Which is literally what was jokingly called "enemy voices" in USSR, the comment was about this exactly, and yes, I was thinking about the thing you linked.
Large intranets are not a problem (that's how it was in the beginning in many places, rather fast and unlimited access to LAN resources, chats etc, but slow and expensive to the Internet), it's just that nothing inside Russia is going to be self-sufficient.
Also every dick without balls in a chair will try to get some control or share or get a bribe or just prevent this from happening so that his relative or something would get the contract.
This wasn't a factor with the large Internet being accessible (unbeatable competition), but will be with intranets (or a countrywide intranet). Nothing will get built. In the 90s such dicks simply didn't understand that this is a good business, so they allowed it to grow (still all the major telecom providers that survived had some connections with FSB etc, or so people say).
Also true if you consider the absolutely massive cost and effort it took China to get where they are with their Great Firewall. From what can be gleaned they also have a huge workforce of people monitoring communications as well in order to keep their internet safe for the state and "sanitized".
They are working on controlling access to the wider internet. The goal is to push people off of western services on to ones they control. This is so they can control the information their citizens see
Russian here. This is a super old claim from our government and is a common source of jokes, it's even called "Cheburnet" (from Cheburashka) colloquially, nobody really treats such claims seriously. Last time Russian government tried to influence internet was when they struggled to ban telegram for several years, and ended up giving up, endorsing it, and moving their official resources to it.
Okay, while I'm not a fan of a fragmented internet, I am a fan of losing all the russian trolls that plague many parts of the internet and online gaming. Counterstrike and similar games will lose their saltiest players too!
Just to be clear, you just break two russian laws and if we was on smth like VKontacte (russian facebook, bought by government via mailru long time ago) and you was russian citizen in russia, you could be sentenced for prison from 12 to 20 years.
I'm skidaddle skadoodle from russia year ago, and that was a best decision in my whole life. Sadly, not every one can leave at this point, cause europe (even when they allowed to get visa) was too expensive for average russian and smth close and more affordable, like China, Kazakhstan, etc., not too much better then russia.
It will be a bit easier for me, if you can check for yourself via translator. I use firefox TWP extension to translate sites from lang I do not know.
So, there it is, link 1, law that usually used as "appendant" for a case. Any hatespeech against goverment was determent by this law, before specific ones was introduced: link2 for example.
link3 by this law you can also get up to 5 years of prison, that one actually not so often used, but you can check for yourself, there was a list of sued people, cant find it right now. Upd. Found it!
Upd1. I didnt notice until now, but site that tracked everyone, who was illegally sentenced to prison, have been liquidated in 2022 apr 5. So, it's not updated since then and do not have people who was recently got sued.
But that all just child play, cause last couple of days they caught people link4, link5 by this law, also know as treason. Especially funny to hear that about trans dude, who just donated own money to Ukrainians military forces.
Also, if you "mass media" of some sort, or just more popular, then a stone from a road, you got this as a bonus.
List can go on, when I said about "laws that was broken" I meant only first and link4, cause they more often used, if police just need a case.
So, as you can see, Russia is a wonderful country, 10 out of 10, would never live there ever again.
Having populations under the thumb of dictators is bad for everyone, even if you live in a relatively free country. Any tools and mechanisms they use to oppress their people are, by extention, bad.
Reposting my reply to someone else on this topic for visibility:
The Russian scammers are using a ton of proxies and VPNs. Unfortunately, this change will not affect them unless the Russian government completely removes access to the global Internet, and even then, the corruption is so deep that many officials will be selling access to the global Internet to their friends or people with with money.
Russian scammers and social media manipulators are here to stay, likely because they're largely state run initiatives and they'll still have access to the global Internet.
What this does is keep the normal Russians insulated from the rest of the world and unable to coordinate outside of their own country, where everything they do is even more tightly controlled by the government.
1- All countries have trolls, in one degree or another.
2- That will also affect the Russian population, who will become even more isolated and powerless.
They do though, some of personal blogs i follow also banned in China; There is a saying in my circle of friends in Mainland China that the blog is “certified by Great Firewall of China” if a person’s blog got blocked
They also monitor internet communications and you can get your account deleted or a police visit if you post something to critical of the state. That's probably irresistibly attractive to Putin.
In my time working at a hosting provider we would get these very strange requests from the Russian government demanding Russian websites customers had with us be taken down for moral violations. Like a DMCA but for free speech.
Terrible situation, even if you're in the "well it's Russia so stuff them" camp. Countries moving to their own Internet is a terrible situation, one we've seen before with China and their deep censorship of online media.
It would be great, but think about it for a second. Russian bots and trolls that are operated by the government will still exist, it's not like they would cease trying to spread misinformation or destabilizing opinions. So that won't change at all. This would primarily affect the people in the country who would now be unable to see real news or learn things the government doesn't want them to.
I'm all for giving Russia the finger, but I do fear that it won't actually make anything better for the rest of us and would just make the people worse off.
I mean, if no normal citizen can access the outside internet then we will know for sure that any connection coming out of Russia has to be a bot. So that would make blocking them much more easier.
We must somehow patch a connection in, to ensure they have a sufficient quantity of international memes, cats and porn. Access to the internet is a basic human right these days, we surely cannot abandon them.
NSA and CIA are absolutely salivating at the idea of the Russians trying to roll their own TCP/IP stack. However good some of the Russian intel groups might be at offense, they are hot garbage at defense.
That’s not what they are trying to do at all though.
The article makes it sound more so like they want their own ‘great firewall’ like China, or to go even further and create something akin to North Korea.
Nah it's not. China doesn't need Russia in any capacity. It does need some of its natural resources, but not too badly really. It's not any more keen on exploiting those than in Central Asian countries. Just doing usual Chinese things, no bigger interest.
I do have mixed feelings about this. Let's say pool it off and Russia net is now thing. That makes it harder for Russian conmen to rum various scams and hacks, ex ransomware, but it makes it a lot harder for the people there to break out of the state own propaganda.
The Russian scammers are using a ton of proxies and VPNs. Unfortunately, this change will not affect them unless the Russian government completely removes access to the global Internet, and even then, the corruption is so deep that many officials will be selling access to the global Internet to their friends or people with money.
Russian scammers and social media manipulators are here to stay, likely because they're largely state run initiatives and they'll still have access to the global Internet.
What this does is keep the normal Russians insulated from the rest of the world and unable to coordinate outside of their own country, where everything they do is even more tightly controlled by the government.
That statement works for every other freedom you lose, it also serves to detect malicious intent from another person. There's always a middle ground, where nothing's perfect, but it's balanced. There's always a compromise. There's no perfect scenario. If you want a perfect society, you have to take away all freedom. If you give away all freedoms, there's anarchy.
This will be obviously all in the name of authoritarianism. Will the Russian Federation people benefit or will this be a means to control information? Note that my criticisms leveled against Russia could apply to Amurica as well. We Amuricans seem to have wet dreams of Christo-Fascism.
That way we can simply do nothing because only one political party is encouraging its constituents to arm up while the other wants everyone to disarm. Guess which side will win?
I don't know what their position is either, but "arming up" isn't going to do anything against a modern, relatively competent military. Back in the time the second amendment was written (as an example) there wasn't that big a disparity in the resources the military could use and normal people. The citizens were less organized but had numbers on their side.
Today, there is absolutely nothing you can do with a gun vs drones, bombs, planes, etc. The only way you really prevail is if the government isn't willing to slaughter its own citizens and guns aren't helping there at all. In fact, the opposite may be true since it makes it easy for the government to label the people shooting at their officials as terrorists.
So, all of this is wrong, but also beside the point. The main point of arming up is so that we don't all get murdered by fascists. I don't mean that in the sense that fascists will take over the government, and then use the state apparatus to exterminate us. The murdering happens before and during their seizure of political power.
"You're wrong" does not constitute a counterargument.
The murdering happens before and during their seizure of political power.
So the scenario is fascists are just roaming around murdering liberals at a point before they seize political power? What are the police doing? If the police are looking the other way, the fascists already have political power. So what you're talking about doesn't seem at all realistic.
Even if we look to one of the most extreme examples in history -Nazi Germany - it still didn't happen remotely like what you're apparently concerned about.
I'll go ahead and respond to your other post as well:
I’m not talking about the value proposition of having a gun for dealing with run of the mill crime.
This makes the value proposition look even worse. At least run of the mill crime has a semi-realistic chance of happening. Doing something that has negative value in normal times and only pays off if something very extreme like civilization breaking down occurs is kind of irrational.
because “guns bad”.
You'll get further in life if you don't make a straw man out of positions you don't agree with. Although, admittedly, you can get pretty far on straw men and Gish gallops.
Anyway:
We’re (Americans) in a situation where we’re faced with an active and armed fascist movement, and those who would oppose that movement have systematically disarmed themselves because “guns bad”.
If we basically have to worry about warlords wandering around killing people at will then civilization already is done.
What’s your plan for when they decide to remind us that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”?
I don't plan my life around everyone being raptured away, aliens landing or civilization completely breaking down. It's irrational to make real sacrifices or do things that require a meaningful tradeoff/risk to avoid such unlikely events.
What’s your plan for when they decide to remind us that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”?
I'm pretty sure Mao didn't mean "If you have a gun, you have political power" with that quote. The original quote was “以后要非常注意军事，须知政权是由枪杆子中取得的”. It's not talking about random citizens with guns, it's from the perspective of leading/governing countries.
Rather than get locked in a "someone is wrong on the internet" cycle, let's put a pin in this. We've both read each others points, and found them unconvincing. Whatever audience we might hope to sway has thinned out. On reddit I would have just silently walked away at this point, but the threadiverse is small and we're likely to encounter each other again.
I'm guessing that our disagreement just comes down to a liberal vs leftist divide, and possibly also American vs European. We're not likely to bridge those as random internet commenters. So, TTFN.
Participation in the conversation is completely voluntary so it's completely up to you if you want to respond.
We’ve both read each others points, and found them unconvincing.
You didn't really argue your point though. You said "You're wrong" and "... But what if bad stuff happens?" It's not like we had an actual debate here. Maybe you didn't find the points I made compelling, but at least I tried to explain my reasoning for reaching that position.
but the threadiverse is small and we’re likely to encounter each other again.
Any negative perception I have toward you personally really doesn't have anything to do with the actuall disagreement, but your approach to "discussing" it. "Because guns bad", "don't bother consulting your canned talking points", etc is not a good-faith approach to debate. If you actually care about fostering good relations in a fairly small community where you may run into people again, I'd suggest reexamining your methods.
I’m guessing that our disagreement just comes down to a liberal vs leftist divide
I don't think so. My position and what I'm arguing (although possibly incorrect) is purely based on what I see as the reality of the situation. A belief about whether guns are effective for preserving freedom against the government/fascists/whatever doesn't have anything really to do with politics.
and possibly also American vs European.
Which one of us is supposed to be the American and which one is supposed to be the European?
Researchers find ‘zero evidence of any kind of protective effects’, with women at particular risk
[snip]
Living with a handgun owner particularly increased the risk of being shot to death in a domestic violence incident, and it did not provide any protection against being killed at home by a stranger, the researchers found.
While gun-suicide rates are higher in rural states, which have proportionally more gun owners, the gun-suicide link plays out in urban areas, too. “In the early 1990s, the dramatic rise in young black male suicides was in lock step with the homicide epidemic of those years,” says HSPH’s Deborah Azrael, associate director of the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center. “Young black male suicide rates approached those of young white males—though black suicide rates had always been much lower than white suicide rates. It was entirely attributable to an increase in suicide by firearms.” Put simply, the fatal link applies across the board. “It’s true of men, it’s true of women, it’s true of kids. It’s true of blacks, it’s true of whites,” says Azrael. “Cut it however you want: In places where exposure to guns is higher, more people die of suicide.”
You're far more likely to drown if you own a pool in your backyard. Population level statistic applied to your individual lifestyle choices are meaningless and patronizing.
Also wrong, and not really relevant to my point? I'm not talking about the value proposition of having a gun for dealing with run of the mill crime.
We're (Americans) in a situation where we're faced with an active and armed fascist movement, and those who would oppose that movement have systematically disarmed themselves because "guns bad". What's your plan for when they decide to remind us that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun"?
Don't bother consulting your canned talking points, you actually have to think about this one for yourself.
I always resent this braindead argument. There's a huge difference between a country waging a foreign war and a country waging a war against its own cities and citizens. Insurgencies work and has been proven time and time again. See: Iraq
There’s a huge difference between a country waging a foreign war and a country waging a war against its own cities and citizens.
Indeed, in that the country isn't generally going to have the will to massacre its own citizens. So it's not that the citizens have a gun that is staying its hand, it's the lack of desire to just go ahead and slaughter them. Part of that is going to come from the fact that the country's military is made up of people who have these citizens as their friends, neighbors, etc.
So having a gun isn't helping you at all in that situation.
Insurgencies work and has been proven time and time again. See: Iraq
So these insurgents control Iraq now? They "won"?
Also, it's not really a comparable situation: dealing with insurgents halfway across the world is harder than dealing with them in your backyard. The US was also not really trying to take over and just rule the country, they were at least half-heartedly trying to set up a government that could manage stuff. In addition, the middle east and oil is strategically important to the US but insurgents in Iraq are obviously much less of a pressing concern than insurgents in the US. Naturally the US isn't going to invest the same level of resources and go to the same lengths to deal with those problems in Iraq compared to what it would do if that was happening in its own backyard. Finally, a lot of the insurgents were religious extremists. Even if every liberal in the US was armed, do you think we/they would really go to those lengths? I think we're just too used to living comfortably and don't really believe anything with that level of fanaticism to be running around with an AK waging a guerrilla war even if we had the AK.
The Russian Federation wants to defederate from the Internet lol
It's the Russian Defederation now
http://i.imgur.com/lgSDkvC.gif
Good luck with that. Maybe they can join North Korea‘s server.
A satellite dish can fix some things, but you'd need an uplink still. So to a large extent back to "enemy voices".
That's theory, in practice these people are impotent and can't themselves work in such an environment.
Which is literally what was jokingly called "enemy voices" in USSR, the comment was about this exactly, and yes, I was thinking about the thing you linked.
More like China and Iran
…with hookers, and blackjack?
In fact, forget the Internet.
Кому нужен интернет, когда есть блэкджек, шлюхи и водка?
Well, now we know who will take a wild ride toward Moscow if the project succeeds.
Poor goats
No it's not. This is similar to "Russia trying to have a new moon program". Not happening ever.
The first part may happen, the second part - ahahaha.
I live in Russia.
"Russian trying to build its own LAN" is the way I read it lol. You can't have "inter" with no other peers.
Large intranets are not a problem (that's how it was in the beginning in many places, rather fast and unlimited access to LAN resources, chats etc, but slow and expensive to the Internet), it's just that nothing inside Russia is going to be self-sufficient.
Also every dick without balls in a chair will try to get some control or share or get a bribe or just prevent this from happening so that his relative or something would get the contract.
This wasn't a factor with the large Internet being accessible (unbeatable competition), but will be with intranets (or a countrywide intranet). Nothing will get built. In the 90s such dicks simply didn't understand that this is a good business, so they allowed it to grow (still all the major telecom providers that survived had some connections with FSB etc, or so people say).
Also true if you consider the absolutely massive cost and effort it took China to get where they are with their Great Firewall. From what can be gleaned they also have a huge workforce of people monitoring communications as well in order to keep their internet safe for the state and "sanitized".
Reading the article that isn't the goal.
They are working on controlling access to the wider internet. The goal is to push people off of western services on to ones they control. This is so they can control the information their citizens see
They wouldn't stop Russian bot farms or hacking.
They just want to remove their citizens from the internet, not themselves. It's too useful for disinformation and general fuckery.
Like North Korea, an intranet
Like China
Like Iran
Russian here. This is a super old claim from our government and is a common source of jokes, it's even called "Cheburnet" (from Cheburashka) colloquially, nobody really treats such claims seriously. Last time Russian government tried to influence internet was when they struggled to ban telegram for several years, and ended up giving up, endorsing it, and moving their official resources to it.
If you can't beat them, join them.
Okay, while I'm not a fan of a fragmented internet, I am a fan of losing all the russian trolls that plague many parts of the internet and online gaming. Counterstrike and similar games will lose their saltiest players too!
Unfortunately I don't think this means they will stop trolling the actual internet, even if they block it from their own country
If we are not able to stop them from infiltrating our internet (if they leave), what stops us from infiltrating their internet?
Agreed. This is the correct answer.
I am not a fan of millions of Russian citizens being in a walled garden of censorship however
Why?
I don't wish it for me but what if the Russian people is not against it?
That's a problem only they can address
How is this a real comment you just made
Just to be clear, you just break two russian laws and if we was on smth like VKontacte (russian facebook, bought by government via mailru long time ago) and you was russian citizen in russia, you could be sentenced for prison from 12 to 20 years. I'm skidaddle skadoodle from russia year ago, and that was a best decision in my whole life. Sadly, not every one can leave at this point, cause europe (even when they allowed to get visa) was too expensive for average russian and smth close and more affordable, like China, Kazakhstan, etc., not too much better then russia.
What two Russian laws were broken? Can you elaborate on them a bit?
It will be a bit easier for me, if you can check for yourself via translator. I use firefox TWP extension to translate sites from lang I do not know.
So, there it is, link 1, law that usually used as "appendant" for a case. Any hatespeech against goverment was determent by this law, before specific ones was introduced: link2 for example.
link3 by this law you can also get up to 5 years of prison, that one actually not so often used, but you can check for yourself, there was a list of sued people, cant find it right now. Upd. Found it! Upd1. I didnt notice until now, but site that tracked everyone, who was illegally sentenced to prison, have been liquidated in 2022 apr 5. So, it's not updated since then and do not have people who was recently got sued.
But that all just child play, cause last couple of days they caught people link4, link5 by this law, also know as treason. Especially funny to hear that about trans dude, who just donated own money to Ukrainians military forces.
Also, if you "mass media" of some sort, or just more popular, then a stone from a road, you got this as a bonus.
List can go on, when I said about "laws that was broken" I meant only first and link4, cause they more often used, if police just need a case.
So, as you can see, Russia is a wonderful country, 10 out of 10, would never live there ever again.
Wow man this is wild.
50 euro can get you free trip to sanatorium for up to 20 years!
Having populations under the thumb of dictators is bad for everyone, even if you live in a relatively free country. Any tools and mechanisms they use to oppress their people are, by extention, bad.
I mean, if they don't want to look at things they shouldn't have to.
The problem is those that don't want to be censored not having a choice.
Reposting my reply to someone else on this topic for visibility:
The Russian scammers are using a ton of proxies and VPNs. Unfortunately, this change will not affect them unless the Russian government completely removes access to the global Internet, and even then, the corruption is so deep that many officials will be selling access to the global Internet to their friends or people with with money.
Russian scammers and social media manipulators are here to stay, likely because they're largely state run initiatives and they'll still have access to the global Internet.
What this does is keep the normal Russians insulated from the rest of the world and unable to coordinate outside of their own country, where everything they do is even more tightly controlled by the government.
1- All countries have trolls, in one degree or another.
2- That will also affect the Russian population, who will become even more isolated and powerless.
True online game is no fun without someone shouting cyka blyat. Lol
God damn bud, thats the best comment I've seen in a long damned time :)
I hope they don't, all the best torrent sites are Russian.
Almost like they're literal fascists just like China!
Oh yes! Only American redditors think that the Russian government has authoritarian tendencies. /s
What does this comment mean?
Just what it says...they deleted their comment.
edit: I now realize that you probably saw the original comment...I don't.
Americans bad! Garble garble
k bye
Damn they are going to pull a China
China only blocks most popular websites, they don't block random personal pages
They do though, some of personal blogs i follow also banned in China; There is a saying in my circle of friends in Mainland China that the blog is “certified by Great Firewall of China” if a person’s blog got blocked
They also monitor internet communications and you can get your account deleted or a police visit if you post something to critical of the state. That's probably irresistibly attractive to Putin.
In my time working at a hosting provider we would get these very strange requests from the Russian government demanding Russian websites customers had with us be taken down for moral violations. Like a DMCA but for free speech.
Terrible situation, even if you're in the "well it's Russia so stuff them" camp. Countries moving to their own Internet is a terrible situation, one we've seen before with China and their deep censorship of online media.
Cool, let them, so what?
It would be great, but think about it for a second. Russian bots and trolls that are operated by the government will still exist, it's not like they would cease trying to spread misinformation or destabilizing opinions. So that won't change at all. This would primarily affect the people in the country who would now be unable to see real news or learn things the government doesn't want them to.
I'm all for giving Russia the finger, but I do fear that it won't actually make anything better for the rest of us and would just make the people worse off.
"Thinking for a second"? You are posting this on the Web. Thinking is for losers.
Hell yeah get tf out you thinking nerds
I hope I can block whole ASNs originated from orcs land, so I can block those too. Or at least majority of them.
I mean, if no normal citizen can access the outside internet then we will know for sure that any connection coming out of Russia has to be a bot. So that would make blocking them much more easier.
Because I need outside access to get the hell out of this godforsaken piece of dirt
Millions of Russian ctizens having their internet cut off isn't a big deal?
And reddit will lose more users than it did at the end of June.
Nah, that'd take Turkey and Azerbaijan and China being shut off too. Russian bots are usually not so numerous.
Will it be the same quality as other things that Russia makes?
We must somehow patch a connection in, to ensure they have a sufficient quantity of international memes, cats and porn. Access to the internet is a basic human right these days, we surely cannot abandon them.
But how will they hack the rest of us if they can't get online?
Their government will definitely still have access.
NSA and CIA are absolutely salivating at the idea of the Russians trying to roll their own TCP/IP stack. However good some of the Russian intel groups might be at offense, they are hot garbage at defense.
That’s not what they are trying to do at all though.
The article makes it sound more so like they want their own ‘great firewall’ like China, or to go even further and create something akin to North Korea.
No reason to reinvent tcp/ip in any case.
great now i have get a Cisco certificate in Russian ip
So basically The Great Firewall of China is extending North?
Nah it's not. China doesn't need Russia in any capacity. It does need some of its natural resources, but not too badly really. It's not any more keen on exploiting those than in Central Asian countries. Just doing usual Chinese things, no bigger interest.
Do you know what is The Great Firewall of China?
Incoming tankie defense of state censorship
it what happens when i go to the great with to gasoline and match
Yep. It's something surrounding a 2-digit percentage of world population. Now Russia has a population of 140mln.
I do have mixed feelings about this. Let's say pool it off and Russia net is now thing. That makes it harder for Russian conmen to rum various scams and hacks, ex ransomware, but it makes it a lot harder for the people there to break out of the state own propaganda.
The Russian scammers are using a ton of proxies and VPNs. Unfortunately, this change will not affect them unless the Russian government completely removes access to the global Internet, and even then, the corruption is so deep that many officials will be selling access to the global Internet to their friends or people with money.
Russian scammers and social media manipulators are here to stay, likely because they're largely state run initiatives and they'll still have access to the global Internet.
What this does is keep the normal Russians insulated from the rest of the world and unable to coordinate outside of their own country, where everything they do is even more tightly controlled by the government.
That statement works for every other freedom you lose, it also serves to detect malicious intent from another person. There's always a middle ground, where nothing's perfect, but it's balanced. There's always a compromise. There's no perfect scenario. If you want a perfect society, you have to take away all freedom. If you give away all freedoms, there's anarchy.
agree, that's why my feels are mixed
With hookers and blackjack?
This will be obviously all in the name of authoritarianism. Will the Russian Federation people benefit or will this be a means to control information? Note that my criticisms leveled against Russia could apply to Amurica as well. We Amuricans seem to have wet dreams of Christo-Fascism.
Good thing everyone can have guns. /s
That way we can simply do nothing because only one political party is encouraging its constituents to arm up while the other wants everyone to disarm. Guess which side will win?
I'm genuinely uncertain what your actual position is here, but yes, liberals and leftists do need to arm up. /m/LiberalGunOwners seems relevant here.
I don't know what their position is either, but "arming up" isn't going to do anything against a modern, relatively competent military. Back in the time the second amendment was written (as an example) there wasn't that big a disparity in the resources the military could use and normal people. The citizens were less organized but had numbers on their side.
Today, there is absolutely nothing you can do with a gun vs drones, bombs, planes, etc. The only way you really prevail is if the government isn't willing to slaughter its own citizens and guns aren't helping there at all. In fact, the opposite may be true since it makes it easy for the government to label the people shooting at their officials as terrorists.
So, all of this is wrong, but also beside the point. The main point of arming up is so that we don't all get murdered by fascists. I don't mean that in the sense that fascists will take over the government, and then use the state apparatus to exterminate us. The murdering happens before and during their seizure of political power.
"You're wrong" does not constitute a counterargument.
So the scenario is fascists are just roaming around murdering liberals at a point before they seize political power? What are the police doing? If the police are looking the other way, the fascists already have political power. So what you're talking about doesn't seem at all realistic.
Even if we look to one of the most extreme examples in history -Nazi Germany - it still didn't happen remotely like what you're apparently concerned about.
I'll go ahead and respond to your other post as well:
This makes the value proposition look even worse. At least run of the mill crime has a semi-realistic chance of happening. Doing something that has negative value in normal times and only pays off if something very extreme like civilization breaking down occurs is kind of irrational.
You'll get further in life if you don't make a straw man out of positions you don't agree with. Although, admittedly, you can get pretty far on straw men and Gish gallops.
Anyway:
If we basically have to worry about warlords wandering around killing people at will then civilization already is done.
I don't plan my life around everyone being raptured away, aliens landing or civilization completely breaking down. It's irrational to make real sacrifices or do things that require a meaningful tradeoff/risk to avoid such unlikely events.
I'm pretty sure Mao didn't mean "If you have a gun, you have political power" with that quote. The original quote was “以后要非常注意军事，须知政权是由枪杆子中取得的”. It's not talking about random citizens with guns, it's from the perspective of leading/governing countries.
Rather than get locked in a "someone is wrong on the internet" cycle, let's put a pin in this. We've both read each others points, and found them unconvincing. Whatever audience we might hope to sway has thinned out. On reddit I would have just silently walked away at this point, but the threadiverse is small and we're likely to encounter each other again.
I'm guessing that our disagreement just comes down to a liberal vs leftist divide, and possibly also American vs European. We're not likely to bridge those as random internet commenters. So, TTFN.
Participation in the conversation is completely voluntary so it's completely up to you if you want to respond.
You didn't really argue your point though. You said "You're wrong" and "... But what if bad stuff happens?" It's not like we had an actual debate here. Maybe you didn't find the points I made compelling, but at least I tried to explain my reasoning for reaching that position.
Any negative perception I have toward you personally really doesn't have anything to do with the actuall disagreement, but your approach to "discussing" it. "Because guns bad", "don't bother consulting your canned talking points", etc is not a good-faith approach to debate. If you actually care about fostering good relations in a fairly small community where you may run into people again, I'd suggest reexamining your methods.
I don't think so. My position and what I'm arguing (although possibly incorrect) is purely based on what I see as the reality of the situation. A belief about whether guns are effective for preserving freedom against the government/fascists/whatever doesn't have anything really to do with politics.
Which one of us is supposed to be the American and which one is supposed to be the European?
You're more likely to kill yourself or a loved one than a home invader.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/07/guns-handguns-safety-homicide-killing-study
[snip]
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/guns-suicide/
You're far more likely to drown if you own a pool in your backyard. Population level statistic applied to your individual lifestyle choices are meaningless and patronizing.
They're completely meaningful and not at all patronizing. (Do you even know what that word means?)
Also wrong, and not really relevant to my point? I'm not talking about the value proposition of having a gun for dealing with run of the mill crime.
We're (Americans) in a situation where we're faced with an active and armed fascist movement, and those who would oppose that movement have systematically disarmed themselves because "guns bad". What's your plan for when they decide to remind us that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun"?
Don't bother consulting your canned talking points, you actually have to think about this one for yourself.
Not wrong, in that the studies are valid, and completely relevant to your point.
Guns kill their owners far more often than they kill home invaders and other intruders.
I always resent this braindead argument. There's a huge difference between a country waging a foreign war and a country waging a war against its own cities and citizens. Insurgencies work and has been proven time and time again. See: Iraq
Indeed, in that the country isn't generally going to have the will to massacre its own citizens. So it's not that the citizens have a gun that is staying its hand, it's the lack of desire to just go ahead and slaughter them. Part of that is going to come from the fact that the country's military is made up of people who have these citizens as their friends, neighbors, etc.
So having a gun isn't helping you at all in that situation.
So these insurgents control Iraq now? They "won"?
Also, it's not really a comparable situation: dealing with insurgents halfway across the world is harder than dealing with them in your backyard. The US was also not really trying to take over and just rule the country, they were at least half-heartedly trying to set up a government that could manage stuff. In addition, the middle east and oil is strategically important to the US but insurgents in Iraq are obviously much less of a pressing concern than insurgents in the US. Naturally the US isn't going to invest the same level of resources and go to the same lengths to deal with those problems in Iraq compared to what it would do if that was happening in its own backyard. Finally, a lot of the insurgents were religious extremists. Even if every liberal in the US was armed, do you think we/they would really go to those lengths? I think we're just too used to living comfortably and don't really believe anything with that level of fanaticism to be running around with an AK waging a guerrilla war even if we had the AK.
The insurgents lost in Iraq. I know you stopped paying attention when FOX News moved on, but the Iraqi government won.
Why would you think I watch Fox news? My bad, mixed up Afghanistan and Iraq. But I'm sure Iraq isn't far behind.
"Access over 50 websites with everything you need!"
Special internet operation initiated. :)
I think they should team up with China. Seems to have similar mentality.
I think if we wait a bit the Russians might do it themselves by accident
Internet 2 will be so hot
It is hot because we used recycled cables from Chernobyl. We tore them out of the wall as we retreated.
Smekalka
Here's hoping that this doesn't become a thing the Russian people deserve so much more and so much better.
It's just sad that their dictator couldn't care any less about the individual or the people as a whole.