Disappointment is the feeling that I experience when looking at the right-side-up flag, so I feel for ya.

Well, then, you better start handing out hazmat suits and respirators to everyone before you start burning.

What would rise from the ashes?

they ‘commit suicide’, or commit a crime that gets them sent to prison in Siberia

Like I said, arguably. Show me some data that says that the opposition has grown above 25% (arbitrary, you may understand what I mean) and then I’ll come down on the side that he probably doesn’t speak for the majority of the country.

That’s like asking if Texas can choose to secede. They can not. Nor can the rest of the US vote to expel Texas without triggering a constitutional crisis.

The only way that they can secede is if we make a constitutional amendment to allow states to secede, yes. Personally, I’d vote for letting Texas secede, if they wanted to.

Now, if an entire country votes to allow a region of their country to be annexed, then sure. Even if elections in Crimea were free and fair–and the evidence strongly suggests that most of the people voting were coerced–it would need to be all of Ukraine voting to allow the annexation.

Now we are seeing eye-to-eye, Helix - that’s pretty much my point. There are diplomatic avenues to solve this problem, so maybe Ukraine can solve the whole thing, in the interest of preventing future wars. I say “solve” in the sense that they may be able to negotiate a plan for how to handle this in the future for the whole old Soviet bloc.

concern trolling

No argument with this paragraph, I agree, in principle.

The whole thing reeks of Putin trolling the West.

rather than the victim accepting a little victimizing

Point taken, however, instead of a little victimizing (by way of that hypothetical peaceful path that we outlined earlier) they are now getting a lot of victimizing (vis a vis, death and destruction).

Again, for the sake of argument, assuming that Russia itself was victimized during the fall of the USSR, and assuming that Putin is seeking to redress that, rather than him trying to take over the whole old-bloc, then is there any other peaceful path?

if we assume that he is trying to take over the whole old-bloc, then I’d be entirely in agreement with you on this topic.

I’m just not willing to make blanket assumptions like that - I prefer the probabilistic approach.

Thanks, by the way, for taking the time to discuss this with me. I’ll keep replying if you do.

word

https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-history-flag-burning

brevity

“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”

https://alanberg.com/if-youre-not-paying-for-the-product-you-are-the-product-podcast-transcript/

heh, you should see it now - they’ve expanded the features.

i’ll take a look at the controversy, thanks.

edit: skimmed it, looks like contrived controversy to me - a rather unprofessional software reviewer that isn’t willing to engage with their subject? no thanks… but to each their own.

We appreciate you, ignore those downvotes lol, you’re still getting upvotes.

It’s only $108/yr for unlimited searches, if you actually need that many. I’m a retired software engineer and search all the time, so I just went with the unlimited plan, but most people don’t actually search more than 300 times a month.

“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”

https://alanberg.com/if-youre-not-paying-for-the-product-you-are-the-product-podcast-transcript/

edt: also, you do get what you pay for. the search results are dramatically different - it’s easy to do a test search and compare the results.

Well, it’s only $108/yr for unlimited searches.

And I used to use search engines professionally for work (think potentially hundereds of searches per day, sometimes), so it’s easy for me to justify paying for quality.

But according the data, most regular folk won’t search more than 300 times per month. Some days you might search more, some you might search less, you know?

Wrong, retired software engineer here.

Some people use search for more than finding recipes and google has been sucking at professional search for a while now, as has been repeatedly reported at Hacker News

Awesome, that’s exactly the type of feedback from a professional that I was looking for - I feel almost exactly the same.

Other than I feel a little bit fanboy-ish now lol.

Indeed, similarly it is fine to ignore the downvotes in this post lol.

asklemmy isn’t news.ycombinator, afterall.

After using the trial for a month and reaching the limit, i decided to pay for the $108/yr unlimited searches.

Kagi did statistical analysis before assigning pricing (it was a long process that they would update us on while they gave us leniency on the quotas). They found that 300 per month was the sweet spot for a lot of regular people that might only search a few times a week or others that might only occasionally do deep dives.

edit: fixed an error, but also adding: no, i exclusively use kagi now on all my devices. give it a test run, it is dramatically different from ddg and googhell

You are so very welcome, friend. I totally agree.

I appreciate your enthusiasm! You do make solid points, some of which I am well aware of, but as Russia is not a specific area of interest for me, I can’t match your level of enthusiasm.

However, in the interest of the spirit of brotherhood and interestimg conversation, I would ask this of you:

That’s entirely due to Vladimir Putin.

Having been in power for so long and with arguably a strong level of domestic support for decades, isn’t it fair to say that we ought to continue to operate as-if he did speak for the whole country?

Building on that semi-rhetorical question, and especially in regard to your concession that the West could have helped more, and in a larger, more historical perspective, might we perhaps give Russia slight leniency to make minor readjustments to borders, if (hypothetically) the local regions did legitimately vote in agreement?

Recall, being “ethnic Russian” is of key interest and, in my opinion, it might be the case that there are border towns that legitimately prefer to be part of Russia, given their local history, but were never represented properly at the fall of the USSR.

You’ve definitely piqued my interest in the specific mechanism by which the USSR was dismantled.

NATO is strictly a defensive organization.

No argument there. Again, though, I’d ask: when exactly would we start to repair our relationship with Russia by loosening up on them a little?

At this juncture, I presume it would be a long ways away, but one never knows what can come out of diplomatic negotiations, so maybe Ukraine solves the whole thing, if we are lucky.

Until we ratify the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in the US, I’m inclined to agree.

If one were to take Russia at face-value, then one would be an idiot

I’ll bite, as one would be an asshole to think one was an idiot for understanding a basic of diplomacy - engage with the opposite side in a constructive manner.

At face-value, recall, Russia is currently explicitly dedicated to being an enemy of the West. Do you want them to always be our enemy?

They get worse every time they lose elections because they’re able to sell their voter base on all the “we need to do these horrible things to win” arguments.

For real.

And enough with the social justice fakery, embrace UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, fully, or shut the f*** up about it.

Preaching generic “omg this is so wrong!” to the choir doesn’t really do any good when the social conservatives really only need to be educated about human rights. They’ll join that UN party when they figure out what’s really up with human rights.