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…

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.

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.

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.

Only that fuck from nvidia cares, if US wins they sell more chips. If they loose they have competition. Fortunately China just announced a new chip technology “projected to deliver capabilities comparable to 1.4-nanometer process technology by 2031” so we’ll eventually have competition to bring down prices.

Haven’t they clearly documented how they did it and what they used so that anyone can replicate it? Anyone with the compute power, which of course few have. But universities could do it.

So how is it not open source in this specific domain of problems? What would a LLM model need to do to be open source then? Duplicate the whole training dataset in a big zipfile for you to download?

From what I understand you could even replicate deepseek by replacing the “cold start” with latest deepseek instead.

I suspect Musk did it first and now that guy wants in on the scam too

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

Ok ok fine, sorry, you have some rare second hand though anecdotal evidence.

But I simply do not want to hear how bad Iran is and this both sideism and lets talk every monday about how the regime in Iran is a dictatorship (wrong) and so on. Because we know where it leads. Sanctions, agitation, and now war.

With both-sides-bad you’re STILL attacking Iran while they are defending against the USA. You’re helping the imperialists. That is the effect of stories like OP.

Iran is a country that has been under siege, under economic attack by the USA and everyone the USA controls. When the USA does sanctions, they threaten sanctions against anyone who breaks their unilateral sanctions. And still they are not just hanging on but managed to fight back the unprovoked and illegal US and Israel attacks.

And again, they MUST go hardline on protesters. What other choice do they have? Surrender to the USA? Killing a few hundred protesters is unfortunately preferable if that prevents a regime change. Do you think they like it? I’m sure they don’t. But they feel they must, to keep in power, which is absolutely their duty. They are at war, and the sanctions are explicitly meant to create unrest.

I wish the Iranian people more freedom and peace. Personally not a fan of Islam. I wish I could see how they would do without being under attack by the largest superpower in the world.

“The Iranian regime is horrible” but how do we know this? You say this as if it’s a fact. As if you believe every mainstream article you read since you were a kid. As if you’ve allowed yourself to be shown only the most extreme anecdotes.

But worst is that you talk as if it’s your business. It’s not. It’s the Iranian people’s business.

The more you support anti-Iranian propaganda, the more hardline Iran has to become. The US and CIA couped Iran once, now tried a second time very openly, but they are constantly supporting “non-profit pro-democracy organizations” which are just there to destabilize. THIS you don’t seem to understand. It’s like a bully constantly punching someone weaker and when they fight back by cracking down on spies and foreign funded organizations meant to destabilize their nation, you come and say “Oh how horrible! They poor people only wanted freedum! I can be your white savior and explain democracy to you!”

Ok ok, I went way overboard there lol, sorry. Nothing against you. But this is the general mechanism. Destabilize with color revolutions, paint a picture in imperial media, then condemn when the “shithole country” defends itself.

Don’t forget, there has never been any evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon even CIA admitted that. And yet still the iranian people have faced crippling sanctions which ultimately destroyed the middle class which is important to build a more robust democracy. US Empire doesn’t like democracy, definitely not in countries which natural resources it wants to steal.

So frankly no, two things aren’t true at the same time. One is much truer than the other. One is what you and your empire or alliance does. The other thing is what you heard about a foreign, far away country which resources we want to steal from their population. Leave Britney alone!

The solution is for every shit post or comment we need to make 10. Every advertising you see, you need to create an anti ad. You need to multiple their effort in the reverse. It costs them money. It costs us just time and effort.

I’m curious if one could do the math on this, if it can work. Like a cost analysis. I’m pretty sure it’s not, like impossible by an order of magnitude.

They have billions of dollars to spend and can dominate and push speech at a much cheaper price. It costs them peanuts to buy votes or sockpuppets or bots. Or they own the algorithm. Meanwhile we have to work to survive and have limited time and energy. I think one of the biggest misconception is that ideas win, but reality is that we have an army of millions on one side and an army of thousands on the other, and there is no doubt who will win.

And worse yet, much of this isn’t even deliberate, it’s a side effect of tuning algorithms to maximize engagement. The more you yell the more they yell their more the engagement numbers go up and they win. Polarization and divisiveness is good business.

No clue if this is true or if this can even be researched, you’d probably need data from the social media providers. The only winning move I see would be to nationalize all social media and turn them into non-profit cooperatives that are controlled by their own workers.

I’d expect they’ll try to turn this into a “Stab-in-the-back myth” like the Nazi’s with WWI. Trump will say they would have won bigly against Iran but now it’s all the fault of the socialists for betraying Emperor Trump!

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?

Yeah they just don’t care any more. Like about anything. I’m not sure how much about Ahmadinejad was propaganda but afaik he was a pretty hardcore Islamic conservative, so couping him into power would just make everything worse. But Trump and Netanyahu are simply insane.

Right! That exists, at $3 per laser shot.

Yeah definitely scary - once you can mass produce drones or combat robots in the millions they become weapons of mass destruction.

I still imagine robots shooting normal caliber guns far better than soldiers can would be a game changer. There was this article about Iran simply producing massively cheaper and that is why they won the war, and overwhelm the expensive toys and defenses of the US. Just state owned weapon manufacturing with long term stability in planning. So if you can take down a drone with 100 bullets it’s going to be cheaper than 1 expensive interceptor drone.

But that is not the case, and you could measure the hypocrisy using cold hard data. Just compare how liberals talk about the USA and USAians during the invasion of… well pick any, vs how liberal talk about Russia and Russians. It’s measurably different by like an order of magnitude. Not to speak of the governments reaction and sanctions and support for weapons. When I see lemmy liberals advocating for donating vast amount of weaponry to e.g. Iran I’ll reconsider. Actually advocating for that is probably illegal where you live though.