SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Issac Asimov's Harry Seldon used "psycho-history" to predict the future. Tom Cruise used "precogs" in Minority Report. And now a pro-Putin think tank is trying to divine dissident activity by mining social media.
The Center for Research in Legitimacy and Political Protest claims to have developed software that will search Russian social media posts for signs of plans by political opposition to the government to stage unapproved protests or meetings. Described by an Izvestia report [in Russian] as "a system to prevent mass disorder," the software searches through social media posts once every five minutes to catch hints of "unauthorized actions" and potentially alert law enforcement to prevent them.
Public protests, rallies, marches, and meetings staged without government approval are outlawed in Russia—individuals can be fined up to about $600 (30,000 rubles) for participating in such events or sentenced to 50 hours of community service.
The software, which went live on May 18, is named "Laplace's demon" after the theoretical all-seeing intellect that could calculate the future of the universe based on the position and state of all matter. According to the Center's director, Yevgeny Venediktov, the software specifically monitors "politically oriented groups of social protest" at a national level, as well as local discussion platforms for specific geographic areas. "Particular attention will be paid to the number of likes and reposts in extremist groups." Groups and user pages associated with "extremists" are tagged by volunteers, aggregated into a central database, and analyzed and filtered by sociologists and political scientists.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by tftp on Thursday May 21 2015, @03:30AM
I think that there will be significant public support of this initiative because people - in all countries, actually - value stability above all. This is why even nasty dictatorial regimes remain in power for decades - as long as dictators are smart enough and tread lightly. In this case the opposition in Russia does not have the ear of the public. Hell, lots of people there support and approve activities of Joseph Stalin. (There are reasons for that - people who came to power after Stalin were not all that great.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Thursday May 21 2015, @05:20AM
Compared to Stalin? Damn. It's a rough crowd when you can come off favorably to a guy who ~killed millions of his own countrymen (women, children...).
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @07:00AM
Stalin was Georgian, not Russian.
The people millions he killed were not his countrymen.
They were the descendants of the enemies of his countrymen.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tftp on Thursday May 21 2015, @04:33PM
Stalin was Georgian, not Russian. The people millions he killed were not his countrymen. They were the descendants of the enemies of his countrymen.
The reality is much more complicated than that. As matter of fact, Stalin was not even a Georgian. He was an Ossetian [wikipedia.org]. Those "minor details" are not exactly minor, considering that Georgia went to war with Ossetia [wikipedia.org]. Today North Ossetia is part of Russian Federation, and South Ossetia is closely aligned. Georgia is an enemy state to them, and the border is fortified. Politics in the mountains of Caucasus is highly tribal, with blood feuds being the norm (even today in Chechnya.)
But that in itself is not particularly important. Stalin was an internationalist. He did not pay attention to national origins of a person; he only paid attention to how that person can be used by the state. In this aspect he was an extreme pragmatist. He was not religious either, despite his early education.
Historians and fiction authors have written thousands of volumes on the subject of those mass killings. Myself, I have read at least a hundred. It's hard to explain it all in one sentence. The primary reason was in political struggle at the top. Trotsky and his adherents were trying to change the course of USSR. Trotsky was exiled, but plenty of his supporters remained in key positions. They became the first who were tried and executed. Another reason is in paranoia of Stalin. I cannot say if it was justified, but he trusted people even less than I do :-) Yet another reason was in the large system of secret police (GPU, NKVD) that had been set up from the first days of revolution (1917.) That system had to justify its existence by discovering more and more "agents of imperialism." Yet another reason was in persons who led those organizations - Genrikh Yagoda [wikipedia.org], Nikolai Yezhov [wikipedia.org], Lavrentiy Beria [wikipedia.org]. Yet another reason was in the profit motive that was present in a lot of convictions (not for the NKVD, in general, but for those who accused the person.) Yet another reason was in the Soviet tendency of set up plans and quotes that are based on last year's numbers. So if NKVD arrested 10,000 people last year, in this year they'd better arrest 15,000. Yet another reason was called "normalcy bias [wikipedia.org]." There are many more reasons, and each of them affected the end result.
But there is one thing that is pretty much a fact. USSR would not have survived the attack of Nazi Germany without an iron discipline that was enforced on factories and in fields. People were working extra long shifts to manufacture weapons and ammo, food and clothes. They were fed with whatever little remained after the bulk of food was sent to the troops. People were given impossible goals all the time - and promised to be shot if they fail to meet them. Those promises were kept. Those extraordinary efforts made it possible to match the German military power by 1943 and to significantly exceed it by the end of the war; and to develop the nuclear weapon by the time when new post-war tensions started mounting.
As any moving mechanism, the system of oppression could not be stopped instantly - and hardly anyone on the top felt the need to stop it. Stalin came up with an idea, even before the war, that the class struggle intensifies as USSR approaches Socialism. Stalin was not a mathematician and did not know what an extrapolation is. So he just winged it. This theory was used as a basis for many convictions after the war. Later it was abandoned, of course.
As you can see, this is a very complex mess. The only certainty here is that nationality played hardly any role in those events.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by tftp on Thursday May 21 2015, @07:42AM
Nikita Khruschev was the major figure that came after Stalin. He killed very few people (primarily Stalin's appointees like Beria.) However he killed something more important - he killed the Communist Party. He pushed for laws and regulations that removed oversight from party functionaries. Those laws resulted, 40 years later, in CPSU crumbling under its own weight of corruption and obsolete thinking.
Leonid Brezhnev came after Khruschev. He killed nobody at all. Except that he killed Soviet economy.
After a couple of temporary and insignificant rulers Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. He killed nobody. Except that he killed USSR and ignited regional wars.
A habitual drunkard Yeltsin then came to power in Russian Federation. The country was ruled by oligarchs like Berezovsky and Khodorkhovsky; they kicked Yeltsin's door open, walked in, and told him what to do. Wars in Chechnya got started.
Then Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned and Putin took control. He stopped the wars in Chechnya by turning some enemies into friends, and by defeating the rest. He explained to oligarchs, in a simple to understand terms, what their proper place in the system of government is. He started building up the country.
Then a bunch of lawyers showed up, organized people to gather in a public square, and demanded that Putin's government resigns and gives *them* the power. The citizens looked at them and considered them idiots. That opinion hasn't changed since then. The opposition has nothing to offer to the people, except "they are doing it all wrong, but we will do it better." Most of the opposition is also pro-West, which hit them real hard when the West decided to impose trade sanctions on Russia and thus made itself a foe of Russia. Now the Russian opposition looks like a bunch of fundamentalist Islamists who walked into an NRA meeting to advocate for adoption of mandatory Sharia laws for everyone in the USA.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday May 21 2015, @07:57AM
You're seriously saying that a couple social and economic ideas are worth more than millions of human lives?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @10:09AM
Stalin, the Georgian, killed millions of Russians: people who had conquered Georgia.
It's obvious why he didn't care about Russians.
Georgians today were recently at war with Russians again.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tftp on Thursday May 21 2015, @03:44PM
You're seriously saying that a couple social and economic ideas are worth more than millions of human lives?
It's not my place to say what is worth how many lives. Fortunately, I don't have to make that decision; and I believe that I know history a bit better than an average person - that also cools the enthusiasm quite a lot. None of the revolutionary leaders were particularly nice guys.
However consider the reasons for the US Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Weren't they about "a couple social and economic ideas" ? Were they worth fighting [civilwar.org] for?
The Civil War was America's bloodiest conflict. The unprecedented violence of battles such as Shiloh, Antietam, Stones River, and Gettysburg shocked citizens and international observers alike. Nearly as many men died in captivity during the Civil War as were killed in the whole of the Vietnam War. Hundreds of thousands died of disease. Roughly 2% of the population, an estimated 620,000 men, lost their lives in the line of duty. Taken as a percentage of today's population, the toll would have risen as high as 6 million souls.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2015, @07:34AM
Let's not forget Madeleine Albright...
Interviewer: "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"
Albright: "we think the price is worth it"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbIX1CP9qr4 [youtube.com]
The US government will someday be looked upon by future generations as being worse than Nazi Germany.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @10:16PM
How many of those people would've affected the world in any significant or relevant fashion had they survived?