PhilipTheBucket

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I have no real idea about the details of manifest v3, but they've already made it come true and it didn't stop this from happening, so that tends to lead to me believing not.

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

They killed thirty thousand people. It was only that small because eventually a counterrevolution killed off all the people who were defining who lives and dies according to what side you're on, and then instituted a reign of terror equally bad.

I wasn't making any point about the Jacobins. I was making a point about arbitrarily killing people without due process. I didn't expect anyone to come in and say "come on it wasn't that bad and anyway look at this other time when things were bad, so who cares," because of who it was holding the axes, but you do you.

I've been learning a lot about how the .ml people look at politics and life, and it honestly makes it make a lot of sense why communist revolutions so reliably start slaughtering people like leaves in autumn once they get control. Once "your side" is always right, and everything has to be twisted around and perceived that way, why wouldn't you?

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

Well. predicting the future is a fool's game, but here goes: I think it'll be minimally funded, interfering with its effectiveness. I don't think debt traps of the IMF / Belt and Road variety are really Russia's style. They involve too much give and take (at least on the surface or in the propaganda telling). I think it'll be more along the lines of "we've set up this outpost and it is here to help you, acceptance is not optional, we're here to help." They'll just make a deal with some leader of whatever small country, and then just show up and start doing their thing, whatever it is. Also, the USAID type of operations were generally competently executed on the ground by people who at least somewhat cared about the mission (regardless of whether they perceive that mission as helping the people they're working with, or advancing some other unrelated US interest), or else can fake it. Russian governmental organizational structures at this point are nothing like that.

So, it'll be poorly funded as I said, and the people on the ground trying to make it happen will be wildly corrupt, kind of lazy in what they are willing to do or make efforts towards, and violent. There is actually some precedent for this in Russia's efforts to "make friends" with some African countries. Mostly the result was Russian mercenaries tasked with guarding the operation roaming around raping people and stealing money. The people "running the operation" didn't really care enough about whatever the official mission was to accomplish much of anything at all that I know of, except for sending reports of wild success back home and collecting paychecks and bribes.

I would expect the Russian version of USAID to be more or less more of that if it does get going.

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

It seems unlikely.

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

I was playing Nine Sols for quite a little while yesterday, and when I switched away for something I discovered that NixOS had decided to rebuild the kernel when I did an update and I hadn't noticed. It was sitting there with the load at 18, all the cores pegged in the red, just happily playing the game for me as normal the whole time.

Nine Sols is not some kind of graphical powerhouse but still I was pretty impressed.

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

I am so gratified to see the rate of downvotes on your nonsense, and the number of people trying to talk sense into you in addition.

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

That is, in fact, exactly how some revolutions with good intentions turned into nightmares far worse than the evils they were revolutioning against.

If you’re going to punish someone, you need to prove they did something wrong. 100% of the time. It doesn’t matter if you “already know” and it’s frustrating to have to go through this slow process where they get to fight back. It doesn’t matter if you’re “on the right side” or whatever. That whole thinking needs to go right the fuck out the window, even if it is satisfyingly simple in the moment.

Edit: To bring some specifics to it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_White_Terror

And so on. It also happened in China, the USSR, lots of places. The structures of law are fragile and slow, and just executing the person that someone accused of being a former ICE agent is easy. Until someone with a grudge accuses you, or your family...

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

This is why jury trials are super important. They're one of those last-ditch safety measures against a police state.

That's why the people ICE arrests usually don't get to have a trial. They're trying to make a new system where they just get to decide what happens to people.

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

The brigade is still experiencing losses, after the command echelon that sits on top of the brigade has been wiped out. Allegedly.

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

Sure let's go ahead and restart the pointless argument, that sounds fun.

The mentality "Why did this person punch me, all I did was steal their wallet, how dare they" is indeed extremely unhinged. There's a lot about American society that considers property "rights" of the wealthy to be sacred and personal safety of the normal people to be optional, and sure, that's fucked up on a systemic level. But none of that applies to street pickpockets. Fuck 'em.

(I sort of suspect that there's a lot of overlap between then "there is NEVER a reason to assault a person over your property" contingent and the "there is NEVER a reason to call the cops" contingent, too. At least when they are talking in internet fantasy land, I sort of suspect that if someone came in their house and started rifling through their belongings they wouldn't have this turn the other cheek stance about it.)

Also:

Shit one had fake elctric wallets to shock the shit out of thieves and only got em confiscated

Lol fuck yes

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

I mean, it was clearly at least partly in jest, but apparently the form was real and they really did go through customs for real.

https://www.space.com/7044-moon-apollo-astronauts-customs.html

It does make sense. I don't think they wanted to set the precedent that coming back from certain types of spaceflight "didn't count" in terms of needing to pass through customs and it was just a free-for-all. It's the same way you still have to pay your taxes when you're the president, a relic of an older and more adherence-to-the-system time than the modern day.

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

Fun fact, they made the Apollo astronauts go through customs when they came back from the moon.

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

What did Ars Technica do, though?

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

Oh, I thought you meant no email address required to make an account.

Just having to register in order to read the feed is probably just for server load reasons, if I had to guess.

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

That's not how it works though.

I actually agree that registration is silly. It's trivial to create fake email addresses; all it does is present obstacles and slight privacy implications for legitimate users, while forming an incredibly mild speedbump for malicious users. But, it's probably not going away, every little tool in the toolbox that can be deployed by overworked volunteer admins against the unending tide of malicious users trying to make their lives more difficult is probably going to get deployed if it is easy to do.

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

Hey did anyone say loops yet?