Allero

I'm not sure MAGAs are intelligent enough to know what it is

For a while, yeah

AI is merely a tool to make more money. First - as a lure to investors, as any hype is. But then through adoption and transformation.

For what it is in what respect? You tried to argue that Cold War is a good vs evil situation, I argued that it is very much evil vs evil.

I fully admit Russia is and always was (I told you why nineties don't really count) an autocracy, and that actions of Russian rulers have caused a lot of misery and suffering. This doesn't stop me from admitting the US is a deeply flawed democracy, that American rulers are known to take plenty of unpopular decisions (including wars that no one asked for), and are generally known to not care about lives of people outside the country, causing even more misery all around the globe up to this day.

And this is exactly why I want the governments to have less power, and advocate for direct democracy. Any power is potential for abuse, and Russia and the US have likely proved it the most. Curbing the power of all governments, big and small, has great potential to reduce violence and abuse. With direct democracy and independent media, Russia could have never attacked Ukraine, Israel could never attack Palestine, and US wouldn't threaten to enter Iran yet again. Russia also wouldn't have opposition in jails or abroad, US wouldn't send immigrants to Alligator Alcatraz, and level of human misery would be so much less.

As long as we lead ourselves to believe that this misery and suffering is righteous or "not that bad" to any degree, we empower the tyrants all around the globe.

Oh, I see!

But then again, same can be said of anything but matter, and even matter as we experience it is just a set of reflections and electrostatic repulsion.

You never truly touch a single object - you just reach the force equilibrium - and all things you see around you, as well as yourself, are 99,99999% emptiness, or rather a few tiny electrons being everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Even if we could compress our entire bodies to a grain of sand, it would still be mostly that - an emptiness filled with uncertainty. So, does it even matter?

Oh, Connect is still out there? Thought it is dead.

Annexation by USSR touched Baltics and parts of Poland. The rest was more of puppet governments - something the US has practiced extensively all around the globe.

Part of it was ex-Axis powers (like Japan), the other part - just about any government thinking of socialism or economic independence from the US or having oil (Vietnam, Cuba, Chile, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Brazil, Bolivia, Cambodia, Syria, Guatemala, China, Egypt - you name it). After the Cold War, there were barely a few years US was not involved in some conflict or the other over its "national interests" or "national security", suggesting that it was never about rivalry with USSR. Needless to say, local population was generally not very happy about getting these military interventions, carpet bombings, coups and instated dictators.

So, I cannot in good faith agree that US was any better in this respect. Both sucked a lot, and same is likely to happen to any grand military power - if anything because military needs experience to stay efficient, and with great power comes great desire to use it to your advantage.

The way it shows in physical models suggests it's a very real phenomena tied to free and bound energy.

We can say energy has a tendency to be released with growth of entropy in the process.

Energy along with matter forms everything physical that we observe.

If we're truing to look into some sort of conspiracy here, I would propose another one.

Reddit is at the forefront of "dead Internet". Now being a paid data provider for AI scrapers, it's in Reddit's interest to generate as much data as possible at as little expense (i.e. servicing actual users) as possible.

At the same time, they need to show that data is user-generated, so they keep registering users - they just ban them later under any made up reason to not spend resources on them.

As a result - data flows, users think being banned is their fault, and no one can prove for sure Reddit is a dead trove of AI data, providing them with plausible deniability to keep on going and racking profits for minimal expense.

Well, entropy is eternal

This took a weird turn, and I hoped we are on the same page.

I do not support Russian government, and I hoped I made it very clear. All I call for is being honest when making accusations towards anyone.

"Russia is behind this" became a common trope that seemingly doesn't need any confirmation. Someone called it on Russia - then Russia it is. It's an instrument of propaganda, and it's how people are trained to believe whatever they hear without even attempting to check proofs.

Cold war is literally both sides, and I don't know what angle makes it not true. Could you elaborate why you put all blame on USSR, exactly?

There were issues with USSR, and quality of life and level of democracy was generally higher in the US; but what does it mean in the context of foreign relations? Isn't/wasn't the US literally the number 1 most invasive country on Earth, with military installations all around the globe and an insane toll of global conflicts and inflicted misery? With all respect, if we compare these two countries specifically, USSR was rather a cute little nuance, and it must take a lot of indoctrination to fail to see it.

Again, this is not to say either USSR or Russia are flawless or even good; a lot of fuckery went on in each, which has caused immense suffering. But if we consider Russian/Soviet imperialism, we should be sure not to apply double standards, or else you'll risk overlooking dangerous precedents.

Think of that from another perspective.

Assuming human lifetime to be 70 years:

• 0.4 lifetimes ago, the term "smartphone" was first used

• 0.5 lifetimes ago, Internet became a thing

• 1.7 lifetimes ago, first airplane rose in the sky

• 3 lifetimes ago, we got the first Turing-complete computer

• 6 lifetimes ago, we started discovering electricity

• 8 lifetimes ago, Middle Ages came to a close

• 20 lifetimes ago you'd be at the end of what we now as antiquity.

• 75 lifetimes ago you'd be at the beginning of Ancient Egypt and the early Bronze Age.

• 105 lifetimes ago you would witness the beginning of first human civilizations.

• 150 lifetimes ago people invented agriculture

• 4300 lifetimes ago humans as we know them appeared

History is speeding up, and today one human life is enough to witness a change our ancestors wouldn't see in a millennia.

Sure, we are, as always, grains of sand in the desert of eternity, but we are grains that matter. That make a change. Every day.

It took only 8 lives to rise from medieval times to where we are now, and less than one lifetime to transform...everything.

Oh, I know that feeling! Sorry to know the long comment is gone, happened to me more than once.

Oh, so you attribute the rise of Finnish right-wing to Russia as well, as in Russian agencies artificially create a wave of anti-immigration and then send immigrants in? Honestly, with all the real damage Russia has done, I feel like it is used as a scapegoat here; among a few reasonably confirmed cases (mostly of Russia killing dissidents abroad etc.), there is a sea of practically baseless speculation. Last time I saw this was a few days ago, when German military vehicles burned and journalists attributed it to Russia because some random pro-Russia Telegram channel mentioned it (and did so with clear factual errors that are alone enough to dismiss it).

Cold war, we should remember, was a two-sided conflict. It was not good vs evil, it was capitalist world full of red scare and propaganda vs communist block full of authoritarianism and, again, propaganda. Both sides could do much more to maintain peace, it's just that one side has eventually collapsed, leaving the other to rule the world and write history books. And as much as Europe was concerned about USSR being on their doorsteps, so was USSR concerned about militarization of Europe with the aid of the US. That's what this entire showoff is based on; it's not a one-sided show of intimidation, and, arguably, both sides would rather not have it. Moreover, it was started by the US swinging nuclear arms around, and then USSR jumped along.

I'm not sure what you consider to be a shot of democracy - perestroika itself or the dissolution of the Soviet Union? In first case, yes, it was a welcome change, but as some of the Soviet republics, particularly in the Baltics, were essentially held in by force and censorship, it was a catalyst for the future dissolution, which is likely why it wasn't done sooner. Dissolution itself brought a lot of freedom to the former republics which were not super fond of being Soviet to begin with, but was a disaster for Russia, Belarus, and new states in the Middle East. In the latter, there was nothing to blow as there was nothing democratic about them to begin with - it was just a bunch of new dictators.

Speaking of Russia in particular, while trying to show a face of democratic change, Yeltsin has consolidated power by creating puppet parties (including a puppet Communist party), silencing opposition by not letting them into main federal TV channels that were the main information source at the time, and destroying existing democratic institutions, sometimes with actual military force (see the assault on Congress of People's Deputies). By the time Putin (heavily endorsed by Yeltsin as the new leader of the country) got to rule Russia, it was already heavily in United Russia party's grip. Make no mistake - this was a show of democracy designed to be blown. And, sure, it was an easy play, as Russians by then never really knew the times they, and not someone in the high cabinets, could vote someone in.

We should certainly have experts running and planning critical parts of the economy, but we should also make sure it's as hard to corrupt as possible. Governments are prone of injecting propaganda in schools we both care about, cutting medical spending, and attacking nuclear plants during the wars. If we should have governments at all, they should either work through as much of direct democracy and self-organizing as opposed to representative power (which is quite close to anarchy), or through careful and open computerized planning with active input of the people. The global political goals in the meantime should shift towards cooperation and integration on all levels, so that one plot of land uniting against the other plot of land would look as absurd as it actually is.