What is it about my question that no-one wants to answer it? It seemed quite simple. What is the advantage in exculpating the US and Europe? You've answered a question about your objectives with a history lesson.

I don't deny anything you've said is possibly true. It's also possibly true that the US had a even greater role then you suggest. That theory isn't overwhelmed by evidence to the contrary, so it remains possible. They've done it loads of times before, so it remains plausible also.

So why do seek to pour cold water on the theory every time it's mentioned? I've been quite clear on my objective. I've been quite clear why, in the face of sketchy evidence, I'm erring on the side of assuming ill intent on the part of those governments. I've asked you four times now why you're so keen on excusing them of that intent, but you keep dodging the question. — Isaac

I think this also has to do with what I call "modern city people". I live in a rural area that is rapidly undergoing suburbanization and gentrification. People from the city are moving here, building their homes (destroying first-grade arable land and forests!). The older culture of mostly farmers is rapidly disappearing, along with its dialect. The new people show a remarkable lack of consideration for others. Earlier on, everyone would greet everyone when meeting in the street. Now it's like in the city, it's normal to walk around with a grim face, silently. Even neighbors don't greet.

An example from traffic: There are many hills here, the roads are old and narrow, with many sharp curves, steep slopes. In many places the road is too narrow for two cars to meet, but there are occasional niches built where one car can move to the side for the other to pass. To the "old settlers", it's normal to take this into consideration and to drive in such a way as the narrow roads permit, so that everyone is safe. But not the new ones. They just drive, like they own the road. They have no qualms about endangering others.

These modern people apparently have a very limited understanding of what it means to live together with others, as neighbors. I see this reflected also in the way Russia's intentions have been interpreted by so many. This modern idea of "I'm going to live as I please, others be damned, and if they don't like it, that's their problem".

That's just not the way to live with other people, with neighbors. But these modern people just don't understand this.

Yes yes, but isn't what is in their free and independent minds important? Suppose what they had in their heads was the brotherhood of man. That would be nice. It follows that anything else would not be nice. — FreeEmotion

It only takes one freeloader, one person who doesn't want this brotherhood of men, and the whole project collapses.

Well, some people are against war and killing innocent people. — ssu

They're not against it as long as they are the ones doing the killing.

Of course the world should be 'one family'. The question is who should be the 'head' of that family. Not everyone wants to see America (or Wall Street) in that role.

This is why I'm saying that the best solution would be for each continent to be free and independent. — Apollodorus

But this independence starts in one's mind. Meaning, cease giving so much of one's precious time to foreign sources for mental engagement. Such as, if you're not American, stop watching US films, US sitcoms, US reality shows etc. And if one watches the US programmes because those in one's native language aren't interesting enough, then it would be prudent to stop watching tv for the purpose of entertainment altogether.

(US films, sitcoms, reality shows, and other tv programmes are de facto examples of US imperialism: they are watched all over the world.)


Meaning, ordinary people could do a lot for the wellbeing of their own culture and country, and it is primarily by saying no to foreign influences.

I don't see how the world is "at peace" when there are wars of various degrees of intensity in Syria, Ethiopia, Yemen, etc. and when people are suppressed, persecuted, and killed in many countries around the world. — Apollodorus

And in the first world as well.

The only difference between dying slowly from overwork exhaustion and poverty (as is the fate of more and more people in first world countries) and dying in a bomb explosion in a war is how quickly it happens.

Simple answer: Because it's constantly changing it's borders! It has problems to know just where it's country ends. Just look at Ukraine now and what Putin is saying about the country. — ssu

*sigh*

Russia's defense of it's country has been for others Russia's invasions and imperialism. Is that hard to understand?

That's what I'm talking about. So many people simply refuse to look at the matter from Russia's perspective. In fact, they refuse to acknowledge that there are perspectives at all. To them, there is just their own perspective, which is The Truth, and all else is wrong.

If one is going to think in such ways, then why bother with philosophy?

In the other hand, we have a population dying in their houses because Putin does not recognize the Ukranian sovereignity. — javi2541997

Democarcy comes with a cost. Everyone is responsible. Nobody is innocent.

From the NY Times

"The sanctions “are severe enough to dismantle Russia’s economy and financial system, something we have never seen in history,” Carl B. Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics, wrote this week. — frank

And the NY Times etc. think that the Russian government hasn't taken this into consideration?

Does nobody play chess? In chess, in order to win, one has to be willing to sacrifice all figures except one.

The real problem is that Russia has always had this border issue: there aren't any obvious geographical borders, but flatland from Europe to Asia. And hence they've always been insisting on having more territory for defense and see springboards everywhere where they are threatened. And of course, the threat of the enemy serve authoritarian regimes well. — ssu

*sigh*

Why is the notion of "protecing your own country" so hard to understand when it is applied to Russia?

Yes yes but what for? What is the end game here? What are the goals of the great nations of the world right now, isn't it more power and domination over the others, in some sort of an international squid game? Is that what the human race was meant for? — FreeEmotion

What else?

Human existence is a mixed bag, and living on a planet where resources are scarce and relatively hard to obtain, this mixed bag is all it can be.

What is amazing is how philosophically unprepared most people seem to be for this. They are operating on the conviction that life on earth not only should be heaven, but that it _can_ be heaven. And that the only reason why it isn't is because some people are just evil.

They keep having those WW II memorials, saying "so that things like that would never happen again", but they never actually analyze why those things happened in the first place. And more, they fail to understand that merely remembering them is _not_ going to prevent them from happening again.

Of course, bringing up heavy existential topics in the abstract at a time like this will by many be judged as nothing other than perverse ... but it's the same in peace times, when nobody wants to think about such things because they're enjoying themselves too much.

So it's never the right time to think about heavy existential topics, while time marches on.

"There is nothing to say about Putin’s attempt to offer legal justification for his aggression. Its merit is zero.

Of course, it is true that the U.S. and its allies violate international law without a blink of an eye, but that provides no extenuation for Putin’s crimes." — Baden

Of course. But why should Russia be a ninny?

Psychology and psychiatry take a dim view of humans.

The more we can embody this ‘stillness’, the more we realise that there is nothing we need to be striving-for in any moment in time - only allowing for a free flow of possible energy. — Possibility

Bhava tanha.

All instances of suffering are a result of ignorance, isolation and exclusion. Karma refers to the quality of our interconnection with the world - it isn’t bound by ethics or this ‘round of rebirth’. The idea of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ karma is a Western notion.

The suicide bomber intends to put an end to his limited awareness of suffering by removing that awareness, along with certain other aspects of the world, by active exclusion. It is a destructive, reductionist intending that unintentionally increases suffering in the world beyond the bomber’s awareness.

The ascetic is bound by an isolated focus on their ‘individual’ round of rebirth, intending to minimise any connection they appear to have with suffering in the world. Any creative intending or karma here is isolated, and cannot extend beyond the individual, isolated from the world.

The sage recognises an underlying universal flow towards interconnection, and creatively intends to minimise suffering by maximising awareness, connection and collaboration. This is karma at work - it is not bound to rebirth, but rather highlights its limitations and extends beyond, and therefore beyond suffering. — Possibility

This is New Age stuff. I'm not touching that with a ten-foot pole.

Fuck all the established agendas and trying to make life's problem a personal problem, mam. — schopenhauer1

It's how capitalism works: Get the people to focus on their private lives, and get them to believe that every failure, every problem in their lives is their own fault. This way, they will be avid consumers, they will have little insight into their own needs, and they will have little regard for others (other people, other beings, the planet). While those higher up make a lot of money and the planet turns into hell.

It seems self-evident, one just needs to connect the dots.

Other than that, William Styron recovered that way, for example.

You and schopenhauer1 are really pitiful. You 1. resent anyone who isn't as miserable as you are. You can't even imagine there are people satisfied with their lives.

You two are broken and you 2. want, 3. demand, that we all be as broken as you are. — T Clark

You and ShowpanhourI 4. called me a liar. Fekyez both. — T Clark

Substantiate your accusations. Copy paste evidence from out post for all four items.

For me the question isn't really why do people get it, it's why do some people recover. — Tom Storm

1. Because they get bored of the depression.

2. Because the treatments for depression they've tried are worse than the depression itself.

Contemplating such topics brings madness and vexation.

That seems unlikely to me because Wittgenstein’s focus was on meaning as sense , and sense is a form
of feeling. He would have had to have an extraordinarily nuanced understanding of the relation between affectivity and conceptualization, which is precisely what autistics
lack.

His social difficulties may in fact have been due to too much emotional sensitivity. — Joshs

How can that be, "to too much emotional sensitivity"?

It seems likely that his "social difficulties" came from him taking his work seriously. Most people, including professional philosophers, turn into ordinary people once they punch out for the day. It even seems that people make a concerted effort not to allow their work to "get to them", whatever that work might be. Few are those who take the implications of their research seriously and apply them in their daily lives.

At college, one thing that always struck me as strange about students who majored in philosophy is how it left no trace on them. They kept making the same errors of reasoning as ordinary people, they were as superficial in their analysis of life problems. From what I've seen, academic philosophers aren't that different either.

I had a linguistics professors who ridiculed her colleague. I forgot the details by now, but the point was that this colleague actually applied the findings from her field of research in daily communication with people, and that apparently made her strange and hard to talk to.

Play it by ear — Joshs

Millennia of philosophy down the drain!

You and schopenhauer1 are really pitiful. You resent anyone who isn't as miserable as you are. You can't even imagine there are people satisfied with their lives.

You two are broken and you want, demand, that we all be as broken as you are. — T Clark

So people who are satisfied with their lives say such things to others as you do here to us?
Interesting this, this "satisfaction with life" ...

This additional dimensionality to Schopenhauer’s approach comes from recognising a qualitative relativity to both reasonable and ethical descriptions of the human condition. Schopenhauer’s philosophical ideas show no awareness of qualitative variability - this is particularly evident in his colour theory. With a father who supposedly committed suicide and a mother who seemed far from accepting of his personal qualities, I would say this is understandable. — Possibility

So how come that you have this awareness of qualitative variability, while Arthur Schopenhauer didn't have it?

Were you born with it?
Or did you learn it?

Our thread troll, informing us of the official Russian view — ssu

The West has indeed shown a remarkable commitment to never looking at itself.

So you set up hardcore weapons along the border with your neighbor, the weapons directed at your neighbor, but you insist that your neighbor is irrational for thinking that you have the intention of using those weapons?

You have some really interesting ideas about good neighborly relations.

I think an essential step toward a real and lasting solution would be to understand that the root cause of the problem is not Russian aggression but Western imperialism. — Apollodorus

I agree. But it seems the West will rather destroy Russia than admit to this.

Instructions for use: Attach said meaningless cliche to enemy of choice — Baden

Exactly what the West is doing.

Hagglund’s argument goes deeper than simply critiquing the idea of heaven. He uses a Derridean deconstructive approach to show that any value that is assumed to be beyond cultural contingency, such as universal notions of the good , the moral , the just or the generous , are incoherent. It is not just that we should prefer finitude over the eternal, the unconditional or the universal, but that all such assumptions fall prey to their own deconstruction. All valuation is contingent and relative. This is just as true of our imagining of a timeless deity, value structure, notion of the good or the true as it is of scientific and aesthetic endeavor. — Joshs

And so the alternative he suggests is ...?

I guess the modern approach to mental health is get used to it! or, roughly, shut up or put up! — Agent Smith

It seems this has always been the main approach most people used, and used a lot.
Remember, for the greater part of human history, human life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". And yet people somehow made it through it. Given the rich art history they've left behind, it seems they managed somehow. Perhaps they even coped better than we do, perhaps because their expectations about life were lower than ours.

The issue is that post-Enlightenment culture has lost sight of there being any way out of it, but that is due to its own philosophical shortcomings. — Wayfarer

Or it's the case that post-Enlightenment culture has too high expectations from life, so high they are bound to be disappointed, thus guaranteeing an additional misery.

Perhaps Viktor Frankl's insights might be relevant to that. — Wayfarer

No. He figured out his life philosophy before he was imprisoned, so he had an absolute advantage.
What would be relevant is if he would develop a meaningful philosophy of life while imprisoned; if he would have gone in unprepared, but came out wise.

it is generally the case that traumatic stress is the most usual triggering cause. — unenlightened

Why is that so? What do your sources say?

It seems "traumatic stress" is so powerful because it forces the person to face moral quandaries for which they were not prepared for.

It does apply to you.

You think Putin has gained anything by violating Ukraine's rights of self-determination for his own irrational purposes? — Garrett Travers

One party's right to self-determination includes their right to make themselves an enemy to another, but that other must simply stand by?

Again, the rational selfishness standard of ethics is the only one that produces interpersonal harmony, or individual flourishing. You've just got it mixed up a bit is all. — Garrett Travers

Americans love drama and they love to overstate the obvious and try to present it as something special.

You think Putin has gained anything by violating Ukraine's rights of self-determination for his own irrational purposes? — Garrett Travers

What do you gain by bad faith and misrepresenting others?

On the one hand, you claim to be looking for solutions, on the other you focus on attributing blame. Let's suppose, for arguments sake, this is 100% Putin's fault. Now we are precisely zero steps closer to finding a way to deescalate the situation. — Baden

What could we as observers do?

It's not like we can actually reach the decision makers and share our ideas with them. So our efforts are doomed from the onset.


The Ukraine could have a nice life as a neutral state and enjoy the benefits from being on good terms with both sides. Like Switzerland. But no. They don't want to profit from their strategic geopolitical position. They don't want to care who one of their neighbors is. They want to do their own thing. They want to be free to threaten their neighbor.
And the Americans don't want to pass up this opportunity either.
And after two years of covid, people are stressed out and need to relieve themselves somehow.

So it's not clear how realistic it is to even consider that the situation could be deescalated.

This is another hint at his mental problems. There's no contingency plan for retreat, it almost seems to be "do or die". — Christoffer

The same thing the West planned to do anyway.

It's strange how so many people think that this is somehow a "one-man show", as if a president is somehow so powerful that he can command everything and everyone under him.

The heavy airplanes fly above relentlessly, one about every 10 to 15 minutes, day and night.



What American president would pass up the opportunity to destroy the country they've been hyping themselves up to hate for 80 years (and more, actually).
This will guarantee Biden a reelection, the Democrats will gain more pover, and the American economy will get a boost, not to mention the American self-image.
Boris Johnson, too, stands to profit from this, with his covid indiscretions firmly forgotten, he's guaranteed a reelection.

What does Rand mean by selfish:

P1. if humans are generated by natural processes with reason (logic, rationality, conceptual faculty) being their means of survival.
P2. and if it is only through this conceptual faculty of reason that humans are capable of living a life according to the values he/she develops with said faculty
C. then the only moral system of society is one in which each human is free to pursue their own values to live and achieve their own goals

Let's start there, what's your issue with this proposition? Is it valid, is is sound? If not, then why for each. — Garrett Travers

For starters, unless one is a Candidean optimist who desires everything he has and who has everything he desires, a Randian egoist is oddly similar to everyone else and not exactly an egoist at all (and certainly not special).

Given that even a Randian egoist still has to make a living, either by selling products or services, or by theft or robbery, this means that his values and goals need to be aligned with the values and goals of other people. For in order to make money, by selling one's products or services, one has to offer other people products or services that they will buy, ie. those products or services need to be aligned with other people's values and goals, or they won't buy them. So not much individuality here. But the thief and the robber aren't much better off either, for they are still bound by what other people have that can be taken from them, and those things are a reflection of those other people's values and goals. Again, not much individuality here.

In short, all this Randian talk of the freedom to pursue one's own values and to achieve one's own goals doesn't contain much freedom nor individuality. At best, it's a hotheaded glorification of the ordinary.

Covid has come, and it seems, mostly gone, and people haven't learned anything from it.
This Ukraine crisis has come, and it will go, and it seems people won't learn anything from it.

The world will go on in a process of destruction and rebirth, and nobody will be the wiser for it.
Just one giant mass of suffering begetting another mass of suffering.

Depression results when a person's view of themself falls so far short of who they think they should be that they can no longer live with themself normally. The psychological treatments aim at redressing this imbalance - which is of course constituted of two self-evolved and self-perpetuated judgements, not by events. Counselling seeks by various means to encourage you to replace your overly critical view of yourself with one more realistic; and to replace your overly optimistic view of where you should be in life with a more realistic one. — Tim3003

So counselling sometimes teaches people to come to terms with being homeless, dying in the gutter?

How do they do that?

So no, depression is not a natural state of man. Perhaps in today's ever-faster-moving and more chaotic society it is becoming more and more common, but it causes under-performance and grief for all who encounter it. I see no evolutionary advantage in that..

Natural selection.

The way I see it, there is a process to the universe in which we don’t so much serve a predestined purpose as
‘creatively intend’. — Possibility

Indeed, this is also called karma, and keeps the round of rebirth going.
All three of your examples (the ascetic, the suicide bomber, and the sage) creatively intend, hence they are bound to the round of rebirth, and thus suffering.

This additional dimensionality to Schopenhauer’s approach comes from recognising a qualitative relativity to both reasonable and ethical descriptions of the human condition.

Schopenhauer’s philosophical ideas show no awareness of qualitative variability

You're missing that the various experessions of this qualitative variability still all function on the same platform, namely that of craving.

Fantasize? Worry maybe sometimes. I do read, fiction and non-fiction. I participate on the forum. I swim. I do my physical therapy exercises. — T Clark

In other words, keep yourself busy.

I don't think you understand how this works, at least works for me. The motivation to do things comes from inside me. I picture a spring bubbling up from under the ground. Just because I do stuff doesn't mean I'm keeping myself busy. Sometimes nothing bubbles up, so I just pay attention and wait. It doesn't usually take long.

Of course. It's like this for most people most of the time anyway. The difference is how deeply one analyzes one's state.

I guess you and schopenhauer1 lack imagination and empathy. You can't imagine other people experiencing things different from what you do. You don't seem to understand that others may feel differently.

Arthur Schopenahuer's, and Buddhism's, idea is that people can't stand doing nothing (actually doing nothing, not mentally, verbally, physically) and that when they find themselves in circumstances where they can't act in any way, they experience this as suffering.

It's why people hate to wait in line, hate to be ill and tied to a hospital bed, hate to be unable to fall asleep. Why prolonged sensory deprivation has an adverse effect. This is also why they hate many types of meditation because there is so little activity there.

I asked you before -- Can you really sit quietly, doing nothing -- not even fantasizing -- for hours, while being fully awake and alert?