Lumich

Girkin aka Strelkov has been in jail for over three years for “extremism”, a phony charge (he was criticizing Putin a lot for bad leadership, and continues to do so from jail). Your stating that “the Russians […] are pretty openly celebrating” him seems inadequate; while he does have supporters, they do not “celebrate” because he didn't succeed as he was left to his own devices and did not receive the Kremlin and (para)military support he was hoping for, so had to abandon Slavyansk to Kiev troops.

The initial attack was the Feb 2014 US-led Maidan massacre and coup d'état. Turchinov started the so-called Anti-Terror Operation on April 7th. Strelkov arrived at Slavyansk on April 12th.

I am not aware of any “hostile actions leading up to the war” by Gazprom.

I don't think Yanukovich “betrayed” his voters more than is typical for any so-called democracy. Also, the majority of them were in the Eastern and South-Eastern parts historically close to Russia.

Nuland/Pyatt were discussing whom to appoint to lead the country, proving the USA was behind the coup d'état. The “fuck the EU” bit is of minor importance and just shows US attitude to EU or EU member states' interests, which is perfectly known anyway.

Paet himself had no doubts about the factfulness of what he was relating to Ashton (because he trusted the politically like-minded MD Olga Bogomolets† he'd spoken to, see 49764198=dead), and he was worried (“really disturbing”) that he was on board with something that was against his very own convictions, that is perfectly clear from the tone of his voice. And there is plenty of corroborating evidence, which the CIA/MI6-backed “new coalition” (the perps) chose to ignore, such as videos of people being hit allowing to reconstruct the snipers' position. Avakov etc even had the trees with the bullets in them cut down to destroy the forensic evidence that proved where the shots had been fired from.

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olha_Bohomolets – She encouraged her students to take part in the Maidan protests, received honors and positions, ran for president (but no mention of what she revealed to Paet).

I don't know what grammar errors you're referring to, but some of the snipers were interviewed in person, there's a documentary (watched it a couple years ago so don't remember any “grammar errors”):

Esclusivo Guerra in Ucraina, le verità nascoste • https://youtu.be/YI_eaMtsOz4

The Russian propaganda you're referring to is for internal consumption, of course they are in cope mode and try to instill confidence in their own population because their situation is very difficult and their leadership showed amazing incompetence in assessing the situation prior to the Feb 2022 invasion, and sent in their troops with guidelines for a “special military operation” (which they reckoned it would be, a matter of days) and not for the deadly war it turned out to be.

Russian incompetence of stupidly marching into the trap, however, does not vindicate the other side, led by the US and the UK, who laid out the trap in the first place, in an elaborate strategic threat and deception involving, among other things, a “con game” to encourage the Kremlin into taking an action it wouldn't have dared to take. The US and their vassals who also invested into this operation sought precisely this kind of war with Ukrainians/Russians on both sides paying with their blood in order for the profit to flow to the US (in order to MAGA) by draining Europe (Germany being the main loser, of course).

Being clever certainly helps in being a war-profiteering bloodsucker, but it doesn't make it any better.

It is my impression that you are dismissing clear evidence, thus showing little interest in an honest debate, rather displaying your allegiance to the Western narrative (a kind of “virtue signaling”), which I think you adhere to because that's psychosocially comfortable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration

And in pursuit of their noble goals, somewhat paradoxically (in the untrained eyes of the naïve observer) they resort to bombing the infrastructure, destroying all state institutions, including education, and also loot^H^H^H securing the national cultural heritage (to preserve in custody in private collections in the City on the Hill). Actually, their belief is so strong that 20 years later the infrastructure still isn't rebuilt (except for oil export, but that's not what it's about).

Ill-intentioned cynics will question the motives of these nation builders and judge them on the merit of their results, not on the holiness of their belief. They will point out that the ped^H^H^H … actually doesn't really love children, but acts in pursuit of highly selfish goals.

People often cite this fact as if there were a problem to it. (Not sure it is your case though.) Is it that Germany is not allowed to have national interests? Who is the judge on this? Our "friend", the remaining exceptional occupation power?

By the way, chancellor Merz, before taking office, had worked for (and owes his personal wealth to) Usanian financial company Blackrock, thus creating a (rarely cited) allegiance problem at the highest level of the state apparatus.

A C hacker (author of lighttpd) taught me ~20 years ago that you'd always choose the native register size for database indices that would be involved in JOINs even when you'd never expect to have so many records, because that's what the machine performs best on.

Insects like bees are usually not considered spirited or soulful. That is because they are too dissimilar from humans. It is intuitive understanding, predating any modern science. Bees, like ants, indeed live and function as collectives.

No automaton will ever be life, whatever von Neumann thought experiments are applied to it. It will always remain dead matter.

Metabolism is the material base for life, but we find (have laws regulating) that people in a coma with unrecoverable brain damage being held alive by medical care and machinery stop experiencing and hence can be switched off and allowed to die. So metabolism, while necessary, is not sufficient.

I cannot follow you in ascribing life-like properties to an LLM. I'm not passionate either about this topic. The LLM, to me, is a tool and that's it. Not sure what you mean by the last sentence (but perhaps not important).

[1] Plato wrote some mumbo-jumbo about it a long time ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophist_(dialogue)

That's because there's no such thing as a "sentience-o-meter", and there's no need to "operationalize" or "measure" anything. Instead, what's wrong with the definition given by Wikipedia, "ability to experience feelings and sensations"? That surely aligns with about 2500 years of philosophy and common sense, preceding all the techno mumbo-jumbo that confuses us today.

Sentience is a property of the higher forms of life, i.e. animals, which is derived from Latin "anima", meaning "soul" or "spirit".¹ Mammals and birds qualify because we relate to them easily and naturally.

Artefacts like GPUs don't even have metabolism, they can't procreate, they're dead matter, and having electricity running through them in intricate circuits doesn't change that.

[1] Some languages make grammatical distinctions based on whether an object is considered "spirited" or not, surfacing fundamentals of human perception of the world at the level of grammar.

Of course I understand the problem about minority and majority positions. Creating majorities, minoritizing dissent, and inciting the (gregarious) majority to actively trample opposition (by mere quantity, not quality; by mass and weight, not argument or intellect) is the bread and butter of how propaganda works and operates. It cannot ever succeed in convincing everybody, but it can succeed in effectively shutting down opposition, which is the purpose.

As for my comment 49670568 (“Incredibly stupid …”), if you read it in context with parent and gp 49668588, you'll see I was echoing to Rob's “Incredibly arrogant/racist take” wrt to Adrian, whose comments I'd been subscribed to via RSS for a couple months prior to creating an HN account, and whom I've never seen posting anything akin to what Rob alleged, and so I was simply taking Adrian's defense (because I felt someone had to).

True, there was a provocative angle to my comment in the last two paragraphs, exacerbated perhaps by being also analytical. People from the US, in my experience, often don't realize how arrogant their self-content attitude in political matters comes across based on how much the US is trampling on other countries (and by trampling I mean to kill and destroy, to cheat and deceive, to plunder and tax, and then to justify or deny).

« The trouble is that users with minority views are often the ones setting fires and stoking flames. » — I usually try to remain factual. Trouble is, facts often are not welcome because psychologically and psychosocially, persuasions dictated by propaganda prevail, and there is pressure to “conform” and “comply”, and to even dismiss dissenters as “whacky” (example 49711252, in context 49708657).

« But would they have been squashed if they had expressed themselves more neutrally and with more relational capacity? It's hard to say; they rarely try. » — I will try. But I have to say that the majority view is very often expressed “in battle mode”, like the bully making it clear there can be no other view, which, again, is simply the result of how propaganda works, by creating the vocabulary and talking points (“global war on terror”, you might remember, “Russian annexation of Crimea”, “pilot suicide”, “Hamas terror”, “Russian war of aggression”), which then are repeated over and over again, and have to be repeated precisely because they are either total lies or meant to suppress the true story, which is much more complex.

« where people are coming from, and how difficult (and even frightening) it might be to give even an inch on the topic » — Yes, I know, a lot of people are frightened, which is also an effect of propaganda. Some, however, and these are the most vocal, do enjoy being in the majority because they enjoy trampling, which could be observed and experienced in real life during the CoVID hoax.

« there is a greater burden on people holding a minority position » — I can see this is the pragmatic conclusion that I would probably also arrive at from your vantage point.

Thanks again for taking the time to elaborate on this meta topic (which I understand is the mainstay topic for you). I might include a reference to your statement in future controversial comments I might make so it gets a chance to be considered by a wider audience.

Finally, on a meta level, the field of propaganda and psychology is interesting in its own right, an important part of social (or perhaps rather post-social) life as shaped by technological mass media, and therefore certainly not unworthy of many a hacker's curiosity, attention, and perhaps even investigation. — Best, Michael

All my comments are stillborn, dead by default. I guess that means shadowbanning has been applied. I'm neither a spammer nor a serial troll. Some people flagged my comments, and the more substantive and factful they were, the more they seemed¹ to be flagged. Some people appear to have licence to drive their political agendas, and others who oppose these views are charged with “trampling curiosity”. HN does not seem to live up to its purported ideals.

[1] There is zero transparency so I cannot see who flagged what how much. What I can see is that the more substantive a comment is the higher the risk it runs of being flagged and made invisible, which practically means automatized censorship (not calling it such would be hairsplitting).

Michael Palmer, in his book Hiroshima revisited, doesn't go as far as to rule out “nukes” entirely, but damage assessment, medical evidence, witness reports and measurements show that no such thing as claimed by the US and Japanese governments happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Instead, there were other ingredients to the atrocities, like the usual napalm, so-called “pumpkin bombs” (the iconic Nagasaki model), flash bombs and coloured smoke (“special effects”), and mustard gas (to generate “radiation sickness”), which is a gel that can linger on and emit poison for weeks (depending on the weather).

Napalm and mustard gas are 100 % consistent with the medical record, which the author is professionally qualified to assess, citing academic literature (which is scarse in case of napalm, probably on account of its heavy use by the US against East Asian peoples in the “defense of democracy”).

The damage pattern is extensive rather than intensive (that is the military expert assessment), just as seen in other napalmed cities in Japan. Miraculous survivors at the alleged “ground zero” (no such thing can really be derived from the damage pattern) preclude any generation of heat drastically higher than what is attainable by conventional means (“victims were vaporized”). So do slender objects like antennas and trees (which blossomed again next spring, then interpreted as a “miracle”). The few stone buildings there were can be seen standing out among the remains of flimsy huts that were blown and burnt.

And of course there was no disruption in settlement, the cities were built up and inhabited again.

« simulations on what happens with your aging asrenal » — Swarms of red herrings to keep the myth alive. Surely other uses of supercomputers are conceivable, even for non-disclosed purposes.

Strangely, while the non-existence of such weapons is undoubtedly good news, there are many “nuke fanboys” (no girls, though – this is a male thing) who will get upset and even angry at this, as if the “atomic bomb” were some kind of god to venerate, when it really only is lies and propaganda that we've been fed when we were kids.

To be clear, this is not to dispute nuclear energy, just the claim that it may be used to obtain explosions, and even extraordinary ones.

To return the "compliment", consider whether it rather applies here … 49386949. And remember to "flag".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch

This negative psychological disposition towards your own collective identity is a profound cultural disorder (at the level of mass psychology). It is wide-spread and even mainstream in Germany among the left-leaning. Significantly, it has never been the object of public debate, as public debate is strictly controlled by the adherents of this perverted ideology.

How the British invented Communism (and blamed it on the Jews) • Richard Poe @ RTF (Matthew Ehret) • 2h01 • https://youtu.be/Cxen-IzX-Gw

« there are some 6 million Indigenous people » — Now where have I seen that figure before? ^^ ChatGPT tells me there are even 9.7 million people in the USA who identify as "American Indian or Alaska Native" (2020 census). I was wrongly exaggerating in claiming they had been "all but exterminated".

Instead, they were removed from the territories that underwent English colonization (in which they had not yet been confined to reservations, but gradually driven from their ancestral lands "by treaty") to what was to become Oklahoma (part of the 1803 Napoleon purchase) by the aptly named 1830 "Indian Removal Act", which is why today OK has the highest absolute number of Indians (730k), followed by Arizona, New Mexico and California (annexed from or "ceded" by Mexico, formerly Nueva España).

So, I exaggerated. They were not exterminated, but they were uprooted or eradicated from the lands of their forefathers under English colonization.

Well, anyway … “evil Russians colonialists”.

† I know the PC term in North America is “first nations” or some such but for those outside NA using the old term is perfectly fine.

While there's zero mention in this article of the glaring inconsistencies and WTFs that are all over 9/11, as duely befits an infoctrination outlet called “The National Interest”, the one bit that is worth thinking about in this final paragraph is the time it took to plan and prepare the event – “decades”.

The complexity of the event was enormous, the rollout spectacular, the orchestration superb, and the manpower involved in planning and execution must have been many many thousands (who all got paid handsomely – for their service and their discretion).

There was a video† (now deleted) where you could hear and see 9/11 commissioner Bob Kerrey call it literally a “30 year conspiracy”.

† https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDfm3NroVG8 DELETED

Here's an observation from my very brief 48h visit to NYC in mid-September 2000. Walking around lower Manhattan, on my way to Battery Park, I came past the WTC and saw, across an empty plaza, a queue of a few dozen people, probably to enter the building or the tourist elevator. The very fact that the queue “stood out” in the general void felt strange. So few people, on a busy and perfect picture postcard blue sky ~25°C late summer early afternoon. And all the streets down to Battery Park were empty. Zero street life. No cafés, no restaurants, no nothing. No one going for a coffee with a colleague or business partner. A total commercial and tourist wasteland.

And yet we're told there were 40 or 50,000 people working in the towers. To that I say bollocks. Rather, the number of people working in the towers must have been commensurate with the level of street life, which was zero. And from that everything can be explained easily.

Not to forget the money flow. The largest insurance case (and fraud) in human history. Made enough money to make thousands of millionaires.

Prof. Maximilian Ruppert (Baustatiker) about the “collapse” (demolition), 27 minutes, in German, Nov 2023 — https://youtu.be/JZ6nL7TPmhc