The American concept of freedom is rooted in the need for unity in the face of diversity. The Bill of Rights provides a government divided against itself. A citizen can appeal to the government to be protected from the government. This is civil rights.

You need to think of societies as being made up of opposing forces. Peace and stability are the balancing of forces rather than executing some ideal principle.

some military analysts say that so far it looks like a textbook example of an invasion in the making. — SophistiCat

They also say it's going to be a blood bath. Maybe it will be quick.

So the Ukrainian military is saying that Russia is getting close to invasion-ready.

Looks like it's going to be a blood bath.

Yet Russia has persistently trained it's troops in huge formations not seen in Western military exercises and hence can adapt to the troops being there. — ssu

Odd. Maybe he was reading War and Peace and thought it would be fun to get out there and camp in the mud.

One of the dangers of gross hyperbole is that you can end up tossing victory into your opponent's lap.

So it was US self-interest — Apollodorus

Sure. It was about defense, not economics.

The world needed supplies, the US needed market for surplus production. — Manuel

You're saying that on the heels of a devastating depression and fighting two wars simultaneously, the US was worried about excess production, so they invested in reindustrializing Europe.
:up:

Mark Blyth says it's the other way around: the world needed the US to buy its goods and establish stability after the war.

There is no reason to doubt the conventional wisdom regarding the Marshall plan: it was to get the British and French back on the job of securing the infrastructure of global trade. Only after it became clear that that wasn't going to happen did the US government start thinking about doing that job itself (with zero experience and a second rate economy).

Just note that you have a tendency to let your biases caus

oops

I don't know if a member of the CIA has ever run for president. I would think such a president would prefer to back a coup rather than deploy the military . It's cheaper.

Waving an invasion banner visible to spy satellites is a flamboyant message of some kind, especially when your real opponent knows you have logistical challenges wrt your target.

I guess here in PF would be people that absolutely would hate him (even more than Trump) — ssu

I don't think so. He seems to be viewed as only looking after Russia's interests in preparing for invasion, or at least that's what I think some were saying

Well for some strange reason American music has something to do with the invasion of Ukraine :lol:

Thus Black History Month.

Please follow my Black History Month posts in the shout box. It might help you.

I guess so.

The only thing worrisome to me is that Russia makes demands it knows NATO cannot accept to. Now it might be a negotiation tactic, but still. — ssu

Putin is a butthead. We'd elect him president if he was American.

This article says Russia suppressed economic activity in Ukraine and half the population has left. Why?

So the "de-escalation" would be that NATO would withdraw troops or never deploy troops to Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, The Baltic States, Slovenia, Croatia, Albania and North Macedonia?

That's what Russia is saying it wants. — ssu

Do they have the will and the means for that?

It's speculated that they don't have the means to fully occupy Ukraine, much less spread eastward.

Although it would be cool if there were 130,000 Russian troops surrounding the Netherlands rights now. :grimace:

I don't drink
. :wink:

That's terrible!

But I got you to stop whining about hip-hop you racist slob!

What Tobias said. Diversity improves the quality of the decisions. — bert1

I don't think there is any guarantee of that. It improves confidence in the government.

Well, I don't know any clergymen so I can't tell. But I think that kind of stuff would be more like Nation of Islam style .... — Apollodorus

Except they don't have a reputation for sexually assaulting children the way Christian clergymen do.

It's true that after all this time there is embedded resentment on both sides, mothers who have lost their children on both sides.

But conservative Israelis have never hidden their agenda of cleansing the country of non-Jews. If you don't know that, you owe it to yourself to learn more about the history of the region.

And your suggestion that wife-beating isn't as simple as it looks needs some examination on your part.

I appreciate the input. Which work is this from? I’m primarily using Robert Bretall’s A Kierkegaard Anthology when it comes to mapping his works out. — Dermot Griffin

It's from Fear and Trembling. :up:

rape rap, — Apollodorus

Is that what Christian clergymen listen to when they're molesting boys?

Animals in the zoo are free, but animals in the wilderness are not. This is why zoo animals are so unhygienic. It's their little protest to pee and shit all over the place.

Although it depends on how they run the zoo.

frank

So, a bit like Plato's anamnesiac idea of recalling the forms which are already embued in your memory banks that simply need to be triggered, eh? — Garrett Travers

I hadn't thought of that, but yes, it is similar. Innate knowledge vs starting with a blank slate.

Thanks a bunch for indulging my curiosity. — Garrett Travers

:up:

Expound on that, would you? I've never heard of it. — Garrett Travers

The idea is that the Persians invented the idea of progress. As opposed to the Hebrew view where you're born ignorant and have to learn about good and evil, Persians, specifically Zoroastrians, believed you're born with this knowledge and it's your responsibility to choose goodness over evil. It's not a one time choice, but something that's before you every day.

Where in the Hebrew outlook, you can tell if someone is good or evil by their health and wealth status (indicating God's covenant based promise), for Persians, outward status doesn't tell you anything. A person could be rich, but if they aren't choosing good every day, they're evil.

This shows up in Christianity, which received Persian ideas which had already been absorbed by the Jews. You can see that the Persian view is sort of proto inwardness.

Still, hardly the first 35 year old eager to jump on an 18 year old, and perhaps her being Jewish made the affair more naughtily thrilling to him. — Ciceronianus

I don't need to read this shit. Put it on reveal.

The idea of self-control as not being ruled by external or internal compulsion is more of a Stoic idea. — Paine

:up: But didnt the Persians see a grand cosmic choice set before the individual?

Does she intend to do that? As someone steeped in a phenomenological tradition I doubt that really is her wish — Tobias

She specifically mentions a number of logical challenges to the idea of volition. Her approach is: this crap is taking place in the realm of philosophy, and this is why: people became ensnared by theology and so fail to see the wisdom of the Greeks (which is actually a Hegelian insight, not Greek, but anyway,)

I think it's pointed to here:

"There was one who was great by virtue of his power,

" and one who was great by virtue of his wisdom,

"and one who was great by reason of his hope,

" and one who was great by reason of his love;

"but Abraham was greater than these,

" great by virtue of power which is impotence,

"great by virtue of wisdom whose secret is foolishness,

" great by reason of a hope that takes the
form is madness,

"and great by reason of a love which is hatred of oneself."
___________________
If you're in the ocean and you're fighting it, you're tiny and weak. If you fuse with the ocean, you become gigantic. There's an ocean running through you. It's the deeper imperatives of your being. Fight against it (often this is done to satisfy other people) and you're weak. Every obstacle is a mountain. But let that ocean animate you and through this impotence, foolishness, madness, and hatred of your own ego, you become like Abraham, who could do no other than the will of God.

That's my two cents worth.

:nerd:

SK is awesome. :up:

"It is the contention of the following considerations that the reason for this obscurity
is that the phenomenon of freedom does not appearin the realm of thought at all, that neither freedom nor its opposite is experienced in the
dialogue between me and myself in the course of which the great philosophic and metaphysical questions arise, and that the philosophical tradition, whose origin in this respect we shall consider later, has distorted, instead of clarifying, the very idea of freedom such as it is given in human experience by transposing it from its
original field, the realm of politics and human affairs in general, to an inward domain, the will."

How do you not read this as saying the Greek view was superior and the concept of will was a mistake?

She's wrong because the arguments against freedom of the will (nobody tops Schopenhauer there) are all purely logical. All you can do with a purely logical argument is map out the way we think. You can't use it as an ontological proof. Those arguments can't be used to reduce our everyday experience to "nothingness" as she says.

You guys do know Sotomayor is on the court, right? :roll:

She's pretty throughly wrong.

The Greeks abhorred the idea of being free from a community, one assumes because it meant vulnerability. Therefore they didn't explore the idea of an inward locus of control and the moral responsibility that is dependent on that idea.

There's nothing superior about the Greek outlook. And "freedom from" requires context for meaning.

The SEP says Augustine's will is basically self control. He was reacting against Manichean fatalism.

City of God appears to be anti-political, but it was a response to accusations that Christianity was responsible for the decline of Rome.

I think that when Rome fell, focus naturally went inward. Christianity followed that trend rather than causing it. So it was a massive shift in external conditions that shaped the way we think about volition.

Apology accepted. Now can we address my arguments — Garrett Travers

Present something worth considering and we'll consider it.

I read that Russia probably won't do a full scale invasion because of logistical challenges. IOW they could overwhelm the Ukrainian defenses, but they couldn't really occupy it.

Let me rephrase this: He believed that faith in God (“The Religious Life”) was the answer to a persons battle with anxiety and despair, leading to sin. — Dermot Griffin

:chin:

Anxiety and despair are the result of one's sin. Recognizing your sin leads you to reject yourself.

So the battle with anxiety and despair ends in something few would recognize as "religious life.". It's more in the land Beyond Good and Evil.

Kierkegaard was much more astonishing than you're making him out to be.