AlteredEgo
Russia is invading Ukraine right now because Putin is big mad about losing control of soviet colonial holdings.
Loosing Ukraine? Well… as long as you’re not implying or hinting at that the US or NATO took Ukraine away from Russia.
And I really hope you’re not suggesting any of the conspiracy theories that the US had anything to do with the euromaidan protests or the that it was a coup or regime change! People who spread ahistorical lies like that are tankies!
It’s nice you are against Sovjiet imperialism, but in this battle between good and evil we need to be unified and unquestioning in our loyalty for freedom to prevail. To be other is to be tanky.
Already there have been ten thousand civilian deaths deaths since the invasion. Has any conflict in recent history been more bloody?
Always remember, doubt is the enemy of victory. History can be rewritten, but glory is forever!
Well I believe the government had to clamp down on opposition because they actually are in league with the imperialist side of the US and want a coup and overthrow democracy in Venezuela. I don’t think they falsified the results, until I see actual evidence, and not just claims of having evidence by the lying US.
It’s similar to Iran: The guardian council was established to prevent coup attempts by e.g. the CIA. Election interference creates a legacy of problems. Many countries in the world can’t have a free democracy because the US can bring such a huge influence to bear. The USA deserve to be hated by many people of the earth. The US experienced that kind of interference the first time in 2016.
But my point is that if your country is under siege by a hostile foreign power you have to hold fast and prevent the take over at any cost. This is where crackdowns and oppression become less black and white and the use of force and violence is an imperative.
The Venezuelan government has been remarkably calm and measured though. They didn’t even arrest Juan Guaidó who clearly is a US puppet.
“I have all these materialist things and still not happy”
My argument would go something like this: If you are the computer, then it is free will. If you could predict the computer, you could argue, but you can’t. You can’t even do this theoretically since you’d need more mass than the universe and can’t initialize your predictive model. So you can only say “that decision was made inside that brain”. That is at least one sensible definition of free will.
It’s like looking at a motor that breaks down and then saying that it’s not really the motor that breaks because the motor had no choice in it’s parts breaking. That’s just rhetoric.
The error I believe is that we don’t want to accept that sentience can arise from mechanical universe and it’s a matter of degree and that this can create meaning. People want to set the bar higher because they want the idea of some type of “pure mind”. But since we’re already discussing the meaning of all these things, arguing that what you are reading is just quantum physics is rhetoric.
Either what you are saying is supposed to be meaningful, or you concede that your words are meaningless. Then I anyone else wins the argument by default ;)
Basically the definition of free will can only be made by someone who claims that meaning exists, emerging from the material world. Therefor within that emergent layer of mind and meaning, a definition of free will other than basic physics is at least acceptable.
But would you surrender your country to Russia or China just because your current leader is a corrupt asshole? Would you have voted for Biden instead of Trump?
The US could have run a social democrat in Venezuela and they’d have won. Instead they picked some ultra-right wing reactionary assholes to support. They picked people who supported the 2002 coup and are in favour of the crushing economic warfare against Venezuela.
Of course there is legitimate protest against Maduro. But he’s the only choice if you don’t want your country to be forever owned and irrevocably fucked by the US imperialist boot. They have oil. That’s all a regime propped up by the US would need to support, oil extraction. No schools, no universities, no roads, no hospitals, just oil extraction. It’s a fucking grim future if you understand the rules.
Because of network effects the understanding of a monopoly has to grow with changing technology.
The fundamental problem is that it wouldn’t even be desireable to split up many of the new social media and internet technologies because that would reduce the quality for everyone, increase costs to support as a business and increase environmental damage from duplicating server storage and power consumption.
What we need is to turn them into public utilities that have significant democratic input by their own workforce (the experts and enthusiasts) and the users (the billions of people who actually create the value for the thing).
I honestly don’t see how you can do that. The problem is that the opposition and the media is presumably propped up by the US. Under that type of siege (and it is a siege, the US is at war with Venezuela) you don’t have lots of choices. History has shown the results of US interventionism in many countries. So I do think it’s an either/or thing.
PS: Just look at Argentina how quickly the democratic and social progress of a country can be dismantled.
Hmm well arguably I ought to rethink my opinion now that lemmy is working well enough.
Look at how many niche communities tried to move from reddit to lemmy and failed. Basically all of them. Even just a little pushback of reddit did a lot (not letting communities be abandoned or closed). Then lemmy is becoming increasingly fragmented (e.g. US imperialists and socialist instances). Then you have people deleting years worth of contribution and valuable content on reddit, answers to questions etc. Or what happens when ~20% of the current lemmy instances fold because of server cost or lost interest? And ultimately how much of a dent on a civilization level is the fediverse going to make?
All that are example of how network effects create a “toll” if you try to leave them.
The EU recently mandated that messenger apps need to create a compatibility layer and afaik even that looks like it’s going to fail to work as thought.