You are literally saying “fucking moron” to something you imagined yourself and I didn’t write.

You are right.

So basically what they’re doing to every other western nation.

You mean western nations’ government policies are all perfect and people pushing against them are Russian shills? And making their politicians look bad?

Maybe those governments and politicians are Russia-infiltrated, and these complaints are resistance.

I don’t think there’s any need to evict it to pressure it to vote the right way.

So Hungary blocking things is a collective performance.

Or maybe not, then the leverage they gain from veto is more than the pressure put at them. In such case that leverage is apparently damn big and they are a small country.

I suppose they shut down mobile internet. That doesn’t make news because wire is normal here.

Also there seem to be tests of DPI and filtering systems now by many ISPs in many places, because apparently Russia is going GFW.

Narcissism (NPL) is inherited and it’s not learned. It’s a DSM condition.

If you mean just being a jerk, then that doesn’t look like this. That looks like Eichmann.

Must be something with psychopaths, for all I know about it was very important to have many children.

Stronger primal instincts maybe, and not augmented by responsibility or fear or love.

In appearances he seems to be real. Culturally quite typical for those jerks who are Russia’s elite now, except their older generation holding power kinda hides that.

Durov is the intermediate generation, gross, but trying to pretend. I don’t know if he was born to such a family (KGB/FSB/nomenclature relatives, getting a good education as a mathematician would check out then) or accepted into their, eh, society seems too strong a word.

It’s like a network of thieves recognizing each other by their particular kind of behavior. There’s too many of them to firmly know they are talking to one of their own, so that behavior and approach to life is all it takes to be perceived as one of them.

(I know you won’t believe me, but they think that signature behavior is aristocratic or whatever, talking in Esopean language, dropping hints, not looking you in the eyes, cold faces, being silent and not talking a lot, fish eyes ; there are people with actual noble ancestry in Russia, they do have sort of a common approach to right behavior, and that’s basically the opposite of this - talking to the other person directly, if making hints, then making it obvious that it’s a metaphor, not trying to show contempt or threat in their face, being clear and honest, at least in appearances.)

Their part of my generation is just shit from the ass. Cunning and more evil, but no class or wisdom at all. I mean, there’s a saying “order beats class”, but they can have order only in ideal conditions too. Using bigger expense to imitate an achievement by smaller expense, which wouldn’t be a compliment to their abilities even if it were real. What’s worst is they don’t even understand it.

Though this is where I must share one thing I’ve learned from them - you can imitate a level much higher than yours. You may have no taste, but read and imitate the taste of people who you want to deceive, and succeed. You may not know some domain area, but deceive those who do. Not have deeper understanding of some important mechanism, but imitate a person who does to those who do.

A thought similar to LLM bots in some sense. So - they are dangerous.

In many cases it’s both.

This is wrong. Psychopaths feel themselves just fine in the society and usually don’t become school shooters.

Shooting up bullies is a very crude solution, one that a psychopath usually doesn’t need.

In any case most of school shootings I’ve read about were connected to bullying, and bully lives don’t matter. Don’t bully, don’t get killed.

A psychopath usually plans their murders, so they’ll do just fine with a heavy sharp object or a reactive not intended for food getting into food. A psychopath will also be on the convenient side of any socially approved action.

I’ve recently fully realized that I’ve met a high quality psychopath once.

School shooters usually use it as their last resort. Bullying of autistic kids is the main problem. Them finding such an exit is a secondary one.

The nations that decide that bombing anyone in the Middle East is lawful when they are doing it.

Also the nations that decide that Kosovo has to be independent, but this is not a precedent for anyone else.

Arabs and Turks ethnically cleansing Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis, Armenians is fine. But a few Slavic peoples murdering each other because of religion warrant an exceptional intervention. But Mustafa Kemal is a good guy.

Russians are to blame for their government’s actions and have to be banned from payment systems and visiting EU countries. But Russians who work in the government and their family members can live in EU countries half the time and more. That’s justified by “killing Russia’s economy for the war”, except Russia’s war is not funded by taxes from citizens paying and accepting payments for shit with MC and Visa. Russia’s war is funded by oil and gas trade. Or by “punishing Russians and making them change the regime”, which is very funny, because the people actually part of the regime are not “punished” this way, they are also the exact group that should be “punished” for good effect, and we the rest kinda see that and don’t have huge sympathies to the narratives of people doing such stuff.

Also about Russia - those nations would decide that Putin’s and Yeltsin’s regimes are nice and legitimate and democratic when they were limited to destroying Russia itself. Again, now every Russian is retroactively to blame for those years as well, except those they were dealing with.

And it’s the same everywhere, if there’s an authoritarian regime - then just like with businesses, it’s sort of a profitable endeavor. And the process making it profitable happens in the western countries. It’s one system in which their elites have that cozy spot of hypocritically accusing everyone other than themselves of the processes they create. A continuation of the colonial system, too continuous and similar to even use the “neo” prefix.

That they are mostly democracies is not real republicanism, at least not in the last 20 years. It’s a sign of luxury - look, we can afford such magnificent Colosseum shows that our populace is well controlled even under pretense of democracy. The countries higher in that hierarchy play democracy more, the countries lower in it - less.

Say, Iran’s regime is unfortunate, but calling it less democratic than UK would be preposterous. It has more crime and corruption, true. But maybe the fact that Iran’s appearance of democracy is above what it’s “allowed” is not a smaller reason for the violence against it, than any fears of it attaining a nuke.

… I’d rather listen to what DPRK, IRI, PRC, even Turkey’s leadership have to say on what’s civilized and what’s not. Everyone is better than NATO&EU. Russia’s … eh, I’ve met some people too close to that, they stink too much, quite westernized one can say.

The world would be a safer place if not only every country had nukes, but also every adult citizen had a farm of combat drones.

I personally don’t want to hear of NATO&allies lecturing everyone else morals. Tired of that. And I understand why in ex-USSR the perception of them like some global good guys was common - the reaction to very invasive and obnoxious and irritating Soviet propaganda.

I don’t understand how people in the west can believe that.

Anyway, no intelligent person from the west I’ve talked to did, so … kinda as it should be.

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He’ll get servicemen killed. It won’t be funny.

It would seem that I’m arguing in the direction opposite of what you’re claiming, but I don’t care, I think I’ve met you before.

You are an idiot, go fuck yourself.

Closest they got to ending that cunt was Prigozhin attempting a coup in a drunken rage, but he sobered up and chickened out before it was done.

No. Prigozhin was a spoiler. A demining attempt, because Putin probably got afraid enough of a coup in the military and decided to use Prigozhin to try and detect people in the high command who’d assist Prigozhin or react favorably, or at least not do enough to impede.

Russians keep gravitating towards authoritarians over and over again. Can’t think of any other country that reverted back to it multiple times in a century. Weak people want strong man leaders, just how it is.

Russia has special services. They work all the time, work very well, and “entrapment” is not a problem for them, similar to “fruit of a poisoned tree”. When you detect people likely to wish for a change early enough and neutralize them, either by silently jailing or intimidating or disrupting them, the society is much more amorphous.

It’s not about gravitating anywhere, wishes or sympathies.

Russians like strong men, it’s a weakness in their society.

No, it’s not any more a Russian weakness than an American one, even less than a Japanese or a Chinese one.

Especially unwise to judge Russians by American stereotypes of Russians.

Everyone outside Russia wanted it to continue to be a democracy

How’s that compatible with supporting Yeltsin in his 1993 coup and in stealing 1996 elections?

Russia even had a brief association with NATO while it was.

No it didn’t. Yeltsin wanted that, yes, and Putin wanted that too. Both wanted to be a big, scary country accepted to NATO and with NATO weaponry. Like Turkey, but with nukes. What both didn’t want is dropping the bullshit about spheres of influence and being an equal of the USA, apparently got told by NATO that beggars are not choosers. Also wanting an association with NATO has plainly nothing to do with being a democracy or not.

But Yeltsin drank too much (alcoholism being another weakness in Russian society) and that allowed a guy like Putin to make himself a Czar.

I think you skipped the part where I was educating you that Yeltsin made himself Czar in 1993 and just passed it on to Putin.

I don’t really care that it breaks your narrative. Putin is a natural continuation of the western-supported and consulted regime in Russia installed in 1993. That Yeltsin presented himself as some liberator and Putin presented himself as ex Soviet intelligence are campaign pictures that mean nothing. All the trusted people around Putin are the same that Yeltsin had even before 1991. Including Putin himself.

Alcoholism is not a bigger weakness in the Russian society than in British ones or in Sweden or in Finland.

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.

I agree about older Soviet engineering, it’s a bit of a result of digital automation being less available due to domestic computer research being shot down politically in favor of copying IBM and DEC, and also having worse abilities at minimization.

Hence Soviet engineering is how you’d approach building a spacefaring civilization with a slide rule as the baseline instrument, and mostly analog components of everything. That does feel cool.

About warheads - there’s an issue of half-life with nuclear warheads, so that they “rot” is not in doubt, the question is how good the maintenance was.