𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠

IIRC they found that even with balanced training data facial recognition models just do worse on darker-skinned people. Something about cameras picking up less contrast on the skin, meaning there are fewer easily-identifiable facial features it can pick up from an image.

If they’re incompetent it’s just going to be a humiliation in the courtroom. They’d have to replace judges as well.

That would make more sense if we also counted in base 12 in general, which we don’t.

Sure, but it’s a bit of a jump to “he tried to secretly dose Melinda with antibiotics to treat the STDs he gave her from screwing underage Russian girls”.

Doubt, sure. Those files should definitely be investigated further. But I don’t think we’ve seen very concrete evidence yet, have we?

This article doesn’t seem to claim that, do you have a link?

This is a draft email from Epstein to himself. We don’t have the actual emails that prove any of this.

If you look at just about any country anywhere, you’ll find that party membership does not really correlate with election success, but rather with more radical beliefs or activism. The national election results of the CPRF had been on a downward trend well before the war broke out as well. Their membership may have increased, but electorally they lost about 70% support. Even in wartime that’s hard to ignore.

I also don’t think you’ve been paying attention to what the propaganda efforts of the Kremlin have been putting out. As a result, you have cause and effect reversed. They’ve been boosting national pride through the “great history of Russia”, which inevitably means highlighting the Soviet Union and the great patriotic war. But the Soviet sympathies created through it are a side-effect of this.

This also explains why polling suggests that sympathies for the Soviet Union mostly (not fully) consist of cultural and military pride. Yet sympathies for the Soviet economic system is low in comparison. It’s also heavily influenced by current geopolitics. Ukraine used to be the most pro-communist member state, but these days the majority no longer regrets its dissolution. In East-Germany, there’s a significant chunk of people who believe life was better in the GDR, yet that effectively translates into nationalist support for parties like the AfD (who of course are fascist, not communist). In Hungary, a large majority believe they were better off under communism than they are now, yet a large majority of 70% supports the move to a market economy. Uzbeks believe the Soviet government better responded to their needs, yet only a tiny minority believe life was actually better in the USSR.

But this is all largely besides the original point, which is that the graphic showing the Soviet referendum results is used in a misleading narrative that suggests people did not want the Soviet Union to dissolve, as that wasn’t on the ballot and subsequent referendum results showed overwhelming support for independence and dissolution. And as election results in former Soviet states prove, support for a return to communism or a more socialist system is fairly low, despite a complicated nostalgia for the Soviet Union in some member states.

Party membership is a bad indicator for national popularity, as evidenced by the historically bad election result that followed the first article you linked.

The second article does not have anything to do with the popularity of the party.

The third article contradicts the sentiment you express in your own paragraph; you suggest the Russian government is taking advantage of rising Soviet sympathies, as if it’s “just happening”. But as your article explains, those Soviet sympathies are being expressly fuelled and created by the Russian government, as part of their propaganda efforts to promote the great patriotic war (which Putin now claims they’re in another one of course, fighting the west). It’s artificial, not natural.

CPRF support rising rapidly? You must live in a fantasy world. Their electoral results have rarely been worse, their 2024 presidential election candidate receiving a mere 4% of the vote (a record low for the party).

Protests were already widespread in the Union. Several member states had already declared nominal independence from Moscow. Gorbachev was doing damage control and trying his best to keep the Union from fracturing further. Elections in member republics saw huge rises in popularity for noncommunist parties.

The referendum was an attempt to gain the political momentum required for reform, in an ultimate effort to keep the Union together. It was essentially a kind of propaganda attempt to display large support for the reformed Union, made possible because dissolution was not on the ballot.

There was widespread civil discontent before the referendum. Elections saw noncommunists rise to power and several member states declared independence. Then I am somehow to believe that the population first swung all the way back to “actually the Soviet Union is great and we don’t want to leave it” and back to “we should leave the Soviet Union” in a matter of mere months? That is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, which you don’t have. The truth is far simpler: at every point once the civil unrest started, the population voted in favour of less Soviet Union and for more independence, and not the other way around.

My point regarding the phrasing of post-Soviet polling is that the wording drastically changes the outcome. Sure, people aren’t happy about how the 90s turned out and they feel they’re not part of a superpower anymore. They’re not happy with being screwed over by western nations. They say those things were better under the Soviet Union. But ask them if they would go back to such a Union, and suddenly support evaporates. And in several former member states even the first few questions don’t find much Soviet sympathies (eg the Baltics). They want to live in a stronger nation, akin to the Soviet Union, but they do not want to go back to what once was. It isn’t a simple case of “boy we sure had it good”, that does a huge disservice to the diverse and complicated opinions of the Union.

such as in the US Empire, where within a single month sentiment on Israel flipped from overwhelmingly positive to majority negative.

It didn’t go from +90% to -90%. That’s what I mean with the huge ‘swing’ seen here. Negative attitudes on Israel went from 42% to 53% in 3 years time. Yet this supposed “total reversal of opinion” happened in months? Nonsense of course. Remember, the Soviet referendum did not have “dissolution” as an option. People picked the option closest to it.

the large majority of people in post-soviet countries feel worse off and/or regret its fall

This is irrelevant to the false notion that the Soviet Union dissolved against what the people wanted at the time, which that graphic is often used to misleadingly suggest.

Even then, opinion polling on the subject is highly unreliable. Even the same pollster slightly rephrasing the question nets wildly different results. In the Baltics opinion is pretty consistent that the fall of the USSR was a good thing. But Belarusians tend to disagree with that. But when Belarusians are asked if they prefer to follow a Soviet system or a western democratic system, they choose the latter. And when another pollster asks them again in the same year, opinions flip again.

There’s certainly a strong sentimental nostalgia towards the Union, though not in all former member states. Yet it seems unlikely the population would be willing to vote it back into existence.

Right up to the end, the majority of people in the USSR wished to retain both the USSR and the system of socialism. This is proven not just from eyewitness reports of support, but also vote totals

This isn’t entirely true. The question posed essentially meant the USSR would reform into a more supranational organisation, granting more sovereignty and independence to the constituent republics. Voting “yes” was basically a vote for “‘less’ Soviet Union”, as there was no option to vote to dissolve it entirely. It’s also why after the yes-vote won, Soviet hardliners tried to coup the government.

When the New Union Treaty wasn’t fully implemented, member republics took it upon themselves to run full independence referendums, which were passed with overwhelming numbers (see the results on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Referendums_in_the_Soviet_Union, 90%+ pro-independence in most countries. Remember, most happened in 1991 just like the Union referendum, and no large population swings to the complete opposite direction that fast). The massive disapproval of the communist party was also very visible, as the vast majority of republics started electing non-communist leaders.

And of course there were people still in favour of the Union, but they were largely outnumbered. Pro-union manifestations were met with large protests that often ended in police action to suppress them. Pro-Union sentiments started increasing again after the economic crises post-collapse, but it has never become so popular again to lead to a reformation.

HOI4 = Hearts of Iron 4 (in case you were unaware)

You mean a minority of the shares is held by the public, and the rest is owned by large investment parties (64% approx.).

I’m always suspicious that this is an attempt to divert attention away from ICE murdering people. Same reason JRM made a fool of himself in the House of Commons.

People are mostly water, no? Makes perfect sense then.

Odd, not for me. For me it’s still quite fast, loads near instantly.

So you were arguing a hypothetical point that hasn’t actually happened. I’m not sure what the point of that is, you’re essentially shoehorning people in a position that you believe they might take, despite them not actually having done so (and possibly wouldn’t take in the first place).

Word of advice: don’t. People tend to not respond well to what is essentially a strawman argument. Don’t focus on hypotheticals but on what has actually happened and what people are actually arguing in favour of. Otherwise you’re having an imaginary discussion with imaginary people.

So either the rules hold, and the seizing was legitimate, or they don’t hold anymore, meaning it doesn’t matter it was seized?

What were you arguing again?