I love talking about this! It's hilarious.

I will never not find infinite joy in people getting mad at trivialities as excuses to be bigots.

It’s amazing how a simple question can strike such reticence and confusion. They likely understand that an answer that runs afoul of certain ideologies could end in forms of ostracism or even assault. It’s the captive mind. — NOS4A2

"People (hypothetically) can't immediately answer my inane question without giving it any thought society is crumbling reeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" — Streetlight

Like clockwork.

When did conservatives become these giant, wet, crybabies? I blame The Algorithm.

IIT: people getting mad that when they (hypothetically?) walk up to other people on the street and demand answers to random questions, those other people do not behave in the appropriate manner. And it is these people, of course, that are the problem. looool.

Stephen King couldn't write a more fragile ego if he tried.

"People can't immediately answer my inane question without giving it any thought society is crumbling reeeeeeeeeeeeeeee"

"To be a philosopher you need only three things. First, infinite intellectual eros: endless curiosity about everything. Second, the ability to pay attention: to be rapt by what is in front of you without seizing it yourself, the care of concentration – in the way you might look closely, without touching, at the green lacewing fly, overwintering silently on the kitchen wall. Third, acceptance of pathlessness (aporia): that there may be no solutions to questions, only the clarification of their statement. Eros, attention, acceptance".

- Gillian Rose, Paradiso

I have no time for snowflakes like the OP who get triggered because of the way some people speak.

Yeah. How dare I disbelieve what Putin or Russian officials sometime say: — ssu

It's great how you are so completely incapable of comprehension that you don't recognize that the point is not that you "disbelieve Putin", but that you slavishly believe war criminals like Biden.

US to Africa: Kindly drop dead from starvation so we can win our proxy war I mean you're only black people who cares lol:

In mid-May, the United States sent an alert to 14 countries, mostly in Africa, that Russian cargo vessels were leaving ports near Ukraine laden with what a State Department cable described as “stolen Ukrainian grain.” The cable identified by name three Russian cargo vessels it said were suspected of transporting it.

The American alert about the grain has only sharpened the dilemma for African countries, many already feeling trapped between East and West, as they potentially face a hard choice between, on one hand, benefiting from possible war crimes and displeasing a powerful Western ally, and on the other, refusing cheap food at a time when wheat prices are soaring and hundreds of thousands of people are starving.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/05/world/africa/ukraine-grain-russia-sales.html

"We, however, will continue to buy the oil and gas we need #BLM".

That article is remarkable to the extent that anyone who has read it is now objectively stupider for having done so.

It's a gossip piece masquerading as a think piece.

Did you enjoy Losurdo's Liberalism? — Maw

I delayed my read of Losurdo! I'm doing a couple of Hegel books atm, then after that I will read his book on Hegel then back to Liberalism + Revolution.

Biden also broke literally every campaign promise he ever made with the exception of pulling out of Afghanistan - after which he stole their gold reserves and plunged the country into famine potentially killing tens of thousands- and is also easily responsible for more death and suffering than anything Putin could ever dream about but sure when glorious leader Biden says something we must surely take him seriously.

Biden says "For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power" and you're willing to ignore that at the drop of a hat to replace it with the 'official line', but Putin mentions something about Ukrainians and Russians being 'one people' some time back and that's enough for you to impute a clear intention to take over the whole country. Your sycophancy over the US is pretty appalling. — Isaac

Yep. If @ssu couldn't brown nose US power, he wouldn't know how to breathe.

:up:. Appreciate your thoughts on Smith and Suwandi too.

Currently Reading:

Joshua Kates - Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction
Drucilla Cornell - The Philosophy of the Limit
Gillian Rose - Hegel Contra Sociology
Leo Strauss - The City and Man
Adrian Johnston - A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical Materialism

This is the kind of approach I was imagining - an outline which helps me understand the thinking process by laying it all out. You must find some of this pretty exhilarating, right? — Tom Storm

Yay, glad to hear it! And yes I think it's awesome :blush: I will just add that Derrida's approach is Derrida's alone: he does not stand for something called 'postmodernism' in general - his ethics is one among a great many, and if I mentioned it it's only because it was already brought up in conversation.

No worries. Perhaps even skip to the paragrpah on the 2nd page which begins: "A good place to begin...". It's a nice starting point, and the paper is relatively well written and hopefully clear.

For your reading pleasure - as well as @Tom Storm's: 11 page PDF.

Is there something like, in particular that exceeds your comprehension?

Derrida honestly reads like he's not just ethical, but rather it's one of his main impulses in writing -- but he writes about truth and meaning instead. — Moliere

Agreed. Among the goals of deconstruction is the effort the keep "open" the very possibility of any ethics whatsoever, without which no ethics could take place. Derrida everywhere aims to foster ethical openings that would otherwise be shut down or covered over by systems in which the movement of différance is supressed. It takes a particularly poor reader of Derrida to charge him with any kind of reletativism or nihilism to which his project is entirely opposed.

The irony in some of this discussion is that one of the upshots of Derrida's critique is that things cannot be reduced to context, and no fine-graining of 'context' would ever serve to explain or justify any phenomenon. This sets him irreducibly apart from any empirical discourse like anthropology, history, law, and so on. And this, insofar as he is committed to resisting the reduction to a skeptical empiricism that would not be able to hold fast to truth in the philosophical sense - or any notion of responsibility, for that matter. Différance disrupts all closure, including "context".

The lesson being that the US should fuck off forever from any involvement in anything ever.

In 1991, twelve years before Iraq was invaded and occupied by President George W. Bush, his father, President George H. W. Bush, launched an aerial war (the Gulf War) against that same nation. At that time, Iraq’s standard of living was the highest in the Middle East. Iraqis enjoyed free medical care and free education. Literacy had reached about 80 percent. University students of both genders received scholarships to study at home and abroad. Most of the economy was state owned. Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein was pressing for a larger portion of the international oil market.

In the six weeks of aerial attacks in 1991, US planes (with minor assistance from other NATO powers) destroyed more than 90 percent of Iraq’s electrical capacity, and much of its telecommunication systems including television and radio stations, along with its flood control, irrigation, sewage treatment, water purification, and hydroelectric systems. Domestic herds and poultry farms suffered heavy losses. US planes burned grain fields with incendiary bombs and hit hundreds of schools, hospitals, rail stations, bus stations, air raid shelters, mosques, and historic sites. Factories that produced textiles, cement, petrochemicals, and phosphate were hit repeatedly. So were the refineries, pipelines, and storage tanks of Iraq’s oil industry. Some 200,000 Iraqi civilians and soldiers were killed in those six weeks.

Nearly all the aerial attackers employed laser-guided depleted-uranium missiles, leaving hundreds of tons of radioactive matter spread over much of the country, leading to tens of thousands of more deaths in the following years, including many from what normally would be treatable and curable illnesses. Twelve years later, Bush Jr. invaded Iraq and wreaked further death and destruction upon that country. — Parenti, The Face of Imperialism

Saddam couldn't have murdered as many Iraqis as the Americans did if he tried - let alone plunged the entire country into a futureless black hole. But I guess they 'deserved it', because they made "stupid decisions". Saddam was a murderous, autocratic fuck. And the US outdid him, over and over and over.

A note of comparison too. It's been about 14 weeks since the war in Ukraine began, and the number of Ukrainian deaths is estimated at about 4000+ or so with another 5000+ injured. Now read again the end of the second paragraph above.

There is no more genocidal state on the planet than the USofA. Speaking of, don't anyone look up the upper-bound death rate for the 'war on terror'. 'Another holocaust' would not be a wrong description.

A fun guessing game. Is this description from before, or after the war with Russia?:

Almost nothing will be received from the war-torn East, where basic infrastructure has been destroyed for power generation, water, hospitals and the civilian housing areas that bore the brunt of the attack. Nearly a million civilians are reported to have fled ... A quarter of Ukraine’s exports normally are from eastern provinces, and are sold mainly to Russia. But [the] bombing [of] Donbas industry and left its coal mines without electricity... It will be expensive to restore power and water facilities that have been destroyed by the forces in Donetsk, which faces a cold dark winter.

So you're saying the default position is to continue war unless there's proof one ought to stop. — Isaac

:up: The cessation of war is a good in itself. You don't play with lives - especially from the comfort of some cosy swivel chair - because one wants to 'play the odds'. One argues on the side of the cessation of war, absolutely. Anything else comes later.

I'm just saying -

Besides it's not uncommon to have fascist/ultra-nationalists in the national armies. — neomac

As well as the absurd effort to smear the lines so that "well aren't the Russians Nazis too hmmm???". Like, yeah, the Russians are genocidal, but this doesn't give people a free pass to downplay and deflect Nazis because they want to score a point. Disagreement is one thing but this stuff above is something else.

Hey look it's Goodwin's L... wait no, it's just a giant incomplete list of Western publications all very clear about the Nazis in Ukraine right before the Americans told them to pipe down a bit because it would make them look bad.



https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/04/azovreplist.html

Wonder which of our resident Nazi sympathizers will chime in to leap to their defense.

Congratulation to Streetlight for his demonstration of Godwin's law. — Olivier5

Oh honey, you don't seem to know the meanings of words. I'm not comparing or making an analogy to Nazis. I'm talking about actual Nazis in Ukraine. Y'know. The ones being showered in American weapons.

Nice try through, A+ for trying to sound minimally intelligent.

Show me how phenomenally smart you are by giving me your definition of "Nazi": bombing, killing, raping, looting, land-grabbing, oppressing minorities (like the Crimean Tatars) for nationalistic reasons is not Nazi. What else then? — neomac

So the answer is yes then. OK, good to know.

American power didn't bomb, kill, rape, loot, land-grab Europeans to have them support Ukraine. — neomac

No, they just enabled and continue to prolong a devastating war which is killing masses of Ukrainians day by day all the better than they can decimate Ukraine on their own terms at the end of it.

OK, bombing, killing, raping, looting, land-grabbing, oppressing minorities (like the Crimean Tatars) for nationalistic reasons is not Nazi to you. What else is required to be Nazi then? — neomac

Are you a stupid person? Because this is a stupid person question. Or is this just another deflection from the fact that you literally argued in defense of Nazis?

It is both fascinating and horrifying to really come to grips with both how the West was treating Ukraine and how Ukraine was treating it's own citizens before the war. I mean the whole place was a complete mess, and one being exacerbated and heightened by Western imperiousness. I mean, this is from Sept 2014:

In April 2014, fresh from riots in Maidan Square and the February 22 coup, and less than a month before the May 2 massacre in Odessa, the IMF approved a $17 billion loan program to Ukraine’s junta. Normal IMF practice is to lend only up to twice a country’s quote in one year. This was eight times as high.

Four months later, on August 29, just as Kiev began losing its attempt at ethnic cleansing against the eastern Donbas region, the IMF signed off on the first loan ever to a side engaged in a civil war, not to mention rife with insider capital flight and a collapsing balance of payments. Based on fictitiously trouble-free projections of the ability to pay, the loan supported Ukraine’s hernia currency long enough to enable the oligarchs’ banks to move their money quickly into Western hard-currency accounts before the hernia plunged further and was worth even fewer euros and dollars.

This loan demonstrates the degree to which the IMF is an arm of U.S. Cold War politics. Kiev used the loan for military expenses to attack the Eastern provinces, and the loan terms imposed the usual budget austerity, as if this would stabilize the country’s finances. Almost nothing will be received from the war-torn East, where basic infrastructure has been destroyed for power generation, water, hospitals and the civilian housing areas that bore the brunt of the attack. Nearly a million civilians are reported to have fled to Russia. Yet the IMF release announced: “The IMF praised the government’s commitment to economic reforms despite the ongoing conflict.” A quarter of Ukraine’s exports normally are from eastern provinces, and are sold mainly to Russia. But Kiev has been bombing Donbas industry and left its coal mines without electricity.

And:

U.S. and IMF backing seems intended to help reduce European dependence on Russian gas so as to squeeze its balance of payments. The idea is that lower gas revenues will squeeze Russia’s ability to maneuver in today’s New Cold War. But this strategy involves a potentially embarrassing U.S. alliance with Kolomoyskyy, reportedly the major owner of Burisma via his Privat Bank. He “was appointed by the coup regime to be governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, a south-central province of Ukraine. Kolomoysky also has been associated with the financing of brutal paramilitary forces killing ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.” The term “ethnic Russian” is a kakaism for local protest against fracking by kleptocrats privatizing the economy’s natural resource wealth.

It will be expensive to restore power and water facilities that have been destroyed by the Kiev forces in Donetsk, which faces a cold dark winter. Kiev has stopped paying pensions and other revenue to the Eastern Ukraine, all but guaranteeing its separatism. Even before the Maidan events the local population sought to prevent gas fracking, just as Germany and other European countries have opposed it.

Also opposed is the appropriation of land and other properties by Ukrainian kleptocrats and especially foreigners such as Monsanto, which has invested in genetically engineered grain projects in Ukraine, seeing the country as Europe’s Achilles Heel when it comes to resisting GMOs. A recent report by the Oakland Institute, Walking on the West Side: the World Bank and the IMF in the Ukraine Conflict, describes IMF-World Bank pressure to deregulate Ukrainian agricultural land use and promote its sale to U.S. and other foreign investors. The World Bank’s Investment Finance Corporation (IFC) has “advised the country to ‘delete provisions regarding mandatory certification of food in the listed laws of Ukraine and Government Decree,’” and “to avoid ‘unnecessary cost for businesses’” by regulations on pesticides, additives and so forth.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/09/the-imfs-new-cold-war-loan-to-ukraine/

Anyone who think the US will treat Ukraine with 'a light touch' is completely out of their god damned mind. They will use this war to utterly fuck Ukraine in no different a way than the current Russian rape of the country, itself sponsored by American manouvering.

So as long as Europe is not strong enough to assert itself as a geopolitical power at the level of the other contenders, they have to pick their side according to their interests. — neomac

Ah yes, the ol' "this genocidal state of affairs is immutable and my genocidal team is better than their genocidal team so there". And only someone who is living under a rock or has had their head bashed in by that self-same rock can imagine that American power is in any way 'softer' than the 'authoritarian regimes' it is otherwise indistinguishable from. No other country on Earth has as much blood on its hands as the US; no other country on Earth even belongs to the same order of death-dealing magnitude.

Are the Russians Nazi too for bombing, killing, raping their Ukrainian "brothers" and "sisters", and their land-grabbing in the name of the ethnic Russians and the glory of Holy Russia? Is the Russification of the Donbas and Crimea Nazi enough to you? — neomac

Russians are clearly not Nazis, they are simply capitalists doing what capitalist nations always do - rape, plunder, and kill.

Mmmkey, and what if Europeans tell themselves to do what the US tells them to do? — neomac

Stupid question.

Oh I see, in your personal idiom, "Nazi" are all Ukrainians who support Zelensky's choice to resist Russian interference/invasion b/c they want to defend Ukrainian sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity. — neomac

No, Nazis are literally Nazis, I don't need to redefine terms so as get away with defending Nazis.

Next episode reported.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/01/us/tulsa-police-incident-active-shooter/index.html — Wayfarer

The scale of mass American gun violence is really, really hard to comprehend. Individual events are one thing but - look at these dates:



https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting

Should Europeans do what Russians tell them? — neomac

Christ, your brain is so rotted by treating this as a team-sport to cheer-lead to that your question is: which non-European entity should tell Europe what to do?

Not to mention the Russian ultra-nationalists very friendly to Putin. — neomac

See, this is why you are an idiot not worth paying attention to. The Nazis who pushed Zelensky to war did so because they were Ukrainian nationalists who did not want any compromise with Russia - including ratifying Minsk, or say, not shelling the ever-living daylights out of Russian-speaking Ukraine.

But please, continue your defense of Nazis.

Westerners legitimately helped them due their security concerns and international commitments more than economic concerns. — neomac

Complete bullshit not worth entertaining.

That’s exactly why I talked about the Europeans. For the US, the “security concerns” must be understood wrt their hegemonic power, of course. — neomac

Europeans do what Americans tell them.

Apparently Ukrainians prefer to be Nazi than Russian, go figure how shitty it feels like to experience Russian hegemony — neomac

Oh well that makes it OK then.

I don't have the information to agree with it because it really depends on what it costs us, or more specifically, what it costs Ukrainians, to "increase the human, financial and military cost of this war for Moscow". — Benkei

That's fair. I would assume that cessation of hostilities would take priority in the order of the two points mentioned. I guess I asked as well because there seem to be many here for whom "punish Russia/punish Putin" seemed to be the overriding concern, above all else. And if that was at least among the things Macron is pushing, then I wonder why the curious promotion of an article that unflatteringly compares him to Kissinger. Macron having been a target for many for not hewing entirely 100% to the US State department line. Just like, 80% only.

Your other questions are good too and it's hard to answer them. As for the second though, one can only look on in utter disbelief. The US created the Taliban no less than the Contras thanks to their pouring in of weapons, and to now pour them into the largest concentration of Nazis in Europe? Good lord it's horrifying. These are the same people, of course, who are materially supporting (rebranded) Al-Qaeda in Syria right now as we speak.

(on how Putin can kill whoever he wants to, wherever they are) — Olivier5

(And how London in particular let Putin ride roughshod all over it to get that sweet sweet Russian billionaire cash at the expense of their own citizens and their ability to afford to live in their own country).

Westerners decided to support them for Western plausible security concerns too, of course. — neomac

You misspelled "so that they can siphon tax money to arms dealers and turn Ukraine into a debt prison producing Nikes for the Western middle class while eliminating a competitor model of capitalism that does not play by the West's rules while letting Ukrainians drop dead for those goals, thanks to a war they precipitated and did everything to encourage and continue to prolong".

The West does not, and has never had 'security concerns'. It only ever has had challenges to its genocidal model of global domination. Anyone who thinks the US in particular has 'security concerns' half-way across the fucking planet is a clown.

To the degree that the Ukraine is crawling with Nazis who decisively tipped the course of events into war, then sure, I agree that the "Ukrainians are more pro-Western than anti-Western". Nazis being a uniquely Western apogee of civilization.

I'm not disappointed dude. We're good friends, remember?

Fair enough, if you think it's a positive. I do too.

That quote, as a strategy. What's wrong with it?

Should people not be trying to increase the costs of war on Moscow? Should people not be trying to end the continuation of a war between unequal belligerents?

Consider Putin's involvement in America's 2016 election — Metaphysician Undercover

As an excuse for democrats to offshore the fact that they irredeemably suck? What does that have to do with anything?