Having grown up in USSR, I would say that it was a good example of a socialist state. It was unarguably more good than bad, and anybody with even a minimally functioning brain can see that the collapse of USSR was a huge tragedy for humanity. But perhaps you see capitalist restoration in the eastern bloc as a positive?

I was being sarcastic and poking fun at people using it. Congrats on taking the bait. What the picture says is that the US which libs championed as a ‘free and enlightened society’ in the 90s was incarcerating more people than USSR did during Stalin years. Rate of incarceration in USSR dropped significantly after that while it remains as high as ever in the US today.

Authoritarianism is a meaningless term used by edgy children whose brains haven’t fully developed yet. The reality is that all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.

Every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.

What ultimately matters is which class controls the institutions of state violence. In capitalist democracies, the government represent the interests of the economic elites who fund political campaigns, own media outlets, and control key industries. Western public lacks the mechanisms necessary to hold the government to account, and the ruling class is disconnected from the broader population. That’s precisely what’s driving political discontent all across western sphere today. Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China, Cuba, or Vietnam. Hence why there is widespread public trust in these government and they enjoy broad support from the masses.

One lifted millions of people out of abject poverty, provided them with food, housing, education, and healthcare, while the other has been terrorizing the world throughout its whole existence. But to an enlightened liberal these look exactly the same.

You’re not frustrating anybody, you’re just a human slop generator adding noise to threads. If that’s what you choose to dedicate your one life on this planet to being, that’s your choice.

And people perseverating just adds noise to every conversation. People need to learn how to deal with feeling icky like grown adults.

they might not need more training infrastructure at this point

One made up number is no better than another. The point is that generating images doesn’t take any more power than most other things people use a computer for. So, what makes it so special that is needs to be singled out?

There are plenty of ways you can make meme, what makes you the arbiter of what the one true way to do it is?

so brave!

Ok, but you realize people aren’t going to do art commissions for a silly meme right?

Anything can be learned given enough time, but the reality is that people only have so much time in their day. If you have the inclination and time to spend learning how to draw, that’s fantastic and good for you. But doing that is an opportunity cost of learning how to do something else.

This is what happens when you refuse to actually understand how anything works. These kinds of images can now be generated by small models running on your laptop. For example, Z-Image Turbo is just 6b params and will run on even modest hardware.

I just love how the AI slop crowd always comes out of the woodwork as if every meme has to be crafted by an artisan. Just get over yourselves.

couldn’t have put it better myself

That’s fair, there’s still a lot of work to be done there. At least most libs, like the one in this thread, fled Russia now, so the healing process can begin.

Yup, and I think you’re completely right that United Russia is basically propped up by Putin’s personality. Once he’s gone, there will be a power vacuum and KPRF only keeps getting more popular. They’re not without problems, but they’re way further left than anything in the west.

clearly that didn’t help you much

I’m 13 and this is deep.

It also helps that DPRK, China, and Vietnam are some of the main Russian allies now. People used to look up to the west and wanting to become like the Americans and the Europeans. Now, they’ve been cured of that thanks to the war, and they’re increasingly looking at what’s happening in the socialist states they’re allied with and realizing Russia could’ve been developing like that as well if the socialist path wasn’t abandoned.