do_something
21d ago
From about 2015 until Merkel's retirement people were regularly calling Poland WN or worse.
This does not change that any definition classifying Poland as WN is deranged.
do_something
21d ago
No "lead developer" would be asking this question.
Note "sole" part. In this case "lead developer" is puffery that costs them nothing and worker can put it on CV.
Except that I’ve never ever seen this drive more people to support these causes.
I am aware of such cases. In one case because people cared, were willing to take being late or risking beating or prison sentence or being thrown out of work and take minor risk of being assassinated by regime - but they were not aware that such opinion was widely shared.
So protests sparked strikes and so on.
Note that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_warning_strike_in_Poland basically failed - despite 12 million people participating in strike - in country that had 36 million people! Imagine 111 million people on strike in USA! Strike included regime television, all TV went out for 4 hours.
But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Polish_strikes were final trigger for regime change.
On other side: for minor issues even minor protest can cause results, especially for local government issues when noone really opposes them. Or opposing group will happily go away and try to take less defended victim rather than fight this specific battle. In sufficiently minor cases things as simple as single person mailing local government can work.
Other model: it is demonstration of power and one step away from armed mob/uprising/terrorism. This also sometimes works. Sometimes by progressing into outright revolution.
See Ukraine in 2014 (president run away, no full scale civil war*) or how Tzarist Russia ended (ended in a full scale civil war).
*or ended in a civil war if you treat what happened in East as civil war rather than Russian invasion.
do_something
21d ago
I participated in some minor protests which were held and they were useful as they were used as "see, people actually care about this issue".
They helped to result in changes at local level.
Protests can be seen as kind of mini-referendum - and give sign to politicians they should at least pretend to care about given topic. Or maybe even care and do something.
In last local elections all politicians actually pretended to care about this topics, some seem to actually care about this topics.
Protest is better sign of actual strong interest than FB petition.
do_something
21d ago
"We don't expect you to be white, but we do expect you to act white."
By such metric Switzerland or Poland is white nationalist.
Or, South Africa by apartheid times was not.
do_something
23d ago
And doing this in family setting typically irritates another person much more than ignoring their comment about shadowy conspiracy.
Often dismissing it out of hand rather than demanding proof is much better strategy.
Is there something you consider sufficient proof that the former were not reasons or at least not primary reasons, or is this an irrefutable belief?
If appearance of various "it would be great to conquer Poland" and/or "we deserve controlling USSR-sized sphere of influence" would appear in Russian popular and official discourse as often as "we should reconquer Moscow/Lithuania/Ukraine" appears in Polish one.
Then I will worry less.
Not invading neighbours, not having dropping nuclear device on Warsaw as part of exercise scenarios etc would be also good step.
Unambiguously being sorry for numerous Russian invasions, massacres and meddling would be nice but even previous steps are dead head dreams, so...
do you have any concrete evidence for the former two?
More or less see above. Putting propaganda billboards with "Russia has no borders", Putin's face and Russian flag in background is not some strong evidence but doing this kind of thing consistently over years has convinced me.
Maybe it is selective presentation of facts but Russia has hardly bothered to counter it.
If I would feel ever in doubt I can go to official Twitter account of Russian government and feel reassured about treating Russia as suspicious, problematic, dangerous and lying.
That's fair, but where for one people paranoid overreaction to their own history might still be arguably adaptive as a meta-reasoning, it seems like insanity for others to go along with it.
Given high cost of failure* and relatively small costs of reducing risks it seems to be not a paranoid overreaction to me. But well, if I would be overly paranoid then I would claim this.
Bombing Moscow under "well, they will attack anyway so we can start" would be.
*underpreparation to WW II resulted in about 16% of population murdered, multiple years of murderous occupation and decades of colonial rule. And massive devastation of economy and several other major problems. Previous such failure resulted in 123 years of occupation and required world war to undo. Even with 1% risk of things going even a bit as badly as that - spending a bit more on defence seems a good idea.
It is not paranoia if they actually after you.
(to be clear, I am not expecting Russia to run death camps, but Mariupol-style devastation is bad enough)
Mea culpa for assuming it is more.
It is such fuckup that overestimating how specific part of fuck up is going is hardly a major failure.
Now there is talk that Poland is or might become the strongest land army in Europe
This would require either absurd overstretching of Polish resources or some comical failure across Europe including Russia. Several years of grinding down USSR reserves maybe could achieve this, but that seems quite unlikely scenario. Though Russia running out of tanks while invading half-failed state next door would still not be the stupidest part of this war.
Poland does not need larger army than Russia has, it needs to have large enough to fulfil it share of ensuring that invading NATO will remain scary enough. Or alternatively, powerful enough that invading Poland will be clearly stupid idea.
Also, ideally it would be small enough that no politician will get some ideas of invading neighbours (no trace of such ideas right now, but I would not underestimate stupidity of politicians).
do_something
23d ago
I think the proper and critical thinking response to a conspiracy claim isn’t dismissing it out of hand, but demanding proof.
Well, you often get "it is OBVIOUS", "lack of proof is proving strength of conspiracy" or "please view this 2h long youtube video".
What now?
do_something
24d ago
But going further, there is a meme, that comment which I have read a thousand times, which says it's a fear of nobody in control, of a random universe and of Hanlon's razor that makes people invent conspiracy theories. Is this meme a psy-op itself? Its aim to bring down status of those who ask questions about possible conspiracies even lower, paint them as cowards running from the reality? Given how reliably it appears as a call-response pair with somebody mentioning a conspiracy theory in a discussion, I'm inclined to answer positively.
I have seen it in action with family members, mostly harmlessly, and seems best explanation of what is going on (in general reasonable aunt complaining about masons controlling substantial part of catholic church - while being controlled by Soros who also runs entire EU).
do_something
25d ago
- it does not seem windows 11 specific, it looks program specific
- there should be an option to reload from file or just do ctrl-z
- I like such feature and several programs that I use on Linux have it
do_something
26d ago
Are you aware that Kurt's content is curated by Kurt's and material unflattering to Kurt will be not shown?
Why you think that you can draw any strong conclusions from such biased sample?
do_something
26d ago
That's the thing, I don't know if it counts as a complex problem. It's a "you're picking small high-hanging fruits, when you haven't even started picking the big low-hanging ones" situation.
"nuclear power has scary failure modes, but it is rare, does not actually kill so many people compared to failure modes of hydro and regular operation of coal burning and can be actually power our civilisation is safeteism is only of strong variety rather than extremely insane variety" apparently is a complex problem. Too many people think that ideal answer without drawbacks is achievable and anything with problems should be discarded.
Kind of "you're picking small pretty high-hanging fruits, when you haven't even started picking the big ugly low-hanging ones"
do_something
26d ago
but they leave out the fact that the vast majority of people on the planet are far better off today than 250 years ago.
vast majority is underestimate, people worse off are tiny % of all population. And they are mostly in places like North Korea where it is caused by not enough capitalism. Or Ukrainian frontline where it can be blamed for many things but surely not capitalism.
do_something
26d ago
"people fail at dealing with complex things, are happy to exaggerate for rhetoric and ignore claimed implications" is nothing new
galaxy-brained plans to limit air travel
only for peasants, private flights are not going to be affected
ban internal combustion engines
luxury cars are exempt
Nevertheless, you have weird people going with full denial of established physics and screaming about 2nd law of thermodynamics without understanding it, and fail to interpret simple graphs.
Because apparently failing at dealing with complex things, exaggeration for rhetoric and ignoring claimed implication are easier to do. Or more interesting?
do_something
26d ago
"scientists can still be wrong" was obvious at start, you still failed to make convincing case about literally anything here.
do_something
27d ago
Ukraine was also poor before war.
do_something
27d ago
Peace deal that was proposed in April(from what we know about anyway) wasn't bad enough to justify a couple of hundreds more dead and maimed.
it was effectively unconditional surrender - Ukraine would dismantle army (far below levels present then or now) - and after that Russia would invade on easy mode.
do_something
27d ago
if you predict that a bear will shit in the woods, then put on a jetpack and fly to the moon, the first prediction coming true does not make the second and third any more likely - even if you parade around any number of people who were absolutely insistent that the bear will never do any of the three things.
Well, I kept hearing from people that Georgia-Russia war is not going to happen, that supposed Russian invasion is fake and they are solely local rebels (in 2014), that Russia surely will not launch full scale invasion and any predictions about it is NATO hoax and vile russophobia and so on.
I am pretty sure that if Russia would invade Estonia people will keep telling me that idea of Russia invading Poland is absurd.
What do you think was the reason, then?
Revanchism for fall of USSR, attempt by Putin to secure his place in history and genuine belief that it will be a cakewalk.
I don't think "the whole country believes this" is a particularly strong argument.
Not claiming that, and I am aware of that. (anyone who thinks it is a strong argument should familiarise themself with what entire country believes in Russia, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Canada - this should be enough for any person to bring several blatantly idiotic widely shared beliefs).
But I mentioned it that it is not some personal witchy insanity. At the very least it is a widespread paranoid reaction to our history.
Don't most Poles also still actually believe that the Smolensk plane crash was orchestrated by Putin?
Would need to recheck but AFAIK "most" was never true (not checked this one, prefer to not get irritated - Smoleńsk was so absurd humiliating fractal fuckup that it is hard to find something comparably embarrassing in Polish history).
and in the case of Poland there are entrenched interests quite interested in nurturing that particular belief
Well, if PO, PIS, Lewica, Tusk, Kaczyński, Miller and basically all politicians and parties (and other groups) actually agree on something it is quite strong hint that either something is widely agreed to be actually a good idea or South Korean arms manufacturers deployed mind control beams.
Though actually "surely as fuck we do not want to be invaded by Russia again, and event faint chance of that is enough to go into alarm mode" counts as "entrenched interests" in Poland.
do_something
27d ago
My expectation is that Ukraine loses at some point in the next couple years, leaving Russia with a pyrrhic victory, a poorer and less-stable country, and cemented as an explicit enemy of the US for the next few decades at least. Why is this a desirable outcome? What value was secured by doing things this way?
Russia emboldened to invade Baltics seems to be worse outcome than that.
do_something
27d ago
Even taking your assumptions as true: Russian Empire is worse than Atlanticist Empire anyway.
they were client states where a pro-Russian government was removed by a Western-backed revolution Because they were hosting strategically important Russian military bases and threatening to seize/expel them?
this is applicable, and happened in Baltics, just a bit earlier
None of these justifications are applicable.
And none of this were real reason for invasion of Ukraine (in my opinion, I may be wrong - or you may simply disagree about interpretation of situation).
The Russian coethnics story was always a pretext for public consumption that didn't actually figure much into the decision whether to go to war
Though here I agree.
Do you not see that "Putin will invade the Baltics" is the same sort of "of course the outgroup will do the maximally evil thing, they are motivated by evil after all" reasoning?
This is not maximally evil thing Putin could do, I can imagine far more evil ones.
And "Russia will invade the Ukraine, then Baltics, then maybe Poland" is prediction dating back to Georgia-Russia war. And still, I would not treat it as likeliest or obvious - but as one of worse scenarios. But as being possible if things will go horribly wrong. I would note that this opinion is relatively well shared in Poland, even postcommunist and anti-Ukraine parties were supporting military builtup and fixing our military. Left one had relatively antimilitary opinion, in they program they suggested spending 3% of GDP on military without increase to 4% as some suggested.
Expecting Russian empire to try invading neighbours when possible is so far fairly well working bet, over last centuries - and there is no indicator that they plan to change it any time soon. Note my prediction is "there is a real risk of Russia invading NATO country", this is not specific to Putin. I have no great illusion that Putin disappearing would make things much better.
do_something
27d ago
I agree that if NATO takes proper steps then invasion will not be a clear success for Russia.
It does not mean at all that Russia will not invade.
do_something
27d ago
But why would Putin attack the Baltics?
For the same reasons as Russia invaded Ukraine? Both actual reasons and claimed reasons would be recycled.
do_something
27d ago
Trained physicists with extensive experience precisely with thermodynamics, made the argument.
Not sure why you assume that scientists cannot ever be hilariously wrong, make stupid mistakes, engaging in harmful conspiracies, troll or be insane cranks. Also in their own field.
It is especially confusing given that you are claiming that massive number of scientists do at least one of this things or similar.
Mix of conspiracy theory about scientists engaging in conspiracy AND appealing to authority of scientists is weird. Can you decide on doing one of these?
"two scientists published paper about X" is not as strong argument as you think it is. Have you heard about replication crisis?
answer is simple, there is no NWO
again, there is no central ruling cabal but many forces in play. Some push porn and that nearly all deviations are fine, some run financial puritanism or their lawyers told them that not processing problematic porn payments would be a good idea. And many more in between.
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