This is the longest post I’ve never read.

Enough of personal perspective to be banned for mentions of things they don’t like, or comments that can be interpreted in a myriad ways. Mods there consciously want people to fall in line. Fuck them, they are worthless idiots.

Not even talking about the surrealistic feeling of some fat American leftist who can’t read in Russian telling you sitting in walking distance from Gorky Park how you’re all wrong and superficial on bloody USSR. And they don’t get any ideas when you tell them that.

And yet a few days ago people chased off someone ranting in a rant comm about cm. Seems more like those advocates for cm can’t handle the criticism or anything pointing out logical flaws in the megathread they update

I think talking about federated services is different from talking about federated data. In Lemmy they are the same, which is why it’s not a good architecture. In Usenet they were not the same, but outside of mammoth technology there’s no similar solution.

Think about bittorrent trackers. They do serve the job of helping peers find each other. But nothing is tied to them, mostly, outside of many closed ones.

Lemmy instances also provide storage and relay services, functionally.

All of these can be separate, and user identities can be untied from instances of some service.

Trackers help you find relays and storage nodes serving specific users and groups. User and group identities are cryptographic (hope so, but one can have separate authentication services, why the hell not ; then it may be analogous to Lemmy instances in regards to bans and moderation).

Doing that isn’t easy, though. But I suppose a competent programmer can implement a tracker (simplest by far - announce, clear, request and storage, the tracker just has to check signatures if identity is, say, hash of public key), a storage service (an object storage with authentication, similar to previous, but perhaps paid with additional registration for that identity), a relay (not much more complex than a toy chat server, but perhaps similar to storage service) and a client application (that one is complex, but not too much, because all the logic of finding stuff by trackers and assembling\replaying group\user\post states is on the client) in not too horrible time.

OK, I’ve started writing a prototype for that in an TCL/Tk recently, lost willpower (ASD, BAD, bad sleep, bad food habits) after adding replays and before adding networking, and when thinking about convenience of integration with ready libraries and such, suspect C or C++ from the beginning would be easier. Bitwise operations not being PITA as a bonus.

If you have the chance, travel. You’ll notice a distinct lack of Westerners standing around and cracking the whip most places. If anything, they’re building wells and handing out vaccines.

It’s arguably the strongest faction, although China’s also up there. But, there’s still plenty of sovereignty to go around.

But Deng is a cool anti-imperialist - to the point where saying billionaires aren’t very communist gets you instabanned. And also somehow Modi, despite the fact the two nations were recently sending people to bash each other with sticks over territory.

I remember back in the day there was dispute over if Assad is cool, if Assad or the actually-socialist Kurds were cooler, and if Daesh is cool too. Interesting to hear Hexbear has a carveout for Russia. .ml, at least, definitely posts TASS all the time.

My sense of the Cold War examples is that they happened in places that were on a kind of knife’s edge already. Like Chile - there was an existing underfunded, previously influential and endogamous military that didn’t need to much encouragement to take down Allende, electoral mandate be damned. They managed to gain influence across a lot of Latin America at the time, but there’s no comparable place now. In modern areas with unstable governments, the US has been losing ground this decade, as opposed to running the show.

If the US was secretly replacing otherwise-stable governments all over the world, it would take vast numbers of people all over and be much too hard to perfectly to cover up. France’s program in north Africa ended up an open secret, for example. You don’t need it to explain anything either; so, it’s not supported by Occam’s razor. And obviously, how could I falsify that idea? This is when it starts feeling like arguing against a conspiracy theory. Every thing you can say against it gets twisted into evidence for a successful coverup.

There’s been open interventions like Iraq and Libya, and legitimate controversy about them, but neither of those guys were remotely elected (which is what I was asking about). Intervening in the sense of throwing their weight around in lesser ways definitely happens, both in secret and in open, but China is also notorious for it, and has even taken a couple swings at Canada deep in the US sphere.

But the fact remains that the foreign policy of the US has remained fairly stable across multiple administrations from both parties, which essentially amounts to saying “promoting freedom and democracy” but in actuality promoting expanding military power around the world and expanding economic power as a result of that military presence at just about any cost.

My point there was just that a lot of the decision makers believe they’re doing something noble (and the rest just want to get re-elected). At least in my country, which is culturally very close to the US, foreign policy isn’t a deliberately self-serving enterprise. (Although the fascist/“far-right populist” movement obviously goes in exactly that direction, and claims it’s a virtue)

I don’t agree at all that it’s always BS.

The first example I was thinking of there is Venezuela. Conditions in the nation are really bad, there’s been mass migration out of it, and it’s not hard to find a Venezuelan that hates Maduro and friends. He can say it’s the CIA planting people, but even if you agree that none of the situation is actually his fault, it’s not the CIA - people do blame the current government. Same story during the Arab Spring. Really, dictators will usually say an enemy manufactured any civil unrest, and the US is the obvious choice for some of them. Others blame local rivals, and historically Jews were popular.

Also, Maduro is still in charge of Venezuela, which goes back to the knife’s edge thing. The US appears to be gearing up for an open armed invasion to dislodge him, because just the considerable public support for the opposition and whatever clandestine programs weren’t enough.

A 2021 review of the existing literature found that foreign interventions since World War II tend overwhelmingly to fail to achieve their purported objectives.[100]

Interesting, I might have to read that. In my head the banana republic coups worked like half the time, but maybe that’s just because nobody talks about the failed ones.

I think the main difference between those examples and the regime changes in the past is that there’s no “accelerant”, (i.e., something like the type of involvement the US’ CIA had in those countries).

I mean, Russia’s trying to make far-right takeovers happen pretty hard.

I’m not saying that the US is secretly controlling the entire world. I’m saying the US has a knee-jerk reaction to deeply meddle in order to promote regimes that advantage them and depose regimes that disadvantage them.

The thing in question at this point, I think, is if it’s a reason why we should support anybody (or almost anybody) who opposes the US. Just saying that the US should chill wouldn’t be out there enough to argue with.

The US has demonstrably engaged in more covert and overt regime change operations and high-pressure tactics around the world than the entire rest of the world combined, since the end of World War II.

Hmm. That would include the end of the actual colonial era. There was a lot of what you could describe as “high-pressure tactics” used by Europe against the various independence movements.

If you restrict it to regime change only, it’s possible, since it’s mainly the US-led West and the Soviets playing. I honestly not sure if there’s non-aligned examples of supporting a foreign coup/revolution.

but I think claiming that US foreign policy isn’t a deliberately self-serving enterprise is pretty far out there and would need to some major evidence to the contrary, like perhaps demonstrating what was the actual noble purpose of all the regime change operations of the past.

If you do believe that’s the case, why should the US be involved in the domestic affairs of other countries?

During the Cold War the reason given was usually “to stop communism”, since then it’s more like “for democracy” or “to stop atrocities”.

That may or may not be drinking the kool-aid. If you are yourself a non-communist democracy, those can overlap with national interest, which is definitely a slippery slope. That’s not the same as it being purely propaganda, though (which looking back through the thread is where this tangent started).

Ah, SDF must have been down at the time and I was on the alt.

You’re right, that is ruder than I remembered, because I said “nonsense”, although I’d still argue that’s mild, and the point was to clarify what was going on to someone confused. The dude was indeed a Dengist - that’s not a derogatory term.

It’s a cliche because it’s an obvious problem with the claim, regardless of how much spin and quote mining is put into it. I learned something from this ban, because Dengism used to be a fringe position within Western socialism. Not so on Lemmy.

I’m gonna go back through some of my other testy exchanges just to make sure I’m not crazy. Pro-NK, pro-China, pro-Russia, pro-Assad. Pol Pot has been been kicked around too, although not directly to me. I will have to pick through the waves of insults and rude gifs that always come with a visit from Hexbear.

Okay, but I’ve been banned before for saying billionaires aren’t communist, and Dengism is just capitalism. I wasn’t rude or off-topic. I’d send a link, but it must be too old now, and all I can find are the previous times I’ve mentioned it.

I explained elsewhere here. We’ll keep it in one place.

defederate from an instance that may have some issues in some of their communities, or let users decide whether to block them, which one would you chose?

The latter.

Here’s me getting instabanned for saying billionaires aren’t very communist, to someone confused as to why OP would say they are.

No problem. The internet should be fun, not stressful.

I would still have to see any evidence that what I said (essentially that the US has been the biggest bully in the world for the last 80 years) is way off the mark.

If we’re including post-WWII decolonisation, pretty much point to any former colony - which is a rather large map area. The British or French didn’t just let them leave, but did atrocities to stop them until they couldn’t anymore. I went looking for casualty figures, but it turns out there’s not much information known. Maybe we’ll have to wait until the guilty parties are all dead.

I think you’d arrive at the same conclusion that it was a two-sided competition if you were to read up in detail on a few times and places during the Cold War, as opposed to just the US coup greatest hits. Mao did not fight alone. The thing is, it’s hard to capture that all in one number. The USSR spent maybe 20% of it’s GDP on it’s military, while being a third the economic size of the US, to give a sense of scale of the kind of resources that were piling in from the communist direction.

Over a period that long and the area of the whole world that’s about as good as I can do in a Lemmy comment.

Social media manipulation is in no way equivalent to supporting or initiating coups.

Ukraine comes to mind (did we talk about that already?), as does Georgia. Globally it’s in no way just social media, either. In places like the Baltics there’s your classic people with suitcases full of money going around and paying for sabotage, access or votes. That’s not just hearsay - some have been caught.

In the West they’re more limited because it’s harder to get away with, so yeah, they mostly mess with social media. I’m pretty sure there was somebody that went to jail in the US during Biden’s time, though.

I’m not sure I understand your second point here,

It wasn’t a point, I just won’t/can’t argue with the basic idea that they’ve been too aggressive. I’m arguing with the first thing.

why should anyone support the US or any of its closest partners?

I mean, the most conservative stance would be just to support nobody and say every country is awful. Why isn’t that in consideration?

have not supported the US/West position in either Ukraine or Palestine.

Ukraine has lots of third world support (see the votes in the image). Palestine has some Western support; Canada just went against the US to recognise it in what is a very sensitive period in our relations. Sweden did long ago.

The claims that it’s “for democracy” is very weak when there are examples in the recent past of the US either supporting or not opposing coups against democratically-elected foreign leaders. The first example that comes to mind is the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the Arab Spring. From what I recall, there was hardly a squeak from the US when that happened, because it benefited the US.

Support for an anti-democratic coup hasn’t happened since the “stop communism” era. If you include not getting involved, neutral Switzerland is a massive bully, and I actually can show it in a Lemmy comment.

I would guess Obama was concerned and disappointed, but also wanted some kind of stability, and to not alienate a new government he was going to have to deal with one way or another. Starting another ground war in the Middle East was obviously out of the question at that point - even closing Libyan airspace was very controversial.

Oh, the pro-Daesh guys were pre-Lemmy. Back when they actually had a de facto state and were fighting the Kurds.

What about .ml? I know for a fact you can’t trash talk China there.