Ukraine does have a far-right problem, and has for some time. That’s why the argument that because Zelensky is Jewish there is no such problem is silly. It’s true that Zelensky isn’t a neo-Nazi, but not true that the government has rid itself of such elements. The Azov battalion, a far-right militia, had Jewish members. Their role in the government during the previous election was enough to draw the concern of the G7. Their current role is enough to inspire far-right mercenaries to join the battle against Russia. My point is, it isn’t only Russian propaganda saying this.

"We are now deploying the NATO response force for the first time in the context of collective defense," Stoltenberg told a news conference on February 25 following a virtual NATO summit.

https://www.rferl.org/amp/nato-combat-ready-force-eastern-states-russia/31723732.html

Wild

Yes, I don’t get the Nazi angle. But upon briefly looking into it, Russia and pro-Russia forces have been using antifascist rhetoric and evoking the word “genocide” against the “Orange Junta” since Poroshenko. Here’s a good article on it. Putin using the same rhetoric (among many other things left unreported) to justify his advance could be the direct result of this species of belief and propaganda.

The Azov Battalion was incorporated into the national guard of Ukraine, though. The UN has accused them of atrocity and war crime in the past. I wouldn’t say the Ukrainian government are neo-Nazis, but such elements are present and currently fighting against the Russians. Even NBC recently filmed them training old ladies and other locals.

The man claims he’s invading Ukraine to stop a genocide, and I’m not allowed to ask if there is evidence for it? Utterly unhinged.

I was asking for evidence for Putin’s claim, so you can keep you conspiracy theories to yourself.

Yeah, the airport is required to create an “air bridge” in order to bring in more troops. What I don’t understand is why they’d let CNN film them, potentially compromising the operation.

The costs of such a maneuver are so dire that one wonders the point of it. If I try to put myself in Putin’s shoes, the only reason I would take such a risk—militarily, economically, politically—was to stop a genocide. I just cannot fathom it.

Either Putin has went looney or he is convinced a genocide is occurring, like he says. Is there any evidence for his genocide claim?

I don’t know why but this video of Russian soldiers allowing CNN to film them is odd.

Any concpet of will that associates it with control and cause is inherently dualistic in the sense of separating subject from world.

But then we look and find out that there is no dualism, that the subject is also the object, and seek other ways to explain it.

I think it's true, in a sense. The "general will" of Rousseau, and other collectivist musings, such as in Hegel and Fichte, could be read as justifying mass war and state power. I believe it is collectivism more so than romanticism that caused this, but collectivism could be said to be a product of romanticism.

‘Control’, ‘under the direction’, ‘cause’. Not sure if any of these terms get at the new ways psychologists are thinking about human agency. Perhaps if we substitute ‘reciprocal causality’ and brain body-environment loops for simple one way control and direction we can get closer to what thinking and willing consists in.

It would seem to me your proposed terms suggest a dualism of some sort, which is perhaps the problem to begin with. I would argue that repurposing dualism under more modern terms would only confuse the issue further.

I am not sure if we are but I would like to know.

How does a thought come into our consciousness? Are we being creative and thoughtful or is our brain feeding us ideas or something else?

What is the process of rumination?

I do feel somewhat in control of my thoughts in the mental or conscious landscape. I feel like I am monitoring my inner life and trying to exert control and making choices.

Assuming that something is the cause of thoughts, and that that something is therefor responsible for them, it goes to follow that each of us are responsible for our thoughts. One's thoughts come from nowhere else; they begin and end nowhere else; they are controlled by nothing else. Even the seemingly arbitrary activities, like the manifestation of thoughts, are wholly controlled by and under the direction of this same being.

Our upholders of democracy and freedom. :snicker:

Next you’ll tell us about The End of History and the Last Man.

Why do you complain about the self-evident truth, and insist that it's somehow "wrong"? What qualifies as a "crime" is what the government dictates is a crime. Isn't that self-evident to you? And that dictation must be allowed to change with an evolving society. Or do you think that the original laws, those of Draco or something like that, should persist unchanged, forever and ever, dictated to never be allowed to change?

I think you have things backward. To make a "charter" which forces the government to adhere in a fixed way, to some dictate which would cripple its capacity to "invent crimes" is what is tyrannical. In reality, the government needs to be able to "invent crimes" faster than the criminals can act them out. But as you correctly indicate, giving a government the power which it needs, to properly govern an evolving society, is fraught with disagreement, therefore very problematic. And it's a problem which obviously has not been solved.

It’s evident to me that laws can be either just or unjust, right or wrong. There is no human right the government has not violated. The government murders, steals from, and enslaves human beings, all of which would subject you or I to swift punishment, and rightfully so.

Defining the limits of the state is not tyranny, at least in theory, but a check on arbitrary power and the monopoly of violence. The expansion of this power should be crippled at every instance, and in my opinion, removed entirely.

Unfortunately, Canada’s charter of rights and freedoms has served only as a small hurdle to its tyranny. Rather than outright prohibit people from freedom of movement, it forces the airlines to enforce rigid restrictions, and travellers to undergo harsh quarantine measures at their own expense. Rather than enforce its discriminatory policies against those who refuse Pfizer vaccines, it forces the private citizen to do it. Rather than freeze and steal the contents of someone’s bank account, it forces the banks to do it. It gets around violating its own charter by forcing those who are not beholden to it to do it for them.

The defining feature of bigotry is that it is intolerant. Even the unreasonable can tolerate another’s thoughts and words.

A public objection is just words, and they do not necessarily lead to this or that action. It doesn’t lead to people getting fired from their job any more than it leads to people not getting fired from their job. The contradiction arises when you believe correlation implies causation.

I’m well aware that the government can invent crimes and violate its charter of rights and freedoms. I’m just saying it’s wrong and tyrannical to do so.

If BLM blockaded the US capital NOS would be singing a different tune.*

Just more ingroup-outgroup posturing.

I love when you foam at the mouth.

Good point, but that obviously is not the only motivation behind cancel culture. Isn’t it really more about something like tribal loyalty? Or maybe you mean that being loyal to a tribe is to be bigoted?

There probably is a tribal element to it. What do you think? By bigoted I mean that one is intolerant of another because of his views, which do not manifest beyond the victimless expressions of thought and speech. There are actions we should not tolerate, however, and censorship is one of them.

The difference, my hyperbolic friend, is that the Salem witch trial executions, for instance, were state-sanctioned. If a private sector employer fires someone because they did something that reduced the businesses profit margin, that’s just good business practice, right?

The motivation of bigotry and resultant actions of censorship and ostracism are wrong no matter who does it, is the point.

I don’t know who to believe.

The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said she would like to “request to the mass disinformation outlets of the USA and Britain – Bloomberg, the New York Times, the Sun etc – announce the schedule of our ‘invasions’ for the coming year. I’d like to plan my vacation”. And these predictions have so far been worthy of such mockery. No doubt some incident will occur before anything happens, but it is unclear who will do it first.

War is certainly immanent, though I hope I eat these words. If so, it will no doubt be a self-fulfilling prophecy premised on projection.

Do you mean those GoFundMe accounts?

No, I mean bank accounts. Bank accounts are being frozen for the crime of donating to a protest.

It’s funny that many of those who whine the loudest about cancel culture believe that a capitalist society should be self-regulating. Isn’t cancel culture the ideal of this philosophy? Probably only when it works in their favor, I imagine.

There is nothing self-regulating about this kind of ostracism and bigotry, even if they have found less violent means of doing it than in the past. Wherever heretical speech and thoughts are censored, it is nonetheless premised on the base motives found in inquisitions and witch-burning.

Cancel culture was regnant in McCarthyism and Anti-communism, I would say.

Polarization was effectively suppressed during those times, though. But in “Eichmann in Jerusalem” she notes of Denmark, which resisted the Nazi program, and even the Gestapo there were destroying orders from Berlin. The “bureaucracy of murder” is only possible in conditions of abject conformity.

I remember a quote from the libertarian radical Albert Jay Nock that was along the lines of the quote you just shared, but from far earlier in the 20th century.

Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one's conscience.

https://mises.org/library/anarchists-progress-0

It’s a combination of herd mentality, or collectivism, allied with statism.

Polarization and division are important. Think of all the one-party or no party states, as uniform as could possibly be. Look at regimes that are unable to suffer dissent. We need more polarization, more division, especially when it comes to power and control. And we should avoid it; we should engage in it.

It’s bigotry, it’s censorship, and it’s cruel. The punishment is disproportionate to the supposed crime, which is often no crime at all, not even an act that warrants much attention.

Those who try to gather a mob and go after another’s job and livelihood because they do not like what was said are a far greater threat to the public than anyone who may say something inappropriate.

That's an expected reply, which sums the attitude very well: 'money is more important than a healthy body'. Obviously the proclaimed "freedom" is not even relevant, it's a money issue. And having money in the bank account is prioritized over having a healthy body. Thanks for the demonstration, NOS.

That’s the expected reply. It suits perfectly well a pampered culture. A bruise is worse than poverty. Getting a spanking is worse than the government stealing your property.

Right, you'd categorize a bunch of 120db air horns and train sirens blowing 24/7, right outside your front door as "peaceful". I'd classify that as torture. You know, one of those horns can be heard miles away (literal truth), imagine a bunch of them right outside your door. Now torture is illegal, but those who engage in it always find new ways of doing it, and claim what they're doing does not qualify, in the attempt to avoid reciprocal punishment.

They are torturers now. I guess the protesters are much stronger than the rest of the population because they are right next to the horns instead of miles away. So they are torturing themselves, and they still look as happy as clams.

I've walked through three different freedom convoy protests where I live and it is nothing like what you describe, so I can reject your characterization out of hand. All walks of life and background were in attendance. I suppose I can understand your position, though, because perhaps you've never had to use a bank account, which is used to store something called "money", the prevailing means by which many of us buy food and pay bills. A little bruise is nothing in comparison.

The protests have been so peaceful that the Ottawa had to make honking illegal in order to impose any punishment. Now anyone who donates to it will be subject to investigation and the seizure of money without due process or court order, and all for donating some money to a bunch of truckers parking their trucks and honking their horns.

Watch MSNBC shill for Ukraine’s Azov Battalion.



Suspiciously enough, Congress removed a ban on funding them back in 2015. It looks like it's paying off.

Nothing new there. Ever been audited by the revenue department?

Have you ever had your bank account frozen for participating in a protest?

If Biden’s pick is given advantage by eliminating an entire gender and other races from the process, it doesn’t follow that members of the another gender and other races should be given the same advantage.

It would be fair.

Well, yes.

Canada’s panty-waisted despot just invoked the Emergencies Act to quell the so-called Freedom Convoy protests. The act gives the federal government sweeping powers, such as to regulate and freeze an individual’s bank account or call in the military. Whatever piddling rights Canada offers its citizens are effectively gone, for now.

The protesters have blocked some important border-crossings, impeding the government’s bottom dollar, and stewing more fear in the ruling class than any Molotov-throwing rioter ever could. All they demand was an end to public health mandates, but Canada’s state-run television likens them to insurrectionists, as is fashionable these days. The worrying part is that none of this is surprising.

No, that’s fair. I don’t understand what you mean when you say I have a superstition that I don’t value fairness.

You’ve lost me.

I don't understand the contention. A murderer has killed someone. How can others of the same taxonomy be perpetrators of murder if they did not kill anyone? A victim of murder is deceased. How can others of the same taxonomy be victims of murder if they are still alive? To confer guilt or victimhood to others beyond perpetrator and victim is a false conclusion and leads to unjust actions, in any case, but to confer them to one race or another is an absurdity.

The superstition as it has been used leads one to false conclusions and unjust actions, such as the assumption that any member of such taxonomies are either victim or perpetrator in some all-purveying race struggle.

I speak of race as pseudoscience and superstition. The history of how this superstition was used to malign, exclude, and murder human beings is well documented. The assumption that any member of such taxonomies are either victim or perpetrator in some all-purveying race struggle are the direct result of the same thinking, and immediately falsified upon evidence to the contrary.

It cannot be confirmed from the mere sight of someone that he is disadvantaged or advantaged by virtue of these taxonomies. Your guesswork, premised on pseudoscience and superstition, sets you right on track to make the very unethical activities you claim to oppose.