it.

When I was sort of an audiophile, my first steps were to switch from ALSA to OSS under Linux. I still think I heard the difference for music, and probably yes - because that was OSS without mixing.

And I still think I hear the difference between FreeBSD newpcm and Linux sound stack. newpcm’s mixing is simpler (firefox starting, opening a sound device and music volume sharply dropping in half is not nice), but it seems to spoil the sounds less.

because a larger company would be in a better position to mitigate the costs of upgrading the infrastructure in one area with the profits from another or whatever.

In this case it appears that it was a small monopoly. Where I live one can generally change a telco without changing your physical exact location. Lots of clumsy wires though under the ceiling near the elevator.

But that was off topic, I’ll add one small point - a bigger company could do what you described too.

4 years from now is not the same as now, and in my opinion literal neo-Nazis are not worse than your current politicians being nice and cozy with mass murderers

Idk, if they join NATO, they wouldn’t have nearly the excuse to retain a large military and have top-down control since they’re largely protected militarily.

Not that large really, it has large budgets, mostly embezzled, but I’m not sure even now one can call Russia more militarized than something like Israel or Turkey or USA. All those conscripts doing their service mostly contribute to numbers and someone’s ego and criminal power (they are usable to suppress riots or do manual labor, if something), not defense. Ukraine, a pretty corrupt country itself, is doing well enough against that military.

Russia’s military is mediocre, and for its size and economic power just miserable. Certainly those in Kremlin wouldn’t even laugh at this, because for their goals and intentions it’s exactly as it should be.

Top-down control is not a matter of excuses, it’s a matter of those having it deciding what matters.

And to be honest, NATO doesn’t seem to be reliable enough in today’s world, alliances and agreements are used as toilet paper every day, sometimes guaranteed or signed by pretty important parties. So nah, it would have plenty of excuses.

I don’t think Russia really knows how to embrace freedom, since they’ve had authoritarianism for pretty much forever, from the Tsars to the USSR to Putin.

That’s not entirely true, Russia between 1905 and 1914 was free enough, and Russia for a couple decades before 1905 was much better in terms of freedom, checks and balances and such, than today’s Russia. The church wasn’t a branch of the ruling group. The courts judged differently and tried to be open and humane. Manual control of everything happening from the center wasn’t a thing. And when that interfered with what the center wanted, the center wouldn’t try to utterly destroy everyone involved. When people read today various politically-loaded texts written by Russian noblemen from late XIX century, they sometimes do the mistake of equating state officials and thieves from that time with state officials and thieves from now. Both are groups of humans, but if a state official from that time did a small fraction of what state officials of today do every day, they’d lose any status. Even in manners it was impolite and undignified for a nobleman to look down at another person, no matter the rank. The opposite, actually, it was polite to look directly in the eyes on the same level.

Obviously these were all real people and power corrupts, but the gap is still too big for any bridges to exist.

This problem is not that old, it’s something from the late 20s. It’s the house that Stalin built.

Communism doesn’t require spreading, and once you put people in charge to spread any ideology at the expense of the people,

It was a common idea that socialism in just one country is not sustainable. The forces threatened by it will destroy it. It was also a common idea that if we unite people in classes and if planned economy is supposed to be more fair and bureaucracy more fair that self-ownership and centralized democracy more fair than decentralized, then group’s majority can be assumed to be the group. And that it’s needed to first conquer the world and then build communism. USSR was supposed to be a conventional, not communist, state, aimed at conquering the world and then building communism.

The same is largely true for the USSR. At the start it may have been a worker revolution, but it quickly devolved into a “sacrifice for the good of the nation” type situation.

It was “for the good of the future” usually, if you look at something like Pavel Kogan’s poetry. And again, that kind of marxists thought even before USSR that the collective is the person. That evolution is incrementing levels. From a person to a collective, from a collective to a centralized nation, from that to a centralized world. From that to space travel and many worlds. That’s why, in their opinion, their ideology was progressive.

The way it was presented as humanist was that it will be more efficient, production-wise, and thus will make everyone happier through having nice things. That’s where the Soviet and ex-Soviet envy and pride in education\spirituality comes from, first communist ideology promised that we’ll drop all morality and and jump to future, and for that we’ll live better and it won’t matter who says what, and then it turned out that they didn’t start living better. Thus those attempts to present Soviet communist ideology as more moral, while it was completely materialist and demonstratively nihilist, didn’t touch upon good and evil at all, only factories and centralized organization allowing bigger efficiency (didn’t work). An inversion.

Like some misguided idea of Azimov’s Empire.

If it was about what’s best for Russians, they probably would’ve joined NATO and maybe the EU,

No chance for Russia to join the EU without cleansing out that elite. Nobody wants to let in such a big bunch of thieves with ability to make their own rules. Of course, they’ve already let in some with the Baltic states, and they (the EU bureaucrats dreaming of similar power) really like that bunch, but fortunately people like Kaja Kallas and UvdL don’t make all the weather yet.

NATO even less likely, NATO’s goal is maintaining world dominance of its existing members.

But that would destroy the chance for Russia to stay relevant as a world superpower.

No it wouldn’t. It would make its resources, including human resources, use so much more efficient that it would quadruple in weight probably.

If you’re attacked by an oppressive regime, fighting against the regime is better than allowing them to subjugate you. That’s not “sacrificing for your country,” that’s sacrificing to prevent an even worse situation.

It depends. There might be a situation where a similar own bunch of thieves beholds with glee how their competition in their own society vanishes on the frontlines. Then after some time that bunch makes all the deals good for them and not for you.

No, individualism is always better. You are the person you know best, and the meaningful good deeds you can do are all near yourself and in your own context.

Idk, Russia seems to be taking a lot from the fascist playbook.

It’s different, Russia has basically a not very old hereditary elite, families of former communists willing to believe they are some kind of smart mafia, while in fact they are thieves. They have a really sensitive collective ego, and are desperately trying to prove they are worth some respect, at least in the form of fear. They are not real fascists, that elite, they are just mimicking fascists to try to get some of that respect, because fascists seem respected, “real”, for them.

It’s the good old inferiority complex of the Soviet elite, same reason why Baltic countries were made some sort of nice cleaned up version of USSR for westerners, or why there existed that parallel infrastructure of comfortable existence for foreign communists living in the USSR, or why that elite was measuring their status by ability to get something from abroad. They always felt that their own thing is not real.

It maybe goes to the very root, where actual Bolsheviks around year 1917 were mostly Germanophiles, and their ideal state was some idealized communist version of the German Empire, scaled for the planet. Their intention was to only start the revolution in Russia, bring it to Germany and let it develop somehow.

Sorry for many words.

I mean, that’s one of the traits of fascism by Eco, but in his list it wasn’t as capitalized.

They don’t tell me everything, and they frequently lie, but I’m present enough to pick up on trends.

To be good enough you just have to be better than the parents who first ask people from outside, like teachers, and then ask their kids for control and still believe them less. OK, that’s my flashbacks again.

This person clearly doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

I’m part Armenian and take maybe too much interest in middle-eastern things.

What happens on the Syrian coast right now in your version?

Busting of telecom monopolies doesn’t lead to nobody building telecom infrastructure. And without state monopoly on alcohol production alcohol drinks don’t become a deficit. They just become cheaper and less incentivizing - that’s considered, but you have to solve deadlocks.

With no patent, copyright or trademark protections the billionaires will own or bury everything.

Trademark protection - yes, it’s very important. Same as authorship vs copyright, copyright might be harmful, but authorship is necessary to protect.

If “delete all IP law” means that you can’t be sued for using something copyrighted, like, say, openly using Opera Presto leaked sources or making a Nintendo console emulator, and that you can’t be sued for rounded corners, and that you can’t be sued for using some proprietary hardware interface without royalties, - then it may be good.

But I think these people are after copyleft.

Still, interesting, how many different people are today implementing what was being discussed in very vague strokes 10-15 years ago. All of it at the same time, breaking everything. I mean really all of it. Signal is one of the common ideas, Musk’s DOGE is another, federation model being alive again is another, and all the ghouls around. A full Brazilian carnival of grotesque ideas. I want my childhood back (Signal is cool, but the rest is not).

It’s damaging because the Internet evolved in the conditions of governments not doing their job at catching criminals, but at the same time taking upon themselves rights and responsibilities they shouldn’t have. The former made it impractical to use more cozy and personal spaces, like personal webpages with guestbooks and such, and the latter put upon webmasters the responsibilities of law enforcement which law enforcement should fulfill itself. It’s as if home owners were responsible for a crime happening on their property, and the police wouldn’t help when called, it would instead arrest them for not preventing it.

Law enforcement doesn’t need more rights, it had all it needed 20 years ago, even 30 years ago. It needs to fulfill its responsibilities.

Those jerks both want to avoid actually working and to censor what you can say. Fuck them.

The boy likely has a pathology. No way this is purely learned interest.

I watched porn in that age. A lot of it. And listened to Nazi marches. And generally marches. But I was kinda depressed by one girl (I suppose with the same pathology that boy has) intentionally trying to compel me to suicide (yes, certain, she made enough attempts for that, and also wasn’t as subtle as she thought), and in general being in school full of walking shit, and my parents being exceptional idiots, loud and irritating at that.

and of course it’s showcasing the rarer jihadist terrorists instead of widespread Nazism and racism

Are you fucking serious?

It’s infuriating, baffling, plainly disgusting how your typical progressive westerner is just blind to usual neo-Nazi skinheads doing a murder or two in a month, while jihadists massacre whole towns, share videos in Telegram on scale, and western politicians shake hands with their leaders and condemn the victims (calling them “Assad supporters to blame for outbreak of violence” or something like that).

Nazism is dead, there’s no nation-state with an army with that as national ideology.

More than half of Sunni-majority nation-states agree on anything if it involves Sunnis massacring someone else, or involving jihad. And of those the most notable are Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, that kind of countries which your usual westerner considers normal.

They literally loudly and officially agree that murdering Christians and Yazidis and Alawites and whomever I’ve forgotten is fine, and your typical progressive westerner parrots that it’s fine, nothing to look at, Christians and Yazidis and Alawites are not on the list of approved victims.

That said, jihadists are a subset of Nazis, just a not very stereotypical one for a westerner.

And I see no problem with porn.

but you can run an X11 software package in Xnest or Xeyphr to functionally sandbox X11

I know (did that with Telegram for some time, until deciding I’ll take the insecurity with working clipboard), but those manuals would only touch upon having a separate user or a chroot.

That might permit for clipboard snooping, have to check, but avoids the keylogging and display-dumping issues.

Will read about firejail.

It is true that X11 — not to mention most traditional desktop operating systems – were not really designed to sandbox software packages. Local stuff is trusted.

It’s about philosophy - I really like p2p applications built using something like Kademlia, because they are built with the premise that everything is unreliable and that works.

Also unreliable things don’t create vendor locks. It’s much easier to change from one unreliable thing to another.

But I’m more optimistic than I think your comment is, think that things have generally gotten better, not worse.

Yes, I’ll repeat my opinion that things becoming more complex and that being described as needed for them to become more secure - means just that the security theater is better now.

Go back a quarter century and nearly all Internet traffic was unencrypted; most is encrypted today.

Encrypted with keys decided using certificates ultimately with some approved CA as root, and the list of those trusted CAs is supplied with software. There have been plenty of cases where a CA has been compromised.

As protection against some punks peeking upon neighbors it works, but the main threat is not some punks. The post is about E2EE and nation-states.

I’d trust Web browsers to reliably sandbox things today more than I did then.

Why do we have hypertext browsers running cross-platform applications? Why can’t we separate these two classes of programs? There are, say, the Gemini protocol for the former and, say, JVM for the latter.

We have containers and VMs, which are a big improvement over chroot jails. My software updates are mostly cryptographically-verified. If you want a cryptographic filesystem, it’s not a big deal to set up these days.

I agree about this.

We don’t have operating systems automatically invoking binaries because they happened to live on something that looks like a CD drive that was connected.

And this.

We’re using more programming languages that are more-resistant to some common memory management bugs that historically led to a lot of our security problems.

Well, yes and no, people had Perl and Tcl as popular ones back then too, ha-ha.

agree that it’s important not to falsely believe that security is present when it’s not. But I don’t think that everything is dismal, either.

Not dismal, I don’t mean that. It’s a lot of fantastic achievements, but they won’t work if taken for always present.

It’s strategically wrong to expect complex unachievable to full extent things to work. People can expect landline to always work (they did at some point at least), but to expect computing to be mostly secure is nuts, and that’s what everyone is doing. Landline phones are one of a very few really reliable technologies, but most of our civilization is not like that.

Enjoy bootlicking the corporate overlords

They are not corporate, they are children of people who ran your beloved USSR. Putin’s grandpa was a cook in Kremlin and fed Lenin, did you know that? Yeltsin is somehow treated as if him being first president of Russia were his main role in history, but he’s been in CC CPSU for much longer. Ilham Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan, lectured in MGIMO in USSR’s late years, while his father was the head of Azerbaijani SSR almost since Stalin.

Do you not understand your words just don’t match anything real? They don’t produce a response because there’s nothing in the place they hit. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you, Russia is not oppressed by some imaginary evil businessmen who hoarded everything in the 90s and then took power. Russia is oppressed by children and grandchildren of the same people who formed CPSU’s core. They didn’t get that through some business projects. They were the state and they are the state. They were the CPSU and ruled the big country, then they wanted better conditions for themselves and feared democratic movements, so they coerced those movements to help them survive. Then in Russia they created a few fake parties in the 90s, which changed names and appearances a few times, till ending up the current set of controlled CPRF, LDPR, the ruling party and some other I forgot, that was their popular effort direction, and the so called “administration of the president of Russia”, which is a parallel government free from constitutional limitations and oversight even when oversight existed in Russia, as their hidden front. Well, that’s all in the past, they won, no fronts anymore. They are killing people in this war just to distract their and Ukraine’s population from themselves.

I’m not going to give you any sources, since what I’m saying is on the surface for someone who tries to learn something about Russia and the USSR. Western socialists do have quite a few myths contradicting that, but if you believe those, then you didn’t try.

Not to say there are no problems with the “corporate overlord” types, but they lost. Khodorkovsky or Berezovsky or Ukrainian oligarchs are of that kind. They lost even in Ukraine. And that’s really unfortunate, had they won there’d be no war.

People disclose more when they think they are safe. Your typical Windows user from year 2009 with their collection of porn banners and botnet nodes would have their private info safer than a new Linux user of the same time. Because the Linux guy would believe he’s free now.

I remember those manuals how to run Skype and every proprietary program from a separate user, while every client in X11 can capture the whole display and see all keystrokes. Or every schoolboy using “but I’ll be able to examine the code” in arguments. Or “but the sources are open” on the subject of OS security even by literate people, while how many people have looked at those sources? If just 3-4 times that amount of people look at Windows components’ disassembly with the same effort, they’ll probably have the same effect on security, one can conceal backdoors in source code well enough. There are so many things one can remember, but those were nice times.

Same with “security” in the Internet. We were using ICQ and everyone knew one can spy on those messages, we were using HTTP and POP and IMAP without encryption and everyone knew one can spy on these too, but we were fine - we adjusted our behavior for that knowledge and used the Web as it should be used.

And what’s the funniest, this “insecure” Internet was more secure, because people acted on the right premises and formed behaviors that made it secure. When you know something is unprotected and can’t be protected, you are not completely taken by surprise if it’s lost.

Now teenage girls use centralized services as they would use private diaries, where an unclearly defined group of people can see the content of those. Many of them think it’s safe because that’s called “private messages” and they “didn’t give access” on some webpage of that service, or even just because there’s a lock sign in the browser address line.

People think they have been given magic that obeys them, magic is different from tech in not requiring understanding to obey. There’s, obviously, no magic, only things fully understood obey their owners, and almost nobody fully understands even door locks.

So - I think the new important kind of social advertising is teaching people to not trust security. Security is like a war victory, it’s not guaranteed and never certain enough to rely upon it. No system based on implication of functional security must be used.

We must use only openly unreliable systems.

That also applies to home appliances (intended) and all kinds of complex devices. When those came with schematics and detailed maintenance manuals, people dreamed of something not requiring these, and as we can see, that something is not better and doesn’t take less effort when breaks.

Unreliability is freedom, and reliance is slavery. But at the same time unreliable systems are better than no systems. Unreliable systems are the compromise between luddism and degenerate civilization.

You shouldn’t worry about this. You should laugh more at sovcits, second amendment fanboys, militia enthusiasts, gun nuts, and even (real and not “conservative right liberal using the word cause it’s less common”) libertarians. Because allowing some jerks to decide these things for you is fine, right? We’ll vote for someone better and they’ll make more laws, we don’t need fallbacks and overrides to remove cancerous laws by force.

I think I like the “fallbacks and overrides” pair, because it complements the “checks and balances” one. Directly opposite, but with the same spirit. Something of Tao Te Ching in it.

other than the reflexive USSR bashing that happens any time Soviet history comes up?

I’m not bashing it, just kinda full of some things of its legacy.

I’m not really seeing connections being drawn here at all

Too bad.

Is the argument the Spartans and the Soviets were similar in that they were both bad?

No, in the way Soviet propaganda presented Soviet citizens its place in the civilized part of history. Which ideas we follow, which we don’t, what is civilization and what is barbarism. Community and ascetism were kinda there, and it was thoroughly militarized and in theory prepared for a supposed full mobilization all the time, except nothing would really work. Not much more than that.

Soviet propaganda was actually very keen on that idea of civilization, antique references all over the place when you read anything touching philosophy from approved things. And the descent to barbarism would be what the “imperialist” or “capitalist” world was doing.

At the same time, due to Soviet economy’s limitations, there was also promotion of ascetism as something morally superior, say, they have all those nice things and rock-n-roll, while we have well-read people and value the spiritual above the material. That part is not new, of course, it can be found in German and Austrian stuff before WWI and in every totalitarian regime around.

I think some of the people creating that aesthetic were actually sincere, which is hard to imagine now, but touching it you feel that. It’s a bittersweet feeling, a painful one.

What does this have to do with Spartans specifically? I don’t know, but the structure of the Soviet society for me looks like something deliberately imagined after a romanticized version of Lycurgus’ Sparta, except done by crooked mind and crooked hands. Which would match the demographic of “old Bolsheviks” and other revolutionaries of early XX century, who were mostly students (mostly dropouts too) of social sciences.