I've heard a lot of fear and murmur about whoever succeeding Putin will be one from his inner circle who will be even more radical than him. I really hope something else will happen, but unlikely, unfortunately...

I think you're very right with the element of pride, and it will indeed to a large degree be their continued downfall. Nevertheless I hope (for a miracle?) that there will be more international openness, despite the isolation that both Kremlin and other nations have imposed upon the country. Isolation is at best only going to create stagnation.

The fact that only those with good connections manage to get out of the dire situation makes me want to do something for them. There are good people there too, who are stuck either due to fear or economy. But I can't say I've seen a lot of good treatment of Russians abroad after 2022. I know people who've had to change their surname in order to avoid prejudice abroad. This is what I feel makes it not only more difficult, but also like they are on their own; there is no support to get.

Russia probably won't become a world leader anytime soon indeed, but they don't have to be for the people to live well. And I agree; a major event is likely necessary for proper change to take place. I held my breath when the Wagner group marched towards Moscow, uncertain if something like a civil war would be breaking out. But alas, the same corruption prevailed as always, and the leader was disposed of through an "accident".

In regards to separation, I'm curious if there will protests at governmental levels in oblasts, krais, or republics, like Kaliningrad, Yakutia, Krasnoyarsk Krai (Siberia), or Khabarovsk Krai. Many of the people in these areas are (for the lack of a better word) disconnected from the war in every sense other than what the state tells them. If the illusion of the propaganda breaks, I wonder if they will at any point think "we'll be better off without Moscow"? And the amount of young men Kremlin has siphoned out of Khabarovsk is a very good reason for wanting separation, imho. They are already closer friends with China than with Moscow anyways, it seems to me.

As long as Putin is in power, the downward spiral will continue. After that? Legally, the prime minister would take over. Realistically, it's whoever manages to woo over the military & the elite. The long-term outcome depends on who will actually be the one in power.

The people though, they're still screwed. Unless a miracle happens and P drops dead tomorrow and the person that ends up taking over is a notch less corrupt than the other. It'd be a miracle indeed. In any case, just like you said, ghost towns will propagate, the intelligent will leave, the old will die. However, Russia is supposed to be big and strong, with nukes and honour. The big bad bear does not show weakness. So personally, I don't think there's going to be "care packages" or "aid" or "you get help if you do X". That'd mean admitting needing help, and that's a big no-no.

As someone from a former Soviet country (now living in UK), my heart bleeds for the Russian people. Over a million young people pushing up sunflowers in Ukraine. Some of them were evil and cruel, yes, but a lot of them didn't want to be there. And war aside, just as you pointed out - Russia never properly recovered and rebuilt post-USSR. And the people suffer more than the ones in power, since the latter have money to import the Mercedes and eat the caviar. Is also why many escape, and become expats. Though nowadays they need connections and to grease the right palms, what with every body being a potential force in the war.

That said, the rampant corruption in Russian leadership has been there for a long time. Pre and post dissolution, the methods have only changed. As such, unless something major happens, I don't think Russia will ever recover and become a world leader. They're too far behind, and unwilling to change. But oh well, gotta see in a couple of generations, I hope I'm wrong. Oh, and I don't think that the modern day Russia will break apart any time soon. Too proud, too harsh, and not worth the effort for those that could potentially benefit from it.

I don't think it's that big of an issue. There will always be a jackass obsessed with some minutia in a large group of people. some specific spaces encourage that (twitter, maybe .world?), and I've seen some videos of presenters trying very desperately to be the annoying twitter lib instead of addressing the real points, but i don't think it's the majority of actual leftists. I mean, Hassan is currently beloved and you've seen the hit pieces that libs were putting out on him.

I think if the FBI leaders who ran cointelpro could see the culture of leftist spaces online today (and offline to an extent), they'd be really fuckin proud of themselves.

We have absolutely allowed ourselves to buy into the notion that "doing the work" is the same thing as finding someone among us to label the enemy and attempting to punish them.

It kinda affects any space dedicated to folks who care about doing something because its good, honestly. I see it a lot from open source people a lot too

FD signifier and Lindsay Ellis* both have really good videos about this subject. Lindsay's is on her cancelation if you go looking for it.

We have to learn to kill the cops in our minds. No more carceral justice, for our fellow leftists or otherwise. We have to learn how to build something together rather than just tear eachother down; when we can do that we'll be an actual threat to the system. Until then, the agents that destroyed the last effective leftist movement in the US are pointing and laughing.

Edit: added a link for FD's video. Apparently the Lindsay Ellis video was taken down or unlisted, so sadly I can't link to it. It was a very effective portrayal of some of the deepest dysfunctions of leftist spaces online

That's a really good point. I don't often see systemic solutions proposed here beyond "live and let live."

Not to derail here, but it is interesting to me that on a pro socialist, left leaning site that there isn't more focus on community based solutions. Isn't the a big focus on the left is to find a way that the many can govern themselves without some centralized group deciding what is and isn't best for everybody.

I think this is wrong. At least from the internet i grew up with. These communities at not hobby projects or owned by moderators. They're owned by the community. Moderators are there to help manage the community. But it isn't theirs to own. The community needs to police itself which is why we have up and down votes. Moderators are there to handle users that are violating something that can't be managed through voting.

I think if we all do our best to engage in good faith. There will always be bad actors or someone having a bad day who doesn’t have the energy to do so, which should be recognized. If you go into a conversation with the intent of sharing something or learning something, usually it will be a good or productive conversation, assuming the other person(s) are not bad actor(s)

I think there have been attempts to include them in the past, like libraries or public access television, but rule has generally been that access to media, especially the ability to create and distribute media, has not been guaranteed and is usually controlled by cartels. See print media, telecom companies.

I think that yeah genetics and whatnot where you are basically guess and checking anyways is where it’s good. Kinda like brute forcing a login, the more attempts you have, the more likely you are to stumble upon the answer. I remember dad telling me about folding@home and to me it sounds like a good idea, and that there, is an ai!

Forgot who but I saw someone who trained his own genai on his own drawings and got it to inbetween his animation which is definitely one of the less bad uses of it. As someone who hand animated once or twice, inbetweening is quite boring tho the generated frames should be a checked over and manually corrected.

I saw a guy who did inbetweening for his animation with a homebrew model he trained with only his data. That is an idea, but the tech is still pretty new

I’m open to talking about ai though I have a bit of an anti ai perspective, shame that even the 5 of us able to hold a conversation get tarred with the same brush

Does free speech not include technologies to access said freedom of speech? Anyways, here for an open and free web

Starting in 2011, Telefónica, the former state monopoly that holds the country's "universal service" contract, has to guarantee to offer "reasonably" priced broadband of at least one megabit per second throughout Spain

Man, I wish the monopoly in Canada would do something like that . . . Stuck paying stupid amount of money for not even gigabit speeds . . .

Yeah, there are going to have to be policies that protect against harassment, including spam. I'm not technical enough to know how to draft those policies, but I think the gist would be that even if you have the right to send messages, no one has any obligation to listen, or continue to listen, or host them on their servers. Malicious activity that disrupts common spaces or others' servers (like DOS attacks) will need some kind of protection. I imagine it would work a lot like federated servers do now: anyone can host a server and say what they want, but other users (and servers) have no obligation to listen to them, rehost their content, or interact with them in any way.

Yeah, I’m glad there are those who see the importance.

Free, uncensored and unrestricted internet access.

Could definitely use some better wording, especially this part:

Everyone on earth, every person, deserves to be able to get on the internet and talk to whomever they wish

This could easily be interpreted as it being illegal to ban someone from any online community or website, or even to block them at a user level. If you block a user's posts, then they can no longer talk to you, which would violate their right to talk to whomever they wish.

So... Scammers, trolls, spammers, AI slop bots, corporate accounts, etc. could all claim they have a right to talk to you over the internet, and any attempt to stop them from doing so is a violation of their rights.

Oh cool, I did not know that was already a thing. Well, I'm glad I made it to the party anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access

that is the problem with voting. some folks treat it as a rare thing to only do in the most extreme case and I was like that. now though its useful for me to upvote everything due to an effect I want in my feed. others downvote almost everything or upvote almost everything. Its would only actually be useful if everyone actually voted on everything genuinly which honestly would be a bit of a chore from my perspective. I really wish I could order by number of comments in the he last X period of time. heck would even get better if it could be more meta and be able to select for most chains with Y number of users. The only thing that would scare me about that is bots or folks knowing people sort by that and gaming the system. Oooh. I would love to be able to filter out for links or images with no body of the person talking about why they like the image or link.

the problem with transparency is we get to see how ugly we are.

and that offends a lot of people. a lot of people would very much rather be ignorant and very much champion such suppression of dissent and difference.

my read on a lot of the 'controversial' subreddits is that most people don't really care if anyone jerks it off to dead bodies, they just don't want to know that it exists. sort of like the homeless. people generally don't care about them, and their objection is primary that they have to see them and acknowledge their existence. they want them to 'go away' because they serve as a vivid remember of their own fragility and capacity for 'badness'.

That's mostly true too.

That you should stop talking about Paradox of Tolerance. Because it's a specific problem in a specific context, and you're generalizing it to internet forums. You're taking it out of context (as does most anyone on the internet when talking about philosophy stuff)

Which is the issue with a lot of philosophical euristics, and argumentative standards. I taught first year philosophy to undergraduates. The vast majority of them... are terrible at it because they misunderstand the context in which their tools we teach them are to be applied... which is philosophy class. A great example is that in philosophy we don't accept arguments from authority... but in law and legal scholarship arguments from authority are a huge part of the discourse. Two difference fields, two difference standards. Bringing one into the other makes your arguments bad/irrelevant and doing so makes you an asshole if you do it deliberately, and a fool if you do it ignorantly.

But on the internet lots of people take the 'i have a hammer and everything is my nail' approach. I could tell you a story about my cat, and you might ask me to cite my sources on that, and claim my story about my cat is wrong/bad because it's not sourced. Or you personally attack me and my cat, because you think all grey cats are evil and anyone who has one is evil. etc. etc. You might do this out of malicious bad faith, or you just might be an idiot, or both.

But to put it another way, any good moderated discussion must be necessarily censored. I'm not going to accept personal stories about cats in my philosophy class, because it's not about that. But if I gointo cat subreddit and start arguing with people about their poor argumentation in talking about their cats, i should probably be booted from the cat subreddit. the cat subreddit isn't a place to philosophically debate other cat owners about the truth of the mental states of their cats that they are discussing. Applying my standards and expectations of philosophical argument would be absurd and ridiculous, just as it would for me to start going around citing local bylaws at them about how they are violating said laws.

But on internet... people are doing this shit all the time. Maybe out of pettiness, maybe to troll, maybe because they are just morons who don't understand the concept of context or the situational.

and frankly a lot of stuff happens via the drive by effect. people stumble onto something and all the sudden it gets viral and gets flooded and taken out of context. happened to lots of small niche subs that hit the front page back in the day.