=================================
 "A Theory of Justice", part one
=================================

I have read a few short works, and finally started Rawls's "A Theory
of Justice".

Voltaire's "Candide" is an okay satire, taking the time of writing
into account, though it feels quite hurried and phantasmagorical, and
its "feel-good" ending seemed like a lazy way to conclude it. Voltaire
attacks literary critics of his other work in this one, as some do
(Dostoevsky comes to mind), even by names. It might be more amusing
for a writer to attack them preemptively, before they even had an
opportunity to criticize the writer's works. The work itself mocks
Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" in particular; that phrase
sounds odd both with and without the context, making it easy to
ridicule. But overall I was disappointed a little, since my
expectations were raised by the descriptions of "Candide" I have heard
before. This is yet another work reminding me of Pratchett's novels,
which similarly include some satire and collide characters with
differing world views.

Next, Václav Havel's "Политика и совесть" ("Politics and Conscience"?)
essay. It includes not merely a criticism of the Soviet and similar
regimes, but a suggestion that the seeds of totalitarianism and
impersonal bureaucracy came from Western Europe, and lay and develop
there as well, taking more covert forms. Such a point of view comes up
here and there. But as with other politicians' writings, it did not
seem like a thorough reasoning or investigation, but rather a way to
convey the author's outlook.

Solzhenitsyn's Nobel lecture is interesting. It covers empathy towards
people far away, sympathizing with the things one has not experienced
firsthand, along the lines of "For Whom the Bell Tolls", Tolstoy,
perhaps humanism more generally. Mentions literature and other arts as
a way to share experience.

Rawls's "A Theory of Justice" (revised edition) brings up ideas that
seem very sensible and simple, often intuitive, with decent
argumentation for them, while poking at a tricky subject, and it is
clearly written. I have only started reading the second part (out of
three) though, so going to write a review next time, but so far it
looks very good, and I am ready to recommend this to
everyone. Apparently it does not require much of context: the prior
works and views it leans on are briefly explained. But there may be
too much of initial excitement on my part, so I will better abstain
from further commenting on a book I have not finished reading yet.

Meantime, the local situation is far from a just one, and keeps moving
in the opposite direction. Some of the bits relevant to censorship,
mass surveillance, and oppression more generally, introduced or
observed recently:

- Mobile Internet access in Moscow works again, though it is at least
  as crippled as wired Internet access.

- The taxation service's website's (nalog.ru) nameservers started
  dropping DNS queries from foreign servers, announcing only a week
  later that it is for security. Users were confused, many not
  believing or not understanding what is going on, even when others
  did try to explain. The nalog.ru technical support (which demands
  email addresses with the "ru" TLD to contact them) claimed that
  everything is fine on their servers and the issues are on the
  clients' ends. The same website started refusing to serve important
  information to older Firefox versions, requiring version 140 at
  least. Its accessibility was always awful though.

- The Ministry of Digital Development demands that mobile ISPs
  introduce mandatory added charges (fines, basically) for VPN traffic
  (likely meaning any foreign traffic, since known VPN traffic is
  blocked already) above 15 GB per month (for now). It also demands
  that major local online services block incoming VPN traffic, and
  snitch on such traffic to the government, so that those proxying
  services can be blocked. Apparently some of their smartphone clients
  are being turned into even more of spyware for this purpose.

- Following the ban of the Memorial human rights organization (which
  attempted to bring attention to the human rights violations of the
  Stalin era), Stalin monument restorations, and replacement of Gulag
  museum with that of the genocide of Soviet people (implying that by
  foreign powers), a punishment for denial of such a genocide is
  introduced, and a memorial day for that.

- Apple ID payments are disabled via mobile service operators,
  hindering payments for VPN services.

- FSB can now request any databases from organizations, without
  bothering even with a formal warrant from a court, which it never
  seemed to have trouble acquiring.

- As usual, requested approvals for protests against the Internet
  blocks are denied with justifications such as infeasibility of the
  declared goals and COVID restrictions, apparently with undesirable
  legal consequences for the people who requested an official approval
  for those.

- I spotted TLS connection issues to my VPS and to imgur.com: on
  2026-04-05 on Rostelecom for a few minutes, on 2026-04-07 on Beeline
  for at least a day. TCP ones succeeded, but then TLS ones froze, as
  if with DPI-based blocking.

- Still noticing a varying packet loss to many foreign servers (which
  are not blocked completely yet). including stackoverflow.com,
  duckduckgo.com. But only for TCP, not ICMP.

- A local WireGuard tunnel died, possibly was blocked. Generally
  network availability is increasingly chaotic and steadily reduced.

- There was a Rostelecom (major ISP) outage, issues with online banks
  and government services. Unclear whether those are related to the
  blocks directly.

- I thought to get a new smartphone, Pixel 10a, while those are
  available and the new fee is not in effect, but noticed that it
  costs $500, with a 10% customs fee, which seemed quite a lot for a
  phone (almost the price of a fine laptop), especially given that I
  barely use those. And that is on top of increased VAT and income
  taxes, with future IMEI registration fee and foreign traffic
  fine/fee, older storage device fees, along with already increased
  connectivity prices and proxy/VPN costs needed to actually connect
  to most places. And that is apart from all the other increased
  costs. So I changed my mind, and it should be easy enough for me to
  minimize phone usage. Besides, so far I manage to avoid local
  (government-controlled) smartphone software, but in case if I will
  have to install it eventually, it is better to not rely on a phone
  for other purposes (aside from flashlight, clock, timers, regular
  and already-surveilled calls and SMS) at that point.

- The state propaganda, which has already spread across schools and
  universities, is going to reach for preschoolers as well:
  "conversations about important things" for kindergartens are
  introduced.

It is a long way from the current situation to a just society here; it
was quite long even before 2022, 2012, or 2000. And it is unclear how
to contribute to movement along that way, but perhaps it is worthwhile
to look into it. Political parties are supposed to be one way to do
that: as mentioned previously, there is at least the decent-looking
Yabloko party here, but they get no parliament seats since 2007. But
it is a surviving legal form of organization nevertheless.


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:Date: 2026-04-11