NKVD means “People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs”.

Internal Affairs. Yes. Internal to the Russian Communist Party.

Imagine if German police under Nazis and Gestapo were one and the same

The NKVD weren’t Jew-hunters, engaged in a policy of ethnic cleansing.

my knowledge of Stalinism is closer to the root, and Russian is my first language

You could say the same thing about Ayn Rand.

Their main activities were about organizing demonstrations on all the important days, though

You definitely sound very knowledgeable

You’d never know it the way they try to make every Microsoft branded app the default

have you contracted police to, well, police your area?

Sadly, I’ve been outvoted in every election that centers on inflating police budgets.

Had Soviet citizens contract NKVD?

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

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.

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.

it’s a mechanism imposed on you with power

All societies are. The question becomes whether you find value in this mechanism or whether it is entirely extractive.

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

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

In business, it’s described as a kind of Principal-Agent problem. What happens when the person you’re working with has goals that deviate from what you contracted with them to do?

A classic “unsolved problem” of social relationships.

Changing the scenario doesn’t answer my question.

Then why did you change the scenario?

So if I own a cafe

More if you own Ticketmaster, and you decide you’re going to freeze out a particular artist from every venue you contact with.

And yes. Absolutely censorship.

The Big Ten were written at a time when paganism/animism was the dominant religious view and the idea of monotheism was weird and foreign. You really had to hammer those home early on, because one minute you’re up on a mountain having the acid trip spiritual moment to define a millennium and the next you’re down in the valley watching all your friends jerk off to a big bronze bull just like you told them not to!

When your parish flock is that prone to stray, I’m almost surprised they don’t have a few more.

Wouldn’t even be the first time this month that a bunch of religious zealots and government thugs stormed a school full of peace-loving hippies and dragged them off by their hair.

What are you talking about?

Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad Better

Says so right there in black and white.

Very foundational to our legal system.

Given our political attitude towards Muslims, Hindus, Atheists, and Pagans, I honestly don’t detect a lie.

In America you can have any religion you want, so long as its the correct one.

You have to be careful, though. In the wrong hands, philosophy can be a dangerous thing.

Keep promoting ideas like “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, “Keep the Sabbath Holy”, and “Don’t Worship False Idols”, and people might start thinking all our wars, our insane work schedules, and our fetishistic consumer culture aren’t good.

Given the habits of your average Louisiana legislator, you might want to scrap the Seventh Commandment entirely.

Truth is treason in the Empire of Lies

This just means privatizing public spaces becomes a method of censorship. Forcing competitors farther and farther away from your captured audience, by enclosing and shutting down the public media venues, functions as a de facto media monopoly.

Generally speaking, you don’t want a single individual with the administrative power to dictate everything anyone else sees or hears.

Shadowbans help prevent bot activity by preventing a bot from knowing if what they posted was actually posted

I have not seen anything to support the theory that shadowbans reduce the number of bots on a platform. If anything, a sophisticated account run by professional engagement farmers is going to know it’s been shadowbanned - and know how to mitigate the ban - more easily than an amateur publisher producing sincere content. The latter is far more likely to run afoul of an difficult-to-detect ban than the former.

It wastes bot’s time

A bot has far more time to waste than a human. So this technique is biased against humans, rather than bots.

If you want to discourage bots from referencing their own metrics, put public metrics behind a captcha. That’s far more effective than undermining visibility in a way only a professional would notice.

Shadowbans should just be illegal as a thing

I mean, regional coding makes sense from a language perspective. I don’t really want to see a bunch of foreign language recommendations on my feed, unless I’m explicitly searching for content in that language.

But I do agree there’s a lack of transparency. And I further agree that The Algorithm creates a rarified collection of “popular” content entirely by way of excluding so much else. The end result is a very generic stream of crap in the main feed and some truly freaky gamed content that’s entirely focused on click-baiting children. Incidentally, jesus fucking christ whomever is responsible for promoting “unboxing” videos should be beaten to death with a flaming bag of nalpam.

None of this is socially desirable or good, but it all appears to be incredibly profitable. Its a social media environment that’s converged on “Oops! All Ads!” and is steadily making its way to “Oops! All scams!” as the content gets worse and worse and worse.

The shadowbanning and segregation of content is just a part of the equation that makes all this possible. But funneling people down into a handful of the most awful, libidinal content generators is really not good.

There is no freedom of speech guarantee in private or public enterprise.

And the consequence of this policy is a back-door path to censorship. A combination of surveillance, selective-admittance, and media saturation allow certain ideological beliefs to suffice the “marketplace of ideas” while others are silenced.

“I want to force people to listen to my bullshit.”

Its more that privatized media infrastructure allows for a monopolization of speech.

Big media companies still force people to listen to bullshit, by way of advertising and algorithmic promotion. Go on YouTube, click through their “recommended” list a few times, and you’ll quickly find yourself watching some Mr. Beast episode or PraegerU video, simply because these folks have invested so heavily in self-promotion.

But there’s a wide swath of content you won’t see, either because YouTube’s algorithm explicitly censors it for policy reasons, because the media isn’t maxing out the SEO YouTube execs desire (the classic Soy Face thumbnail for instance), or because you’re not spending enough money to boost visibility.

This has nothing to do with what the generic video watcher wants to see and everything to do with what YouTube administration wants that watcher to see.

RFK Jr is a nasty little freak with some very toxic beliefs. But that’s not why he’s struggling to get noticed on the platform, when plenty of other nasty freaks with toxic beliefs get mainstream circulation.

Prosperity Gospel is so close to LaVeyan Satanism that it barely makes a difference.

It’s ground zero for Bots training on other Bots

They keep decorum and fight with one arm tied behind their back

They’re more than happy to fight dirty. But they only know how to punch left.

I then had people try to tell me that Biden was too old to debate, that Trump ran circles around Biden, and that Trump had taken the win for the debate.

That’s every debate. You show up to cheer for your team and then you compete to see who can say “You fucking idiot, my guy won!” the loudest.

Why did anyone think MAGA would come out of that fight saying anything less?

Maybe this time, Biden will actually get to use his time to talk without the orange fucking idiot opening his.

Only if he gives Trump a stiff punch to the throat.