Nvidia is so far the only company that managed to provide a high-quality proprietary Linux driver for their hardware. Others either provide high-quality open source drivers (ex: Intel) or crappy proprietary drivers (AMD/ATI).
So dozens or not, Nvidia is doing fine as far as Linux-using gamers are concerned. Developers, on the other hand, could use a less hostile stance on documentation and vendor support of open drivers.
You do realize that you can just take your C++ code, compile it for.NET, and it will just work, right?
I can also compile it for 8080 and run it in an emulator. In both cases one would get the worst of both worlds.
And it is very easy to have Java/.NET frontend (for RAD) with C/C++ backend (for performance); especially so with.NET, because it has P/Invoke and a matching type system.
And that would require two programmers -- a n00b for Java and a professional for C/C++. Or the same work can be implemented by one professional programmer in the same time -- because face it, RAD is for marketing people who make UI mockups for vaporware.
There was no open source framework like this because no one in his right mind would want to develop such a framework for his own use.
Both Java and.NET are frameworks made for OTHER people, so those other people can produce seemingly working software while being completely ignorant and untrained. This is why most of "convenience" of Java and.NET is completely irrelevant for developers who produce high-quality code -- as far as language is concerned, if one can notice any "improvement" between C++ and Java, he is likely not qualified to use either.
Java and.NET conquer developers by building massive blobs of interdependent infrastructure that can be only used within those frameworks. Once someone makes an attempt to use a tiny part of it, he has to accept the whole thing, and reject everything else, as this is the core design behind those systems. This is why non-idiots end up working with Java and.NET, not because those platforms are based on some kind of useful ideas.
And now those massive pieces of infrastructure are crumbling under their own weight because everyone who is working on them, mimics Sun and Microsoft, and writes his own massive infrastructures on top on those infrastructures without having nearly enough resources to maintain those things. It's infrastructures all the way down.
C++/Qt developer produces better-looking, more portable and much simpler GUI applications, C programmer does likewise with network servers, and Python programmer writes complex scripts. Java and.NET ended up being a path toward eternal mediocrity that Microsoft so much relies on, and Sun ended up contributing to.
I have news for you -- there are no natural rights. Rights are whatever government recognizes as such. There is more or less reasonable list known as Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- however US law doesn't cover a tiny fraction of it, and botches what it does. USSR openly did not recognize freedom of press/speech, so people treated everything published as opinion of government-supported organizations. Somehow, they still were sufficiently informed about everything that mattered.
But their six year old kids would suffer (directly and indirectly) because their parents decided to exercise that interesting thing called freedom of expression.
If you want to fight the society that you live in, don't have kids.
I am sure, it's rather tough to be six years old in US if your parents exercised their right to get a mortgage and buy a massive house, only to be laid off before the housing market crashes.
The whole point of publishing anything in USSR was to make government acknowledge it. Mass media, in any country, doesn't exist to inform people, it exists to bring attention of powerful people to some already known facts or to demonstrate support for some opinion -- especially now when actual information moved to the Internet.
This is why there was so much wrangling in USSR around publication of things -- once anything is published, it means, government already acknowledged it, and has to act. Many of those "reporters" were real political activists -- ones whose words actually mattered.
>And in other cultures you do not have to "transact business" or "deal with the government" in any active manner just to survive.
Sure. There are still hunter-gatherer societies out there.
No. I don't want to "transact business". I want to go to work, do something useful there, be paid for it, and have it used by other people. I don't want my unwillingness to control and manipulate other people, to relegate me to some kind of underclass. There are places, even in US, where this kind of personal goal is acceptable and respected, however just barely.
I disagree. If I want to eat twinkies for breakfast lunch and dinner every day, that is one option I have.
If you want twinkies for breakfast and I want public healthcare unburdened by hordes of twinkies-for-breakfast-eaters, guess whose interests would a local equivalent of FDA take into account in a civilized country?
I can also buy an incredible variety of fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats - either industrially raised or organic -
...and all of them worse than pretty much anything you can get abroad.
and cook myself dinner every night.
No, you can't. Thanks to long commutes, Americans' life schedule never had time for this since non-working housewives disappeared.
Many places don't have nearly this many options. The former Soviet Union certainly didn't.
Indeed, Soviet Union didn't have wide variety of food. What is more important, it also didn't have a variety of quality of food -- the food that was available, had to be high-quality, no matter how much the production costs. There was no incentive to cut corners -- it's not like someone could replace sugar with corn syrup and put the difference into his own pocket. So all sugar would be beet sugar (cane doesn't grow in Russia), but absolutely no corn syrup. All vegetables would be grown in open soil. All cattle grown without "experiments" that Ministry of Healthcare would ban as unsafe or merely risky. No special "food for rich people" and mildly poisonous cheap feed "for the masses".
Luxury food was uncommon, and I heard, alcoholic drinks were substandard, but I don't drink alcohol in the first place. Chocolate was good -- I still buy one imported from there. Bread was very cheap (massively subsidized) and very good. I still don't see a fundamental difference between any bread sold in US and a wad of cotton covered with glue -- even Russian bakeries in US don't make it quite the same as ones in Russia. Maybe it degenerated to the same level there, too.
Because I want to accomplish more than finding a place that I find least offensive for my tasted to live last few years of my life. Moving is difficult and expensive, I did it once to get out of the massive economic crisis of 1990's when I have graduated, and it was a massive endeavor for a person who is neither rich nor well-connected. I am still not sure that few years of productive work that I have gained from it were really worth the effort, however it was always clear for me that I am making a sacrifice and going to live in a society that I will find foreign and hostile. But this was only necessary because my own country was destroyed. I guess, at some point I can move to Russia or Belarus, as they are no longer post-Soviet mess that I have left, and I am an accomplished engineer instead of a recent graduate, three months out of university, but the amount of effort and expenses, the work that I could do instead of relocating again half across the globe, don't make such a thing worthwhile.
This is why I find it deeply offensive when Americans call their personally comfortable existence "freedom", or imply that immigrants such as myself, came to their country looking for this "freedom" or as an expression of approval of their ideology. I came here to live despite the oppression, because I care about developing science and technology, and the place where I hoped to do this before, became unsuitable for those purposes.
My stated problem is that I have to lecture people and write books just so I can explain some trivial fact about myself -- all thanks to idiotic racist assumption that American culture makes -- that Jews and Jewish culture are tied to some idiotic religion. If I was ethnically Russian I would not be automatically assumed to be Russian Orthodox. If I was British, I would not be assumed to be Anglican. Chinese? Polish? German? French? Japanese? None of those ethnicities have names that automatically imply following any particular religion, no matter how popular in corresponding countries. Jews are the only exception.
If you want to, you can come here from Russian an be wrapped up in your own little ethnic cocoon and not even bother learning English. The US of A tolerates that quite well.
This is precisely a freakshow version of a culture that I don't have anything to do with.
If you tried the same thing back in the USSR you would have been sent to a gulag.
USSR had plenty of relatively self-isolated tiny ethnic groups that were not doing anything unacceptable by common cultural standards. They were perceived as silly, but that's all.
A lot of people grew up fearing just that.
Fearing what?
If you were lucky enough to be some ethnic Russian part of the KGB crowd then clearly you would have been insulated from any of that nonsense or most of the economic deprivations for that matter.
I am neither ethnic Russian (mostly Jewish) and lived in a family of intellectuals (at least 3 generations of Electrical Engineers), not particularly associated with Communist Party leadership or KGB. The closest thing to any "oppressors" would by my grandfather who served in the Navy in WWII.
I have never seen a worse "economic deprivation" than occasional shortage of Moscow Sausage/Salami over the time of my childhood (I like it on sandwiches with tea), or being unable to buy a PDP-11 computer in 1988 when I was a student, so I had to use one in a school lab.
All horrors you were told about USSR are taken from 1930's-50's, a time that was long gone when I was born in 1969.
one of the most influential Russian writers of past 50 years.
"One of the most influential Russian writers" in US. He certainly influenced last half a century of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda.
In Russia even after his return to the country, acceptance by 90's political elite and praise by post-Communist propaganda (and plenty of other things such as stupid political manifestos and expressing antisemitic views in public) he is seen as a merely unusual and relatively talented writer who was unfairly imprisoned, then reduced himself to a political crackpot.
Also even in Volume one it is covered that GLULAG is an acronym.
And yet all Americans that I have ever seen writing that word, write it in lowercase, use plural, and in other ways imply that it means "prison camp". So not only they used his writing as the source, they didn't actually read it -- all they know is how it was portrayed in American propaganda.
I guess, it would be too much to expect of them to know that "GULAG Archipelago" is a work of autobiographic fiction -- Solzhenitsyn mixes facts from his own life with ideas and guesses that have nothing to do with his personal experience. This is often the only origin of claims about ridiculously large numbers of supposed Stalin's victims. Research shows that at most two millions of people were executed or died in prison for political reasons -- what is two millions too many but certainly wouldn't be enough for American propaganda workers. So instead of doing their own research, American "historians" decided to take writings of one seriously wronged person with vendetta against Communists, and treat his ramblings as facts. Naturally, Communists were not amused, and mutual accusations in Cold War propaganda were at ridiculous levels even in 70's-90's when actual causes for hostility nearly disappeared.
Okay, but seriously, while I agree that the American left would be considered center or even center-right in a lot of places, there are American socialists. There are just not a whole lot of them.
You are correct -- I am one person, and I live there.
But seriously, they are so marginalized that they about just as much a part of American culture as foreigners such as myself, and on top of that they are weak and underdeveloped as a political movement. A single teenage street gang has more political momentum behind itself than all American socialists combined.
You seriously expect to be able to transact business, or deal with the government, without paying bribes.
And in other cultures you do not have to "transact business" or "deal with the government" in any active manner just to survive.
You're used to a wide variety of choices for almost anything you buy.
...all those "choices" being inferior to the standards one would expect in other societies, thanks to governments pandering to businesses, monopolies, runaway cost-cutting and "creative" kinds of outsourcing.
The biggest meal of the day is in the evening.
...and this is why (plus the above as applied to food) obesity is both common and the most common reason for social ostracism.
You don't care very much what family someone comes from.
Instead you merely care how much money that family thrown at him/her.
If you have an appointment, you'll mutter an excuse if you're five minutes late, and apologize profusely if it's ten minutes. An hour late is almost inexcusable.
This is not acceptable in any culture. In US recently arrived foreigners are often late to their appointment because they don't have a car yet (something that in other countries is not strictly necessary to get anywhere).
If you're talking to someone, you get uncomfortable if they approach closer than about two feet.
This is the only thing that is actually valid in this list -- and only because Americans are trained to distrust each other and see a body of another human as some kind of abnormal, threatening or repulsive presence in their lives, while for others it's something ordinary, not significantly different from their own.
About the only things you expect to bargain for are houses, cars, and antiques. Haggling is largely a matter of finding the hidden point that's the buyer's minimum.
In USSR the only place one would be haggling is a farmers' market and maybe when buying a used car (from the previous owner). The idea of haggling for cars that happens in US is still something that I can't distinguish from outright scam, and I am not even going to explain what US real estate marker is.
There may have been a brief period of McCarthyism, but objectively there were no American gulags.
First and foremost, GULAG HAS NO PLURAL. It makes very easy to recognize Americans who pretend to be Russians or whose propaganda writings are translated into Russian, by this error that any Russian would notice -- as "GULAG" is an abbreviation for "Department of [Penitentiary] Camps" in Russian. It also shows that most Americans not only are only familiar with USSR labor camps through one book by Solzhenitsyn, they also limited their knowledge of that book to its title.
Second, US definitely had prison camps of various kinds, most egregiously camps for Japanese Americans during WWII, however currently operating Guantanamo Bay camp and various outsourced torture programs are also notable. Conditions in many American prisons are actually worse than most of what GULAG prisoners experienced -- if given a choice, I would rather cut trees in Siberian forest surrounded by intimidating-looking armed guards than be raped or stabbed by homemade knives. US also has long history of political prisoners, likely politically motivated assassinations, plus things that not even Stalin dared to do such as genocide (shut up, Robert Conquest readers).
USSR also did not inflict on its population a tiny fraction of death and misery that was caused by black slavery in the South, wage slavery everywhere, shitty social programs and a kind of "health insurance" that, if implemented in USSR, would get Kremlin overrun by angry crowds.
Perhaps the language barrier is an issue. "Freedom" does not equate with "Comfort" in English, although many people feel uncomfortable when their freedoms are limited. Individual discomfort/comfort levels can be effects of lesser or greater freedom, but are not the metric of freedom. I am uncomfortable on a hot, humid day but do not suffer any loss of freedom.
But this is merely comfort, yet Americans see it as "freedom". My point is that all societies are pretty far from any kind of "freedom", and yet Americans for some reason believe that their society is "free" just because they don't feel discomfort they would expect from oppression. I see it as a regrettable lack of perspective.
It sounds like you need to do some more shopping around between subcultures. Maybe it's because I spent a lot of time in college towns or because I grew up in Northern California, but I'm used to seeing two things that contradict your claims.
I am in Berkeley [, you insensitive clod!] That's probably the closest -- and yet way, way outside of what actually would be acceptable.
1) People from radically different cultures who moved to the United States and feel they're more able to practice their own culture here than back in India, China, Indonesia, etc., because in their homeland they were part of an offshoot culture than was frowned upon, while in their new homes that's absolutely welcomed.
Only if their culture is fringe at home, and is still fringe here -- except only at home they are taken seriously, so people don't bother to express direct hostility toward them in US. Those people who believe that they "practice their own culture" in US are deluding themselves -- their lives only exist in context of American society that follows rules and system of values that is specific to US. They can "practice their own culture" as a hobby or (and usually only) as a religious cult that no one cares about -- this is not "culture", this is thin veneer of a culture over their entirely American lives. Yes, that includes how Russian culture "exists" in US -- forgive me, I forgot to bring my knife, thick accent, bottle of vodka and two liters of sweat. I don't want this and would be insulted to reduce my cultural background to such a freak show.
2) People from the United States who hold very different values from the prevailing national/regional/local views, who are quite happy with their freedom to be different. I've also lived places in the U.S. where that's not the case, but usually that's been my experience.
American society is actually very much homogenized. Differences are superficial and mostly based on racial diversity, and racism that keeps people of the same race together, thus forming a "subculture" with no unique values. For example, if you look at Black/African American culture (that formed entirely over the history of US) it's clear that there are plenty of superficial differences but at its core it's exactly the same as culture of, say, white Protestants, except adapted to being discriminated against, and developed in relatively closed communities. For white American, especially one who adopted racial stereotype it looks "different" or even hostile, but most goals, values and ideas are exactly the same. Many other subcultures have the same fundamental nature, even if not based on ethnicity.
What bothers me most, American geek/nerd subculture, that I am supposed to be associated with, is still very close to mainstream, however mainstream treats it with such a ferocious hostility, I can never understand such a situation. For me American society looks like this Star Trek episode -- groups that I can barely recognize as different treat each other as complete opposites of themselves, and they don't realize just how far I am from all of them.
There's a lot of room here for vegans, people who hate television, people who are only interested in Chinese music, people who want to have no friends, people who never want to be alone,
Vegans? Hate television? That's not what a culture is about.
There are no "socialists" in US. American "socialist" would be welcome in the second-from-the right party anywhere else in the world -- and it's usually only second from the right because first would be basically Nazi. In USSR Communists wouldn't recognize him as belonging to a related movement. Politics is one of the area where only a very narrow range of opinion is tolerated in serious public discourse. "Libert
How can your "native culture" be truly yours if it was "forced" on you? How too can exposure to different cultures within the US be construed as "imposed" on you?
I realize (in retrospect) that when I grew up I didn't really have a choice, which culture to accept, so my set of values is consistent with what was popular in USSR at the time of my childhood, so local culture and government didn't seem like they force on me anything I don't want in the first place. This is the primary reason why I did not feel oppressed there but do feel oppressed in US.
More importantly, Americans believe that they are "free" only because they live in the same country that imposes the same basic culture and ideology on everyone (usually slightly decorated with some crude ethnic/racial flavor but the same at the core). Nevertheless this is not actually freedom -- it would be freedom if they were just as comfortable if they did not share the same values, and my experience shows that a person with different background feels extremely uncomfortable and oppressed here.
Objectively, both USSR and US societies were/are very strict in values, beliefs and ideology imposed on their members -- there are "sacred" ideas that, if attacked effectively and in a public manner, would earn a person ostracism and persecution. It's less visible because it applies only to things that are public and effective, and both societies had also wildly different standards on what is "public" and what can be "effective".
How much free speech do you need at age 6? How about being free of saying that your parents are Jewish, or that your parents are, say novelists or scientists or whatever who happen to be censored by the party without having your teacher telling you to shut up (at best) or sending you into the corner because your parents are traitor, counter revolutionary, dogs or some other shit while all the other kids laugh at you (at worst)?
Seriously man. That is a really stupid question.
Those things wouldn't be censored in USSR.
One would have to to try to publish something in the range between "Capitalism is good" and "Communists eat babies" to actually notice that there is actually a censor somewhere. Of course, some people did just that, but none of them were six years old.
Except, of course, those things didn't happen in USSR since 50's.
By the way, "Americans don't have long lines in the grocery stores!" was a major propaganda point in late 80's when former Communist politicians tried to paint US as the model for the "new direction" of their country. A lot of people actually believed that US has no lines at the checkout -- the only kind of "line in the grocery store" one would find in Russia in 80's. Personally, when I arrived in US, I was *SHOCKED* to see that in this particular aspect US and USSR had exactly the same kind of parity one would expect in nuclear weapons.
Also after 22 years in USSR and 16 years in US, I can assure everyone that I feel more oppressed in US than I ever did in USSR -- if for no other reason then because US imposes on me a culture different from my own, while in USSR I at very least had the luxury of having my native culture being forced on myself. I realize that for Americans it would be the other way around, but this is the only real difference for a person who is not a professional politician.
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Nvidia is so far the only company that managed to provide a high-quality proprietary Linux driver for their hardware.
Others either provide high-quality open source drivers (ex: Intel) or crappy proprietary drivers (AMD/ATI).
So dozens or not, Nvidia is doing fine as far as Linux-using gamers are concerned. Developers, on the other hand, could use a less hostile stance on documentation and vendor support of open drivers.
You do realize that you can just take your C++ code, compile it for .NET, and it will just work, right?
I can also compile it for 8080 and run it in an emulator. In both cases one would get the worst of both worlds.
And it is very easy to have Java/.NET frontend (for RAD) with C/C++ backend (for performance); especially so with .NET, because it has P/Invoke and a matching type system.
And that would require two programmers -- a n00b for Java and a professional for C/C++.
Or the same work can be implemented by one professional programmer in the same time -- because face it, RAD is for marketing people who make UI mockups for vaporware.
There was no open source framework like this because no one in his right mind would want to develop such a framework for his own use.
Both Java and .NET are frameworks made for OTHER people, so those other people can produce seemingly working software while being completely ignorant and untrained. This is why most of "convenience" of Java and .NET is completely irrelevant for developers who produce high-quality code -- as far as language is concerned, if one can notice any "improvement" between C++ and Java, he is likely not qualified to use either.
Java and .NET conquer developers by building massive blobs of interdependent infrastructure that can be only used within those frameworks. Once someone makes an attempt to use a tiny part of it, he has to accept the whole thing, and reject everything else, as this is the core design behind those systems. This is why non-idiots end up working with Java and .NET, not because those platforms are based on some kind of useful ideas.
And now those massive pieces of infrastructure are crumbling under their own weight because everyone who is working on them, mimics Sun and Microsoft, and writes his own massive infrastructures on top on those infrastructures without having nearly enough resources to maintain those things. It's infrastructures all the way down.
C++/Qt developer produces better-looking, more portable and much simpler GUI applications, C programmer does likewise with network servers, and Python programmer writes complex scripts. Java and .NET ended up being a path toward eternal mediocrity that Microsoft so much relies on, and Sun ended up contributing to.
Really? </sarcasm>
Ya, rly.
Which would be their natural right, no?
I have news for you -- there are no natural rights. Rights are whatever government recognizes as such. There is more or less reasonable list known as Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- however US law doesn't cover a tiny fraction of it, and botches what it does. USSR openly did not recognize freedom of press/speech, so people treated everything published as opinion of government-supported organizations. Somehow, they still were sufficiently informed about everything that mattered.
But their six year old kids would suffer (directly and indirectly) because their parents decided to exercise that interesting thing called freedom of expression.
If you want to fight the society that you live in, don't have kids.
I am sure, it's rather tough to be six years old in US if your parents exercised their right to get a mortgage and buy a massive house, only to be laid off before the housing market crashes.
The whole point of publishing anything in USSR was to make government acknowledge it. Mass media, in any country, doesn't exist to inform people, it exists to bring attention of powerful people to some already known facts or to demonstrate support for some opinion -- especially now when actual information moved to the Internet.
This is why there was so much wrangling in USSR around publication of things -- once anything is published, it means, government already acknowledged it, and has to act. Many of those "reporters" were real political activists -- ones whose words actually mattered.
>And in other cultures you do not have to "transact business" or "deal with the government" in any active manner just to survive.
Sure. There are still hunter-gatherer societies out there.
No. I don't want to "transact business". I want to go to work, do something useful there, be paid for it, and have it used by other people. I don't want my unwillingness to control and manipulate other people, to relegate me to some kind of underclass. There are places, even in US, where this kind of personal goal is acceptable and respected, however just barely.
I disagree. If I want to eat twinkies for breakfast lunch and dinner every day, that is one option I have.
If you want twinkies for breakfast and I want public healthcare unburdened by hordes of twinkies-for-breakfast-eaters, guess whose interests would a local equivalent of FDA take into account in a civilized country?
I can also buy an incredible variety of fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats - either industrially raised or organic -
...and all of them worse than pretty much anything you can get abroad.
and cook myself dinner every night.
No, you can't. Thanks to long commutes, Americans' life schedule never had time for this since non-working housewives disappeared.
Many places don't have nearly this many options. The former Soviet Union certainly didn't.
Indeed, Soviet Union didn't have wide variety of food. What is more important, it also didn't have a variety of quality of food -- the food that was available, had to be high-quality, no matter how much the production costs. There was no incentive to cut corners -- it's not like someone could replace sugar with corn syrup and put the difference into his own pocket. So all sugar would be beet sugar (cane doesn't grow in Russia), but absolutely no corn syrup. All vegetables would be grown in open soil. All cattle grown without "experiments" that Ministry of Healthcare would ban as unsafe or merely risky. No special "food for rich people" and mildly poisonous cheap feed "for the masses".
Luxury food was uncommon, and I heard, alcoholic drinks were substandard, but I don't drink alcohol in the first place. Chocolate was good -- I still buy one imported from there. Bread was very cheap (massively subsidized) and very good. I still don't see a fundamental difference between any bread sold in US and a wad of cotton covered with glue -- even Russian bakeries in US don't make it quite the same as ones in Russia. Maybe it degenerated to the same level there, too.
Then why stay?
Because I want to accomplish more than finding a place that I find least offensive for my tasted to live last few years of my life. Moving is difficult and expensive, I did it once to get out of the massive economic crisis of 1990's when I have graduated, and it was a massive endeavor for a person who is neither rich nor well-connected. I am still not sure that few years of productive work that I have gained from it were really worth the effort, however it was always clear for me that I am making a sacrifice and going to live in a society that I will find foreign and hostile. But this was only necessary because my own country was destroyed. I guess, at some point I can move to Russia or Belarus, as they are no longer post-Soviet mess that I have left, and I am an accomplished engineer instead of a recent graduate, three months out of university, but the amount of effort and expenses, the work that I could do instead of relocating again half across the globe, don't make such a thing worthwhile.
This is why I find it deeply offensive when Americans call their personally comfortable existence "freedom", or imply that immigrants such as myself, came to their country looking for this "freedom" or as an expression of approval of their ideology. I came here to live despite the oppression, because I care about developing science and technology, and the place where I hoped to do this before, became unsuitable for those purposes.
My stated problem is that I have to lecture people and write books just so I can explain some trivial fact about myself -- all thanks to idiotic racist assumption that American culture makes -- that Jews and Jewish culture are tied to some idiotic religion. If I was ethnically Russian I would not be automatically assumed to be Russian Orthodox. If I was British, I would not be assumed to be Anglican. Chinese? Polish? German? French? Japanese? None of those ethnicities have names that automatically imply following any particular religion, no matter how popular in corresponding countries. Jews are the only exception.
If you want to, you can come here from Russian an be wrapped up in your own
little ethnic cocoon and not even bother learning English. The US of A
tolerates that quite well.
This is precisely a freakshow version of a culture that I don't have anything to do with.
If you tried the same thing back in the USSR you would have been sent to a gulag.
USSR had plenty of relatively self-isolated tiny ethnic groups that were not doing anything unacceptable by common cultural standards. They were perceived as silly, but that's all.
A lot of people grew up fearing just that.
Fearing what?
If you were lucky enough to be some ethnic Russian part of the KGB crowd
then clearly you would have been insulated from any of that nonsense or
most of the economic deprivations for that matter.
I am neither ethnic Russian (mostly Jewish) and lived in a family of intellectuals (at least 3 generations of Electrical Engineers), not particularly associated with Communist Party leadership or KGB. The closest thing to any "oppressors" would by my grandfather who served in the Navy in WWII.
I have never seen a worse "economic deprivation" than occasional shortage of Moscow Sausage/Salami over the time of my childhood (I like it on sandwiches with tea), or being unable to buy a PDP-11 computer in 1988 when I was a student, so I had to use one in a school lab.
All horrors you were told about USSR are taken from 1930's-50's, a time that was long gone when I was born in 1969.
one of the most influential Russian writers of past 50 years.
"One of the most influential Russian writers" in US. He certainly influenced last half a century of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda.
In Russia even after his return to the country, acceptance by 90's political elite and praise by post-Communist propaganda (and plenty of other things such as stupid political manifestos and expressing antisemitic views in public) he is seen as a merely unusual and relatively talented writer who was unfairly imprisoned, then reduced himself to a political crackpot.
Also even in Volume one it is covered that GLULAG is an acronym.
And yet all Americans that I have ever seen writing that word, write it in lowercase, use plural, and in other ways imply that it means "prison camp". So not only they used his writing as the source, they didn't actually read it -- all they know is how it was portrayed in American propaganda.
I guess, it would be too much to expect of them to know that "GULAG Archipelago" is a work of autobiographic fiction -- Solzhenitsyn mixes facts from his own life with ideas and guesses that have nothing to do with his personal experience. This is often the only origin of claims about ridiculously large numbers of supposed Stalin's victims. Research shows that at most two millions of people were executed or died in prison for political reasons -- what is two millions too many but certainly wouldn't be enough for American propaganda workers. So instead of doing their own research, American "historians" decided to take writings of one seriously wronged person with vendetta against Communists, and treat his ramblings as facts. Naturally, Communists were not amused, and mutual accusations in Cold War propaganda were at ridiculous levels even in 70's-90's when actual causes for hostility nearly disappeared.
Okay, but seriously, while I agree that the American left would be considered center or even center-right in a lot of places, there are American socialists. There are just not a whole lot of them.
You are correct -- I am one person, and I live there.
But seriously, they are so marginalized that they about just as much a part of American culture as foreigners such as myself, and on top of that they are weak and underdeveloped as a political movement. A single teenage street gang has more political momentum behind itself than all American socialists combined.
I don't really need anyone to explain my own viewpoint to me -- my problem is that one has to write a book just to announce its existence.
You seriously expect to be able to transact business, or deal with the government, without paying bribes.
And in other cultures you do not have to "transact business" or "deal with the government" in any active manner just to survive.
You're used to a wide variety of choices for almost anything you buy.
...all those "choices" being inferior to the standards one would expect in other societies, thanks to governments pandering to businesses, monopolies, runaway cost-cutting and "creative" kinds of outsourcing.
The biggest meal of the day is in the evening.
...and this is why (plus the above as applied to food) obesity is both common and the most common reason for social ostracism.
You don't care very much what family someone comes from.
Instead you merely care how much money that family thrown at him/her.
If you have an appointment, you'll mutter an excuse if you're five minutes late, and apologize profusely if it's ten minutes. An hour late is almost inexcusable.
This is not acceptable in any culture. In US recently arrived foreigners are often late to their appointment because they don't have a car yet (something that in other countries is not strictly necessary to get anywhere).
If you're talking to someone, you get uncomfortable if they approach closer than about two feet.
This is the only thing that is actually valid in this list -- and only because Americans are trained to distrust each other and see a body of another human as some kind of abnormal, threatening or repulsive presence in their lives, while for others it's something ordinary, not significantly different from their own.
About the only things you expect to bargain for are houses, cars, and antiques. Haggling is largely a matter of finding the hidden point that's the buyer's minimum.
In USSR the only place one would be haggling is a farmers' market and maybe when buying a used car (from the previous owner). The idea of haggling for cars that happens in US is still something that I can't distinguish from outright scam, and I am not even going to explain what US real estate marker is.
There may have been a brief period of McCarthyism, but objectively there were no American gulags.
First and foremost, GULAG HAS NO PLURAL. It makes very easy to recognize Americans who pretend to be Russians or whose propaganda writings are translated into Russian, by this error that any Russian would notice -- as "GULAG" is an abbreviation for "Department of [Penitentiary] Camps" in Russian. It also shows that most Americans not only are only familiar with USSR labor camps through one book by Solzhenitsyn, they also limited their knowledge of that book to its title.
Second, US definitely had prison camps of various kinds, most egregiously camps for Japanese Americans during WWII, however currently operating Guantanamo Bay camp and various outsourced torture programs are also notable. Conditions in many American prisons are actually worse than most of what GULAG prisoners experienced -- if given a choice, I would rather cut trees in Siberian forest surrounded by intimidating-looking armed guards than be raped or stabbed by homemade knives. US also has long history of political prisoners, likely politically motivated assassinations, plus things that not even Stalin dared to do such as genocide (shut up, Robert Conquest readers).
USSR also did not inflict on its population a tiny fraction of death and misery that was caused by black slavery in the South, wage slavery everywhere, shitty social programs and a kind of "health insurance" that, if implemented in USSR, would get Kremlin overrun by angry crowds.
Perhaps the language barrier is an issue. "Freedom" does not equate with "Comfort" in English, although many people feel uncomfortable when their freedoms are limited. Individual discomfort/comfort levels can be effects of lesser or greater freedom, but are not the metric of freedom. I am uncomfortable on a hot, humid day but do not suffer any loss of freedom.
But this is merely comfort, yet Americans see it as "freedom". My point is that all societies are pretty far from any kind of "freedom", and yet Americans for some reason believe that their society is "free" just because they don't feel discomfort they would expect from oppression. I see it as a regrettable lack of perspective.
It sounds like you need to do some more shopping around between subcultures. Maybe it's because I spent a lot of time in college towns or because I grew up in Northern California, but I'm used to seeing two things that contradict your claims.
I am in Berkeley [, you insensitive clod!] That's probably the closest -- and yet way, way outside of what actually would be acceptable.
1) People from radically different cultures who moved to the United States and feel they're more able to practice their own culture here than back in India, China, Indonesia, etc., because in their homeland they were part of an offshoot culture than was frowned upon, while in their new homes that's absolutely welcomed.
Only if their culture is fringe at home, and is still fringe here -- except only at home they are taken seriously, so people don't bother to express direct hostility toward them in US. Those people who believe that they "practice their own culture" in US are deluding themselves -- their lives only exist in context of American society that follows rules and system of values that is specific to US. They can "practice their own culture" as a hobby or (and usually only) as a religious cult that no one cares about -- this is not "culture", this is thin veneer of a culture over their entirely American lives. Yes, that includes how Russian culture "exists" in US -- forgive me, I forgot to bring my knife, thick accent, bottle of vodka and two liters of sweat. I don't want this and would be insulted to reduce my cultural background to such a freak show.
2) People from the United States who hold very different values from the prevailing national/regional/local views, who are quite happy with their freedom to be different. I've also lived places in the U.S. where that's not the case, but usually that's been my experience.
American society is actually very much homogenized. Differences are superficial and mostly based on racial diversity, and racism that keeps people of the same race together, thus forming a "subculture" with no unique values. For example, if you look at Black/African American culture (that formed entirely over the history of US) it's clear that there are plenty of superficial differences but at its core it's exactly the same as culture of, say, white Protestants, except adapted to being discriminated against, and developed in relatively closed communities. For white American, especially one who adopted racial stereotype it looks "different" or even hostile, but most goals, values and ideas are exactly the same. Many other subcultures have the same fundamental nature, even if not based on ethnicity.
What bothers me most, American geek/nerd subculture, that I am supposed to be associated with, is still very close to mainstream, however mainstream treats it with such a ferocious hostility, I can never understand such a situation. For me American society looks like this Star Trek episode -- groups that I can barely recognize as different treat each other as complete opposites of themselves, and they don't realize just how far I am from all of them.
There's a lot of room here for vegans, people who hate television, people who are only interested in Chinese music, people who want to have no friends, people who never want to be alone,
Vegans? Hate television? That's not what a culture is about.
socialists, anarchists, conservatives, libertarians,
There are no "socialists" in US. American "socialist" would be welcome in the second-from-the right party anywhere else in the world -- and it's usually only second from the right because first would be basically Nazi. In USSR Communists wouldn't recognize him as belonging to a related movement. Politics is one of the area where only a very narrow range of opinion is tolerated in serious public discourse. "Libert
With respect, can I ask what culture it is that you're feeling is being imposed on you and/or all Americans?
Do you really expect a foreigner to describe you what he dislikes in your culture in a way that you would find acceptable?
How the fuck heavy is 200kg in lbs??
Ironic, isn't it?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=200kg+in+pounds?
Ironic, isn't it?
How can your "native culture" be truly yours if it was "forced" on you? How too can exposure to different cultures within the US be construed as "imposed" on you?
I realize (in retrospect) that when I grew up I didn't really have a choice, which culture to accept, so my set of values is consistent with what was popular in USSR at the time of my childhood, so local culture and government didn't seem like they force on me anything I don't want in the first place. This is the primary reason why I did not feel oppressed there but do feel oppressed in US.
More importantly, Americans believe that they are "free" only because they live in the same country that imposes the same basic culture and ideology on everyone (usually slightly decorated with some crude ethnic/racial flavor but the same at the core). Nevertheless this is not actually freedom -- it would be freedom if they were just as comfortable if they did not share the same values, and my experience shows that a person with different background feels extremely uncomfortable and oppressed here.
Objectively, both USSR and US societies were/are very strict in values, beliefs and ideology imposed on their members -- there are "sacred" ideas that, if attacked effectively and in a public manner, would earn a person ostracism and persecution. It's less visible because it applies only to things that are public and effective, and both societies had also wildly different standards on what is "public" and what can be "effective".
How much free speech do you need at age 6? How about being free of saying that your parents are Jewish, or that your parents are, say novelists or scientists or whatever who happen to be censored by the party without having your teacher telling you to shut up (at best) or sending you into the corner because your parents are traitor, counter revolutionary, dogs or some other shit while all the other kids laugh at you (at worst)?
Seriously man. That is a really stupid question.
Those things wouldn't be censored in USSR.
One would have to to try to publish something in the range between "Capitalism is good" and "Communists eat babies" to actually notice that there is actually a censor somewhere. Of course, some people did just that, but none of them were six years old.
Except, of course, those things didn't happen in USSR since 50's.
By the way, "Americans don't have long lines in the grocery stores!" was a major propaganda point in late 80's when former Communist politicians tried to paint US as the model for the "new direction" of their country. A lot of people actually believed that US has no lines at the checkout -- the only kind of "line in the grocery store" one would find in Russia in 80's. Personally, when I arrived in US, I was *SHOCKED* to see that in this particular aspect US and USSR had exactly the same kind of parity one would expect in nuclear weapons.
I can confirm that.
Also after 22 years in USSR and 16 years in US, I can assure everyone that I feel more oppressed in US than I ever did in USSR -- if for no other reason then because US imposes on me a culture different from my own, while in USSR I at very least had the luxury of having my native culture being forced on myself. I realize that for Americans it would be the other way around, but this is the only real difference for a person who is not a professional politician.
Goatse is red, /b/ has three posters --
Mudkips are blue.
moot, Chris-chan and you.
6%? What happened with the remaining 94%? Did they accumulate elsewhere (and then the whole thing is so far an epic fail)?