What you might want to think real hard about is why hierarchies form in the first place, and what problem they solve. Then you might start to understand why every society converges on this model at a certain point or it dies out.

meanwhile in the real world

• A remarkable 72% of Hungarians say that most people in their country are actually worse off today economically than they were under communism. Only 8% say most people in Hungary are better off, and 16% say things are about the same. In no other Central or Eastern European country surveyed did so many believe that economic life is worse now than during the communist era. This is the result of almost universal displeasure with the economy. Fully 94% describe the country’s economy as bad, the highest level of economic discontent in the hard hit region of Central and Eastern Europe. Just 46% of Hungarians approve of their country’s switch from a state-controlled economy to a market economy; 42% disapprove of the move away from communism. The public is even more negative toward Hungary’s integration into Europe; 71% say their country has been weakened by the process.

• The most incredible result was registered in a July 2010 IRES (Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy) poll, according to which 41% of the respondents would have voted for Ceausescu, had he run for the position of president. And 63% of the survey participants said their life was better during communism, while only 23% attested that their life was worse then. Some 68% declared that communism was a good idea, just one that had been poorly applied.

• Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an “illegitimate state.” In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.

• A poll shows that as many as 81 per cent of Serbians believe they lived best in the former Yugoslavia -“during the time of socialism”. The survey focused on the respondents’ views on the transition “from socialism to capitalism”, and a clear majority said they trusted social institutions the most during the rule of Yugoslav communist president Josip Broz Tito. The standard of living during Tito’s rule from the Second World War to the 1980s was also assessed as best, whereas the Milosevic decade of the 1990s, and the subsequent decade since the fall of his regime are seen as “more or less the same”. 45 percent said they trusted social institutions most under communism with 23 percent choosing the 2001-2003 period when Zoran Djinđic was prime minister. Only 19 per cent selected present-day institutions.

ok there fash

Thank you for providing much needed levity in this thread.

Because no actual communist would say anything of the sort.

Indeed, the low end is what I’m most excited about. Qwen 3.8 27b is already comparable to Opus 4.5, so if next version is as good as Fable, that’s good enough for vast majority of things people need to do. And while I’m really thankful that Chinese companies choose to release their models in the open, its far better to run your whole tool chain locally end to end.

Libs being confronted with the fact that propaganda terms they’ve memorized are meaningless never gets old.

Aww, is google banned at the troll farm?

It was correct of you to put communists in quotes there.

That’s an amazing counterpoint, thank you.

Thank you for providing concrete example of why gulags will indeed be necessary after a socialist revolution.

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?