Overlords
I for one..... Ah, forget it.
Every year Russia holds – and broadcasts on state television – a tech showcase of its latest products for an audience of hundreds of school kids. This year's PROJECT show, which took place on Tuesday, was dominated by Boris the Robot, who was able to not just walk and talk but also dance and do math. He was, the show and the …
This quote is often wrongly attributed to either Lenin or Goebbels. While this was surely Goebbels credo, I believe it is actually from the novel “The Crown of a Life” (1869) by Isa Blagden.
Btw., Russians are rather surprised when you attribute this to Lenin. Even in the Western countries this misconception has only come up about a decade ago. But I guess if you repeat it often enough...
There's your Goebbels again. ;-P
"And that is the world in 2018: where people go to great lengths to persuade you of one reality and then, when it is exposed, insist that they never did any such thing and it's all of you that are at fault for claiming it ever happened like that in the first place"
And that has been Russia since 1917.
"The fact that he had no external sensors and danced like, well, a man stuck inside of robot suit trying to dance like a robot, rather than a machine trying to approximate human dancing"
Indeed. They should have got Tik and Tok out of retirement (assuming they're not still going!) instead.
(Anyone else remember trying to do that "robotic head movement" thing as a kid in the early 80s?)
>Wasn't Putin in there, was it? Make a change if someone else pulled HIS strings!
A 9-year-old using email? I don't believe it! I didn't think they'd even know what that is nowadays...
("It was like Instagram, dearie, except that you didn't need to include a heavily-doctored selfie or an artfully-arranged picture of your lunch with every message")
At least she has a healthy sense of scepticism.
If by "indoctrinated", you mean she is encouraged to think for herself, then I'm guilty as charged. However, I must take offense at your characterization of email as "archaic", Sir or Madam. Unless, of course, you can name a single Fortune-1000 that doesn't list email as one of their most important business tools. Until then, I expect a full and complete retraction of your heinous comment.
There is a very BIG incentive to rig things in state "tech" competitions in (ex) Eastern Europe. The tradition goes back decades :) If you win your school gets a massive chunk of funding direct or indirect in the next academic year. If you are somewhere in the middle of nowhere in a bankrupt region somewhere in the middle of Siberia the incentive to cheat is immense
I have seen it myself and I have had blazing rows with refs myself as a part of a student team who tried to win fair and square in similar events (not in USSR, another Eastern Block country).
"Either way, it's bye-bye Boris and our hopes for a dancing robot this year."
We still have the dancing Maybot. As she won her leadership ballot by a good margin tonight then Boris might still rue the day he supported misleading "facts" on the side of a bus.
When someone apparently makes something difficult look easy - you need to examine their calculations.
"More like 67:33 - an entire 3rd of the party don't support her - hardly a ringng endorsement"
It is more than the 66% majority that is usually reckoned to be the sensible threshold for major constitutional changes.
The problem for many years has been the First Past The Past election system for Westminster. To game the FPTP system you need to be a large party. Such a party then necessarily combines many competing factions. Both the Tory and Labour parties are riven with civil wars between their factions. Often extreme minorities seek to hold the executive levers of power to implement their policies.
In Europe various Proportional Representation systems allow the factions to be individual parties. A government therefore combines these as needed - usually producing more gentle shifts in overall left/right positioning. Unfortunately even PR governments can be dependent on an small extreme party - if there are one or two large parties dependent on their voting cooperation.
"PR allowed the Nazi party to gain a toe hold in Government, the rest is history!"
The PR system then had a weakness that allowed very small parties to get a toe-hold - modern PR avoids that. The Nazi party was actually quite successful in elections at a time when there was violent conflict between extreme right and left groups in society - but its share of the votes was starting to decline. People caught in the middle, and business leaders, wanted stability.
The big mistake was that politicians and business leaders thought that they could control the almost civil war situation by inviting the Nazis to join the government. In the meantime they had already passed an "Enabling Act" - only to be activated if the civil disturbances became worse and quick drastic action would be needed.
When they gave Hitler the role of Chancellor they lost control of the situation. He activated the "Enabling Act" that then allowed him to rule by decree. From then on all branches of the government were purged and filled with Nazi appointees - especially the judiciary so that anything could be interpreted as legal.
That precedent is what worried a lot of observers when the GOP supported Trump no matter how much they had to hold their noses.
Poland's right-wing governing party have tried to bias the judiciary in the same way - except the EU has ruled it not permissible.
The merit and strength of first past the post is that successful parties have to have broad appeal and therefore can't be focusse don single issues but address most issues and the trade offs between them. The public vote based on these compromise positions and understand at least broadly and most of the time the general approach and platforms concerned. In PR systems, and this is worse the more faithfully proportional the system is, mainstream parties more or less draw and the power is given to minor often single issue or group focussed parties who are often quite unpopular. The decisions about broad policy are taken as part of coallition negotiations with the result often being directly against strong public opion with policies supported by as little as 5 or 10% of the population becomming the price for forming a coallition. It is not so bad when systems prevent very small minority parties getting representation but these are by definition not proportional systems. True PR is a democratic nightmare handing power to small minorities, encouraging political fragmentation and discouraging any real debate about priorities and trade offs.
"The problem with PR can be, small extremist parties can hold a lot of power disproportional to their actual size. As an example look at Germany in the 1930's."
ahh, that explains why the damn tory party keep winning. but actually have less than 100,000 members..
either that or I'm surround on this island by idiots.
"[...] to agree, support, and vote for a party."
What a voter believes they will get by voting for a particular party is open to debate. Manifesto promises are just that - promises that can be discarded, postponed, or re-interpreted once they are in power. Sometimes that is because they don't see the practical difficulties until later.
For the bigger parties - the local MP that the voter enables to be elected may be of a minority faction that has quite contrary ideas. Should that minority faction gain executive power then voters will rue the day they voted that way.
There used to be a time when our local candidates or party activists would knock on doors. For the last few decades round here the most one gets is a leaflet headlining some of their "promises" in a PR biased style.
I always try to dig deeper - and it is surprising how often an apparently anodyne party candidate turns out to have some personal incompatible ideas.
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