I am not supporting kagi since i found out they fund putin's war via yandex that is fully owned ditrctly by state
I’m sure if there was an open, comparable index they would happily just use that but if you want to change the landscape and slowly build up your own index you’ll have to make some pragmatic choices that might not be so black and white.
I've often switched between Google and DDG but always came back to Google as in direct comparisons I was always not finding the right results in DDG. Kagi is the first time that I have not switched back a single time as nothing changed negatively in the quality and quantity of the results.
It's a noble goal to have your own search index, but it's duplicating a lot of work that others with much more resources already do well.
I know this wouldn't be easy but maybe such an arrangement would be possible where there is some shared index and then the partners can each use it, extend it... in their own way.
2) At least in my case Russia is directly targeting my country, while USA does not (in general, far away empires are less dangerous than nearby ones)
3) In addition Russia is more resource constrained so getting the same amount of funds benefits them more
4) USA is also doing plenty of non-evil things while for Russia this activity are much much smaller part of their spending
That really depends on where you live in the world. South Americans, Palestinians and Iranians would probably disagree with you.
If you meant something else, excluding Venezuela, please tell me.
For who is greater enemy see my point (2) and I understand that for someone directly familiar with United Fruit Company type of adventures USA may be greater enemy despite being overall less evil.
Search is now Uruky, and I’ll see how that goes. https://uruky.com/
In terms of other products, I have more American ones than is ideal.
I wish it were not necessary to use search indexes from multiple countries I do not like, but the American government and American companies have decided they should be in charge of what users are allowed to see. I see no alternative.
Maybe english is not his first language, but at least in America we use the word “politics” to describe things like party association, arguing over wedge issues, treating elections as a “team sport”, rhetoric, etc. We don’t use it to describe an attempt by one nation to wipe out another one.
I’ve been a Kagi user for several years now but, ugh, now I have to think about it a lot more and I’m probably not going to be as enthusiastic about recommending it.
The moral dimension is also completely illusory. Ukraine is fighting a war of attrition that's funding is due to the same cold-hearted power politics that Russia subscribes to. It greatly benefits the US and EU to keep Russia in an expensive, resource-intensive, prolonged military engagement. Put another way, the US is knowingly sacrificing Ukrainian lives and infrastructure because it gives us more power; however, at the end of the day we get to drape our actions in nice sounding rhetoric about supporting national independence even though that is merely accidental. Not to mention that the Ukrainian government has legitimately persecuted Russian-speaking minority populations in the country. Obviously, this has very little to do Russia's actual motivations for the war, but the point is the Russia's actions also have accidental good effects.
“The moral dimension is illusory“
Yeah maybe if you glue your eyelids shut and pretend millions of dead people are actually totally fine, and definitely WORTH expending for… wait what is it that Russia has gained from this invasion?
Disgusting effort, I hope you never have control over a single ounce of power.
> The moral dimension is also completely illusory. Ukraine is fighting a war of attrition that's funding is due to the same cold-hearted power politics that Russia subscribes to.
Blatant gaslighting. Ukraine is defending against an invasion. Russia has said it wants to go further and take what it can of Europe, states that the Baltics aren't countries and threatens us all with nukes on a daily basis.
In Europe we defend ourselves by funding Ukraine.
It is super simple; Russia attacks when it is strong enough and takes what it can.
We tried living in peace, we believed in it. We basically got rid of our armies in Europe, since everybody knows how to live in peace. Except Russia.
We will not make that mistake again.
Talk about an extraordinary case of recency bias. Cheap shot, I know, but I had to make it.
Europe currently defends itself because that's all it CAN do. They abandoned their armies because the continent outsourced defense spending/industry to the United States and Russia following WWII.
We outsourced our defense spending to Russia?
Are you incapable of embarrassment over your own level of ignorance?
Wrong. The UK and France have several military bases in the middle east, thousands of kilometers away from home.
The NATO invasion of Libya is an example of how Europeans "know how to live in peace"
Ukraine wanted to join NATO because it sees Russia as a threat (I dunno, maybe because Russia had just invaded Crimea and "annexed" it).
Russia's response is to invade Ukraine, slaughtering countless civilians, and has stated that it wants to take more territory around other former-soviet states.
And your reaction, to a country exercising its sovereignty, and another country invading it as a result, is "yup, that's just politics for ya"? That countries have the right to invade other countries if they feel disadvantaged by their neighbor's decisions?
Ukraine didn't just disadvantage their neighbor. In international affairs, red lines are a common tool for expressing acceptable bounds of negotiation. Russia made it very explicit that if Ukraine joined NATO there would be conflict. We live in the real world, and "sovereignty" is not real; nations are not unconstrained agents that can do whatever they please. They have to weigh the effects of their actions and be willing and capable of defending the consequences. This has been true for all of human history, has never changed, and likely never will. You simply deluded yourself into thinking otherwise.
I will also add that in the modern world, peace has largely been maintained because the value of international commerce is much greater than the value derived from conflict. Economic integration is the best recipe for enduring tranquility. However, the US has pursued broad economic sanctions against Russia since the annexation of Crimea, all but ensuring that an invasion of Ukraine would be a profitable (or at least not harmful). In other words, the United States miscalculated, overplayed it's hand in pursuing a containment strategy against Russia and ultimately invited violence.
> However, the US has pursued broad economic sanctions against Russia since the annexation of Crimea
Oh those poor Russians, they can't even violently annex neighboring territory without getting sanctioned. I feel so bad for them. We should have just uttered "tsk, tsk" and kicked them out of the olympics. That'll teach 'em!
No, the "economic tranquility" was the period after the Soviet Union fell and the entire western world was welcoming Russia in with open arms, and the economic integration was well under way. Until Putin came in and decided "no, I like things the way they were" and has been trying to bring back the USSR ever since. He doesn't want any economy he can't directly control by force. You think Putin wants economic integration? He wants his soviet union back.
None of what you're talking about is "politics" unless you think Russia actually has a leg to stand on with any of this. They don't. They never have. They're the aggressor here and none of the "warnings" they gave justify any of this.
It's also important to note that this conflict is not one-sided. Ukraine has dedicedly become a proxy for US and European power projection. This is not a genocide or some other form of needless violence. This is a classic example of powers butting heads and all parties refusing to take de-escalatory actions.
Lol so we can only pass judgement on something if there exists a law that it violates, and an authority that can prosecute it. If there’s no ability to prosecute something, it must be fine, just fine!
> On the world stage, there is no higher authority, rights, or laws. What you have are a set of nations, which by definition, are agents seeking to secure prosperity for themselves.
> This is a classic example of powers butting heads
I keep imagine you looking at Hitler’s actions in the 1930s and concluding “there’s no higher authority than nation states, so this is all just geopolitics, powers butting heads” and refusing to make a judgement on good vs bad.
Maybe a good checksum on your world views is “if it results in what Hitler did being fine, maybe I need to reevaluate”.
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I'll edit this to add: You bring up "distinctions between [my] moral language and the language of geopolitics"... that's what the whole objection to Kagi's founder is about. Confusing geopolitical decision making like "what should U.S. foreign policy be, if we want to maximize the chance of peace", and moral judgements, like "is invading your neighbors to get what you want ok", is the very thing Kagi's founder is doing that I find objectionable. Because you should be able to pass a moral judgement on an action without conflating that with whether the U.S. and its allies made the right strategic moves. It doesn't matter that Russia signaled their actions in advance, it's still not ok to invade another nation. One should be able to clearly see this to be true, and not just sweep it under "it's just politics." Calling it politics is both strictly speaking true, and also a cop-out, because you get to avoid actually making a judgement about whether you think it's right. Kagi's founder did that, and you're doing that here.
The US could easily say today that it has a national security concern that it needs Greenland in order to have a good defensive posture against Russia now that the north sea is becoming more navigable. Does that make it morally right to just... invade and take Greenland? I assume that is your position, because it's essentially exactly what Russia is doing. (You don't need to respond if your answer is "Yes". This thread is getting long and if your position is indeed that countries can take what they want if they have "national security concerns", we're far enough apart that there's no reason to continue debating.)
I loathe the charge that if you have any nuance and think the war is not ENTIERLY Russia's fault, then you must be brainwashed by propaganda.
And after you then stopped typing the response, otherwise having to use a device that was made in China built from oil-based components using oil—based transport throughout its supply chain, send a postcard with your apology to the Kagi team and anyone else who does not fund wars and still uses traded goods, because this is how the world is.
If you want to throw a however tiny wrench into Putin‘s war efforts, complain load to your government to join sanctions and to have them support Ukraine and make your choice at the ballot box accordingly.
why? Kagi is not entitled to be paid by them, and on free market they are free to not buy a commercial product and use alternatives
and avoiding Kagi is trivial to achieve while avoiding products that were produced with oil in some way is impossible
Source for Kagi switching to Nebius Group [1] from Yandex?
(I care deeply about the war in Ukraine. But I'm still a happy Kagi user. I would like the option to exclude Yandex from my results. It reduces the effectiveness of the search engine. But that's a choice I'd prefer to be able to make myself. I'm not sure if that's realistic to offer to every user at scale, however.)
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...