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Comment Threads

• heteromeles commented on Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia?
  Hmmm. I'd point out that there are really strong echoes of the old Korean hermit kingdom in modern North Korea. Similarly, there are some echoes of the old Tsarist regime in Stalin, and even now with Putin. The Korean case is particularly interesting because Korea's always been in this messy relationship with Japan, and also in a useful, centuries-long "junior client" relationship with China, wherein the Korean rulers acknowledge China's paramount power, do some trading with China whenever they send delegates to pay homage to the Chinese leaders, and otherwise do their own thing behind their own closed borders. IIRC,...
• scott-sanford commented on Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia?
  ...the idealism and optimism at the core of the governing ideology... So naive idealists signed up, and then became tired, cynical, disillusioned functionaries... Yes, this. One of the easiest, if over-simplified, ways to explain the Prague Spring of 1968 is that many people listened to what was promised and wanted it; Czechs actually set out to build a free, liberal, Communist utopia. This freaked out the functionaries in Moscow so much that Warsaw Pact militaries invaded their own ally....
• Greg. Tingey commented on Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia?
  ss Very true However, note the similarity to the idealistic, messianic religion that communism appears to have morphed into a funhouse mirror of? [ Or maybe was to start with? ] Look at the idealism there. And what did you get? The Auto-da-fe & Calvin's tyrranical police state. Charlie occasionally reminds us that the last execution murder by the church, for "atheism" in Britain was 18th January 1697....
• TRX commented on Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia?
  flying cars Some years ago I thought it would be nice to build an ultralight aircraft. At the time, in the USA, Federal regulations allowed small aircraft of carefully restricted specification to be built and flown with very little regulation. Building the airplane would have been easy enough, but when I looked into actually flying it near where I lived, it got ugly. Where someone might stand on the ground and look up and see open sky, a pilot sees interlocking restricted flight paths, no-fly zones, altitude restrictions... I lived near one side of a triangle of a major...
• Antiquercus commented on Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia?
  Regarding the photograph of Stalin and co. There seems to be something wrong with the story that the photo was retouched to remove each man as they fell out of favour and were killed. I thought it was very convenient that each man was positioned so that his image could be removed from the outside-in, as they died. So I went to wikipedia to get the chronology of their removal. There's no entry for Antipov (presumably the man on Stalin's right) but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deputy_Premier_of_the_Soviet_Union gives: Nikolai K. Antipov (April 27, 1935 - June 21, 1937) Sergei Kirov is the man on...