Funny. I've always been proud of understanding things deeper than people around me (or trying).
But at the same time those people around would treat as something miserable the fact that I don't even try to remember dates, numbers, names, other specific facts not necessary for understanding the whole architecture. I'm fine with that context, but it's obvious.
Yeah, that and also you can look at how nation-states behave.
Everything in life is modular, they are already corporations.
Like you have some kind of LEGO blocks, one thing made of them is called a corporation, another such thing is called a nation-state. If you attach blocks to the former to make it same as the latter, it'll behave the same too.
This is also the reason I'm skeptical of any liberal ideas of the "let's vote in the party that will be good , nice and make laws for the state to be always good , nice". If the state is made of the same blocks and you've just glued a paper with some letters on it on the outside - obviously nothing will change in that regard.
EDIT: Also notice how Trump, Vance and others do not behave as if they've suddenly won everything and are going to institute fascism right now and kill all they don't like. That's cause they understand very well that they've only been voted in. It is an event in their favor, but the structure is not going anywhere. They'll just make it a bit closer to what they want. A bit. Maybe. Anyway, the structure itself is much more complex, nameless and I don't know shit about it.
I'd rather give us all the right to arm ourselves with anything we want and carefully consider what the state and the corporations and such are offering us to do, not obey with our heads down under the threat of violence. Sadly that kind of bright future requires a process I can't fathom. Probably an evolutionary, not revolutionary one. And of course not a reformatory one, that's the stupidest variant possible yet so many people believe in it.
This is also called distributism in Catholic political ideologies, and before I'm labeled as fascist, the whole point of distributism is about humans being weak and flawed and power having to be distributed. It's Christian, but the opposite of fascist (which would be that humans are weak and flawed and thus only strength and life at the moment matter). Traditionalism\progressism and such are literally not the subject of that ideology. Just how to avoid power of one person over another as much as possible, considering the Christian postulate that humans are flawed and weak and no human can be entrusted power (I mean, at the same time they have a pretty hierarchical structure since Pentarchy and before, but that's been contested since then and the hierarchy has failed to ever make all its opponents heretics).
My (night school) education, personally, improved quite a lot with COVID. Yep, it was disrupted. But instead of spending two hours in transport I'd be at my desk. Instead of just sitting in a boring depressing auditory with my ADHD, ASD and possibly PTSD, I was at my desk with tea and my laptop and maybe some food and my dog nearby.
If we are hopeful, that's what RFK should go after in fact. Homeopathy.
But, judging from where he starts, skoleotherapy, as in worm treatment, is the new fashion for you.
I wanna play Plague Inc again.
Except this cult doesn’t even have fun drug fueled orgies.
Drugs may be bad for one's health, but orgies are good. So yes please. I'll be the cult leader with prima noctae right.
That would be a noble endeavor.
Nah. The US hasn’t been able to force Russia to stop their invasion of Ukraine, nor stop them from playing fuck-fuck games all over the rest of the world. And China is almost certainly stronger than Russia is. They both joined the internet because they wanted to, not because they were forced.
I'm begging your pardon, but when the Internet came to Russia, US was sending humanitarian aid there. Literally giving out chicken legs in Moscow.
Also differences in power are not two discrete states. A parent can't force their child to marry a specific person, but they can force them to live in a certain area, using, say, financial help as leverage.
Oh, they’ll just choose to cooperate and act like a single central authority? Without a preexisting central authority forcing them to? 🤔
So? They'll form a cluster.
One can say top-level Soviet bureaucrats were not yes-men to the general secretary either. They made decisions collegially.
ARPANET was created by the US, but no one forced the Russians or the Chinese to adopt the IP protocol on their computers and connect to their neighbors.
Also no one forced people to adapt railway gauge or PSTN standards.
This is important because a super common anti-anarchist talking point is that people won’t cooperate (at least not at scale) unless an overarching authority forces them to. The existence of the internet demolishes that argument. It would be fundamentally impossible if that talking point were true.
I can't agree. It's the lower authorities submitting to the higher authority. That happens. A small group of authorities is close to one. In fact none are monolithic.
People are different. For me some purple actually is good. As opposed to green on computer displays. Real green is very good, of course.
Any non-neutral color is hard though.
My thoughts about power balance, power vacuum and so on are simple.
Those who'd want to take power are usually cowards. It's no good to dead. It's no good if there's nothing remaining to have power over. The one who can destroy a thing owns it.
There's the Cold War MAD doctrine which was employed by all sides and simultaneously vilified by green, pacifist etc parties. But maybe now we can see how the world without MAD looks and see that it's better when everyone is armed to their teeth.
You can come to the truth from anywhere if you seek it honestly. It's the same with weapons - everyone arming themselves and being ready to defend themselves create a group immunity, where sociopathic behaviors get rewarded less, and sociopaths are more challenged in accumulating power. Again, the only real kind of ownership is where you can destroy your property. You own your life when you are capable of sacrificing it as you wish. When a society is armed to its teeth, then its power imposed upon any kind of power-accumulating authorities is more than theirs, and when it's disarmed, it's nothing compared to theirs.
People being accustomed to anarchy and actively wanting it are not enough. People want to try all kinds of things. People fear. People are malicious. People want worse societies when they believe they will be the ones imposing injustice upon others. People are also just stupid.
The Internet is not an example of anarchy, of course. It's nothing without its backbone cables built with participation of governments and enormous corporations and treated as strategic assets. It's no more anarchist than sea ports. There was a sprinkle of anarchy there in its transient years from an elitarian scientific thing to a common medium. That was not stable. Nothing anarchist can be stable in a system of dominating hierarchy.
I admit it was easy to buy into this fairy tale when I was a kid. In 2006 it seemed that the humanity is one step from becoming free and, well, humane.
All that said, I think eventually we win.
But we can never know, because our perception is always poisoned. It's much easier to do that than to thoroughly weed us out (it has a better characteristic considering their superior power, while the latter is not plausible to do). That's what the adversary is always doing. Any "smart and considered" action is likely wrong, because it's based on compromised perception. This is just like scammers calling you to "help catch criminals" or something.
The only way anarchism ever succeeds is by acting on rigid principle, as if fighting blindfolded.
Or edit a word doc and send it back and have it not be screwed up.
It will be screwed up.
And it's normal. Things get screwed up.
Thinking that abusive monopoly is better than things screwing up a bit here and there is just plain dystopian madness.
I'm so fucking tired of people around not caring about any deep issues, but suddenly becoming perfectionist in cases where that has been advertised to them as norm.
I'm autistic, so talking about "common sense" might be funny, but - IP is technically an extension of contract law to a very abstract area. If we are being this rigid, then sovereign citizens must too have a say in politics. If we are being this rigid, then I want all Turks gone (or sworn fealty to me, LOL) from Khodorchur, Dayq province of Western Armenia. If we are being this rigid, then all governments in the world are illegal.
You get the idea.
And if we are, then why won't we be even more rigid and ask how can one own a number? Which is ultimately any intellectual property. Piece of information is not a blockable resource.
And if we are not, then I don't see any public value in an institution that harms people.
And there's none, this is purely a device of power. When you realize this, and look at other such devices of power, you also realize that your society (as one that, well, imposed such IP laws on most of the world as a condition for economic interaction) is not free.
Shut down themselves even better.
Why would you blame them if they have all those "conveniences" like the default save location, file managers focusing on pics to click and and not directory structure, and so on. Of course they don't know, they don't know they have to know and thus don't think they could choose or something.
These things were not invented for computer-literate people. The way they were being made in year 1999 they were usable for common folk.
Blaming normies as people who can't do things is delusional. Modern UI\UX, which is plain stupid and unprofessional, is the problem. Normies are fine. They can be taught to navigate a paper book, right? Then they can do this.
By the way, I still remember my fury when auto-complete suggestions, AJAX search on webpages, default locations for saving files and other such things started becoming the only considered way to do anything. Because I knew where this all leads. It's not hard to imagine how a person who've never had anything else will form their habits.
And not only these "simplifications" are everywhere, but also they UI\UX has become more cluttered everywhere! It's an unusable mess, and it being that is justified by having some "convenience" magic that makes it even bigger mess.
This is why Windows should have remained a shell for DOS. On Unix-like systems the competition between various desktops slows down this degeneracy. That's what they are trying to solve with Wayland, so that people could only use Gnome, KDE and a couple of half-functional compositors with too long config files to set up with my ADHD.
Even those guys are getting some understanding of modern warfare, wow.
BTW, I know that shouldn't be too public, but are NATO countries doing this? Because Hollywood movies are good and all, but this is the revolution that has already happened, like tercios. I mean cheap mass-produced drones. One can talk quality-over-quantity all one wants, but there's no way one wins against a well-organized equal force possessing those in good numbers. And level of organization is something hard to predict and developed by experience, so hoping for Russia and NK and China and who not remaining clumsy would not be wise.
Oh, basically the moment I've learned that many school shooters are autistic and I'm likely autistic, I started joking on that subject.
I mean, it (still) feels funny. Not that autistic people are braver (often seems the opposite), we just fear different things than NT generally. So what NT people (especially kids, especially in an environment prone to bullying) fear is not what we fear.