This narative omits the contradicting fact that Soviet Union decimated Poland and others it conquered in alliance with Germany. If the alliance was just to buy time for Red Army, then it would not make sense for Red Army to spend time massacring the elites and armies of conquered states [0] that could become their buffer against Germany or even become their allies. This narative, which I started hearing after the start of last Russian war, is therefore pretty naive attempt of current day Russia to spin the story of their initial alliance with nazi Germany which was definitely real.
> If the alliance was just to buy time for Red Army, then it would not make sense for Red Army to spend time massacring the elites and armies of conquered states
The USSR did not have to expend much effort in taking eastern Poland. It moved in after the Polish army had been largely defeated by the Germans in the West. The USSR's actions here were opportunistic.
> This narative, which I started hearing after the start of last Russian war
This "narrative" has been around for many decades, and is not particularly controversial. Even at the time, the fact that the USSR and Germany signed a pact at all stunned the world, because they were arch enemies.
It was not a marriage of love, and calling it an "alliance" is a major stretch. It was an opportunistic move by two enemies that each had their reasons to temporarily put off their conflict. The Red Army was in turmoil because of the purges and Stalin was deathly afraid of a German attack. The Germans wanted time to go after Poland and the western powers.
A central tenet of Nazism was its hatred for Bolshevism (and that was tightly connected to the Nazis' antisemitism as well). Hitler had openly stated his goal of destroying the Soviet Union, and it was clear that any pact could not last.
The USSR did not have to expend much effort in taking eastern Poland.
The poster above wasn't referring to the effort expended in "taking" eastern Poland militarily -- but in subjugating the population and massacring the elites. This was not an accidental byproduct of the invasion; it was part of its intent. Along with the extremely rapid and violent annexation of the Baltic states in the same period.
It wasn't like Soviet troops wandered in these countries, and didn't know what else to do with the local population. The Bolsheviks were against the independence of all 4 of these countries after the end of WW I, and in the years 1919-1920 tried and failed to conquer each of them. Each attempt was swiftly (enough) repulsed, providing the Bolshevik regime with the first of its many deeply embarrassing setbacks.
The main trigger for the M-R pact was of course the question of how to deal the Germans. But judging by how the Soviets focused their energy and attention in these countries 1939-1941, and its relations with them in the interwar years -- it wasn't their only motivation.
> The Bolsheviks were against the independence of all 4 of these countries after the end of WW I, and in the years 1919-1920 tried and failed to conquer each of them.
The Soviets accepted the independence of Finland, and it was Poland that invaded Soviet Russia in 1920, not the other way around.
I know, and I'm pretty sure you know that I know. The context was M-R, so that's the time frame I was referring to. Your bringing Finland into this just didn't make sense any sense otherwise, so if I misread you there, that was why.
The war began with ...
Look - I see why you're saying what you're saying. But you're misstating the details, and the overall narrative you're presenting just doesn't add up, given the full context of surrounding events. I'd dissect the matter further, but I just don't think you're engaging in good faith here (either with me, or with the other commenter who jumped in at the same point in the thread). Which is a pity because you're obviously quite knowledgeable about lots of things. But you're also reading things into what people say that just aren't there, and your responses seem to attempt shift the topic rather than address what they're saying.
> in the years 1919-1920 tried and failed to conquer each of them
Then when I pointed out that the Soviets accepted Finnish independence, you switched to talking about the Winter War, which is 20 years later.
> I know, and I'm pretty sure you know that I know.
I can accept that you know when the Winter War occurred, but then I can't understand why you would raise it to justify a point you specifically made about 1919-20. During the revolution, the Soviets let Finland go. They accepted its independence. You claimed they tried to reconquer it in 1919-20, which is not correct.
> A central tenet of Nazism was its hatred for Bolshevism (and that was tightly connected to the Nazis' antisemitism as well).
Another central tenet of both Nazism and Bolshevism is their hatred for capitalism and democracy. Their alliance allowed to suffocate Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland (attempt failed), and expand their borders until they met, as they had agreed in the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact - without triggering a direct conflict between Germany and the USSR.
The obsolete narrative that portrays USSR as the victim or opportunistic bystander fails to explain why the USSR murdered Polish officers, scholars and other members of the national elite by tens of thousands, and unleashed similar terror in every other occupied country, or why the USSR tried to invade Finland and allocated a significant part of its entire military to the task while it was allegedly so worried about German attack, or why it supplied Germany with incredible amount of raw resources bypassing the British naval blockade, or why Germany initiated large technology transfer to the USSR, including drawings, performance testing data and actual samples of their latest fighter planes and bombers and a ton of other equipment.
The argument that Germany and USSR were on long-term collision course in terms of ideology doesn't change the fact that the alliance was very beneficial to both of them while it lasted and allowed them to maul Europe with impunity. That's why USSR denied until its final days that the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact even existed; the protocol and events that followed completely shatter the myth of USSR as opportunistic bystander.
Even in the present day, Russian goverment (including Putin personally) can't make up its mind whether Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all saw "working class uprisings" at the same time and joined the USSR "voluntarily" (one narrative), or whether USSR performed a clever trick on Germany and invaded those countries on its own initiative to win time (another narrative). The narrative keeps shifting to whatever is convenient at the moment; it has become a meme.
> Another central tenet of both Nazism and Bolshevism is their hatred for capitalism and democracy.
Nazi Germany was a capitalist country. The reason why German conservatives brought the Nazis into government was in order to smash the German socialist and labor movement. Portraying Nazi Germany as anticapitalist is deeply ahistorical.
Your argument, that the repression carried out in Poland and the Baltics by the USSR proves it wasn't motivated by fear of Germany, does not logically follow.
> why the USSR tried to invade Finland and allocated a significant part of its entire military to the task while it was allegedly so worried about German attack
The USSR's invasion of Finland was intimately bound up with its fear of German invasion. I'm just reciting some basic history here - nothing new or groundbreaking. The USSR wanted a buffer outside of Leningrad, which was directly on the border, and the right to use naval bases in the Baltic sea. The Soviets did not believe that a small country would be able to remain neutral when push came to shove, so it did not trust Finnish promises of neutrality. Those were the considerations that led the USSR to invade Finland.
Number 2 is not true. I have a Yubikey and it can't be used on Android without a Google made app or account. It's always the same story, give a plausible option to seem open or neutral, but make sure there are "details" that establishes chain of consequences preventing it that is weird enough to allow denying intention. Even though I'm not that young I thought I just need to wait for Firefox to implement it, but as time went by I got curious and found out why it actually can't be done.
I was able to log in to GitHub using a Yubikey on my Pixel without a special app.
Check whether your Yubikey supports resident keys (aka discoverable credentials) and whether the FIDO key for your account was created with residentKey: true, otherwise it’s a completely different (older) flow under the hood, where the private key actually gets sent to the server, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the underlying cause of what’s happening to you.
Thanks for trying to help but I really meant it can't be done, not that it doesn't work for me. This is the starting point for understanding why https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1678045 but that rabbit hole is pretty deep if you want to understand the whole web of consequences.
Wow. I just bought a couple of new YubiKeys for the OpenPGP Curve25519 support. I was looking forward to using the NFC feature with my Android phone. Is it just a Chrome problem? I downloaded some OpenPGP app from fdroid and it says it supports NFC keys.
I'm not sure about your exact situation, lot of the scenarios are OK, just the one without Google services which are dependent on Google account doesn't work. That is actually irrelevant for "normal" phone users that are logged to Google all the time anyway.
Czech Republic is one of the few countries where Google has a meaningful local competitor, Seznam, for it's major services and maps is the service where I'm most glad for that. All the shortcomings from the article are so much more obvious and painful when you have an alternative that does it right. I wondered for a long time how Google can have such a bad product, like I literally can't recognize a place I know perfectly on the screen so I need to "search" for it so Google zooms into some indistinctive bland colored area for me. And I've realized that's exactly the point, that's the prime example of enshitification. Tool that works so bad that you think you need it more. I'm so glad for mapy.cz and that statement from the article, that I can choose only Google or Apple maps, is not true for me.
Describing the intelectual elites that overthrew soviet puppet totalitarian government as a bunch of CIA agents that acted out of pure envy of Kundera's genius who just misstepped a bit when he was ok with soviet invasion haven't gave you a hint? Really?
No it didn’t. In fact I did not get the idea that Kundera was ok with the soviet invasion at all.
And, well, if the idea of CIA agents propping up pro-capitalism opposition figures is “pro-Russian”, then every Hollywood spy movie is pro-Russian. I have no idea how common “CIA meddles, all the way to the top” really is, or was, but it’s a common narrative across western culture so it didn’t strike me as super weird.
I’ll admit that the idea that Havel did little by himself to become the President, that it was all due to support by the CIA people, which wasn’t said so literally but certainly suggested, felt rather unrealistic.
Is your argument based on Hollywood action movies and popular stereotypes based on them? Come on, pal. The only other guys who have always been obsessed with CIA agents in context of central and eastern Europe are Russian propagandists. And Petr Drulák is not a scriptwriter.
I like the essay a lot and I find it intellectually amusing that many negative comments here manifest exactly the flaws that could be prevented by learning the essay writing as described in the blog. The article clearly states assumptions, definitions, context and limitations of it's arguments and in that specific area it's very hard to refute them because they are sound. On the other side the gist of many comments here is that article is negative towards GPT and should be positive, i.e. the same generalist aproach that GPT generated text would take and which is hard to argue about.
I'm not going to analyse particular flaws of separate comments because the article itself is really comprehensive and answers for many objections are better in original form there than any reproduction I can make here. But the high number of rebuttals that obviously have problems either understanding the essay or formulating a solid counterargument is curious. An obvious explanation is that some people couldn't resist the pleasure of letting AI dismiss the statement about insufficient AI capabilities, but that's a lazy one.
Comments saying current AI is comparable to actual human inteligence may be right even though I can clearly see that AI is not performing actions I consider necessary for thinking. It's because I consider my own mind as a model of human inteligence, but as I learned many times before, the thinking process may be hugely different for different people. I have no idea if other people also do need to create an explicit model of something in their head to be able to "think" about it.
It would explain A LOT for me if thinking of some other people really works in the same way as in GPT. That situation should however still be viewed not as a technology enhancement so big it reaches human level but reconsideration of what we consider a human level.
This happens to me a lot. I want to make a joke, but it gets so long an complex that it becomes an analysis.
This is a textbook piece of propaganda targeting the smart people, a real gem. The core principle lies in this sentence "The war in Ukraine is mostly a sideshow". With fascinating lightness it completely inverts the size of a story of one of the biggest countries in the world becoming fascist and attacking a neighbor in most boody war since WW2 which was several years in the making and a story of one infrastructure attack. The war and it's culprit is too obvious to attack directly, but what a propagandist can still try is to shift focus from the obvious main story to uncertain sidestory and switching their importance. Using the uncertainty of the sidestory it's then possible to use a lot of true arguments which convinces even the smart people if they miss the initial "significance inversion".
I'm confused, it seems like you are talking about something different than the original Twitter thread. The complaint there is that hardware that's officially supported on Windows does not have attached/downloadable driver for archivation and the only way to install driver for Windows is to first install elaborate middleman software and only through that it's possible to download and install the real driver from manufacturer's servers which must be online. That's word by word the same case for Mac hardware. The stackexchange answer I provided is the equivalent procedure as what Foone tries to explore in his thread, just for Mac's.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre