======================
 Fukuyama and Heywood
======================

This month I have read Francis Fukuyama's "Liberalism and its
Discontents". It reads almost like a textbook: a relatively light
reading and a fine overview. Not as engaging as the books that make
you to argue and to research more, like the last month's Nozick's book
was, but nice and educational.

Then started reading Andrew Heywood's "Politics" textbook. This one is
an actual textbook, the first modern one I read on politics; it is
nice to see references from it to multiple books I did read already,
and as happened to me previously while reading textbooks after
learning some parts of the subject elsewhere, it is nice to see
everything put together neatly and systematically, outlined and
compared, but also feels like I should have started from such a
textbook. Also as happens to me with some (text)books, it feels like
it would be useful for everyone to read a book like this. I am just a
little more than a quarter through it though, apparently it will take
a while to finish.


Isolation and repressions
=========================

Unfortunately, things around here do keep worsening. Among
Internet-related ones, there were DoH disruptions lately, followed by
TSPU-based interception of plain Google and Cloudflare DNS, replacing
the results with censored ones. While a few major banks started
requiring the local untrusted X.509 root certificates to access their
Web banking, and suggesting to recklessly install those system-wide (I
had to set a separate Firefox profile for those). And mirror.mephi.ru
(which includes a Debian mirror, which I started using after partial
blocks on foreign mirrors) was down for a couple of weeks. On top of
that, I have more of bureaucratic infosec-themed compliance work,
based on poorly written (and translated) local standards. Local Jingle
calls (DTLS traffic) also work poorly lately, but it is unclear
whether it is an artificially created problem.

The calamities outside of the Internet are many as well. Yabloko, the
only registered party openly advocating for peace (in addition to
being a nice social liberal party generally), was removed from ballots
based on charges such as violation of the IP rights, including those
of the photographer of the Hiroshima bombing, for using that picture,
and a ChatGPT-generated image, supposedly violating OpenAI's IP
rights. The people who came to the open court hearing were then
visited by the police and warned, some were detained. Plenty of
arrests all around, including those of parliamentary candidates. There
are new long sentences (4 to 11 years) for messages posted on the
Internet and contradicting government positions. The state propaganda
and government officials keep verbally attacking citizens who do not
support the government's course.

There are more routine daily life inconveniences created by the
government to rant about, but those fade, given the other news.

I try to be more sociable, thereby attempting to contribute to a civil
society development. As expected, the occasional political discussions
are quite awkward: basically like those about technologies, "editor
wars" and others. Plenty of dogmatism, unwillingness to consider other
perspectives (reminding me of the law of the instrument), or even to
allow for their existence, even among liberals. Also as with
technologies, many people are mostly unfamiliar with it all, many
demonstrate various fallacies and biases. But there were nice, fun,
and less political conversations, too. And it is good to see other
people who want to improve things (as opposed to the many indifferent
ones, those who gave up or did not even consider it worthwhile to try,
or those who are somehow supportive of the current situation): even
the increasing online isolation feels a little less disturbing then.


Physical exercises
==================

I tried to make my way through a "monkey bars" (aka "horizontal
ladder") course for the first time. It was not easy for me, but I
managed it. Likely it would become easier with training, but I do not
have those nearby. It is a fairly fun exercise to try.

Also started trying to do "typewriter" pull-ups, to work towards
"archer" pull-ups.


----

:Date: 2026-08-28