It’s funny, after the breakup of USSR there existed for a few years such an entity as “CIS armed forces”. It does not anymore because national governments want to control their own militaries.

Any country can become such, but as you’ve said yourself - everyone having nukes is more realistic than nobody having nukes, and the “mass destruction” part can even have upsides.

It should, but that’s only one level.

First Germany should build a competent armed force which will participate in all the ongoing wars on the globe to gain experience.

(I’m not a German citizen nor I intend to become one.)

It’s a common misconception that using peaceful means is always more moral than fighting a colonial war.

One can imagine a simple experiment. Country A conquers country B and brutalizes country C. Would it be more moral for Germany to peacefully trade (including military goods\technologies) with country A or to use said armed force to get a piece of country B? Country B suffers in both cases, but in the latter case Germany doesn’t finance the aggressor, and also presents some competition and can make life in parts of B controlled by it better. It can also offer military help to C for some preferential treatment.

Ah, also country A already has such a fighting force, all bullies already do. A military has to fight wars to remain competent. So there’s no vegetarian way to defend from influence of bullies. And there’s no neutral way as well - either you are a bully or you actively fight bullies. Maybe both. If you are neither, then you become weaker with time, and thus simply part of supply chain for bullies. Also neutrality always helps bullies and never the victim, that’s Eli Wiesel quote, if someone didn’t know.

Germany also had that in the 20s, if we are being honest. It wasn’t an imperfect democracy and, ahem, it’s been ~35 years since USSR feeling really unwell, and ~25 years since Putin coming to power, and ~20 years since people started suspecting he’s not going to leave, and ~15 years since Medvedev becoming a president and Russians splitting into the half realizing that they’ve just been assraped, and the half deceiving themselves with some expectations, and ~10 years since every Russian being assraped again, Crimea and Donbass.

When Hitler came to power, it was just about 10 years since finalizing the mess that happened in Germany after end of monarchy.

Oh, the populace knows it’s being oppressed. It’s apathetic.

Russia is ruled by very unpleasant people, not very efficient, not very intelligent, but capable of curbing all threats to their power.

I’m confident that if ever the government in Russia changes, rooting out that mafia group will last for another century or more.

If there is a dictator in your country you have some moral duty to find out at least a bit about the truth.

How do I know?

I’m German.

Last time I heard, your government openly supported the genocidal state of Israel.

Also I’d say many Russians in 1996 wouldn’t expect a war on Ukraine.

My grandparent’s generation was the one that actively closed their eyes, that actively looked away, that everything that happend was someone else’s problem. They were the Generation that arranged themselves, that did good business as long as it wasn’t them that were deported, killed or fought at in the war.

See, somewhere around the year I was born (1996) in Russia it became a social consensus that something is wrong and that these new “democrats” are not in fact democratic in any way, and that they also commit enormous crimes. In 1993 it kinda slipped, because the parliament opposed to Yeltsin had an unhealthy concentration of Communists, neo-Nazis, bandits and hybrids of them.

And, well, then the society with that consensus learned that “the civilized world” considers legitimate the people with whom it does business. No exceptions for authoritarianism or genocide.

There were widespread protests, you know? It was common to treat the Russian government like shit since then and till early 00s too, on TV and in private conversations and so on. But that government endured the storm, and somehow by that time the most important figures not associated with it were dead.

This didn’t happen the same way as it did in Germany where people looked the other way because they were generally fine with everything Nazi. This happened because people got tired of looking the right way. It’s apathy, not hypocrisy.

And that’s obvious from the very beginning, when you look at how human collectives work. You never can determine who really does nothing.

Even if we imagine this is somehow possible, there are social predators, as in psychopaths or at least scheming jerks, in every one of them, who don’t want a transparent structure of responsibility. And there’s the majority of us who rely on their kind to handle the social dynamics we don’t want. And there’s need for some stability.

But all that aside, engineers would be the last group in my list to check for people “doing nothing”. Almost everyone eager to discuss engineers “doing nothing” would fit higher there.

Made me want to vomit, which is actually a good thing since I have migraine and it sort of makes it a bit better

I’ve heard Japanese people think this way of people who drink milk.

Well, that’s what I meant. Our civilization has become seriously invested into a few simulacra at once. Using that to replace frustration with a smaller (but very attractive) simulacrum that couldn’t be maintained anymore 20+ years ago.

“Touching grass” will be painful.

I, ahem, meant something like

Will as in “determination, aspiration, ambition”,

by desire, but probably have lost the initial thought a few times when typing this.

What you actually want is food, shelter, health, family and friends, peace, song and exercise, being there for others as they’re there for you.

But you don’t want a painting of a friend instead of a friend.

IMHO both camera and microphone should have a physical switch disconnecting them.

I mean, I’m in Moscow and it’s barely below 0 degC.

But - yes.

Wearing a sweater still makes sense there. To spend less energy.

But in that case it’ll be more a matter of heat isolation. Though when such a low temperature exists on the outside consistently, air humidity drops and it sucks heat less. I think it works this way, but that’s pure intuition or something, my physics knowledge sucks definitely.

I personally agree that this is a kind of a regulator.

Like what Tao Te Ching says. Humans shouldn’t have too much of what they desire. Such a reality in some area fails them as an opportunity to learn. It’s also a dead end - you can’t have children with a robot. You can’t grow children with a robot, or maybe you can, but it will not be sufficiently complex and it will have different criteria of success.

But this doesn’t limit advanced civilization.

It’s just that in these things we are trying to cheat. Advancement to AGI, if it ever happens, should be done in its own turn. We have means to solve a lot of purely technical problems, but we haven’t yet. There’s no reason to hurry with AGI.

The reason Europe has conquered the world was that European cultures had this respect to simplicity, born from Christian morality, but also respect to choice and logic. Remove any one of these three, and you lose that power.

Europeans had sometimes less sophisticated technologies in any particular area than, say, China or Safavid Persia or Ottomans or Southeast Asian nations or even at some point some African nations. But what they had was complete and comprehensive system, civilization as a whole. They always had the lower level of the building finished before going to the next one.

This was due to that Christian modesty combined with antique philosophy.

I also think we’ve diverted from that relatively recently - around the dotcom bubble crash, maybe. I think it had deeper implications than what people think, because the trust into said philosophy started eroding at that very point. Which created imbalance in favor of forces less affected, like Microsoft and others, who have eroded it further, and the “good” forces, like Sun or Compaq or Motorola or what not, have contributed more into it with their attempts to survive after the 90s than they would if they’d die with the crash immediately, because they showed the public something that looked like a loss in honest competition.

It also helps that the golden age is over

Even the stone age is coming to an end - in favor of clay dicks. Talking about games.

Countries with more efficient governments lose fewer lives than countries with less efficient governments. But also more open countries lose more lives than more closed countries. And authoritarian countries, other things equal, lose fewer lives.

This means that structures that immobilize small power, but not big power, and have better infrastructure for big power, are encouraged.

Thus corporations with oligarchic ambitions are, yes, interested in big pandemics.

A bit like Hanseatic cities and other such unions became much stronger after European populations shrinking from plague.

Except then it would also lead to servitude becoming softer and less normal, because of shortage of hands. Our current world does not have that shortage. No pandemic will bring it. Maybe a nuclear war and planetary hunger.

This is a level higher. Modern nation states are being dismantled slowly. We will have that cyberpunk dystopia, but as always, it will be different from what’s been predicted. There will be genocide, and there will be nationalism, and there will be death squadrons, and there will be militant marxist groups, and there will be mafia organizations.

I mean, they all already exist, it’s just that 90s worldview was a rare period of truthful representation of reality in public perception, where we felt how huge the world is. Now it’s glossy bullshit again.

I’m sorry, but there are plenty of invasive primates there already, much worse than macaques at that.

So I hope yes.

I would have a novel or two finished by now, if not for various Ds and Ses.

It usually (in attempts from my teens) goes like the first couple of paragraphs describing nature, some for the later parts of the book describing various locations and situations, and then I find myself unable to describe people as they behave. That would be my ASD chiming in, I guess, impaired theory of mind and all that. My characters are pretentious, awkward and flat. Sometimes I’d figure out the mood to write from their POV, and then it would seem to feel better. But all that doesn’t matter cause ADHD.

It comes from a story about baron Munchausen