The benefits of a Game of Thrones education.

WHAT is right there on video? That is NOT one of Zelensky's bodyguards. That's a random soldier from the 25th Separate Secheslav Airborne Brigade, which recaptured Izyum, during Zelensky's visit to celebrate the victory. Do you think bodyguards spend all their time taking selfies with the person they're protecting? Grow some common sense circuits in your brain. And it's not like Zelensky was handing the man an award with the patch prominently featured in front of the camera while he received it or anything. The Russian volunteer ranks are absolutely littered with Nazis.

What, you mean like the Russian governor of occupied Donetsk outright giving an award to a guy with a Totenkopf patch? Or all of the numerous Russian officials who have praised or given awards to the puppy-eating, unabashed Nazi, Milchakov?

Also, contrary to the misinfo sites you read, that was not a photo of "one of Zelensky's bodyguards". That was from his visit to Izyum where he was posing with random soldiers from the 25th Separate Secheslav Airborne Brigade to celebrate the retaking of the city from the Russians. That's why everyone has their phone out to take selfies.

Stalin was perfectly happy to ally with Hitler for the conquest of eastern Europe. The USSR only turned "anti-Nazi", not for ideological reasons, but because the Nazis betrayed them. Today in Russia, "Nazi" is used as a general insult for any external perceived enemy of the state, with any actual connection to Nazism not being at all required. Yet actual support for the actual principles of fascism within Russia is well tolerated. For example, Putin's good friend Dmitri Rogozin, now governor of occupied Zaporozhye Oblast, is absolutely a fascist, including speaking at a far-rally surrounded by people doing Nazi salutes under a only slightly modified Nazi flag, among so, SO many other things.

In most countries, the saying with respect to WWII is "Never Again". In Russia, it's "We Can Repeat It!" (Mozhem povtorit!).

I guess it depends on who you were. If you were Jewish, the Nazi occupation was definitely worse. Stalin was more of an equal-opportunity atrocity-committer.

It is kind of darkly funny how similarly Hitler and Stalin thought, though. For example, Hitler cited positively the Holodomor and the collectivization of Ukraine, and planned to use the Holodomor as a role model for resource extraction during scarcity, and to maintain the collectivization of Ukrainians set in place by the Soviets. He likewise viewed Ukrainians as a "colonial peoples", in the sort of Africanizing terms common among imperial powers of the time, and just planned to switch which foreign colonial master ruled them, arguing that ultimately Ukrainians would prefer the German yoke to the "Jewish"** (Soviet) one.

** How the whole Nazi view of the USSR as a "Jewish Empire" played out was I guess predictable. Because if the Wehrmacht rolls into your town, and you're some low-level communist functionary, and there's a bunch of soldiers knocking on your door who want to kill communists, but who also believe communists = jews = communists, what's your response? For most, it was along the lines of, "Yes, yes, you're right, communists ARE Jews, absolutely! And look, I'm not a Jew, I can prove it! But THAT GUY over there, HE is Jewish, that's the guy you're looking for!".

The USSR fought the Nazis to the last Ukrainian.

The highest price in that war was paid by Ukrainians and Belarusians.

Really, computer chips are the *hardest* thing we could compromise. It's way easier to e.g. compromise mechanical or electrical parts so that they fail under stress.

They use so many western chips, if we knew what the programming was, and actually cared to, we could contaminate the smuggling routes with compromised chips to do exactly that.

Heck, we could probably do it with rough guess work if we actually cared. For GPS receivers it's obvious how to manipulate them, but even in CPUs, if you see e.g.: two floating point registers with values that look reasonable for latitude/longitude coordinates in a non-occupied part of Ukraine, and another two registers that look reasonable for latitude/longitude coordinates in an occupied part of Ukraine or in Russia... swap them. And of course, delay your functionality by some number of weeks or when a pair of registers is within range of a known production facility, so that the batch passes QA.

The fact that there's been no apparent signs of any effort at all to contaminate Russia's smuggling routes with compromised parts just screams about how lax the west has been taking this all. Heck, forget about compromising smuggled part streams, just cracking down on the smugglers at all. Like, EU trade with Tajikistan increased by an order of magnitude after the war started - gee, I wonder what's going on there!. Yet zero effort was made for years to crack down at all.

Ukraine's far-right unified in the last election under the Svoboda party. They won 2,16% of the vote, putting Ukraine the weakest electoral performance by the far right in all of Europe.

From the Wikipedia article on Utkin:

Views
According to several news outlets, Utkin was an admirer of Nazi Germany and had multiple Nazi tattoos, including Schutzstaffel (SS) insignia.[13][14][15][16][17] Utkin also reportedly used call sign Wagner after German composer Richard Wagner, because his work was greatly admired by Adolf Hitler and was appropriated by the Nazis.[3][18][19] Allegedly he greeted subordinates by saying "Heil!", wore a Wehrmacht field cap around Wagner training grounds, and sometimes signed his name with the lightning bolt insignia of the SS.[20]

Members of the Wagner Group have said that Utkin was a Rodnover, a believer in the Slavic native faith.[21]

And why stop at Wagner? Let's take another example: Rusych. They have been heavily used since 2014, and their leader - the infamous puppy-eater Alexey Milchakov - is a proud and unabashed Nazi, who openly marches with a Nazi flag and openly declares himself to be a Nazi in interviews, and nonetheless, has received awards from multiple high-ranking Russian government officials for his brigade's successes in Ukraine.

Accidentally replied to a sub post!

I cannot comment on the content of your post because I simply don't know the history of India,

and your comment does remind me of a book by Steven Pinker called The Better Angels of Our Nature where he details, in gruesome descriptions, the fact that humanity's past has been filled with barbarities.

We have gradually on everage become more peaceful and more empathetic through our evolution.

Humanity's history is full of horrors, and these happened pretty much everywhere, as far as I understand it.

What's extremely confusing today, I think, is that not everywhere has changed to the same amount of empathy at the same time. Just like in any population or country in the planet, a certain percentage of people are going to be psychopaths.

Where a lot of, perhaps, let's call them liberal views, get it a bit wrong, is imagining that absolutely everyone in the world holds the exact same liberal values and attitudes as the best liberal people of the West do.

Actually, it's a vast tapestry, and some areas are more liberal, and other areas are less liberal. And some people in amongst groups are more liberal, and some are less liberal. Some parts of the world are more violent, in their systems, their attitudes, beliefs, etc. Some do violence in different ways -- USA and Russia have 13,000 nuclear warheads pointed at each other -- that's violence also.

And this is a challenge for globalization, but I think it just means that globalization needs to happen -- to get all its benefits -- gradually, perhaps slowly in a moderated way, rather than massive changes which are perhaps a little bit counterproductive.

There is a common humanity but we also have a common barbarity in our collective history and -- as the saying goes -- the future has already been invented but it isn't evenly distributed yet -- so have to include that in a way that works, not in a way that's chaotic and catastrophic. It just needs doing with moderation.

But this also means being moderate in how we go about making generalizations about groups. That becomes labeling and othering, and that, if done in a blind way, doesn't really help anyone.

It's better to just look realistically at peoples and situations and context. As they are now. As you find them right now. Try to see everything fresh -- we can all still make judgments, we just have to be careful that they are good judgments rather than blind judgments.

Every judgement is only a piece of the picture, a partial truth.

For example, it seems to be in the interests of the world's superpowers to promote and back the most extreme and violent groups amongst developing countries as a way to keep those countries destabilised, fragile, and easier to control and influence.

If the world's superpowers had been actively backing and promoting the most reasonable, modern, forward-looking groups amongst the developing countries, I think the picture today would be quite different.

And that doesn't negate the barbarities of the past from across the world, be it the Roman Empire, the British Empire, various Chinese dynasties, etc.

looking forward to reliving the rich text email versus plain text flame wars with the waiter!

Yum!

Currently have a project going using Python scripting in Blender using scipy.optimize.differential_evolution and Cycles rendering to optimize the shape of a reflector to match a desired light distribution pattern. It's not a perfect tool for the job, but it seems to be pretty accurate.

What do you say to the people who claim that we need gas because it is flexible and fast enough to cope with the high variability of renewables and we need nuclear because we're always going to need base load in quantities that are hard to get otherwise?