The NKVD was a tool of the Russian Soviets to police itself. So, less a contract between citizens than between party bosses.

NKVD means “People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs”. And in Stalin’s era they still retained the pretense of a democracy on new principles from the 20s.

But Soviet police were far closer to the ideal community policing model than their Western peers, simply because they weren’t built atop the framework of plantation overseers, slave catchers, and anti-indigenious paramilitary.

No. If you ever learn Russian well enough … I actually don’t know what specifically to recommend you. Vysotsky’s songs? It’s just everything you read that will communicate some idea of how it all worked.

Soviet “militia” (it was called that, but in fact it was police, of course) was quite similar to all three things you’ve mentioned.

Also NKVD was both what later became KGB and what later became MVD (after Stalin and Beria USSR had sort of a moment of epiphany, not complete, but hundreds of thousands of people were released from prison camps, hundreds of thousands rehabilitated postmortem, and it was said publicly and officially that such things shouldn’t happen again), so it included both people in black leather coats who’d come at night and people in white coats who’d regulate road traffic and catch small time thieves at day. With pretty similar methods between them.

Imagine if German police under Nazis and Gestapo were one and the same organization administratively. There’d be more “cultural exchange” than there was in reality.

Pick up a copy of Fanshen (Chinese Cultural Revolution, not Russian Stalinist era, but it’s the same through line). The social transition from a country of sovereign landlords to egalitarian policing was rocky, but it was real and significant.

I will, but my knowledge of Stalinism is closer to the root, and Russian is my first language, so I don’t think this will be useful for that kind of example.

The difference between a plantation overseer and a union rep is significant primarily because of who they answer to.

Since USSR came into this discussion, official unions in USSR made that difference very small. Their main activities were about organizing demonstrations on all the important days, though. And also the usual Soviet organization stuff - distribution of some goods via that organization to its members (like some fruit which would rarely be seen in some specific area due to Soviet logistics being not very good), sending children of some members to some kinda better summer camps or some competitions, all that.

I agree it’s an unsolved problem, but have you contracted police to, well, police your area? Had Soviet citizens contract NKVD?

It’s rather between the two. In fact it’s a mechanism imposed on you with power, but there’s a lot of effort to conceal it as an imperfect market.

Yes, thank you for explaining the same thing politely, I had a slight hangover yesterday.

The problem is with unneeded people making unneeded decisions for you anonymously (for them), centrally and obviously with no transparency.

The advantages of the Internet as it came into existence for us were disadvantages for some people. Trapping people inside social media with one entry point and having the actual communication there allows for control which the initial architecture was intended to make hard.

It wastes shadowbanned person’s time, so it’s not.

Similar to vote obfuscation.

Which sucks just as badly.

The whole problem with shadowbans is that they are not very easy to prove (without cooperation from Meta). One can be shadowbanned from one area (by geolocation), but not from another. One can be shadowbanned for some users but not for other. The decisions here can be made based on any kind of data and frankly Meta has a lot to make it efficient and yet hard to prove.

Shadowbans should just be illegal as a thing, first, and second, some of the arguments against him from the article are negligible.

I just don’t get you people hating him more than the two main candidates. It seems being a murderer is a lesser problem than being a nutcase for you.

You can be killed with steel, which has a lot of other implications on what you do in order to avoid getting killed with steel.

Does steel fuck it all up?

Centralization is a shitty backwards idea. But you have to be very conscious of yourself and your instincts to neuter the part that tells you that it’s not to understand it.

Distributivism minus Catholicism is just so good. I always return to it when I give up on trying to find future in some other political ideology.

We are finally coming to comprehend how our brains work, and how intelligent systems generally work at any scale, in any ecosystem.

Who told you that?

(If you don’t mean ML-based things fallaciously called “AI”, then ignore this)

I didn’t quite imagine Japanese to be the Wookies of our world, but the surprise is welcome.

EDIT: Oh, but then Corellians made lots of wooden stuff too.

I can do that in Russian too. I can’t do the former in English.

There are plenty of things possible in one language and not (yet\anymore) in another. I don’t see what does this have to do with any kind of demonization. Maybe for people knowing only one language, which, yes, is more common for English speakers than I’d like to think.

I suppose a speaker of Finnish would have something to enlighten us about some languages being in some regards inferior to his own, too. Or a speaker of Icelandic. Or maybe even Persian. There are languages having dozens of words to distinguish shades\textures of snow or sand, or not having future tense.

I think they are joking.

That said, правда (“truth” as something you believe to be true) and истина (“truth” as objective truth) are different words in Russian, but not having that distinction in a language doesn’t prevent its speakers from making it.