rottingleaf @ rottingleaf @lemmy.world

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I'm talking about ancaps as well.

It's a technical decision. There are so many things in life where you can lose everything in a moment without a fraction of your own guilt, and nobody can help you.

Thanks to that technical decision BTC still functions the way I described.

I know it's not anonymous.

It has the widest reach of cryptocurrencies.

by now, power is the only ideology. They’re mighty so they must be right, don’t they?

It's not about "right". It's that you can't trust anyone, and if you make a mistake, your own input to any revolution doesn't happen.

Russia had a revolution before, it can have one again. ...

Collective psyche can be regulated. It will happen when people in Kremlin make a mistake.

Who would be the current-day Bolsheviks, opposed to the deposed-of system but also to the freedom of the people?

Yes, that is where I'll add that making a transitional committee of Yashin, Navalnaya and others, augmented with the older wave like Kasparov and Portnikov, might not be a good idea. Only allowing ex-commies (ex-system in this case) to "turn democrat" and become the government like in 1991 can be worse.

I'd probably trust escapist communists like RSD and groups of edgy ancap children more.

Is that different for non-libertarian paradise-building attempts?

I swear, you guys just apparently decide nobody will ask the obvious questions, because libertarians are an allowed target.

Libertarianism doesn't deny empathy and "pro social behavior" (as an autistic person, I rarely see it toward myself, not being liked and not making right faces - apparently not deserving of it, but OK ; it's already good if those "pro social" people don't consider it normal to steal from you when they don't like you), it actually relies on those more.

The issue is that it's something that needs scale and consistency. You can't just assemble a bunch of idealists and crooks and expect them to make a working mechanism.

I don't think there were many more successful attempts by left anarchists.

BTC is useful though.

It's very easy to judge from the EU, but if you are in Russia and need to pay for something in the interwebs, it's very convenient to have an imperfect, but kinda functioning system like this.

(Idiots replying with "go rebel" or "change location" need not bother, I happen to have family, friends, dog, ASD and BAD, my sister who's on my support every time she makes a planning mistake can change location, I can't. I'm also not a Jedi chosen one to have useful options of "rebelling".)

Closest they got to ending that cunt was Prigozhin attempting a coup in a drunken rage, but he sobered up and chickened out before it was done.

No. Prigozhin was a spoiler. A demining attempt, because Putin probably got afraid enough of a coup in the military and decided to use Prigozhin to try and detect people in the high command who'd assist Prigozhin or react favorably, or at least not do enough to impede.

Russians keep gravitating towards authoritarians over and over again. Can’t think of any other country that reverted back to it multiple times in a century. Weak people want strong man leaders, just how it is.

Russia has special services. They work all the time, work very well, and "entrapment" is not a problem for them, similar to "fruit of a poisoned tree". When you detect people likely to wish for a change early enough and neutralize them, either by silently jailing or intimidating or disrupting them, the society is much more amorphous.

It's not about gravitating anywhere, wishes or sympathies.

But there’s still a reason why you’re having these particular kinds of dreams, and not different ones.

I dunno, if we are going to that level, then I see plenty people not from Russia in the interwebs having this. In case of MENA people - much stronger.

It's a problem, but not such a deep one. Even among ex-military people from older generation.

Do you think it’s even constitutional for Putin to deputise people with presidential powers? That any court would challenge him? Law in Russia was, and is, subordinate to the powers that be.

No, Putin has been logically fully described in the "Dolls" show. He just wants to torture and kill people better than him, and the law he's interested in only as long as he can call whoever he wants destroyed "state criminals".

I'm saying that the Russian empire was different, and even the USSR was different.

That’s the attitude of those considered strong, yes. You either become them or you break and end up with a tattoo saying “slave” on your forehead or something.

Yup, I'm saying it's not the only idea of morality in the whole of Russian society and not even the dominant one.

It definitely is the one emanating from the state.

Part of the same ethos, with maybe slightly different dances, clothing, and they can continue pronouncing things with h instead of g as long as they admit they’re Russians, that they accept, as you put it above, the father’s authority

In this case no, it's not the father. It's the same master. Slaves replace their own dignity with their master's importance.

So those really thinking Ukraine shouldn't be independent are the people terribly irritated by Ukrainians not willing to have a master. If Ukrainians wanted to have a master, that master would have a lower status than their master, in their opinion, so it would all be fine - Ukraine is a separate country, but Ukrainians are in the same general status. It's envy - why can they have this and we can't. A typical village thing by the way.

Like that anecdote about hell and a Jewish cauldron, guarded by three imps to throw those escaping back in and prevent them from helping others, a Ukrainian cauldron guarded by one imp to just throw those escaping back in, and a Russian cauldron unguarded.

It’s not. It destroys social cohesion, it breeds neurosis.

Yep, in this regard we agree. It also breeds idiocy and cowardice with all participants certain they are being wise and brave and sacrificing.

The reason is simple: Without the people neurotic, distrustful, and accustomed to bowing to authority, the central authority would fall, because people would actually be able to organise bottom-up. The central authority knows that, and thus does nothing to combat it, the people, well, it’s Russia’s only way to greatness, isn’t it? Any alternatives?

That's where you are wrong.

As you might have guessed, one can't punish FSB for entrapment, they are the ones doing the punishing. So that's what they were doing since Soviet times. Everyone trying to "organize bottom-up" will just be detected by FSB before being visible for anyone else.

They are proactive. They have their agents of various kinds in youth groups, in hobby groups, everywhere. They even provoke such "organizing".

They literally lure teens into "political" groups. Just for everyone with potential to be under control.

It would be problematic, say, in the US, if FBI tried to put someone in jail for being a member of a group the leader and half other members of which are state agents, and which approached that someone first. In Russia it's not. They are always fishing for people willing to do something.

I've literally heard of more cases where a (say, anarchist) group had such agents, but it all became known because of some other crime (a murder in that case), than in "extremist" sense. Meaning this happens very silently.

So, about distrust. It's well-substantiated. Russians can't organize in Russia and can't, frankly, trust a Russian in such things.

Similar to Armenians TBH, it sometimes seems there are more agents of various intelligence services and oligarchs in Armenia and diaspora than people really interested in changing something.

Which brings me to Navalny’s balls of steel, returning to Russia: Yes, that’s impressive. That’s strong, “virtuous suffering”. But it’s also accepting the status quo. You can’t be a revolutionary against a system by holding onto the ethos that fuels it.

Absolutely! That's exactly what his action communicated.

I think he was trying to send a signal to that layer of deeply skeptical people that he's one of them and not of those like Sobchak and Nemtsov and similar. And he was successful, he's seen very differently from them.

Except see my previous part about special services' work. The real problem is not in nobody willing to organize. Without it, whether Navalny would do his sacrifice or not, Russia's government would have changed around 2012.

You can start rehearsing the rebel yell sounds of popcorn, sorry, of gulping and smell of jasmine tea in my room

Snokhachestvo and the cultural approaches similar to it are prevalent in those people who are Russia's elite now, but generally seem very rare as far as I can see.

And that stuff about Europe and homosexuality seems for me a kind of "the hungry doesn't understand the full", more of jokes and separation than of really thinking that's true. It's just that there are people outside the prison and inside it, and those inside can't afford to behave freely. It's almost envy, except without even negative feelings. More like alienation - "they live so much easier that for them homosexuality is a real concern".

Also there's the criminal culture homosexuality, as a marker of status in the criminal hierarchy, which is demonstrably non-consensual, and one can see a psychological parallel between living freely in general inside a prison and being gay in a place where people get raped. A nonsensically careless behavior, something like that. And being nonsensically careless is weak.

The Tsar and the viceroys, plundering the country and living the good life.

They followed their own laws. If a law was too cumbersome to make, they didn't. It was an absolute monarchy, but if you compare today's Russia's judicial system to the imperial one - the latter seems very humane. By stats, by procedures, by stories of people who witnessed it.

and there’s no shortage of either because, according to Russian culture throughout the ages, good fathers make sure that their sons are strong men by raping the son’s wife

The kind of peasant communes and huge families where such things happened wasn't actually natural. It was becoming the more common, the more people were becoming personal serfs. That is, there was that transition during Catherine where state serfs (which in practice meant almost a free man) were given to nobles en masse, she considered that a better arrangement. Sort of a privatization.

In the position of son, you’re just expected to take it, otherwise you’re weak, and the “father” will make sure that’s an even worse fate.

Nah, not that. If we make this comparison, for them it's the father's right, and you are subordinate. It's not about fear of punishment, it's about enduring for endurance's sake. Almost morality.

The Siloviki do indeed want to free Ukrainians – so they bomb cities.

No, they don't. They want to kill and loot and subjugate.

People who you are maybe looking for here are not those who try to somehow explain the state's justifications for this war. It's those who think that this has to be finished anyway regardless of whether the war should have been started.

Free them from their “European gayness”, that is. Such is the perversity of the Russian psyche.

I haven't met such real people. OK, to be honest, probably I didn't realize but I have.

The point is - almost nobody really thinks that about gayness and what not, but everybody thinks it's smarter to play along, that's what I meant by the amorphousness of mind of Russians.

Or, differently put: You sure you’re looking at the water you’re swimming in? I’m not Russian, I only lived there, and I was able to see the water. Swimming feels quite a bit different in Russia than it does virtually everywhere else.

It does, but it's more of a culture of virtuous suffering, like doing your work the hard way instead of loosening up a bit and doing it better, but with less "honest labor" or something. And lies. The virtuous suffering thing is often stupid, but sometimes a strength. The lies however are usually stupid, yet Russians somehow always start with lies and then maybe work it up to saying the truth.

Russians don’t have the “fuck the feds” grassroots rebelliousness of Americans, they don’t have a honour/respectability culture like the Japanese not to mention that Russians have basically no civil society while Japan (as a stem family culture) has a very strong one, and unlike the Chinese Russians are fatalist AF, don’t really have expectations about things becoming better for them. If the CCP had started this shit they would’ve lost the mandate of heaven quite a while ago.

All wrong.

There's just one thing that Russians really lack - understanding of the importance of truth. It would seem the Orwellian amorphousness of mind is a legacy Russians have carried from the USSR, except one can see signs of it all over the Russian literature school course. Russians really love "grey morality", ambiguity and nihilism.

For an American or a German it takes belief in a propaganda device to follow it. For a Russian - just acceptance that it's likelier to be better in some way.

It’s an acceptance of might makes right combined with social acceptance of tyrannical behaviour on the individual level and, consequently, high distrust among individuals stopping the formation of a civil society.

No. Just the belief that there's some deeper grey wisdom, a secret, and you'd be an idiot to just give yourself to some specific idea.

A whole country of cynics thinking they know better. Thus extremely skeptical about any initiative.

But that might not be wrong course of action too, Westerners don't seem to comprehend that today's Russia is not USSR, and that solving the problem of making Russians, say, rebel en masse is not going to achieve much. That rebellion will be predicted, easily disrupted and the people involved will regret they were born. It's probably perpetually happening - new and new people who'd eventually have done something finding yet another FSB trap and going to a secret jail silently before they would do anything.

Russian society hasn’t fundamentally changed since the days of the Tsars

It has and to the worse. Except, of course, back then the majority consisted of illiterate peasants.

Central power delegates exploitation of people, the environment etc to viceroys in exchange for loyalty, meanwhile acquisition of new colonial subjects is ongoing as, being built on terror, the imperial core can never feel safe and needs to bash something to distract itself from its vulnerability.

No. That's not how central power functioned back then, and what happens now is a mafia group gratuitously using its vast human resources to just have fun. Their fun in this case is conquering Ukraine to feel themselves more powerful. Only it doesn't quite work out, but I think the feeling of being able to mobilize people and send them to the grinder is good enough.

Russians like strong men, it’s a weakness in their society.

No, it's not any more a Russian weakness than an American one, even less than a Japanese or a Chinese one.

Especially unwise to judge Russians by American stereotypes of Russians.

Everyone outside Russia wanted it to continue to be a democracy

How's that compatible with supporting Yeltsin in his 1993 coup and in stealing 1996 elections?

Russia even had a brief association with NATO while it was.

No it didn't. Yeltsin wanted that, yes, and Putin wanted that too. Both wanted to be a big, scary country accepted to NATO and with NATO weaponry. Like Turkey, but with nukes. What both didn't want is dropping the bullshit about spheres of influence and being an equal of the USA, apparently got told by NATO that beggars are not choosers. Also wanting an association with NATO has plainly nothing to do with being a democracy or not.

But Yeltsin drank too much (alcoholism being another weakness in Russian society) and that allowed a guy like Putin to make himself a Czar.

I think you skipped the part where I was educating you that Yeltsin made himself Czar in 1993 and just passed it on to Putin.

I don't really care that it breaks your narrative. Putin is a natural continuation of the western-supported and consulted regime in Russia installed in 1993. That Yeltsin presented himself as some liberator and Putin presented himself as ex Soviet intelligence are campaign pictures that mean nothing. All the trusted people around Putin are the same that Yeltsin had even before 1991. Including Putin himself.

Alcoholism is not a bigger weakness in the Russian society than in British ones or in Sweden or in Finland.

Yeltsin brought a lot of democractic traits into Russia

No. The democratic mechanisms started working a bit earlier than the USSR stopped existing.

People like Sakharov, Galina Starovoitova, have your heard of such names?

The democratic reforms happened before USSR's collapse.

Yeltsin used that to come to power in 1991, and then kicked the ladder in 1993, and in 1999 named Putin as the next president on television. Oh, of course Putin "won" an election after that.

And that process was actively supported by western governments, especially in 1996, with the justification that an honest democracy in Russia will lead to scary-scary communists coming back to power.

Should they kept going on that direction they’d be a global superpower on pretty much all fronts by now, surpassing US and even China.

Yeltsin was a dying alcoholic living uncritically and without shame by the motto "to my friends everything, to everyone else the law". They have kept going on that exact direction. That's the bloody point.

Yeltsin usurped power in 1993. If that didn't happen and the conflict between Yeltsin and the parliament was resolved peacefully and legally (by having snap parliament and presidential elections simultaneously, so - replacing both sides of the conflict, in other words, Yeltsin would have to back the democratic claims with the democratic action of leaving the post ; that was the constitutional court's decision), then maybe. But instead Yeltsin used tanks to resolve the dispute.

Anyway, no, even if 1993 conflict would end differently, I think surpassing Germany is possible.

Soviet Union was an interesting part of the planet, the older generation from there can "know" and teach you all the right things, but not live by them. Talk about bravery and honor, and very correctly, but act dishonorably and be completely blind to that, talk about science and logic and critical mind and very correctly, but go to fortunetellers and believe in energies. Talk about principle, but not follow it. Never use the "thought experiment" tool freely. And so on.

They needed lots of time to fix that - through pain. It's not been 40 years yet, if we take biblical timespans. Maybe in year 2031 Russia will finally be ready.

But they had also pretty big internal problems and a ton of people who desired old soviet times and whatever, so we ended up with what we have today. Wikipedia has way more info and links to study it further.

In 1991 nobody desired "old times" back. People saw how it all was degrading until falling apart. Don't you give me Wikipedia links, lol. Something should have happened for a lot of people to wish a "restoration", don't you think so? Like what I've described. And that "restoration" was provided by the same people, Yeltsin's people, with the figure of Putin and his image of a "former Soviet intelligence operative".

Zelensky is a bit like a CEO presenting his company's prospects. He was talking like this two years ago, too.

I personally think he's not wrong. Just - until Kremlin gang's members and their families are being caught and jailed\deported all over the globe, or at least in NATO countries, this is all bullshit. Well, maybe after failing in Ukraine they'll attack some smaller and weaker country, just to show themselves they can defeat someone. And maybe they'll try again.

In any case - yes, that leadership keeps Russia weak, inefficient, dependent, but as everyone can see, it's also capable of destruction on scale too big to allow. So maybe some optimism should be applied and the goal be for Russia's regime to change and for it to have a democracy that may make its potential useful for everyone around. The "keeping it weak" approach, after all, has already led to Putin.

Since a bit earlier or so I've read.

We are talking about guns for civilians, the revolutionaries usually apply to themselves the same rules they'd use for the army after their revolution.

Sauron used conversations and scenes to turn Saruman charmed and deadly frightened. Over the palantir, which was a device to see the future, the past, the probable, close and far away. Thus also a communication device.

So basically their name refers to knowing things which are not their fucking concern. Not what you said.

EDIT: Still, the way communication of Saruman and Denethor with Sauron turned them both mad - is a good metaphor of how lots of awesome technology was misused to almost ruin humanity in the last 30 years. I wonder if it's reversible.

What "they made" 50 years ago is of little value now. Expertise matters, and it's lost with time passing.

Still - yes. Nationalization is a bad solution because it gives the state power to nationalize. Seems a truism.

Just let NASA work in its normal role. Instead of replacing that with SpaceX contracts.

Who said US?