vovchik_ilich [he/him]

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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2024

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  • We’re already there, there’s no need for this hypothetical. We’ve reached the point where we have trademarked plants, and natural cross-pollination with neighbouring fields has led to fines to farmers because they’re technically growing someone else’s intellectual property plant.

    Vaccines and drugs whose research is paid for with public funds are copyrighted and poorer nations are forbidden from obtaining them at reasonable prices.

    Vanguard technologies like FPGAs are seeing a rise in later years not because the concept is new, but because 40-year-old key patents of the technology started to expire and this allowed third parties to improve on the technology, and increase its availability and affordability.

    Time and time again, software and hardware designed and published with open source but licensed copyright (or copyleft) are blatantly copied and modified without permission by big tech, without any credit or compensation to the original author, in complete violation of the license terms, and nothing ever happens because they have better lawyers than the small open source people.

    AI models are unlawfully trained illegally with immense amounts of copyrighted material, and then substitute artists with real understanding of the art.

    No need to make up hypotheticals for a society in which this already happens




  • […] is a provocation worthy of military invasion?

    See, that’s an entirely different statement. Threatening to join Russia’s geopolitical rival’s military alliance while bordering Russia, is provocation. The acts in Donbas since 2014 are provocation. Is it “worthy of military invasion”? I don’t believe so. The proto-fascist Russian government is clearly not acting entirely out of pure will and self defense, and I’ll be the last to defend it since I have loved ones directly suffering under that government. But it’s important to frame things correctly, and yes, threatening to join NATO while bordering Russia is a huge provocation.

    Particularly, NATO has no history of defensiveness (as far as I know it has never intervened for the defensive purposes it’s supposed to uphold), but it has a history of offensiveness. Yugoslavia and Libya can both attest to that, and extra-officially (technically not NATO interventions even if many NATO members participated one way or another), countries such as Iraq can also attest. The case of Iraq is a perfect example of what unprovoked invasion in modern times is, and we are still forced to see libs fall heads over heels for a fucking Dick Satan Cheney endorsement to Kamala “most lethal army in the world” Harris.

    So, yes, when a country bordering you chooses to join a historically aggressive military alliance that openly challenges you, that’s huge provocation. And it’s important to state so when we talk about the war in Ukraine.






  • I highly recommend that you get yourself a copy of the book “Human rights in the soviet union” by Albert Szymanski. It discusses the access to goods, healthcare, education, publications in local languages, and much more, for different republics within the USSR, for the period from 1917 to 1980 approximately. There was a famine in Kazakhstan, but how many famines were there in Kazakhstan before communism, and how many were there during?

    In the book (which you can probably find online, ehem Anna’s Archive ehem), go to the chapter that discusses the central Asian republics, and look quickly through the tables discussing these metrics, and comparing them to (historically similar pre-1917) countries of the region such as Afghanistan or Pakistan. You’ll see how communism brought literacy, education, healthcare, pensions, women’s rights, and material well-being to central-Asian republics.












  • The U.S. has been gunning for Russia for centuries

    Technically one century but sure, I don’t deny that the US attitude towards Russia stems from imperialism.

    It’s borderline racist to claim that Russia is imperialist

    “It’s borderline to say Russia has reached the final stage of capitalism, with the financialization of the economy and the concentration of capital in the hands of a few oligarchs” I really don’t see how it’s racist to say that.

    when you claim that Russia is imperialist for defending it’s people from a decades-long siege that is generations old

    Establishing a continuity in “Russia” and the reasons for the US hostility towards it for the past 100+ years is absurd. The reasons why Tsarist Russia was expansionist (although not imperialist since it was barely industrialized), weren’t the same as why the USSR invested in military and the US was hostile to it, and aren’t the same as to why modern Russia invests in military and why the US is hostile to it.

    for defending it’s people

    And I don’t claim that Russia is imperialist because it engages in warfare, that’s not my criteria. The USSR engaged in warfare and Afghanistan and it wasn’t imperialist, the argument could be made that something relatively similar is happening in Ukraine now. My point as to why it’s imperialist is the consolidation of capital in the hands of a few, and the financialization of the economy. The EU is also an empire in this regard. It’s harder to say for China given the wide state control over the private companies. I really fail to see how comparing highly developed capitalism in country A with highly developed capitalism in country B is racist of a State Department talking point.