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?

Dunno which authoritarians you are talking about, most leftists in the wild will be for gun control.

Nobody thinks about that, just about hitting the people they don’t like. They don’t think of consequences, they don’t think that nationalization means humongous companies and wealth in fact changing hands in favor of people who already control the government.

That’s every fascist regime in history BTW - make your natural opponents hang themselves. Like in Russia in 1999 groups people most hurt by Yeltsin’s regime were deceived into voting for Putin, because he managed to create that “Soviet intelligence agent” image, despite being continuation of said regime. Or again in 2004, when he managed to take credit for growing oil prices, which meant that said groups of people feared literal starvation less, and the factor they’ve grown by compared to 1998 was so huge, that Russia’s level of life really didn’t catch up, but that was enough. Hold people in misery, throw them bones, they’ll be grateful.

Also why most Russians gloated over Khodorkovsky, Berezovsky, other oligarchs being beaten by Putin.

Cause the oligarchs seemed the face of that regime, except Putin was its soul materialized. They somehow thought that when he hurts all the oligarchs enough, things will be good.

DOD is also responsible for what they accept.

Why is everyone surprised.

But karl-marxists forget those the moment their side seems more in fashion.

That’s what I meant. I was joking, there’s such a thing - joke

The internet has plenty of people who don’t want to spend their effort for others’ moneymaking.

All we need is a transparent and simple process of using the real system.

Registering a DNS record is still cumbersome and done only by technical people, just like making a simple webpage. Or hidden someplace hard to find in Yandex/Google/other web interfaces. Despite it not being hard.

Maybe some simpler tools are needed too - say, Geminispace is an example of one such.

But in general what’s hard is as hard as things that are now easy were. Just the same effort didn’t go there.

Say, it’s not a common thing now to register a DNS record like one person’s “internet identity” (just personal websites maybe), but if it were, would it be harder than registering an e-mail account or a phone number? And then, if the system were used as it should, the rest could be done without users troubling themselves. Navigating that “internet contact directory” like you do in Facebook, sending DMs like you do in Facebook, but over an Internet protocol (say, XMPP or something new using that contact functionality) by a native application, having forums and feeds and e-mail and filesharing without platforms. All via native applications just as easy to use as the social media we have.

OK, I’m sleepy. Just - it’s technically possible.

Modern web page design is garbage and unreadable.

Because it’s a “newspaper meets slot machine” design. Kills two birds with one stone, hijacking media (censorship is invisible) and making money (invisible too).

I don’t need to know stacy from North Dakota’s thoughts on an article because 99% of the time it’s toxic anyways. Or misinformed.

And also because not every place is supposed to be crawling with people.

No. You have a toolbox, it’s called a web browser. To unite the particular websites you have a web ring, or your own bookmarks. There were also web catalogues.

First of all, it was performed the way that nobody knew what to even do with those privatization vouchers. They didn’t directly give anyone stocks, just vouchers for part of a company etc. Those had to be exchanged for stocks.

People didn’t know what to do with them, people had problems feeding their families, and people were offered some money for them. And people thought that’s what capitalism is, you get offered money for something, you give it. Nobody scams you, right?

Since those oligarchs happened to all have right friends, it’s without any doubt not a mistake that those stocks could even be sold.

And - attention - another history lesson. All the Soviet propaganda against religion led to everyone becoming “kinda church-loving” in the 90-s initially. All the Soviet propaganda for scientific view of the world led to thousands of sects and charlatans, together scamming most of the population. All the Soviet propaganda for honest and labor ethic led to most people not even considering such scams really scams, because in Soviet propaganda doing business was treated same as scamming someone.

So nobody even thought what’s happening is wrong. And the part of the population which did understand was those who got the shorter stick. People losing themselves in a bottle or a needle, people literally dying from hunger, people having to do crime or prostitution or mercenary work to survive. It was an unholy kingdom where for a part of the population it seemed they are almost the middle class now, just like in those American movies and ads, and the other part saw those ads and those people daily, but could barely survive.

And then, after a few years, the former part grew some understanding that Russia is approaching fascism, and the latter part, which already lived it since 1993, was so broken that it obeyed the fascists after they gave it a bit of a life without hunger and depression in the 00s.

See, there is a layer of the Russian (and general ex-Soviet) culture, in vibes and emotions, showing things as they really were, but it’s horrible to look into that. It was plainly impossible for a normal person to accept some group of people like Anatoly Sobchak’s daughter as opposition. After real opposition figures were being marginalized, jailed and even murdered for a few years. After the Chechen wars. After the way that privatization happened, and the 1993. Nobody would follow people who are just a subset of the same evil, except playing clean because it’s in fashion.

Then, of course, such a decision, so to say, made by a whole country leads to madness.

And this is what we live since then. Those stormtroopers on crutches storming Ukrainian positions - they know that their orders come from the evil itself. They are not fighting for something or against something, only to feel that evil as more material, or take their share of the suffering, or prove something to themselves. It’s a whole society of depressed people who need to prove something to themselves, because everything around is both evil, fake and dirty, one yearns for purification. It’s desperation of the better kind of people, whether you believe it or not. The worst kind finds ways not to die. It’s even natural for humans, like best shown in Japanese culture of honorable death. In European military cultures honorable suicide was a thing, well, in 2022 a few Russian generals shot themselves. I’ve read about them.

It’s really disgusting to be of the “fat” part of the population of these two.

How’s visiting dozens of pages different from visiting dozens of websites?

And BTW, on sites where feeds are in fashion, maybe some kind of Usenet upgraded for HTML and Markdown and post\author hyperlinks would be more in place.

Rediscover is a good word. Discovery depends on the entry point.

We start with the entry points designed for entrapment.

Should just avoid them. That’s hard, because their creators use all the casino-style and other means possible, since their power and profits depend on them functioning.

I’ve recently realized that all things I blamed on the Internet as it’s designed being obsolete, they are not caused by that. It’s not obsolete. It’s a system that can function well into the next millennium, even.

And even the Web as in year 2000.

Encryption, hashing, signatures, all the cryptography are the only qualitatively new thing.

But they can be applied to the old model, and it’s simple - we use a reserved range of v6 addresses and we map identifiers to them. An identifier is derived from person’s public key. Overlay networks are a thing.

We can do other things, say, publish user contacts and public keys in DNS. That allows secure store-and-forward communication over any service, not just trusted one, with encrypted messages.

The model itself allows bloody everything, people just don’t use it to the full extent.

Since Confederate States of America have gained a negative connotation and to avoid confusion, you could proclaim Libertarian States of America, I know most people here are not libertarian, but still fucking closer to that than typical trumpists, and they are going to steal the word otherwise. Said as a libertarian and a citizen of Russia, which means I’ll enjoy watching the events from afar quite a lot, might even remember to make popcorn.