Look, even if I’d accept all of those explanations as given - at the end of the day close to a million people still were executed.

The death penalty is morally incorrect, at the very least because we know any justice system makes mistakes and you’ll execute innocent. And when killing people en-masse like in the purge, there will be a lot of innocents. It might have been deemed unavoidable in 1940, but from today’s perspective it is unacceptable, inexcusable, despicable, disgusting.

So - do you *really *think you can convince any emotionally stable person outside your little ivory tower with this Stalin rehabilitation thing? Do you think it makes people more or less likely to want to join a communist revolution were Stalin has been rehabilitated?

And even if you are utterly convinced of being in the absolute right here - you must see how incredibly easy you make it for neoliberals to utterly destroy you on this. Easy and total victory. What a monumental task and waste of propaganda resources it would be to convince people of “rehabilitating Stalin”. A right wing think tank could not find a better issue to push into communist communities! A perfect own goal! Is this really the hill you want the hope for a new revolution to die on?

Honestly…

Just FYI: It’s not the network provide we have to worry about in my country. That is specific to the USA I believe.

Here they have “headhunters” that make a contract with a rights holder, torrent a file, write down the IP of someone who uploads a video to them, then legally request the name to the IP and send an invoice for about $2000. No three warnings or anything. And they are very good at sending legal officials to impound any of your valuable stuff in case you don’t pay.

Even other “illegal” activity like calling Israel an apartheid regime or supporting palestine or insulting your head of state might get you flagged by a three letter agency, but they won’t use official legal channels. There is a protection of the herd with VPN.

I wonder if renowned professors and academics are on average more ethical or the same as then.

You hear things like OP and think “Yeah there is a good reason why we stopped treating professors as authorities to consult on anything”. Just how many people must have known and just silently accepted this atrocity.

Signal requires to use phone number, which in many countries is legally required to be tied to your personal identity. Like the SMS provider must have a copy of your id card. You’re basically naked to the CIA when using Signal. Even if not like in the US they presumably mass collect SIM and location correlations for ID. For the life of me I do not understand how anyone can promote that shit.

So the “honeypot” of Signal is that the mainstream promotes it as IF it was a privacy focused app when it’s very glaringly obviously is not. So the effect is that it prevents market space and attention for other apps actually focused on privacy without requiring ID to sign up. It’s a bit like introducing sterile insects to prevent the spread of unwanted pests (= actually secure communication).

They are perfect for torrenting though. The kind of activity 3 letter agencies don’t want their spying to be disturbed for.

Who is the third from the left?

PS: Sorry that was politically incorrect, let me rephrase my question: Who is the second from the far right?

Wikipedia since I haven’t read history about this. I know it’s not a reliable source but without doing a deep dive, what is lol. And sending people to the gulag wasn’t much better than death, so counting the deaths there too you get 3.3 mil. But the precise number hardly matters. Not even the most favorable view matters outside of academia. It happened, it’s a mountain of bodies. It simply cannot be excused or rehabilitated. You must say “this was very bad, it must never happen again”.

And I’m sure you all would, but then how can you in the same breath rehabilitate the man at the head of the government that did it?

If you want to promote the (undoubtedly many) good things about Stalinism you’ll need to repackage, rebrand, rebrand it. Call it early Sovjietism or something.

But part of it is that we as humanity still lacks a good answer about what to do about how the “calculus of power” can subvert anything. There will always be sociopaths, narcissist and schemers that pay lip service while min-maxing their own gain, no matter the ideology or religion. There is no doubt that the worst people did the best during the purges. It must have been an easy promotion bonanza. Denounce, report, promote, repeat. Easy soviet-style rank-maxxing lol. The theory of communism is incomplete without an good answer to this.

Anyway that thread shocked me and gave me a new (worse) perspective on the whole “Liberals vs Tankies” culture war. Maybe the fundamental crisis is that we lack any theory or ideology that can lead us out of the current mess. All existing ideologies have demonstrably failed, and maybe we’ve reached the limit of what an average person can reasonably learn and understand and execute. People subconsciously know this so as things get more desperate, there is rising intellectual pain or tension and desire that “but something has to work!” and I just want to believe in something!! So people make themselves believe and ignore or rationalize the glaring problems and increasingly shut the door to discordant noises.

There are too many forks already lol. And none of the forks have the features I want anyway. It’s also expensive.

Thanks, yeah seems it was a mistake. The CEO / founder is I believe a libertarian, but at least he believes in something, like privacy.

Is there an article about this?

Tbh there is little evidence. There is a lot of shitposting people socialists are pissed off being called “tankie” or communist as a slur. I mean this shit is old. McCarthy would love this “oh you’re a tankie!” shit.

The worst I’ve seen is a communist community discussing that Stalin needs to be rehabilitated for his role in building up the USSR despite his “mistakes” (The big oopsie of 3.3 million dead in the great purge). I mean that is just stupid.

The larger issue is the laser focus the liberal community has on tankies, it’s not the fascists that are currently rising or already ruling, noooo it’s the “authoritarian tankies” that are at the lowest of their power ever. Whoever has been putting money into this tankie meme is brilliant. Just amplify that shit and stoke that hatred. Fascism bad, but oh please don’t be too radical lol.

So basically lemmy failed as a platform precisely because the neoliberal have managed to already cut out the socialist heart of lemmy.

It’s kinda shocking, an article written by a scholar with a PhD in history without geopolitical slant. Reading an article without intellectual pain? Woah! Not that journalism ever was that great, but it kinda feels like a lost art today.

They wrong him like one of those alt-right philosophy bros, as if they could somehow make him make sense.

<sad modem noises>

Caillou

Geforce 3090 with 24TB should be able to run a “Q5 version” of it. Maybe get a second older computer, or maybe you can run two cards in one PC.

I believe forking doesn’t work because of network effects - Wikipedia.

No clue how exactly, but maybe you could also give them “toys” or things that are fun for them. Or shiny things that jingle or something lol. Or maybe build them a raised stand where they can land and look with a roof against rain. Or maybe even a birdbath?

And local and under your control. As a “second brain” that isn’t sentient but intelligent to assist you AI has great potential. In a few years we’ll probably have the models and new hardware to run good enough models locally on cheap enough hardware.

But by then they’ll have drummed enough support for “muh copyright” to buy legislation for AI licensing and make all AI models have to pay a license fee to… “someone”. Like that poor writer who had his work illegally read by an AI. So then no open source models can exist and they have the monopoly. Big win for the little guy lol.

At least China is pushing to expand production capacity.