Why is it that in the rest of the world American propaganda was efficient in the 70s, 80s and 90s, and stopped being efficient in our time? They didn’t have that “sophisticated methodology” then, they have it now

China has its own problems.

Not really. The best US propaganda has always been looking strong, rich and real, if too glossy. Also being too different (it doesn’t stop to surprise me how people speaking English can be so different from British people that honestly I, living in Russia, feel more similar to the latter than Americans are ; and nobody notices that from culture and arts, it takes being exposed to many real Americans to see that this is not just in movies), thus seeming some magical other world where the impossible is possible.

(Plus a bit of the legacy of “give me your tired …” and “the new world” seeming like a place for those fleeing tyranny, like some new normal free life out there, even if not perfect ; it’s fascinating how this image hasn’t been true for more than 50 years, yet it lives on in books which much of the humanity still reads, and is perceived like real. This stopped being true when my grandma was younger than I am now.)

Also the lame anti-US propaganda had an effect of people subjected to it being ready to believe anything opposing it. Like much of Soviet propaganda about the West was honestly true, but it took another 20 years for the majority of ex-Soviet people to understand that, after they understood that Western propaganda about USSR was true as well.

While the arts working like that are a short period which coincided with a short explosion of the level of life in the West (followed by it falling again), decaying of the second world, loss of faith into any kind of bright future and socialism, thus turning to the past (things like “the American dream”, memory of times when USA was half the world GDP, trying to find good and nice in the stereotypical, demonized in the past, images).

And - important - the Internet, where the famous “network effect” works, and what is the network effect? The network effect means that the one starting something gets all the sprouts. 1 man creates a network and invites 99 people, each with their own culture, but in the network the culture of that 1 man will dominate, because they will come to that one man.

The conclusion is the same, though, poisoning the Internet with slop means slowly killing it. And slop is the opposite of what made the USA seem strong. It was “real” vs “fake”.

Soviet industries were “fake” - lots of stuff broken fresh from the factory, requiring some tinkering to make it work ; Soviet computers were “fake” - other than the previous point, rare and expensive, and a household didn’t have one ; Soviet economy was “fake” - imitating a real one with “funds” and “wooden” rubles, while having deficits ; Soviet politics were “fake” - one party, and in any democratic procedure if you’d diverge from the commonly accepted line, you’d have social problems (reminds you of anything?) ; Soviet ideology was “fake” - look, we’ve been building space communism for 30 years, and the result is that we have ICBMs and “Pravda” newspapers and canned “sea cabbage” in stores and Lenin worship, but don’t have normal toilet paper, sausages and jeans, and notably - no space communism ; and even Soviet culture was “fake” - those sour tones, that stoneface acting, that boredom, while there in the West they have rock-n-roll and action movies and magazines with naked women.

And the USA most of all seemed “how a superpower should really be”, except look at it now. It still is stronger, but it’s undergoing a similar transformation as the USSR, and the problem is that USA’s civilization offering was that it’s immune to that. And the USSR was internationalist, while the USA’s even official offering is “we are your masters and better than you, fuck you little bitch, and if you behave very well you might immigrate here in the future”. Somehow Soviet people thought USA was internationalist too, but the Internet broke that for most of the planet.

And it didn’t colonize Mars. And it didn’t unite the humanity in one republic with everyone equal in rights. And it didn’t fix war, hunger and barbarism. So just like USSR’s promise of space communism expiring, USA’s promise of space liberal capitalism expires now.

Basically USA’s elites were not content with the amount of power they had over their country and the world, and decided to expand it (via the Internet), thus removing their main strength.

Lastly propaganda campaigns is something that was best done with the old kind of connectivity, when they only had to influence the adversarial regimes (Soviet elites, for example), and those regimes would then influence their own population ; in the USSR the rosy picture of the USA was most of all produced by its elites trying to copy the USA or to get a piece of it in the form of jeans etc. The people who are going to design\train\direct the tools for these campaigns simply can’t understand all the complexity of another culture, to influence people living in it. They are deliberately choosing a far more complex task, when the easier one yielded good enough results. In the hope of achieving some sort of world domination by a shortcut instead of, well, fixing their economy and doing it the old-fashioned way.

Libertarians agree about free Palestine.

Honestly I wouldn’t expect Kluxers and normal old world fascists to understand each other. One of them is about race, the other is usually about cultural and ideological divisions. Even if the latter use race as one excuse to murder someone en masse, it’s not the core of their ideology, the core is that they should be able and need to practice to murder someone en masse. While American racists are something extremely weird.

Your large paragraph has so many fallacies I genuinely don’t think you’re being serious.

“So many” is not a number, and you have named zero (0, as in a bagel hole).

Also go fuck yourself my rights are literally being stripped away so that corporations can own the government more.

So what does this have to do with libertarianism? Is it libertarians stripping you of whatever?

I wonder if it’s economically plausible to make a FPGA-based all-in-one system. In a “smartphone” box, maybe far weaker than most Android phones, but far less tall in expertise needed to do anything, for a low start to be possible without humongous investment and expected minimal parties. Something graphical Lisp-based as an OS. Perhaps with an interface to use it as a tablet when attached to a bigger box, or a laptop when attached to that box.

Focusing on having the necessary modules and input-output devices, with the FPGA itself being configured with something simple-enough RISC-V based with tagged memory, for example.

Like when you need a portable computer with cell connectivity and a battery, and want to have some choice, but are not too attached to specific platforms and popular places.

It seems that for militaries using FPGA is already an established practice, turns out to be more convenient and even cheaper. And with anything trying to fight big companies, it seems using FPGA will make more sense.

I mean, Sun Tzu wrote about “when you know your enemy and know yourself”, all that. Knowing myself I’m certain that trying to take on anyone bigger and smarter than me using things on their level of complexity is a failure from the start. Knowing them is beyond my ability in general, but we definitely know that those companies are led by very intelligent people who just won’t make the simpler kind of mistakes. And he also wrote a bit on the “death grounds”, where if you leave a path for retreat, that’s not a death ground. I think paths for retreat like alternative Android versions and such are all intentionally let be, so that you’d not resist too much.

Or, this is sort of a fewer dream, or bipolar psychosis to be more specific.

As someone from Russia, I grew up seeing movies where you all over there sue each other over unfortunate rude word.

Perhaps that last paragraph is where you really should try suing someone, no jokes.

I think they are more conscious than to be driven by small margins (another example of such underestimation is Lenin’s “they’ll sell us the rope we’ll use to hang them”).

It’s like boiling frogs - a very slow process of attracting users, slowly killing competition and diversity, slowly making the ecosystem more and more controlled, then slowly making “neutral” systems not neutral anymore (like those features of Chrome making security exceptions for Google services found a few years ago), and slowly desensitizing people to leaps of faith they do trusting Google (and other companies), while the trust accumulates into total control.

In an environment most convenient for making webapps people make webapps.

It’s not even such a wrong idea honestly, if the “web” in “webapp” were a bit leaner and you’d make local applications with something document-oriented for GUI looking at a local service. It’s just a decent bit of structure to make application design easier. Nothing wrong with that IMHO.

But, ahem, when by “webapp” we mean that we have a browser fulfilling the role of an operating system, and there’s one company making it, then something is wrong.

I’ve recently gotten to think that the company which made the basement for all these disgusting companies is usually viewed as not just not disgusting, but almost holy. Meaning Sun. So, maybe, judging the tree by its fruits, the most disgusting company was Sun.

I mean, I know that everyone who used their products and of course people who worked there are still in awe and remember it like a Soviet summer camp shown in the Everlasting Summer game.

But perhaps that’s misguided. They’ve built the hierarchical systems, the infrastructure, for all the dystopia of today, and their code still powers much of it.

Also you know how the second competitor in an almost monopolized market is sometimes considered an accomplice of monopoly? Because they are strong enough to support some of its ways, while the rest are not. So they reinforce it. I’m also looking at Firefox writing this. Literally.

Perhaps we’d have a better environment office-wise if LibreOffice and OpenOffice were not a thing. They support MS formats, thus indirectly contributing to MS dominance. The network effects work in a few different ways, while were it different, those desperately needing MS documents would use MSO, at the same time those just needing some office suite would possibly not.

Perhaps that can also be applied to Unix and Unix-likes, Sun made a lot of momentum for Unix and Unix-like desktops when they contributed to TCL/Tk so that it became a tool for making Unix and Unix-like desktop applications easily. And when they created Java and Java applets in web browsers prepared the public for scripts in browsers and cross-platform applications served over net.

Yes, it all felt like heaven behind the corner, but perhaps they are to blame. What if.

After all, much of that was free or for the cost of a CD then, and free cheese usually is part of a trap. Perhaps if instead commercial competing platforms, like Amiga or even Apple, were to gain more following, we’d have a different world. All those development resources couldn’t have been gifted (Sun in the 90s, I mean, and honestly many universities) out of nowhere, something made that worth the expense.

Or, if we want free and open, Lisp environments are somewhat easier to hack on (also again about TCL, it kinda approaches that in convenience for a non-programmer to make something simple, quick and dirty, but good enough), and accessibility to wider, eh, masses is meaningful here. So maybe GNU shouldn’t have gone with a Unix-like system idea. I mean, OK, they do have a Lisp environment fit for everything, it’s called Emacs.

BTW, about disgusting companies coming to mind first, I’m not disgusted by Oracle, in comparison to most other big ones they do honest business. I dunno why they are hated, uncle Larry says dystopian shit with enthusiasm and no remorse, but at the same time his company sells exactly what it advertises. It’s all kinda open and straightforward, it’s the “one rich asshole called Larry Ellison” company, which may not be what someone likes, but is certainly better than companies actively building worldwide digital fascism (it, of course, offers expertise and help to those who do in case they need it). Also he’s really a self-made man. Unlike all those other types from good families, good environments and with good education.

OK. I just have that conspiracy theory brewing in my mind about Sun actually being evil. Sorry.

It’s the most obviously flawed ideology o have ever seen.

It’s the exact opposite. It’s the only one incorporating all the basic necessary principles.

Which is why Cato institute is the only ideological authority which I can read without starting to curse.

And I’m certain you don’t know shit about ancap just like every other person I’ve met saying this. Maybe you should LYAO over how you repeat one and the same statement on it never providing arguments. Laugh over yourself, you know.

It’s the point which all decent ideologies approach. Left or right, doesn’t matter.

If you don’t have private property, then you have group property, which in human nature means group leader’s property (and also decisions made in a group don’t make anything better, might read about Khmer Rouge, they didn’t have such a strict vertical hierarchy, the results were not nicer from that). If you don’t have non-aggression as a principle, then you make it acceptable to attack those you (or your group) decide to be wrong people (say, suppose you’re a white supremacist commune), and forfeit any moral justification of tolerance to your own ideology. If you don’t have natural law as a principle, then your ideology is self-contradictory and you’ll have violence as the main justification anyway (also see USA as a nation, all liberal and moralist around except when it’s about natives’ rights). If you don’t have personal responsibility and freedom of choice as a principle, then you erode any idea of obligation and decency, since obligations and decisions will be imposed by various jerks upon you left and right and you’ll learn to discard them. And if you compare imaginary heaven of some ideology to today’s real world and think that the result of such a comparison is an indicator of anything, you should see a therapist.

Just look outside and see that this but worse is a terrible idea.

This doesn’t mean anything. I pity you if it does for you.

But that really is a bias too. Everything has a bias relative to most existing points of view. That’s why the “free speech” thing was invented, because when your world is larger than one isolated village or even one isolated, even if moving, royal court, then you can’t make everyone think the same subjectively correct way. Free speech was a way for nations to survive modernization. There are more dimensions to the world than any single person understands enough to not be what you said. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is an idiot in something and would want to shut everyone up in that dimension.

Not only it’s a right first and foremost of those you disagree with, though, but it also can’t ever be based on good will. It can only be based on inability to break by force. Like any other institution.

I think many bad things in our reality are due to reliance on good will having been covertly put into many key places of the mechanisms.

Sorry, but that’s all permanent political -isms. To find -isms which are not centered around that proposition, you have to leave politics and look for various ephemeral ideas, which only become popular in response to disturbances.

Thus, a user receives an answer that has already undergone a filtering of sorts.

Wouldn’t this be an expected trait of a system predicting next most likely token based on lossy compression of specific datasets and other lossy optimization?

It began in 1983, somewhere around TCP/IP becoming a thing.

That near Florida?

I personally think it will, but as part of bigger events. Like a power takeover. A few decades later, perhaps, not that soon. Imagine if someone\something respected and remembered as the ultimate good comes out of shadows to deliver our world (mostly the computer industry and the Internet) from evil (LLM bots, hate campaigns, all the black mirror stuff) by putting it all in hierarchical order and redoing all the political system along the way. Democracy has failed, it’s the rule of the loudest, thus of those with the best bots, all such things.

Wouldn’t be the first time, such technological changes often affect political system changes all over the world. Remember what coincided with automobiles, airships and airplanes, electric lighting and radio becoming popular.

Except in the 00s everyone thought the changes will all be nice and positive.

As an ancap whose views have been called repugnant too, I say you could be more specific and say he’s racist, misogynist and mixes up social prowess, intelligence and wisdom, while these are three different things.

and impliment a social credit score like China does.

Honestly you don’t need such an official system, and such a commercial system, as that network of data brokers and credit rating providers, already exists. So of that in particular I wouldn’t be scared because it’s not avoidable anyway. What’s avoidable is government’s ability to discriminate based on data. Think how.

There was a time when bank card number was practically all you needed to get someone’s money.

I think Estonia’s electronic IDs are the best, they have the government sign (sometimes provide, but generally just sign) your public key. It’s both that the government doesn’t have your private key and that it’s immediately usable for many things. I don’t know if they do, but one can also make ID cards (with a necessary chip inside, of course), where a private key can be written and used for signing operations, but not read back.

Modern technology allows so much goodness that politicians and corps have just started globally gaslighting us over what can be done and what can’t. Stalling on technically easily solvable issues, so that it wouldn’t come to real ones.