Yeah, I think that managed to put my feeling into more concise words. Russian socialism cost many many lives, but at its core the principles it was trying to champion seem correct: it proposes fairness and dignity through the active improvement of people’s education and lives. Whereas fascist movements (Hitler, Mussolini, Trump) are actively destructive. They thrive off of people’s hatred and fear of “the other”.

I guess my main question would be… If the Soviet Union was truly raising thinking, critical workers that would one day not become slaves, then how is it possible that immediately after its collapse, Russia became almost immediately a fascist state that indeed allowed only slaves and never masters to exist beyond its oligarchy?

Something seems amiss in the proposition there. It seems to me like fascism is almost an unavoidable illness that comes to all societies sooner or later, and the only thing we can do is find ways to weaken it before it leads to catastrophic results.

MAGA will be a good example of how fascism comes to its end within societies that cannot be militarily opposed.

What is the reasoning behind that conclusion? I can see how comparing the two simply because they’re totalitarian would be superficial (there are many structural differences between both). And to me, what the Nazis did, the rhetoric they used and their rise to power has always felt much more ominous and foreboding than even Stalin’s.

But I can’t put it into words and I see no real reason why Stalin’s crimes and death camps would in any way be less evil than the Nazis’. To me it feels like Nazis went beyond just political power straight into core beliefs and ideology, whereas Stalin’s crimes were just your typical tyrant authoritarian maneuvering, but I don’t know if that really makes an ethical difference.

No man. In that hypothetical, you would have had a civil war on your hands with Trump as a martyr.

All of his devout cultists would have gone out to actually just murder every “lib”. If you think his cult is a terrorist organisation now, you can’t imagine how bad it would’ve been with him dead.

Murdering the figurehead of a violent movement doesn’t dissipate the impetus, it causes it to explode in every direction.

Look up the murder of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, or Inukai Tsuyoshi, hell even Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The death of an evil figurehead is not always the best path forward, because ideally we would want to avoid generalised death, destruction and bloodshed as much as possible.

Conservatism in the US nowadays mostly features some degree of cultism. In a lot of people’s cases, that means a cult to cruelty, unfortunately.

Don’t worry, the Colombian right wing has done its absolute best to victim blame the farmers, or to diminish the atrocity or to claim it was a necessary sacrifice.

Meanwhile the Colombian guerrillas did their absolute best to shit on the popular movements that fueled them initially by allying themselves with drug traffickers and committing atrocities themselves against rural civilian populations.

So basically the Colombian civilians of the 20th century were sandwiched between an overzealous fascist right wing and a violent and reckless left wing.

Nowadays both sides are politically mostly rhetorical and the left wing is far less violent while the right wing is more careful about their image after losing elections and Congress seats to the left.

This is exactly how the banana massacre in Colombia took place 100 years ago. Workers were being paid in United Fruit Company bonds, which caused revolts and protests, the US government threatened to invade to protect the company’s interests, so the Colombian government deployed the army to suppress the protests and murdered thousands of farmers.

This still shapes Colombian politics to this day, has appeared in A Hundred Years of Solitude, and has absolutely helped power the leftist movements in the country since. The parliament and president have constantly referenced this instance in recent years too as examples of American neocolonialism.

It’s a tale as old as time.

I mean, surely the answer is yes? There are virtually no supreme leaders who haven’t committed some form of sexual assault or power harassment in history.

Some examples include: European monarchs, Japanese daimyo, Latin American dictators, the United States dictator, several United States presidents, probably a vast number of catholic archbishops and surely some popes, and several Islamic religious imams and ayatollahs.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The situation is eerily similar to that of the Crusader States and the Latin Empire in surprise surprise the “Holy Land”.

Not to mention those wars also came as a general result of prosperity and wealth in Christian kingdoms that fought and pushed back against the Islamic states.

Israel has a lot in common with the Latin Empire really. Fully supported by a foreign, far away power with strategic interests in the region.

Which is why you use it simply as a proofreader and then evaluate the mistakes it brought up. You don’t blindly trust it or worse, use it to write everything from scratch, because then you’re just going to deliver shit code.

I see people hating on AI for things that are far more the fault of how people use it than of the technology itself. AI is extremely over hyped, but if you understand it for what it is, it’s a fairly useful tool.

I think it’s probably fine as long as you wrote that stuff yourself and simply had AI parse through it to check or correct anything you might have missed, which is how I mostly use it.

For code generation, AI is still far too unreliable, and I don’t like the tone it gives to my emails because it doesn’t sound like me. So I just have it correct my weird grammar or spelling sometimes.

The only other option is that they did reach an agreement and said agreement allowed Spain to deny its existence. Trump did this with Iran before bombing actually, where he proposed the Iranian government could save face with public statements while complying with his demands. When they refused, he bombed them.

LLMs like ChatGPT do have their uses and I don’t think we can say they’re absolutely scams. As someone living in another country, they help me proofread my comms and documents so I don’t have any spelling mistakes or weird grammar in them.

Likewise, for coding they can find logical mistakes quickly and are usually good at translating from one programming language to another. So I can see their value as assistants of sorts, but the new hype where all human labour is being replaced by AI makes it very difficult to support these enterprises.

The problem is that I’ve been coding on Windows (and occasionally) Mac for the good part of 8 years and I’ve just become used to the bullshit here. I really hate the idea of having to get used to a completely new brand of bullshit. And I don’t mean corporate bullshit but rather OS jank.

But yeah, thanks for the suggestions. I think I’ll start figuring out some way to migrate all of my stuff. And the C++ legacy libraries and other more complex things.

Ugh. I’ve never wanted to use Linux and can’t afford a Mac, but with this situation, Linux is all I have left. Which I do find annoying but I just can’t keep justifying using Windows.

I really think you guys need to wake up to the fact that they don’t care about distracting from the Epstein files because they know they can’t be held accountable whatsoever.

The reality is every file could come out unredacted tomorrow and absolutely nothing would happen (maybe one or two major donors would get house arrest at best).

They’re not trying to distract from anything because it doesn’t matter. No one will do anything.

They are just furthering the US’s economic and military goals by toppling unfriendly governments because they can. They don’t care about optics, but they do care about whatever goals they have underlined for themselves.

The most likely unsettling reality for most American progressives, I imagine, is that toppling Iran, establishing a friendly government and gaining military power in the region, benefits them as well, just like with Venezuela, but it is a dark reality for most of the rest of the world. Not because Iran’s government was great, they were absolute shit, but because that means the US will just extort whoever they want whenever they want.

Some Americans probably prefer to believe this is a distraction than to see how this ultimately does benefit their own country’s immediate military interests at the expense of almost everybody else, not to mention setting an incredibly grim precedent for the future.

Basically, I think people are being naive or deliberately playing dumb when they pretend they don’t understand how this benefits the US military industrial complex, and instead think it’s all a distraction. Yes, what benefits you guys actively harms other humans. That’s the sad reality of geopolitics sometimes.

I mean to be fair I haven’t met the first Venezuelan (I’m literally constantly interacting with all types of Venezuelans day to day) that didn’t want Maduro gone and behind bars, so what happened there is slightly less pure evil and more of a deal with the devil type of situation.

If I had a penny for every Bulgarian ruler that took the skull of a Byzantine emperor and turned it into a drinking cup, I’d have two pennies…

I think no one will condemn this because everyone sees the Israeli government as a bigger issue than even Trump. Which is quite naive.

We just have the rule that whoever cooks doesn’t wash. I hate cooking because I hate getting my hands sticky, my wife hates washing the dishes because she always forgets the corners and we end up rewashing anyway.

It’s perfect harmony. Whenever she doesn’t want to cook, I cook, and she then procrastinates washing as long as she wants because it is her responsibility and we both know it.

We basically never fight, but cooking and washing has never been a point of tension in this household lol.

Scammers aren’t even writing their own scams anymore. It’s ChatGPT all the way down.