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Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

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Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#91

Post by mc32 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #45
baybal2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will call this a "Elzin Effect": — When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake — Yes, that Boris Yeltsin. In 1989 the future first president of post-Soviet Russia visited Houston, and what most impressed him wasn’t NASA. — It was a Randall’s grocery store, where the Houston Chronicle saw him “nodding his head in amazement” at the fish, produce and frozen pudding pops: — “He commented that if the Soviet p…

That Yeltsin story is a great anecdote but surely the Soviets did enough (and way more) spying to know basic and everyday facts about the US, like whether supermarket shelves are stocked. I mean, how much does it take to know this fact?

Propaganda and indoctrination make it hard to believe what your eyes see. It takes years to believe your own eyes, so it’s no surprise that most people would dismiss to them unverifiable accounts that differed from what they heard daily.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#93

Post by baybal2 »

082349872349872 wrote: post #69
baybal2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1976 soviet TV docco about New York: Even such documentaries were curtailed, nor aired, or aired only in Moscow and very later, or screened privately. This particular ones seem to be aimed not on your average union's citizen, and it feels much more like "internal propaganda." Such things were screened to lower level CPSU members, and whomever amounted to social elites as prophylaxis exactly against such scenario as…

I've also run across a few major US cities in filmstrips on https://diafilmy.su , were those censored as well?

I never saw USSR myself, but for few very blurry memories of my first years of life I barely recall.

But from my lifelong interest studying how countries work, and fail, I would tell that an average union's citizen would be given a chance to see such inoculatory dosages of "truths" a dozen or so times in his life, the more the higher the rank the person has in the society. And that for most, the exposure to it will pass more or less without consequences, given how watered down it was.

I believe their rationale for engaging in the later was to influence their own elites as much as they can until the level where the benefit from it comes close to the harm from truth stirring up "proles."

I'd say a half of all adult, moderately intellectually developed, working age people by eighties had an idea in principle that:

1. USA is more well off than the union, some even knew by how much from smuggled Western press.

2. That all communists are liars, and that the CPSU is now corrupt beyond salvation.

3. That Radio Liberty is probably not all lie.

4. USA is probably less corrupt than USSR, or at least their bosses don't steal more than half of worker's salary.

5. That it's possible that not all Americans were millionaires, but nevertheless, even some non-millionaires may be able to afford a car in USA...

6. That CPSU keeps microdosing them with much distorted, and watered down depictions of reality in, and outside of the union, in just enough dosage as to preserve CPSU's last vestiges of credibility, as to make what they say not entirely silly.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#94

Post by yodelshady »

gameswithgo wrote: post #85
op03 wrote: post #12

Dont we see this with open source? More people show up. More people can find issues. Many more people can find issues than can fix them. The bug tracker bloats. Core team members get called incompetent every 2 hrs. As a counter reaction some core team members get it into their head, to share less or react in unhelpful ways that have long term costs and things go back and forth in waves. We have a few rules at work. 1…

I think it has more to do with how quickly trolls can spread insane memes than anything like this. Flat earth, QAnon, pizza pedos. People have insanity trying to get in their heads all day. I bet it isn't just government people trust less since mobile internet, but everything.

I'm inclined to agree it's not limited to government, but what's incredible about fringe theories is that the very same people who espouse "trust no-one" also lend enormous amounts of credibility to terrible sources.

Disclaimer: I think hacker communities have some soul-searching to do here: "trust no one" and "gubbermint bad" enjoy far too cosy an acceptance, in vast disproportion to the reasoning or evidence behind them. Trusting no one isn't feasible, so all we're doing is transferring trust, on the basis on anecdote at best and usually just memes, from organisations with flawed but improvable accountability to organisations with none whatsoever.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#95

Post by 082349872349872 »

romanoderoma wrote: post #49
baybal2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> p.s: It's a good story, but Yeltsin went to Texas less than two months before the Berlin wall was taken down, people in USSR already knew about supermarkets at that time. Especially in East Germany. That's not the reason why they teared the wall down. I beg you thing otherwise. I spent my first 5 years of life, 1990-1995, with my mother shuttling in between a country which I would rather not name, and Russia, where…

I'm from Italy, my grandfather lived in Russia, during and soon after WWII. I wasn't saying that Russia in the 90s was an happy place like the cocaine driven USA of the 90s. Russia in the 90s was dealing with the ruins left by the regime. I know of people that died because they poisoned themselves with home made vodka. In Italy people were going crazy from all the novelties too, like any novelty people are attracted…

The war in Afghanistan[1] was on the spending side, on the income side was the double whammy of oil price and (because oil is denominated in it) dollar decline. I think Fahd probably deserves a bit more credit for kneecapping the USSR than he commonly gets.

Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttzAsH1yM6E&t=60 (along the lines of: officers, you brought sons back to their mothers)

[1] I remember back when the Taliban were freedom fighters instead of terrorists. In the interim, I doubt their theology has changed significantly (but any outside weaponry is probably currently labelled in a different script).

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#97

Post by luckylion »

mjburgess wrote: post #89
luckylion wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Despite, of course, almost everything working almost all of the time. And, of course, of almost everyone involved acting in good faith. That depends on the definition of "working", I think. I don't doubt the good faith of those involved, but "some form of train service between two locations" is a very low hurdle for "working" if that train is late, slower then advertised, only half the size it was announced to be,…

The trains run. Given human history, and every other undeveloped country, this is working. It is incredibly difficult for a society to function as smoothly as any western country does. It is miraculous to people in many nations that there can be such things as timetables at all.

> The trains run. Given human history, and every other undeveloped country, this is working.

Sure, and in the context of any single country it might not be working. Is a train running at 3mph "working" because there were no trains on earth during all those years of human history before the invention of trains? I don't think that's a useful definition of "working".

I do absolutely agree that advanced societies are miraculous, though I wouldn't call them functioning smoothly (there's a lot of overhead). Still, there's plenty of things that aren't working at all or aren't working as well as they should (a thousand dollar burger should taste crazy delicious), and government (or more general: a large bureaucracy, of which government is the largest) is often involved.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#98

Post by 082349872349872 »

pydry wrote: post #60
baybal2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will call this a "Elzin Effect": — When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake — Yes, that Boris Yeltsin. In 1989 the future first president of post-Soviet Russia visited Houston, and what most impressed him wasn’t NASA. — It was a Randall’s grocery store, where the Houston Chronicle saw him “nodding his head in amazement” at the fish, produce and frozen pudding pops: — “He commented that if the Soviet p…

Time magazine once bragged on its cover how the US helped Yeltsin win the election: https://off-guardian.org/2018/02/19/yanks-to-the-rescue-time... He was essentially Russia's Trump although a) probably a lot more in America's pocket than vice versa and b) it's difficult to overstate how much Russia suffered under him. They suffered enormously in the 90s - quality of life and life expectancies declined enormously. No…

Brezhnev may have had the Trump eye: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/79/d2/5b/79d25b5058348a24e117...

I don't think Trump has ever been accused of wandering around Moscow blotto, but Putin certainly got a laugh when he claimed he was certain that, Trump's hotel having been in close proximity to the Bolshoi, the future POTUS, a family man, would undoubtedly have taken the opportunity to sample the culture of Russia instead of that of its girls of low social responsibility.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#99

Post by 082349872349872 »

baybal2 wrote: post #93
082349872349872 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also run across a few major US cities in filmstrips on https://diafilmy.su , were those censored as well?

I never saw USSR myself, but for few very blurry memories of my first years of life I barely recall. But from my lifelong interest studying how countries work, and fail, I would tell that an average union's citizen would be given a chance to see such inoculatory dosages of "truths" a dozen or so times in his life, the more the higher the rank the person has in the society. And that for most, the exposure to it will p…

Thank you. That seems to confirm the first half of my hypothesis for the rise of ЕР in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24698473 , do you have any opinions on the validity of the second half?

> "neo-feudalism is what one gets when russians spend the 1980's deciding the capitalists had valid criticisms of communism, then the 1990's deciding the communists had valid criticisms of capitalism."

where by neo-feudalism I mean I believe the basic deal Putin has with the populace is: (1) living standards will increase, (2) what corruption there is will keep its ill-gotten gains at home and not flee to London, and (3) governors may fleece their region according to taste but if they're so blatant as to cause a major scandal they'll be out.

Re: Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

#100

Post by baybal2 »

pydry wrote: post #60
baybal2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will call this a "Elzin Effect": — When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake — Yes, that Boris Yeltsin. In 1989 the future first president of post-Soviet Russia visited Houston, and what most impressed him wasn’t NASA. — It was a Randall’s grocery store, where the Houston Chronicle saw him “nodding his head in amazement” at the fish, produce and frozen pudding pops: — “He commented that if the Soviet p…

Time magazine once bragged on its cover how the US helped Yeltsin win the election: https://off-guardian.org/2018/02/19/yanks-to-the-rescue-time... He was essentially Russia's Trump although a) probably a lot more in America's pocket than vice versa and b) it's difficult to overstate how much Russia suffered under him. They suffered enormously in the 90s - quality of life and life expectancies declined enormously. No…

> They suffered enormously in the 90s - quality of life and life expectancies declined enormously.

If you lived in the Potemkin village №1 — Moscow, then yes. Having myself lived in a part of Russia where light wasn't shining back in soviet times, nineties were such a giant breath of fresh air, and opportunity.

For most of people there, it was a never before seen opportunity to change their predicament to live in the empire's cloaca — the union's Far East. Were they to continue live as in USSR, most there would've probably kept living on a few dollars a day.

In 1993, longshoremen, and dockers in Vladivostok at my father's business were getting $300-$500 a month, almost as much as average bankers in Moscow. It was enough for somewhat comfortable living for most.

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