At the same time “global economic integration” and “global trade” including outsourcing of production to countries with cheaper labor were sold to the populace as a logical continuation of liberal democracies. Increasing efficiency, thus increasing the level of life. That the level of life also depends on having leverage, and moving critical production outside means reduction of leverage, nobody thought (well, the majority of population didn’t think that, bread and circuses).

While this is a system old as humanity, Chinese imperial bureaucracy and Roman one and Assyrian one and Persian one worked like this, to build hierarchical systems. Troops quelling rebellions in one province are from one in the opposite part of the empire. Troops fighting wars in a province are never local, because wars between empires always involve stimuli to change masters. Bureaucrats are too foreign, everything is foreign and not reliant on locals. Even food and drinks are sent from other provinces and tightly guarded - despite that being far more expensive then than now.

So today in a western country all the digital products are made mostly in other countries, all the electronics are made mostly in other countries, much of the food and much of the clothes and much of everything. And this is treated like the good free western way of life. The further from WWII, the less everybody feared such a situation.

While the firmer is integration, the harder it’s to leave it, and the harder it’s to leave, the less meaningful any freedom is - your vote matters only for the bosses in you part, and they have the combined power of the bosses to deceive you, to misdirect your vote, or to plainly steal it, or to go around it.

Historically integration built empires.

The USSR, a recent example of an honest attempt at autarky, which is often used as an example of who tries autarky and why, didn’t really try. It’s the other way around actually, in 20s it was rather democratic, in 30s it was basically buying foreign technologies and machinery for gold and grain for everything (that’s the Stalin’s industrialization), in 40s too (war and all), and the only parts of its history where it really was trying to do autarky significantly enough was during the Thaw and Brezhnev, and while that didn’t work so well, that’s also the most democratic period of its history.

But at the same time high autarky degree means lower level of life. I’ve been excited with Trotskyism once, despite most of time being a ancap. Because, well, it involves direct democracy and mass participation in all political activity, and no career bureaucrats and politicians, the need for that is substantiated by any limited minority of politicians or bureaucrats being possible to covertly threaten, blackmail, buy, groom, etc.

I don’t subscribe to their “democratic planning of the economy using modern means of computation” thing - I agree it’s possible if Amazon is doing just that on scale far bigger than needed for a government in one country, don’t get me wrong, and that demands fewer resources than all this “AI research around”, but there’s inherent degeneracy in such a planning system because, as a specific example, you don’t know you have to design and produce a good that would be in high demand but isn’t already produced.

I think Trotskyism in many of its parts is still very good, actual participation not only is beneficial for the system, it also gives the populace the psychological understanding that politics is not about casting your vote once or twice for the guys who frighten you less. Feeling of holding the wheel. Personal responsibility and ability to change things for good. These are important exactly to compensate worse level of life (locally worse, because good level of life combined with tyranny eventually becomes worse too) emotionally, because otherwise it’ll be impossible to institute a political system nobody wants.

Well, it is one big process.

Hard to trace the power which allowed for all those slow processes of subversion to happen, but a lot of it stems ultimately from the USSR’s breakup and those who managed to make profit on it.

Western countries’ MIC’s which no more had to prepare for real war, so same big funding, but less accountability. Western politicians making profit on reducing their militaries - it’s a profitable process of selling properties and scrapping tech and such. Western advisors in ex-USSR helping their new mafia elites. Western businesses who first managed to secure some agreements to do business in ex-USSR.

Then - the tech sector, via plenty of qualified labor from ex-USSR moving to USA and other western countries. Cheap fossil fuels sold by Russia to EU countries, which became a major factor in their economies in the 90s and 00s.

Politicians in this were very notably not complacent, just looking out for themselves and noticing opportunities for themselves.

Also a lot happened just due to technical progress and lack of macro-level competition. Soviet system notably had deadlocks because interested parties couldn’t agree to one countrywide system. Suppose USSR somehow managed to survive till now, with its collegial and totalitarian-bureaucratic, but not mafia-style, government. Then total surveillance being introduced in the West now and long ago in China wouldn’t be successfully implemented in the USSR, for the similar reasons EU countries want to have their own surveillance, but not US surveillance over their citizens. In USSR it would be between ministries and factions not willing to be controlled by others. So in USSR there’d likely be some status quo.

I mean, it’s purely a hypothesis, it already imploded and there’s nothing more to say about this. Just - such things as now would sometimes happen during the Cold War too, but having a big totalitarian state as a counterweight helped a lot. Like an example of what will happen if this is allowed, and like an alternative (if we are going to have totalitarianism, then let’s at least have the red workers-and-peasants kind), and like a real threat in case of weakening of western nations.

So one can imagine that USSR’s breakup did lead in many ways to what we have now. At the same time had it not happened, then maybe on my side of the screen everything would already be surveilled (or maybe it is).

A few stolen elections in a row were approved by US politicians and various European politicians almost unanimously, because of “supporting Yeltsin against reaction”, and “if not this imperfect democracy, then Commies or neo-Nazis”, and “but we’re having a reboot of relations”, and then with almost open realpoliticking shit about how Putin is convenient to do business with, and if there’s a change of regime, it won’t be as easy.

So I would argue about root causes a lot. Especially since the root cause would be Western interference during USSR’s breakup, first aimed at preserving USSR, then after that failing aimed at preserving Russia as 1) some sort of superpower, 2) authoritarian regime led by Yeltsin’s crowd.

It doesn’t even matter that they likely didn’t know what they were doing, likely led by Tom Clancy books style idiotic ideas of the dangers and chances in that process, and the main “threat” perceived was some “radical reactionary takeover” leading to someone launching nukes just for the sake of it. It even reads idiotic, but such opinions were said officially, however nuts it was.

EDIT: And also there’s the subject of Ukraine’s nukes. If someone didn’t know, it’s not Russia that pressured Ukraine to get rid of its nukes in favor of Russia. It’s USA. Convenient to have one hegemon in a region, with whom you can deal, except that hegemon might eventually accept the idea that they are the hegemon.

Früher war mehr Lametta?

As someone still in Russia, a bit of the same.

That is, I expected things to get worse, but not “avalanche of shit, cockroaches and rat bones” levels of worse.

Except the idolization part started receding much earlier, when I actually learned English well enough to understand that these are very intolerant societies. Say, where in Russia people disagreeing with you on some key matters would look at you like a fool or just decide to stop this conversation so that neither of you would offend the other, in English-speaking countries, it seems, there was simply no way to survive outside of some echo chamber and God forbid you find none to fit into. But that was like 10-15 years ago, now, of course, in Russia you can get jailed or strongly fined for words.

But I thought there’s some deeper wisdom and in those harsher societies people are also somehow better capable to maintain their common freedom and dignity yadda-yadda. In fact that’s not what I see.

As a bit of gloating - at least now the “why are you not all revolting against Putin” Western types can be answered with their own regrettable example instead of common sense and logic, these are fine, but an example is more efficient.

I’ve thought of all these, but what I’m describing should be a comprehensive system in itself and at the same time have global identities and addressing of all content, so that data model could be applied, for example, for a sneakernet or for some situation where you’d have to synchronize data over delay-tolerant networks.

Most of all like Briar or Usenet or something else.

Perhaps you were mostly in the right kind of communities on Reddit.

Also I dunno what you’re talking about, I gave up on Reddit after being banned for like 10th time, the reasons all being “calls to violence” (that’d be about civil rights, democracy and such) or “ethnic hate” (that’d be about NATO allies not having a carte blanche to do whatever they want, specifically Turkey and Azerbaijan).

I’m less reserved on Lemmy, and my views are around anarcho-capitalist (I’ll admit some Trotskyist and anarcho-syndicalist things appeal to me, so sort of left from the average).

What kind of stupid s*** is this? Is the Fediverse just a safe space for leftists because of what happened to Twitter?

It’s a hierarchical system. Want something better - design and implement a p2p social media with democratic leadership of communities.

I would say the future is in pooling resources.

Like it happens with torrents. As one p2p protocol very successful.

Self-hosting not applications, but storage and uniform services. Let different user applications use the same pooled storage and services.

All services are ultimately storage, computation, relays, search&indexing and trackers. So if there’s a way to contribute storage, computing resources, search and relay nodes by announcing them via trackers (suppose), then one can make any global networked application using that.

But I’m still thinking how can that even work. What I’m dreaming of is just year 2000 Internet (with FTP, e-mail, IRC, search engines), except simplified and made for machines, with the end result being represented to user by a local application. There should be some way to pay for resources in a uniform way, and reputation of resources (not too good if someone can make a storage service, collect payment, get a “store” request and then just take it offline), or it won’t work.

And global cryptographic identities.

Not like Fediverse in the end, more like NOSTR.

Not really. A normal thing for most functional states 50 years ago. A comprehensive pipeline of training and preparation for various industrial and military roles.

From first aid to orientation on terrain to radio knowledge to flag signals. Flight clubs, other relevant sports, small arms disassembly and assembly. What to do in case of an emergency. Chemistry, electric engineering, mechanical engineering.

Computer games weren’t a thing, and cheap small drone planes too. But this is pretty normal, except nothing is official, because today nation-states prefer gray schemes.

Oh my God, I cannot imagine living with a hoarder. I have problems with collecting things, but I certainly don’t hoard things.

Kinda similar. I have construction materials or junk laying around for long, but in general places under my exclusive control are kinda livable. If chaotic a bit.

I have a friend who is a hoarder and she has lost the use of her bathroom recently.

That’s the main reason for the rack in the bathroom. To be able to maybe sometimes shower normally. Two things - 1) place to put stuff so that it wouldn’t fall down, 2) no place to hang plastic bags filled with various crap.

She has to shower at the gym. Every day, she drives to the gym in the morning and take a shower.

Been close to that.

I just cannot imagine living in that world.

I think you’ve just did, judging by the emotion.

I don’t know how you do it.

Counting days, months and years of wasted life.

I would lose my damn mind.

Achievement completed long ago.

(No help, just sharing)

Seems like my life. Except I live with my mom and she’s a hoarder. I’ve assembled three metal racks in place of piles of stuff where those were unbearable. So - I had some place where I wanted to stick the fourth, except I can’t remember what it was, it doesn’t seem to fit anywhere (racks are a desperate measure, actually furniture should only be thrown out here). And the usual with getting perpetually distracted from work (at least I kinda get it done).

I meant joining BRICS together after formally ceasing to be part of British monarchy. And becoming less dependent on other integrations much abused today.

Ex-Soviet everything since 1991.

Including Kaya Kallas.

Yeah, McCarthyists working together with Bolsheviks-turned-mafia to turn the world into shit. That’s just wonderful.

The western countries are dependent on the imperial framework of “the eyes” cooperation, other intelligence and security cooperation, NATO cooperation, similarity of financial, patent and IP regulations, similarity of legal systems, interconnectivity of their elites and various blackmail material on those, and their common crime networks (one would hope that at least mafia groups should align along some other clusters on the map, but it doesn’t seem so).

Those regulations support the status of western elites, which means the elites themselves won’t reform anything in any good direction.

The NATO cooperation is extremely efficient and comfort-providing - instead of countrywide mandatory conscription you have small groups of professional soldiers and military bureaucrats, military matters are not something that all the society cares about.

Instead of domestic military industries sufficient to fulfill the needs of a military you can have as much silent and respectable corruption as you wish. It’s both convenient for the population and for the elites (criminals) to have a small professional military, an international (imperial) MIC framework, all not influenced significantly by domestic popular opinions.

Intelligence cooperation allows domestic intelligence services to bypass all limitations that exist for them on paper about their own citizens. It also makes every such service more powerful than intended.

Similar financial regulations lead not only to good things, like smaller cost of doing business, but also to bad things, like monopolies. Even the EU supposedly big regulations don’t prevent big tech from abusing honestly whatever they want. GDPR is a farce in its actual enforcement.

Patent and IP regulations - well, that’s basically a way to legal monopoly, and that’s how it works. BTW, let’s just remember that even trademarks are a relatively new thing legally. And copyright. And patents. And when all these were introduced, that was similar to state monopoly on alcohol beverages in some countries or state monopoly on tobacco in others, and was reasoned legally in exactly that way - authorship and right to print something should be registered for the crown to have an income from that, not because of some ownership of ideas or protection. It still works like an imperial mechanism.

Similarity of legal systems - I’ll admit at some point I thought English law is the best thing after sliced bread. But I’m not so sure at this point. At some point a German court acquitted Tehlirian, after all. As an example of the main competing family of legal systems.

Elites and crime - I mean, your whole part of the world is in the “trade and denial” stage after really buying the 80s and 90s idea that democracies and institutions don’t require perpetual struggle to maintain. That is, fiction of those years would usually argue with that idea, but sometimes wide masses just want to believe something so badly that no art can dissuade them. And in the 00s it was decided.

OK, too much text.

What I really mean is that for Canada it doesn’t make sense to join BRICS unless it manages to pull a Brazil and somehow switch the camp from “imperial” to “fringe kingdoms”.

It’s not just a multicultural area, it’s as if they made the African continent two states, drawing the border randomly for one of them to be majority Muslim (and consisting of two unconnected parts).

It’s a whole world with a few language families of completely different cultures, inside which there are languages as big as German not mutually intelligible with their related languages near them.

There’s no such ethnicity as “Indian”.

BTW, about religion - there is an ethnic and religious group in India, their Church is Apostolic Christian, Miaphysite, and it’s in communion with Coptic and Armenian churches, and it has way more members than there are Armenian Christians in the world. Yet when listing Miaphysite churches, it’s usually not even remembered.

I mean, they use English as the main international language inside India, the fact that there’s no native language fitting the role of lingua franca more talks for itself. It’s not about policy, it’s about the fact that Hindi or Urdu are nothing for Dravidic regions. Not even oppression, just WTF and why should they use it.

This is also funny in the sense that one of explanations of Bitcoin is “digital gold” - that world economies and societies went in a wrong direction once they stopped being gold-backed, except gold and everything RL is controlled by governments, while Bitcoin is a subject to freedom of speech and whatever.

An already archaic viewpoint TBH, that many even western governments respect freedom of anything and human rights. And in another sense too archaic - the idea that a currency being gold-backed is something valuable was kinda libertarian around year 2007.

Which is also an answer to people saying that Bitcoin is not backed by anything (like country’s economy in this sense and not technical ability to exchange it for gold), it’s the main cryptocurrency, and it seems to work well enough despite high volatility.

This won’t be a circle though. Today they really like their control and surveillance. A gold-backed currency is where anyone owning N of M can exchange them to gold with which an M is guaranteed by a rate that doesn’t change, load that gold into bags, carry it to another country, go to a bank and exchange that gold to its currency. Perhaps declaring that they are carrying that gold at customs.

Gold-backed for governments - we-ell, maybe in some way.

Well. There was a time when currencies were to an extent interoperable, via a certain portion of silver called joachimstaler, or just taler, or yefimok, or dollar … being approximately the same everywhere. Still, that was mostly used in colonies and in international trade, locally they’d use different incompatible currencies.

The British Empire is most notable on this picture with its glaring absence.

Yes, about the British and the French - these are countries that still fought small undeclared colonial wars after USSR ceased to exist.

They still fucking do.

Jordan is still not very different from a UK puppet regime.

Also why the West loves Arab monarchies so much - because they don’t change anything in inconvenient directions. They sell oil, buy weapons, build nice shit. But their countries are not just staying on one place in terms of democracy, enlightenment and human rights - they are further into medieval shit than they were after liberation from the Ottomans. Then they were sort of “naturally”, traditionally tribal and medieval. Not much different from many parts of the world. But since then those puppet monarchies, installed by empires, have been changing their societies in the opposite direction. The West not just supports Muslim religious movements against Leftist movements, the West supports Muslim monarchist and fundamentalist creme-de-la-creme (not) basically Nazi movements like our recent time’s ISIS against Muslim republican and Leftist movements. So some Muslim and socialist mojaheds, like those US supported in Afghanistan, are not good enough when guys like HTS are available. Even Egypt’s ikhvans, with their democratic component, are not good enough. Only Salafi beheaders in black with their nasheeds.

Germany - at some point their society realized firmly that there are mistakes in the past to be worked through. Unfortunately that was somewhere in the 90s, and in the middle of that process they for whatever reason abruptly decided that they have understood enough and are now a morality specialist nation. Which is why a German often feels entitled to express their opinions on the Holocaust as if their nation were participating in the victim role.

In some sense USSR was a huge spoiler. It took upon itself a lot of hopes of this world, despite Stalin and repressions, and then Brezhnev happened - just covering every budget inefficiency by selling natural resources to the supposed enemy, covering every pipeline hole by buying technology of the supposed enemy, resolving every deadlock between interested local producers by cloning technology of the supposed enemy, and so on. Then after 10 years or so the whole Soviet society and even more its elite were confident in Soviet system’s inferiority, and it couldn’t end any other way than it did from that point.