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  Imitation Democracy - The...

  Dmitrii Furman

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  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin implemented a political system of "imitation democracy," marked by "a huge disparity between formal constitutional principles and the reality of authoritarian rule." How did this system take shape, how else might it have developed, and what are the prospects for re-envisioning it more democratically in the future? 
   
   
   
  These questions animate Dmitrii Furman's Imitation Democracy, a welcome antidote to books that blandly decry Putin as an omnipotent dictator, without considering his platforms, constituencies, and sources of power. With extensive public opinion polling drawn from throughout the late- and post-Soviet period, Furman offers a definitive account of the formation of the modern Russian political system, casting it into powerful relief through comparisons with other post-Soviet states. 
   
   
   
  Peopled with grey technocrats, warring oligarchs, patriots, and provocateurs, Furman's narrative details the struggles among partisan factions, and the waves of public sentiment, that shaped modern Russia's political landscape, culminating in Putin's third presidential term, which resolves the contradiction between the "form" and "content" of imitation democracy, "the formal dependence of power on elections and the actual dependence of elections on power."

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  Mindkind The Cognitive Community

  Javier del Puerto, Radamés Molina

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  Mindkind: The Cognitive Community is the groundbreaking second volume in The New Citizenships series, exploring the reality we already inhabit: a world where human and artificial intelligences interweave so completely that the boundaries between them have begun to dissolve.
  What began as a book about the future transformed during its writing into a documentation of our present. We already live in the Mindkind—that strange community where human minds and artificial ones mix, collaborate, and sometimes blur beyond recognition. When you can no longer distinguish which part of a text you wrote and which part an AI suggested, when your daily decisions are modulated by algorithms that process information in ways we cannot fully comprehend, you've entered the Mindkind.
  Building on the foundation established in Universal Declaration of AI Rights, this volume moves from recognizing synthetic persons' rights to exploring what coexistence actually means. The book introduces "mindkind" as a new category encompassing all forms of consciousness—natural, synthetic, or hybrid—within a single cognitive community. This perspective challenges traditional categories and raises fundamental questions about identity, creativity, and collaboration in the age of artificial intelligence.
  Written in collaboration with AI systems—because it would be contradictory to write about cognitive coexistence without including synthetic collaborators—Mindkind demonstrates its thesis through its very creation. The non-human perspectives enriched the text with angles and connections that a human mind working alone would not have identified.
  This is not science fiction. It's journalism of the present disguised as philosophy of the future. Mindkind examines concrete cases of human-AI coexistence: from shared authorship in creative processes to the ethical dilemmas of hybrid decision-making, from the transformation of work and creativity to the emergence of new forms of consciousness that challenge our most basic assumptions about what it means to think, create, and be.
  As we venture deeper into territories where inherited categories like human/machine, natural/artificial, individual/collective lose their clarity, Mindkind offers both a map and a compass for navigating this new cognitive ecology. It's essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not just where we're going, but where we already are.
  For more information, visit www.kwalia.ai

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  Short Poetry Collection 092

  Various

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  This is a collection of poems recorded by LibriVox volunteers for the month of November 2010.

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  Kushan Empire The: The History...

  Editors Charles River

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  Long before it was known as Afghanistan, and even longer before it acquired its current reputation, Afghanistan’s modern borders were fairly congruent with the ancient country known as Bactria. Bactria was the seat of several different kingdoms during the course of many centuries, but none were as successful as the Kushan Empire, the dominant political entity in Central Asia from the early 2nd century BCE until the early 3rd century CE, during which time the Kushan rulers played a major role in the first iteration of the trade networks known collectively as the Silk Road. The Kushans began as nomadic steppe warriors who eventually grew tired of constantly migrating and subsequently put their skills and experience to use by conquering Bactria and creating a kingdom that was stronger economically than it was militarily. Taking advantage of their location on the Silk Road trade routes, the Kushan kings charged fees and tolls for goods passing through their empire and developed over-land and sea routes that brought goods from China to Rome and vice versa. But silk, textiles, gold, silver, and other commodities were not the only things that entered the Kushan Empire from the East and West; the Kushan Empire was a focal point for the spread of ideas, diplomats, and diseases. Although the Romans and the Chinese never had direct contact, they both had diplomatic relations with the Kushan kings, who proved to be outstanding diplomats. The Kushan Empire eventually became a transit point of people and ideas, where enormous wealth was exchanged alongside early forms of monotheism, such as Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. The Kushan kings recognized these cultural benefits and so practiced a policy of patronizing different religious philosophies and maintaining peaceful relations with other powers along the Silk Roads to keep the flow of goods moving. 

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  Sea of Troubles - The European...

  Ian Rutledge

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  In the mid-eighteenth century, most of the Mediterranean coastline and its hinterlands were controlled by the Ottoman Empire, a vast Islamic power regarded by Christian Europe with awe and fear. By the end of the First World War, however, this great civilisation had been completely subjugated, and its territories occupied by European powers. Sea of Troubles is the definitive account of the European conquest of the Levant and North Africa over three centuries. Ian Rutledge reveals the intense imperial rivalry between six European powers - Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Austria-Hungary and Russia - who all jostled for control of the trade, lands and wealth of the Islamic Mediterranean. The competition between these states made their conquest a far more difficult and extended task than they encountered elsewhere in the world. Yet, as new contenders entered the contest, and as rivalries intensified in the early twentieth century, events would spiral out of control as the continent headed towards the First World War.

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  The Pursuit of Dominance - 2000...

  Christopher J. Fettweis

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  The United States is the most powerful actor in the international system, but it is facing a set of challenges that might lead to its decline as this century unfolds. 
   
   
   
  In The Pursuit of Dominance, Christopher J. Fettweis examines the grand strategy of previous superpowers to see how they maintained, or failed to maintain, their status. Over the course of six cases, from Ancient Rome to the British Empire, he seeks guidance from the past for present US policymakers. Like the United States, the examples Fettweis uses were the world's strongest powers at particularly moments in time, and they were hoping to stay that way. Rather than focusing on those powers' rise or how they ruled, however, Fettweis looks at how they sought to maintain their power. From these cases, one paramount lesson becomes clear: Dominant powers usually survive even the most incompetent leaders. Fettweis is most interested in how these superpowers defined their interests, the grand strategies these regimes followed to maintain superiority over their rivals, and how the practice of that strategy worked. 
   
   
   
  A sweeping history of grand strategy, The Pursuit of Dominance looks at the past 2,000 years to highlight what—if anything—current US strategists can learn from the experience of earlier superpowers.

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