I recall reading in some random internet place that the Nazis also went on wild goose chases in the Himalayas... might have been a conspiracy forum (which means this "factoid" may be discarded at will; and some might argue that therefore it's immoral to repeat it)
In any case, as such matters are usually state secrets I can never really know, only imagine things.
Golodomor was not gradual and not slippery. The entire ideology of the Bolševik party relied on systemic eradication of classes they found hostile to their cause - intellectuals, land gentry, well-do peasants. You kill off the folks in the land that know, how to farm, you get famine. Nothing to do with “war and outdated farming methods”
The poor peasants knew how to farm as well, but they were forcibly rounded up into communal kolkhozes and had fixed quotas of grain brutally confiscated.
How could you describe that part of russian history as anything like a gradual slippery slope? It start with a revolution followed by another more radical revolutions and went one from there. Nothing gradual about it.
The revolution was a reaction to the terrible leaders in Russia. The start wasn’t the revolution. Where do you pick as the beginning? I’m not sure, but the revolution was a reaction.
You need to drop your Communist Manifesto and actually read what has been really going on in Russia at the time.
Lenin and his cronies were revolutionaries well before the calamities of the Great War. The leaders of Russian revolutions were were mostly upper middle class intellectuals and were radicalized in relatively comfortable social circumstances at universities and in various intellectual circles. Lenin often bragged that he actively pushed people against one another so he could harness more revolutionary momentum, which led to even more calamities. And that's not even mentioning that he was implanted as an ideological virus to destroy the Russian Empire by the German agents.
The revolution wasn't some romantic reaction lead by the proletariat against the oppressor. It was led by power hungry fanatics who manipulated the people's grievances to remove those who were in their way and then installed themselves into power.
I’m a huge fan of Simon Sebag Montefiore. You couldn’t read his Russian histories and find much to like in any of Russia’s leaders.
The system overthrown by the revolution was brutal, but so were the revolutionaries. Where do you think they learned their policing tactics and techniques?
In terms of Lenin being a weapon, one of the greatest quotes on this is Churchill’s. Germany “turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia”
It’s a quote from a book that’s well worth a read if you haven’t already, ‘Lenin on the Train’ by Catherine Merridale.
Stolypin might have had some good ideas (eg have peasants own land), but mass executions of protesters and the use of terrorism against workers are not the actions of benevolent leaders. There were mass crackdowns.
The Lena goldfields massacre is an example of this.
The repeated combination of Nicholas II’s inaction/absense followed by a cack-handed crackdown was the ultimate fuel to the fire.
All of which had equivalents in other places and usually led to better reforms or suppression that are still bad but not as bad both in scale and violence than what the communists did.
That is all true, as far as I know, but then the question is why did they succeed, if not by exploiting widespread discontent in the general population?
Indeed, but widespread discontent seems to be an important risk factor for that outcome, isn’t it?
My understanding of history is limited, but this I know; History is always messy, and you can never identify just one single reason for the way things turned out.
The US hasn't seen total war, famine and disease yet the Marxists are openly pushing people against one another to ferment a revolution. Again we see the same pattern of upper middle class intellectuals radicalized in universities openly opposing incremental reforms in favor of violent uprisings. Just saying "History is messy" is intellectual laziness, the patterns are clear and happened many times before.
There doesn't need to be a good side in a battle. The communists were evil. The czars were... at least, extremely incompetent; and their screw-ups also cost lives... at the end, including their own.
To simplify it a lot, for the last two or three centuries before the communist revolution, the czars couldn't make up their mind about what type of country they wanted to have, so they kept radically changing policies every generation. On one hand, they wanted absolute tyranny, Asia-style. On the other hand, they wanted material progress just like in the West. So, one day they opened many schools, allowed independent press, hoping that this will bring progress and wealth. Then, ten or twenty years later, they panicked, seeing that there was too much independent thought and heresy, so they closed all those schools and put all journalists in prison. Then again, ten or twenty years later, they decided they needed some progress and prosperity, so they opened the schools and allowed the press again... then banned everything again... then allowed everything again... then banned again... and so on, for centuries. If you keep giving people freedoms and then taking them away, they will be pissed off way more than someone who was consistently oppressed for generations. The pre-communist Russia had tons of potential revolutionaries, and strong oppressive secret police to keep control over everything.
The last czar deserves a Darwin award, because he was repeatedly warned about the danger of communists and asked for permission to crush them mercilessly (that is, to apply more than just the usual routine persecution of everyone), but instead he fired the boss of the secret police, accusing him of wasting resources on trivialities and ignoring the real danger -- the Jews. (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were published in Russia in 1903.)
Then, WW1 happened, and communists got the extremely intelligent and ruthless leader Lenin, who promised everyone whatever they wanted, made alliances, broke all promises, kept stabbing all his former allies in the back as he was making new allies, until he got to the top. Then he established his own version of secret police which, after many rebrandings, still remains one of the pillars of Russia, surviving even the fall of communism. And yes, it is a "coincidence" that many celebrities of the revolution were also upper middle class intellectuals of the previous regime. (Except for Stalin, I think.)
And in some sense this yes-then-no-then-yes-then-no style of government persisted during communism and later, as if it's inextricably a part of Russian politics no matter the regime. Peasants were considered the enemies of progress, then the driving force of progress; capitalism was evil, then good, then evil, then good, then evil again; etc.
As the French saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
What about the role of the parents? (the king and queen?)
IMO they handle Elsa's powers in the worst way possible. The trolls sublty hint at what not to do: "fear is the worse you can do"; then they do exactly that. She's taught to deny and hide everything by her parents. So when they tragically die, she just keeps on the same self-repression path until it gets real bad.
It's clear that they don't know how to handle her powers and are doing the best they can, albeit yes, it was probably the worst way to handle it. They were scared that someone would get hurt by her powers (check) and that, if discovered, she would be deemed a monster (check).
Furthermore, the troll king's advice was that Anna could not know about her powers or the damage from being struck in the head would return. So their only choice was to isolate the two sisters from one another.
There was nothing intentionally villainous with the parents.
Some people prefer not to commingle the functional, lambda-calculus part of a language with the parts that do side effects. It seems they believe in the separation of Church and state. --Guy Steele
A good paper describing functional programming and also talks about the differences between these two mindsets is "Conception, Evolution, and Application of Functional Programming Languages" by Paul Hudak (1989). You can find a copy at https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse583/00wi/p359-h....
there's an aspect of readability that is in the eye of the reader.
I've been thinking about this a lot. often I hear (specially old-guard) hackers talking about easy and simplicity but they really mean it's familiar to them.
One of my yoga teachers would coincidentally tell us to approach things slowly and carefully in the middle of practice because “you wouldn’t just toss around a running chainsaw would you?”
> Since AIs are smarter than humans, why bother teaching humans at all? Unless there is a point where a developed human brain could outsmart the AI, it seems to be a waste and emotionally guided.
taking this point and running off with it. why bother having humans at all? let's all become a simulation and live within a computer.
None of those things are true on macOS. Maybe you could argue sideloading is harder, but only insofar as it requires a three word Terminal command. One I know by heart. `sudo spctl --master-disable`.
from a very broad conceptual viewpoint; "the law" exist from (or out of) written language (where "language" is seen as a social-technology).
what computer technology and the internet (or for short: software) is doing to civilization is still at a very early stage. As I see this, the goal of "law" and the goal of "computer science" are quite similar.
As I see these kinds of articles (stratechery focuses on exactly this), is that we're witnessing the 'adjustments' in society brought about by the invention of software. I put all of this on a level comparable to the invention of writing and the subsequent 'rise' of rule of law.
having said this, the difficult thing to make sense of, and to explain to people with less software-experience is coming to understand what this article taps into in the section of "the global internet"; it's actually quite tricky to pin this down for me right now.
I'm referring to that aspect (or quality) of software that causes several executives to say this kinds of things:
>We have tried to get to what’s common, and the reality is it’s super hard on a global basis to design software that behaves differently in different countries. It is super difficult.
>If you’re a global technology business, most of the time, it is far more efficient and legally compliant to operate a global model than to have different practices and standards in different countries.
It's that thing sowftware does in which special cases worsen software complexity.
Software (and computing, and even industrial automation) are all about doing the same thing, no matter what. It's all about finding ways to avoid special cases; to avoid code repetition; and all that.
I'm sure that most people in Hacker News, due to our hands-on experience with software, are quite able to intuitively grasp this. But it's not so easy to explain and this 'quality of the digital' is (and will continue to) forcing contemporary capitalism to be re-evaluated (or something along these lines).
In any case, as such matters are usually state secrets I can never really know, only imagine things.