It is forbidden in many democratic countries to spread hateful lies by way of press. — Olivier5

And what exactly do you think Putin said about the press he banned? That it was spreading the truth but he didn't like it?

The point of a free press is that it is free from the government it may criticise. That is not the case if it's that same government who gets to unilaterally decide if what they're publishing are 'hateful lies'. I would hazard a guess that's close to the exact wording Putin used about the press he banned.

Ukraine is a democracy, while Russia is not. It makes a difference in my book, and obviously for Ukrainians. — Olivier5

I'm not going to repeat the argument that @boethius has already made against the distinction you're trying to make. Though I will emphasise the main point that Ukraine is not currently a democracy, so claiming that supporting Ukraine is supporting democracy is just factually inaccurate.

What I'll add is that what makes a difference 'in your book' is irrelevant to your argument here.

Fine, the democratic process is top goal in your book, Ukraine was slightly better than Russia on that front according to some official measures. In your book, that makes it an important victory if Ukraine defeat Russia here. In your book.

Your argument, however, is not that. Your argument here has always been that alternative views are ludicrous. Not that they just have different top goals. That they are so wrong as to be apologist, Putin's supporters, or even fucking FSB agents!

If all you've got to support your argument is that, in your book, democracy is the number objective, then you've no ground at all on which to argue that alternative views must be apologist. We simply have a different number one objective. For me, it's human rights. On that score, Ukraine is a hairs breadth different from Russia, and a Ukraine in mountains of debt to the US would probably be even worse.

Democracy is not a cure for human rights violations because its essentially nationalist and populist and does nothing to prevent off-shoring human rights abuses to minorities or foreign nations.

OK, let's clear up a few potential blocking differences.

Firstly, death is death. If your loved one dies from childhood cancer it's not somehow less emotionally painful than if they die in a cluster bomb attack on a school. They're no less dead, it's often not even any less physically painful. Dead's dead. So a 'world order' as you put it, in which (for example) the EPA can be given backhanders to approve chemicals they know have a risk of cancer such as to cause, on average, 100 more deaths a year than otherwise, is no different to a world in which an aggressor uses cluster bombs in their annual war and kills 100 children in a school. 100 children needlessly dead in both cases.

Secondly, Ukraine is not part of the same 'world order' as the West (in terms of the freedoms and benefits you're talking about). It comes out below Russia on many Human Development Indices, it's around the same level in terms of political corruption (though better than Russia in this case), it's the world's main hub of illegal arms dealing and it has a huge far-right problem. Ukraine fighting Russia is not New World vs Old World. It's Old World vs Old World. To establish a new world order there we'd have to overthrow both governments. Getting one to beat the other is irrelevant to that project.

Those aside, I agree with the thrust of what you've written, that some kind of system needs to be in place to ensure peace and that system needs to be enforced against infraction, by (often) war.

But that's not what's happening here. As @boethius mentioned way back (some hundred pages at least) if the UN or NATO had pulled their finger out of their arse earlier and stopped this thing in its tracks (either full NATO membership fo Ukraine, or perhaps even troops on the ground), then we wouldn't be here. We're here because the new world order doesn't really want to establish peace at all, it profits from war. It's in their financial best interests that Russia is tied up in a long protracted war and that Ukraine have only just enough ability to resist to keep acting as a lucrative market for weapons. It's not remotely helping 'fight the good fight' to have an army just about strong enough to hold off the enemy but not quite strong enough to repel them, and keep it that way for as long as possible. If we're serious about stopping Russia, then stop Russia. Put 100 battalions of UN/NATO troops on ground to enforce a peace and see how many atrocities get committed under that watch. But we're not serious about stopping Russia. We're serious about dragging out the war long enough to cripple them.

The best commentary I have heard paints Putin as the head of a crime mob who has become stuck in escalation mode by his miscalculations. Partly Ukraine is just about staying domestically popular. But also, he actually does seem to have a personal and irrational hatred of the West’s imposition of a global rules framework, so would be happy to smash it.

Putin may not actually have planned to go further than smash the emergence of such order right on his own doorstep. Maybe Poland, the Baltic States, Finland, could all be left as no kind of real threat to the Russian kleptocratic, fossil fuel, crime syndicate at all. — apokrisis

This I agree with in the most part. We might quibble about the proportions of motivation, but I think broadly this is right.

the whole planet should find Putin worth stopping - but in the context of the degree to which he threatens the world order that we need to construct, rather than the degree that it protects the world order that underpinned a fossil fuel consumption based model of humanity these past 70 years. — apokrisis

Absolutely. The argument is about method, not outcome.

Putin needs to be prevented, not only from committing more war crimes, but from running his kleptocracy in which human rights are serially abused. The question is whether a continued ground war fought using Ukrainian troops with a drip feed of US weapons and a global propaganda effort is the best method.

The reasons I don't think it is, are;

1) The pre-war Ukrainian regime was barely better then the Russian one. The regime post-war isn't likely to be an improvement. so getting Ukraine to fend off Russia does little to prevent the aspects of Putin's regime we want to stop, and prolongs rather than foreshortens the commission of war crimes.

2) For whatever reason, Russia put on the table an opening demand that was barely any different from the status quo. Ukraine could have agreed to it and noticed almost nothing. So (again, not knowing the reasons Russia made such a mild offer) there is an opportunity for an enforced peace on those terms. Enforced peace is almost universally a less harmful state of affairs than war.

3) Even in the worse case scenario that Russia had some card such that a peace deal on those terms gave it some control it didn't already have, dealing with the human rights abuses in a state controlled by Russia is no harder than fighting a ground war against them. We haven't made the situation any worse. We still need to achieve the same thing, only now we get to do it not in a war zone. It is universally easier to manage any situation outside of hostilities than it is whilst they are ongoing.

If we eliminated the corporate structure, while it would greatly impact the way business operates, solutions would be devised to accomplish the same goal. Loan documents could be created to allow investors to take a share in your personally owned business and indemnity agreements could be devised either through insurance policies or investors to accept liability if it should arise.

Limiting liability isn't something that is only accomplished by corporate structure and investment opportunities can be created without corporate structure. You can as much invest in my lemonade stand and have an agreed upon return structure as you can buy corporate stocks, and I can protect my personal assets should I sell poison lemonade by buying an insurance policy or paying someone to post a bond. — Hanover

This sounds like the "there's no point making it illegal, they'll just find another way round" argument. Trotted out regularly to avoid any legislation limiting corporate excess. The same is true of drugs, abortion, prostitution, and a whole host of other matters which people have no trouble nonetheless making illegal (and continuing to mop up all the 'ways round' people find). If there are other ways to limit liability but offload the risk elsewhere, then they need to be cleared up too.

That seems a reasonable response to their nonsense claim against you, right? — Hanover

No. Not to me. If I'm making 5% return because of the success of a lemonade stand (I knew what I was really investing in at the start, I knew how the interest was really going to be paid off) then I'm profiting from the success of that lemonade stand. It's only fair I should shoulder the share of harms if it fails.

I'm not suggesting that doing away with limited liability is the only option. There are there ways of doing it. We could set corporation tax high enough to cover a decent welfare program and have laws guaranteeing a decent wage and working conditions. Those two measures would be an alternative means of tying the profits back to the risks, you reap the profits, but you pay a tax to cover the social consequences of the risk. Unfortunately we have neither.

I'm open to arguments that there is something else underwriting the disparity, but the starting point has to be admitting that there is such a disparity and putting the obvious label on it.

Reading the first half or so of Why Nations Fail (before I got bored) convinced me that the data is not really ambiguous here. My son's conclusion was that we ought to treat capitalism like nuclear power — yeah it works, and maybe nothing else works nearly as well so it's our best option, but it's super dangerous and we should carefully contain it. — Srap Tasmaner

Interesting. I think the balance is about the extent to which those caveat that you admit (colonialism - both old and new), and ecological abuse, are responsible for the rise. It's possible, is it not, that the reason capitalist countries are rich is nothing more than that they stole resources from other counties and didn't pay their ecological 'bills'? If so, then there's no need to be cautious with economic arrangements which create monstrous disparity on the grounds that they might also have a part to play in this prosperity. We've already accounted for the prosperity - we stole it.

If you're going to have the indecency to talk about me in the third person at least read what I fucking wrote first.

The question was about the relative change in war crimes (or human rights abuses) following peace negotiations compared to those committed during the actual war in question.

Only a fucking moron could read that and assume the question was "does anyone ever do anything bad outside of war".

(Oh, and just to correct your historical inaccuracies, the Poles didn't negotiate a peace treaty, the Polish government continued in exile, the Polish army surrendered, but don't let any facts cloud your biases).

The point, for anyone with a post-kindergarten level of interest in the subject, was that there's no good reason to believe that atrocities would continue at the same level in Russian controlled territories. They haven't committed atrocities on this scale in other occupied territories, and most, if not all, peace negotiations have lead at the very least to a reduction in those sorts of human rights abuses.

Considering the enormous harms of continued war, anyone not playing out their Star Wars fantasies would need an extremely good reason to justify continued war. The idea that it will cause less atrocities isn't even a moderately good one on average. With this particular situation, where Ukraine are no angels themselves, it's hard to argue there'd be much difference. Look at the human rights reports on Donbas before the war. There's barely a hair between the abuses of occupying Russia and those of Ukrainian forces and militia.

It's scary how easily the caricatures are cemented into narratives which then build support for actual policy.

The evidence isn't even hard to find, the reports of Ukrainian human rights abuses, far-right violence, slavery, corruption and illegal arms trading are still online. It's not as if some shadowy cabal have hidden them away to rewrite history, they've just told everyone to pretend it isn't the case and that's enough apparently. Now Putin is the devil, Zelensky is a saint. It's always been that way. And that's that.

But then one quite corrupt, violent nation invading another slightly less corrupt slightly less militaristic one, as a story, doesn't sell weapons for nearly as long as the story of the world-dominating embodiment of evil invading the harmless Ewoks.

When a war is over, there should be NO killings — ssu

So not even all caps worked? Shit. I've run out of ways to communicate the word 'reduce' with any more clarity.

What does Putin want...? To de-NATO and de-Nazify...? Hard to tell exactly — jorndoe

The demands couldn't have been clearer and were delivered pretty near the beginning of the war. No NATO membership, independent Donbas, Russian Crimea.

Unless Ukraine fight even harder than they have been (or NATO finally pull their finger out of their arse and get properly involved instead of just seeing Ukraine as a lucrative arms market) it looks likely that this is what they're going to end up with anyway... Just with thousands of innocent dead in addition.

If Ukrainians want to fight to the death for their flag, that's up to them. Doesn't make it morally right, nor advisable.

there's a reason "conservative" politicians justify corporate giveaways in the name of the corner store, because that business structure is not suspect. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I see what you're saying. I'm going to sneak in another leftist dig here though and say that this is why the corner shop is used. Its why @Hanover reached straight for the restaurant owner. Because it's a non-suspect, honest, down-to-earth arrangement which can be used to justify the gross immorality of corporate profiteering.

But anyway...

If we focus on that fundamental structure, we're sort of playing on the conservative's turf. I'm suggesting this is not where the trouble is, but in the financialization of business and in other rent-seeking (rather than just profit-taking) behavior. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. I think you're right. As so often happens when systems grow somewhat chaotically, we get emergent features we wouldn't necessarily have planned if we'd have designed the system from scratch. One of the emergent properties of the corporate model is the ability to leverage complex financial instruments (using the corporation's assets) which yield a truly unholy amount of disproportionate income.

If such instruments (rent-seeking being only one such) could be banned then I think we'd have something like a solution, but what concerns me is the extent to which such behaviour only emerges because of the immunity this legal fiction of the corporation gives its owners. Can we keep the corner shop without also allowing subprime mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations (like I know what they are!)...? Maybe. I hope so.

I also think there's an empirical case that business formation, with institutions to support it, raises the standard of living of a community. Look at the success of micro-lending programs, for example. So I need room to consider the corner store blameless, rather than exploitative just because it includes an owner and a few employees. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. That's fair. I think that possibly the rot at the heart of the whole thing is this risk/reward model of business in the first place. If communities really do need the corner store is it a sensible strategy to encourage someone to gamble on one at 20:1 odds with the incentive being a high payout. Maybe we ought to just build the corner store ourselves as a community?

Except where Putin has succeeded in gaining a military victory: In Chechnya, the Chechen Republic. — ssu

Jesus. Can none of you read?

which strategy is most likely to quickly reduce the scale of war crimes. — Isaac

REDUCE. Reduce. Reduce.

Not sure if all caps, bolding, or underlining works on you people so maybe all three. We're discussing which approach might reduce the amount of death and destruction. Pointing out that there is still some war crime activity in occupied territories is not an argument that there is more war crime activity in occupied territories than there is in the actual war.

Where the response to torture is "Yes, everybody does that," there's some moral calibration in order. No, not everybody does that, and those who do are criminals. — frank

Both Russia and Ukraine have been accused of summary arrests and torture in the contested regions prior to the wars. Read the fucking reports before mouthing off with your pseudo-psychologising.

Exactly. No need to trivialize war crimes. — Olivier5

No one is trivialising war crimes. Some are using them to spit out lazy virtue signalling instead of actually considering the situation seriously.

And fight. — Olivier5

Go on then.

As if Russians are not known for their ethnic cleansing penchant in the occupied territories: — neomac

The question was...

which strategy is most likely to quickly reduce the scale of war crimes. — Isaac

Try reading first, commenting after. If you have anything to contribute about what course of action is most likely to REDUCE the severity of war crimes then let's have it, because I don't know if you've noticed but continued war doesn't seem to be doing that.

So no actual counterargument then. Thought not.

If in doubt resort to accusations of apologism and return to shitposting random articles without comment.

Pathetic.

They routinely murder and torture folks there. — Olivier5

So? Are you completely incapable of following an argument. The question is about which strategy is most likely to quickly reduce the scale of war crimes. It is not about whether Russia do anything bad.

Ukrainian armed forces routinely murder and torture folks in Ukraine too. So how does this fact link to your assertion that peace negotiations will not lessen the scale of war crimes?

What seems to be completely escaping the counterargument here is the notion that anything can be judged comparatively. It is not sufficient to point out that things might be horrific under Russian occupation, to make an argument you have to show that they would be more horrific than continued war, either by scale or duration.

What evidence do you have that they won't continue after a peace deal? — Olivier5

I can't think of a single precedent. In no circumstances at all, that I'm aware of, throughout history, have war crimes continued on the same scale after peace negotiations as they were at before them. I would think the complete absence of such a situation from the annals of human history would count as fairly substantial evidence.

There are no such war crimes in Russia nowadays.

The scale of war crimes in Russia-occupied Crimea and Donbas before the war were on a par with those committed by the Ukrainian forces.

So we have no historical precedent, no reason to think Russia treats its own citizens that way, and no evidence from 8 years of Russia-occupied territory in Ukraine of similar scales of war crime.

how would you bring the guilty to justice, after a peace deal? — Olivier5

Same way they were brought to justice after the Yugoslav conflict. Why would you think the methods would be any different?

a peace deal now entrenching Russia's position in Dombass and Crimea would ensure that they can continue their crimes unabated. — Olivier5

On what evidence? What evidence do you have that war crimes continue in occupied territories after the peace deals have been signed to a greater extent than they do during the war. Do we see similar atrocities being carried out in current Russia on ethnic Ukrainians? Are there still such crimes being committed on a regular basis on the former Yugoslavia more so than during the war?

And prior to the invasion are you saying that no such crimes were committed by Ukrainian forces in Donbas during the insurgencies - because the UN war crime tribunal would beg to differ with you on that front.

You've still not joined the dots. What links the scale of atrocities during the war with the notion that only further war can prevent them?

How would your argument apply to Hitler? — apokrisis

What argument? The argument that peace negotiations and territorial concessions are often a good strategy to avoid loss of life? Then yes, that would definitely have been true of 1930's Europe too.

You’ve said the same thing a hundred times. — apokrisis

Oh, well maybe an answer this time then.

What is the link between the scale of the atrocities and the efficacy of continued war as a strategy to limit them? It's a simple enough question.

No, you are quite right. This is indeed how one wages a war to liberate and denazify a country. What was I thinking! — apokrisis

Intersting outburst. Anything in response to what I actually wrote...?

So your 'sources' are the CIA, and the arms-industry-funded Atlantic Council? Phew, thank goodness we've finally found some unbiased sources without any ulterior motives to worry about.

And...?

How does the scale of the atrocity have any bearing whatsoever on the most effective method for stopping it?

The Yugoslav wars were the scene of some of the worst war crimes since WWII. None of which prevented several peace talks, UN interventions, negotiations, agreements over territory and a final division of the disputed territories. None of which, incidentally, even prevented the perpetrators of those war crimes being brought to justice.

There's nothing whatsoever about peace talks, concessions and territorial agreements which either perpetuates war crimes, nor prevents justice being done to those who committed them.

So if you want to have a serious conversation instead of just virtue signalling, then link your atrocities to a solution of some kind. Join the dots. How does the fact that the Russian army are behaving so atrociously mean that prolonged war is better than negotiated peace (even with concessions). What's the link?

I think it's valuable to explore the logic of risk and reward, owner and employer, and you've raised some interesting questions, but your analysis is throughout colored by an image of the likes of the board of directors of Exxon Mobil, on the one hand, and the guys and gals working on the oil rig, on the other. — Srap Tasmaner

Funny how a left wing ideology is always 'colouring' someone's interpretations, but more centrist views are apparently transparent. Our ideology 'colours' our narratives. Every single one of us. There's no un-coloured version. Yes, I'm far more concerned about the disparity between the Exxon CEO and his workers then the local restaurant owner and his staff. That my bag. It doesn't on it's own make the narrative any less viable.

Google small business employment statistics and you'll find there are many other stories to tell. Something like half of employed Americans work for a company with more than 500 employees, and something like 45% work for a company with fewer than 20, and the bulk of the latter are self-financed businesses. — Srap Tasmaner

Right. So a minority.

As I've said to @Hanover a few times now, the issue here is whether the 'increased risk' narrative can be used tout court as a justification for the fact that owners reap all the profits from a corporation (with very little of the risks). Your statistics seem to confirm the theory that it cannot. Only in a minority of cases are the owners taking a comparable risk to the workers. The majority of cases they're not, so the justification based on the increased burden of risk is not sound.

The business isn't an abstraction anymore than any term is a conglomerate of various parts. I get that the business isn't simply desks, computers, people, software and the like, but that it's a bunch of stuff holistically, but it's actually a physical thing as much as a university is, a government is, or even an apple is. You can point to the stem, the peel, the seed, whatever, but where is the apple? It's the whole thing. — Hanover

But all those parts belong to the corporation, not the owner. You can't have it both ways. Later on you want to distance the 'bricks and mortar' from the owner when you say...

just as I don't have to pay your debts because I am a different person than you, I (personally) don't have to pay the debts of the corporation unless I personally guaranteed it. Just like if I have no money at all, it will do you no good to sue me because I can't pay what I don't have, but if I do have assets, you will be able to collect. What that means is that my million dollar corporation stiffs you, you sue it, and you can garnish its accounts and seize its assets just as if it were a person. — Hanover

... So when it's debt is all "Oh, the corporation is a separate person and the owner's didn't ought to be any more liable than your or I", when it's profits is all "Oh there's definitely a real thing the owners own, it's all the assets, the buildings, the activities..."

Basically, the owners own the profits, but relieve themselves of the debts.

The unemployment rate is 3.7%, which is effectively zero when you discount those who don't want to work and those who are temporarily between jobs. Businesses are closing because of lack of workers. I'm not sure what economy you're looking at. — Hanover

According to the latest YouGov poll, just 17% of British workers are very happy with their job and over half report being unhappy at work. So why aren't they all just picking another one off the shelf?

I can go online right now, go to the Secretary of State website, and create for me a corporation or an LLC in a matter of minutes. That will not suddenly propel me to great wealth. According to one site, the average small business owner earns between $30,000 and $146,000 per year, with a median of $64,650. When someone tells me they're self employed, that doesn't cause me to think they must be wealthy. — Hanover

As I've said repeatedly, the fact that you can point to counterexamples doesn't have any bearing on whether this minority can be used to justify the status of the majority.

If the owner works 100 hours in a week and doesn't sell his product, he earns nothing. That's not a theoretical construct. That occurs all the time. The owner get the profits, and profits are defined as what is left over after expenses. An employee is an expense. What this means is that the owner is paid last with the remainder. That remainder may be zero, it may be debt, it may be riches, and it may be anything in between — Hanover

What it may be is neither here nor there, we're talking about risk. That means the relevant metric is what it's likely to be, not what it may be. My point is that the distribution of wealth between business owners and worker in general indicates that what it's likely to be, is far greater on average, meaning the risk is far lower than the risk the worker takes.

This is a cartoonization of the real world. Reminds me quite a bit of the propaganda used in WWI. Very dangerous thinking, in my opinion. — Manuel

Yes, it's frightening how quickly these sorts of narratives can take hold, as if the past weren't written in black and white for everyone to see.

Go back a few years and read literally any foreign affairs strategist writing about the region, the topics will be the far right in Ukraine, black market arms, Russian oil and gas, and talk of Putin's internal power politics. Now everyone's pretending like Ukraine is some sort of doe-eyed Disney hero, and Putin's the devil and we've always known it. But the writing is still online, no one was talking that way before the invasion. It's scary-level denial.

Russia has seen it's share of defeats (just like the US with Vietnam and Afghanistan — ssu

They went well didn't they. Good job Russia were defeated in Afghanistan otherwise the place might be absolute hell...oh, wait, it is.

I didn't ask for your assessment. I think you know why. — frank

Yes, because it's easier to ignore my questions than it is to answer them.

No, the real problem is that... — ssu

@Manuel's question was about the solution, not the problem. It's lazy virtue signaling to just whinge on about the extent to which Russia's attitude is the problem. The question is what course of action we should endorse as a solution to it.

It turns out there is no debate. — frank

Yes. If you decide to ignore all counterarguments, that tends to be the outcome.

if I want for there to be plenty of eggs for all our citizens, it does not follow that the best way to assure that is to pay the egg collectors the same as the chicken owners just because they both assume the same risk. — Hanover

Understood, but the status quo has no reason to take default position here. If worker-ownersip were to be championed as the norm, I agree it need be judged on more then just equitably, but so must the current arrangements.

You also overlook the ethical value of property ownership, or perhaps you don't, but you just don't think it has any value. I would argue that it does, which means that a large part of the reason I reap larger rewards for the profits gained in my business is precisely because it's mine. That is, they are my eggs because they are my chickens. — Hanover

This, I think, is the key point. There's nothing to own except by the fiat of government. There's no such thing as 'a business' it's a legal fiction. The question we're addressing here is 'ought there be?' I think that question precedes any question about whose property the entity then is, once reified.

As a business owner, what you own is a piece of paper saying the profits are yours. So to make a property argument that one is entitled to those profits is circular.

I also don't follow why greater risk must (as a matter of ethical imperative) precede reward in order for it to be justified. The fact that I have been able to reduce my risk by being prudent and cautious and by implementing all sorts of hazard controls shouldn't result in my having to share more of my profits with others. To suggest otherwise would incentivize recklessness. — Hanover

Possibly, but that's an aside from the argument raised here that owners deserve, or need, the profits because of the risk.

Since I would suspect most prior business owners had those qualities to some degree, the reason they are not in the soup line is because they were able to go out and get a job. But that they lost their life savings but were able to find a new job doesn't mean they didn't suffer negative consequences. — Hanover

No, but the point is, as a class, they're better off than workers. If their risk was the same there would be the full range of businesses owners from the destitute (business has failed), through the poor (business is on the way out) to the rich) business is doing well. There isn't. There's just the rich (in the majority). So either they're all extremely lucky, or something is tipping the scales in their favour.

If you don't like your job or find a better one, you quit and take the new one. That's not the same as having the strings attached to a financial obligation, which is what I take risk to be. — Hanover

This is true, but far from the norm, which is why I made reference to yhd idea that we can't justify the status of the majority on the risk/benefit of a minority.

The overwhelming majority of the work force are desperate for a job and would be devastated if they lost the one they had. Few are lucky enough to be shopping around for jobs.

The overwhelming majority of corporation owners are extremely wealthy and hold their investments as part of well-hedged portfolio with little to no personal collateral tied to it. Yes, you can pick extreme examples to the contrary, but these cannot really be used to justify a status quo that benefits a very different cohort.

I think if you stepped into the typical corner restaurant and saw how they were struggling to keep things afloat, I don't know you'd terribly want to be the owner and might find being a server a better gig. — Hanover

Maybe, but again, in terms of share of the employment pool these are fringe cases, so in terms of just treatment of workers, they're hardly a fair target. Furthermore, as I said to Srap, if there's so much risk and so little gain, then sharing that exposure should be welcomed.

incentivizing them is what we want to do, which means offering them the opportunity to make larger profits and the possibility of making nothing or even losing money. — Hanover

I agree with the first half, but I don't see why high stakes gambling is the only incentive we could offer. What about low risk low reward options?

No employee goes into a job with the understanding they may owe their employer at the end of the shift, yet that is exactly what an employer signs up knowing could well happen and he could be indebted to the employee, among others. — Hanover

How's that a loss to the owner? You're basically saying that when there's a mismatch between work done and pay due, its the worker who walks away with nothing (being owed money doesn't put food on the table). I'm sure the owner will be weeping into their leather upholstery at the shame of owing money, but seeing as it'll be the corporation which owes it, their lobster is not so much at risk that evening.

what do you think accounts for the continuing support of the West? — frank

Good question, what could it possibly be...?

https://www.businessinsider.com/congress-war-profiteers-stock-lockheed-martin-raytheon-investment-2022-3?op=1&r=US&IR=T

I see. That makes sense now.

What I see wrong is that a fact is not correct just because it supports someone's values.

Facts about whether you are more likely to die if you take a vaccine or not, is not dependent on your preferences. — PhilosophyRunner

A fact that isn't correct isn't a fact though, is it?

Out of the facts (propositions which are correct), what is wrong with selecting those which support your preferences/values. How else would you have us select facts?

But in order to justify their real "point," they jumped on whatever "facts" that support their values/preferences — PhilosophyRunner

And what do you see as being wrong with that?

I wrote it down as provocation. — god must be atheist

I see. Then consider me provoked.

Instead I would like to inject that while I like this "token" metaphor, I would use, if I were you, a different metaphor, "totem". — god must be atheist

Interesting idea, unfortunately 'token' is already much used in the literature on the subject and I don't think I have sufficient sway to start a new trend.

I don't think those who advocated Ukraine's surrender to Russia had any kind of resistance in mind. — frank

From six months ago...

if we assume that life in 'independence' would be worse for the people there (a significant assumption), the fact remains that two options are open to us to do something about that

1. Keep fighting wars to keep them under the control of the (marginally) better government.
2. Keep fighting revolutions to make it not matter what government they are under the control of.

The latter has the advantage of freeing millions more from misery and you've presented little by way of clear evidence that the former is somehow so much easier as to commend on the grounds of achievability alone. — Isaac

...but don't let what's actually been written get in the way of your little vignette of strawmen.

I also think that because so many people feel like they are foot soldiers in a culture war these days — Tom Storm

Yeah, not only odd alliances, but the beliefs become tokens of group membership. To strongly profess a belief that X is to be s member of that group. Of course, belief expression has always been one of the tokens used to identity group membership, but social media has exaggerated its role to the point where it's basically the only token that's recognised. I'm probably going to sound like an old curmudgeon saying this, but I remember a time not too long ago where I might have a pretty heated argument with a colleague on some matter over which we disagreed, but we'd neither of us even dream of trying to delegitimise the other. We knew, even through the tension, that we were, in some ways, still part of the same group (privileged white male ivory-towered professer I'm afraid), but the point is that other tokens rendered us as being in the same group despite our clashing beliefs.

Do you think there's a practical way out of our mutually destructive ideological lynch mobs? — Tom Storm

No. It's a putting the genie back in the bottle problem. We have to learn to live with it now. The trouble with any fix is that the nature of the problem means that any fix will be rejected. We could reign in social media, but who's going to agree to that? We could put restrictions on certain debate platforms (deliberately do what should be done naturally), but others will just pop up instead and become more popular.

I think it's a root and branch problem. There's something quite fundamentally missing in most people's lives which makes them reach for, and cling to, these groups against their better judgment. My guess is the loss of community and purpose, but that's a whole 'nother thread...

Often with these things if the public were just more discerning... (ie, if they shared my values) everything would improve. — Tom Storm

Yes. I think the problem has been mis-targeted. The narrative here seems to be that people are just stupid and we need to control the media so they don't lead the stupid people on. I think this frames the problems wrong. We need to be asking why people are motivated to believe something like a Murdoch paper (or worse, the likes of Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson) in the first place.

Personally I don't believe anyone is so stupid as to think that in normal circumstances a talk-show pundit or journalist is better placed than a relevant university professor to inform them on some subject matter. No one is unaware of the process of data accumulation, the general way knowledge works...

So the question is not how do Murdoch, Jones and Carlson get away with it, the question is what's gone wrong with the universities (etc) that means ordinary people (who fully understand how knowledge acquisition works), have decided their obvious status as repositories of that knowledge is in question.

My personal answer to that is role social media now plays as arbiter of truth. The battles are no longer fought between academics, they're fought on social media, so there's been a shift in what qualifies a person to be part of the debate, and it's not their academic qualification.

This changes the field over which the battles are fought, but also changes the weapons used. Evidence, peer review, methodology... No longer as useful as 'likes', and a whipped up mob.

you think Ukraine has bullied Russia? — jorndoe

No.

I think the problem is that 'truth' needs to be assessed. We cannot just 'see' it, we need to discover it. That requires an institution.

Newspapers are already supposed to publish only well-evidenced information. They don't, because there's an economic and political incentive to lie. How would a fact-checking institution be any less exposed to exactly the same economic and political incentives?

Basically, we can't seem to escape the fact that we (as individuals) are not capable of assessing the raw data ourselves, so we must trust an institution to do so. That institution will be exposed to economic and political incentives. Well, we might as well trust the newspaper in the first place.

One way forward I can see is to make it more difficult for conflicts of interest to be hidden. That way we could at least make a more informed choice over which institution to trust.

FaceBook committed to fact checking. — god must be atheist

Yeah, 'cos that really sorts out the corporate control over information, put a private corporation in control of information...

There are laws against toxic waste, where are the laws against toxic disinformation? — Tom Storm

How do you see such laws working? Presumably, absent of investigations, no judge is going to somehow know what is 'true' so the law would have to require some standard of evidence before publication, but what standard would prevent the sort of misinformation someone like Murdoch pushes that wouldn't also shut down corporate whistleblowers, wikileaks, or investigative journalism in general?

Say I'm worth x and you're worth 1000x. I wager x/10 and win earning say 5/4 my wager, so my wealth becomes 9x/8. You wager 10x and win, earning 50x/4, so your wealth is now 1012.5x. The ratio of your wealth is to mine is now 900:1, instead of 1000:1. So my hunch about how this would work is *wrong*. By wagering 10 times as much in absolute terms, but one tenth in relative terms, you allowed me to close the ratio gap. On the other hand, you used to have only 999 more dollars than I; now you have 1011.375 more. I've closed the ratio gap, but am further behind absolutely. Interesting. What happens when we go again? — Srap Tasmaner

This is really interesting. Can we actually manipulate income disparity by fixing rates of return for investments (assuming a rational actor would always invest some fixed portion of any free capital)? I'll defer to your superior maths, but it looks as if the return on investment could potentially determine the direction of disparity?

I also suspect that high rollers needn't limit how much they risk, as I surmised here. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's another important point. Especially if returns on larger investments are higher (even proportionately) than returns on lower investments. One could see it as a membership criteria fro the higher return games. Only those with a higher stake are going to be allowed in to the higher return games, which means the return doesn't entirely reflect the absolute risk, but partly reflects the market value of the size of the risk (bigger risks are just worth more because they're more sought after).

Of course, then we need to translate all this economics into desert, because the matter at hand was wether the higher returns investments the owner gets we justified by their increased risk...

If you have a point, please make it more explicit. — frank

It's not rocket science. I just want you to explain your analogy to me. How does one bully punching the other bully in the nose create a more peaceful world? We just exchange bullies.

I'm just asking the simple question. If, in your scenario, the world were made up of bullies, how would your theory (punch the bully on the nose) bring about peace. It's your theory so it doesn't seem too much to ask you to explain it.

Isaac is very angry that we would forget what kind of a bully the US has been. We might forget this because it's obvious that Russia is the aggressor here, Ukraine is the victim and the US is aiding Ukraine. Isaac would be extremely angry if now the US would look good as a "white knight in shining armour" coming to help a victim. Because the US is bad. Remember all the children that died in Iraq thanks to the sanctions etc. Even if this is a thread about the war in Ukraine, that doesn't matter. — ssu

Yeah, the US are only providing the weapons, the intelligence, the strategy, the training, the finances and the global propaganda...I see now they're barely involved, how foolish of me to even mention them.

Let's leave them out of it then.

Prior to the invasion Ukraine were one of the most corrupt nations in the regions, the continent's top black market arms dealers and a hotbed of Neo-nazi extreme right violence. Likewise Russia.

So explain to me how @frank's analogy works. how does the world become more peaceful if Ukraine 'beat' Russia as opposed to Russia 'beat' Ukraine? What magic pill stops Ukraine from thinking "now Russia's weak and we've got all these weapons, we could have Valuyki or Belgorod"?

Is it because they're all just really, really nice?