There is no secret about the pursuit of U.S. interests and their intention to support ties to the E.U.

This influx of support does not show that the revolution was engineered by outsiders.

Since the violence wielded by the Yanukovych regime was a decisive factor in the growth of the revolution, your planners would have had to have been behind that as well. Pretty crafty.

The coup speculators point to associations to particular groups but do not cover the broad coalition of people who otherwise were not aligned with each other. If this was supposed be something like Operation Condor in Chile, how these very different agents were being leveraged simultaneously needs to be explained.

When Mearsheimer speaks of a coup, no effort is made to show how the revolution was managed as a project.

Well, none of that remotely resembled Wittgenstein's Zettel.

Maybe it was a chat.gpt stunt:

"AI, what combination of identity and opinion would piss off the most people at the same time given their previous statements?"

Do you have a source that rebuts her account of the participants?

I did not mean to insinuate anything about vetting; Just curious about what looked interesting.

zettel's profile says he was invited by Jamal.

I would disagree to call the Revolution of Dignity a "staged coup" starting with the Euromaidan protests. This wasn't some Operation Ajax, but naturally Russian propaganda portrays it to be so. — ssu

When considering the diversity of participants, both previously organized and spontaneously self-organized, this comparison between the 'Orange' and 'Maidan' shows the idea that they were all fronts for foreign governments very difficult to imagine.

One vital component to how quickly and far the revolution spread was the repression of the protests by the authorities. That does not come up much amongst the promoters of coup narratives.

Your choice between A and B is sort of passive/aggressive.

There is a beauty that pushes buttons other people have. There is a kind that reveals to you what you like. The latter requires a different investigation than having to put in ear plugs to stop hearing the Sirens.

The distortion of truth is not the same as its suppression — NOS4A2

I have no idea what this means. Truth is only useful as a concept if all misrepresentations count as the opposite of it. We do not possess a version of events beyond attempts to recount them. Reporting a false narrative is often done for the purpose of suppressing another.

Regarding Spanish films, Carlos Saura's Blood Wedding is fantastic:

In the spirit of remembering Beck, this album with Rod Stewart still rankles my chains.:

Brilliant.
I had no idea this existed.
A parallel of the harmony and the pacing.

It seems to be an algorithm that takes three reactions to Heidegger's language and reconfigures them to fit different contexts.

I have made several attempts to seriously study Heidegger over the years and lapsed into a coma each time. I object to a lot of his approach but now find myself wanting to defend him from the use of classifications he argued against.

Oh no! See the movie anyway. I implore you. I had to see it 3 times in the theater— a modern masterpiece on all levels. — Mikie

One thing about that movie I will never forget; Javier Bardem was entirely too good at playing his role.
I cannot watch him in other movies because I cannot unsee him from there.

Furthemore, Chalmers is part of a kind of new wave in 'consciousness studies' that is far more open to, shall we say, alternative philosophical models, than the diehards of analytical philosophy. — Wayfarer

I completely agree.

I don't mean to accuse you of losing sight of something but to suggest there is a gap between Husserl, for example, and Chalmers in regard to how the 'first person' is understood as the source of phenomena.

Chalmers is fighting for accepting methods of the first person as evidence in the face of the thinking/practice that has excluded them. Husserl is taking those experiences as given to him without qualification.

Heidegger is a voice of opposition to the 'scientism' he sees in society. Chalmers is militating against that view when he does not accept that science has nothing more to do with the matter of subjectivity.

Ah yes, the power of subtraction.

Like my old Sifu said while teaching martial arts:

"if you are genuinely interested in self-defense, try not being such an asshole."

Righto!
I have seen half of that list. I better get to work on the rest.

But we can't study the nature of being that way, because it's never something we're apart from or outside of (another insight from existentialism.) In the case of the actual 'experience of consciousness', we are at once the subject and the object of investigation, and so, not tractable to the powerful methods of the objective sciences that have been developed since the 17th century. — Wayfarer

I read Chalmers to be saying that consciousness could be investigated as a scientific phenomenon if the 'powerful methods' stopped insisting upon reducing it into a mechanism that excludes the need for a 'subject.'. Chalmers says the only way to avoid the problem is to include consciousness.as a fundamental property like mass, space, time, etcetera. To that extent, he is arguing against a 'scientism' that accepts the Descartes/Kant divisions as a final word on what can be investigated.

I understand the viewpoints stated by many in this thread that dismiss his framework as philosophically suspect. I just don't want to lose sight of what he thought he was doing as a point of departure.

My favorite from that album is Guinnivere:


It still feels like travelling from one place to another.

Yes, they are worthy.

Kubrick, Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini, for sure. Some I didn't see listed by others:

The Last Picture Show
Solaris by Tarkovsky
Richard II, with Lawrence Olivier
Alexander Nevski and Ivan the Terrible by Eisenstein
Koyaanisqatsi
Lawrence of Arabia
Heart of Glass by Herzog
High Noon
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

In regard to my challenge to your 'grouping' idea as it relates to having an opinion, I considered your following remarks:

You've not yet provided any reason at all why the aggregated opinion of that particular group matters to us more than the opinion of any other group.

The aggregated views of {all the people who live within that border} has no meaning. It's just a random means of stratification unrelated to the opinion being aggregated.

The comments you cite say that there is no such thing as a Ukrainian identity, history, language and culture. I've also argued that there's no such thing as the will of the Ukrainians, or the motive of the Ukrainians. I've argued that no such thing exists because Ukraine (like all other countries) is an arbitrary line drawn by powerful people based on the amount of resources they had the power to control at the time. It does not in any way 'capture' some natural grouping of people all of whom think alike. It would be no more real then me taking a quick glance at the posts on religion here and announcing that "the belief of TPF is that there is a God".

Sure, but same goes for a load of people getting together to do anything. Run a marathon. Clear mines. Save lives in wars zones. There's nothing unique about getting together to fight a common enemy which creates some moral purpose which we then are under an obligations to respect. The Nazis got together for a common goal.

Yes? What connects the acceptance that there are motivations to fight back with somehow having to pretend those motivations are more politically important that the object of the most powerful nation on earth? The former is an argument about their mere existence, the latter is an argument about their importance in determining if western policy is morally acceptable.

Still don't. There's no such thing as a Ukrainian identity. Ukrainians identify in all sorts of different, occasionally completely incompatible ways. That's why there was a civil war going on before this invasion.

Of course Ukraine does not have its own history, language and culture. It's an arbitrary line on a map, it's absurd to think it somehow contains a natural grouping of language, history and culture.

Tell me, how did the people who determined where the line should be ensure that it encompassed such a natural grouping? Were studies done, where polls taken? Because as I recall learning it, it was some politicians in a negotiating room that drew the line. Did Lenin consult ethnographers in 1922? Did Krushchev cede Crimea because his anthropologists insisted the 'culture' there belonged to Ukraine?

No country's boundaries are carefully drawn around natural breaks in culture and language. It's one of the reasons we have so many fucking wars.

In this case, you'd be blind to ignore the fact that the Russian-speaking population in the east of Ukraine have a different language to the rest, the suppression of which was instrumental in the pre-2022 war. — Isaac

After all that, it is difficult to process:

We're not talking about what opinion 'do' so I don't see the relevance of this. we're talking about the moral weight one ought give the aggregated opinion of a certain grouping. — Isaac

Just out of idle curiosity, what is a "vague wife"? I've known a few people whose normal state was "vague". — BC

I get why the summary says that but it does not reflect a careful reading of the book. With the possible exception of the son, all the characters operate in a fixated manner. The characters who are easily understood are the committed nazis. The diffuse presentation of others makes it difficult to separate a coping strategy from a clear thought of resistance. Suspicion becomes more than a thought and switches the tracks one travels upon.

We are good people, aren't we? — BC

The best of all possible people. Oh wait, a collection of soil has formed on the road outside. I will take my broom and........

.

The scale is a significant difference. They are not the same event. I do challenge the idea that the difference was the result of a "weak moral anchor."

Hannah Arendt is on to something when she distinguishes religious hatred from antisemitism because of the way the latter developed through an international community. The story of punishing a group that is identified as the cause of one's misfortune changes into one of a People rising up against their oppressors. The story of the Russian Revolution is similar in seeing the fight as liberating themselves from the previous winners of the world order.

This way of becoming who you are through destruction has a different character than taking the confidence of one's superiority to be reason enough to rule over others. The Japanese didn't claim the Chinese were stopping them from being who they were. They liked the fruits of empire and hoped to like it even more. They weren't remaking the structure of their society at the same time.

That's what I was getting at. The particular kind of immorality that created the Holocaust, for instance, could it have been related to a weak moral anchor? — frank

Killing Jews was a crowd pleaser well before the Enlightenment. The Crusades had people doing it at home as well as abroad. For example: The Pogroms of 1189 and 1190

If you are thinking of a Nietzschean narrative of nihilism from loss of faith, it is interesting to consider the intellectuals who were drawn to Naziism as a rejection of modern values that exclude a 'spiritual' life:

In April 1933, Heidegger took on the rectorship of Freiburg University, and joined the Nazi Party with great public fanfare the following month. He supported a political revolution which, he believed, by teaching the Germans discipline and an “instinct for the ultimate”, would prepare the way for a “deeper … spiritual” revolution. What this was really about, he insisted, was that “exposed to the most extreme questionableness of its own existence, this people [should] will … to be a spiritual people”. If the Party did not “sacrifice itself as a transitional phenomenon”, he grandly declared, but instead pretended to be “complete, eternal truth dropped from heaven”, it was “an aberration and a folly”.

The Notebooks document Heidegger’s increasingly bitter realization that Hitler and his chief ideologue Rosenberg wanted nothing to do with this idealism: Germanness, to them, was a matter of race and territory, not of spiritual destiny. — Judith Wolfe

As on many other topics, Heidegger was a poor student of Nietzsche. Fred could tell creatures apart from the sounds they made and the odors they out gassed.

And anomie? — BC

That is an interesting question.
The first thought that pops into my head is the movie The Last Picture Show.


Perhaps more closely related to the topic at hand would be Walter Kempowski's novel All for Nothing. It tells a story of the Germans losing the war in a way that reproduces the condition that made it possible. Don't read near bedtime.

Do you agree that scientism was also a factor? — frank

I think of it more along the lines of John Keegan in his A History of Warfare. Advances in technology has long been a part of why certain methods succeeded but figuring out how to become more lethal with what you have got is not only about the tools used. He has a great account of how deadly the use of the Phalanx was against less organized forces.
Keegan speaks of nuclear weapons as a sort of lethality that conditions people in a way not experienced previously. The pursuit of the lethal leads to a standing wave where there is no progress beyond it. If 'scientism' is a factor from that point of view, it is no different from all the efforts to make better tools to kill from time out of mind.

Regarding ennui, young people get bored where they live confined by certain structures and the allure of fighting in another place has always been more attractive than doing chores for some of them..

Machine guns. Bombs and Missiles. Industrial Project Management. Mass Media. The shrinking of the world as a shared space. Ennui.

You translated my phrasing into other words with your question. I will think about the best way to answer.

It is presumptuous to assert that the ideas are coherent outside of the context of human thought and experience. On the other hand, it is also presumptuous to claim that such a domain of experience is a process that is going on in a fashion self-sufficient enough to have no relationship to this "arrangement."

I am not able to pull together a report to something able to answer the question of 'being qua being.' Looking at various ways of talking about it are interesting. But pursuing some of those while losing interest in others does not seem to me like choosing a favorite.

The act of selection is one of the elements under review.

So I tread water in what I think is the Socratic fashion; There is some arrangement that is the source of what is experienced: I am ill-equipped to say what that might be.

I have no idea what this means, — Isaac

It is a description that shows the result of only considering "groups" of individuals and their opinions to adequately represent people living together in a particular society. All the different ways people work, judge themselves, mate, educate children, and govern themselves are not simply an aggregate of their opinions.

Opinions, by themselves, do not do anything.

Nor does it need to. I'm making a moral argument. Moral arguments are about the way things ought to be, not about the way things are. — Isaac

You present the absence of Ukrainian agency as a fact, authorizing the removal of their voice from any moral calculus. You champion Mearsheimer's theory of International Relations as the best explanation of the events unfolding in Ukraine. You discount previous behavior by Russia as indicative of anything happening in this conflict.

All of your 'moral' arguments are made upon the basis of what you have argued to be happening.

The expression: 'absolute power corrupts absolutely.' was made by Lord Acton to strictly refer to those who took advantage of their place in society to prey upon others below them.

I don't know where insecurity comes into the picture.

As to the question of martyrdom and guilt, escape from the cave is escape from the city. Socrates was a citizen of the city in the double sense of place or Chora. — Fooloso4

Your account of the Chora presented in the Timaeus reminds me of a passage in the Theaetetus:

Socrates: Evils, Theodorus, can never be done away with, for the good must always come from the contrary; nor have they any place in the divine world, but they must needs haunt this region of our mortal nature. — Theaetetus, 176a, translated by Cornford

The translation does not fully capture the Greek in regard to 'place' (topos):

τὴν δὲ θνητὴν φύσιν καὶ τόνδε τὸν τόπον περιπολεῖ ἐξ ἀνάγκης.

The word περιπολεῖ is to wander around an area the way a vagrant or a military patrol might do.

The ἀνάγκης is the same 'necessity' that required starting over again in Timaeus.

It's not that there's no polities. One could create any such grouping - {all dog owners} - for example. It's... — Isaac

The word 'polity' does not mean a grouping by means of a shared property. The first meaning given in the OED is: "Civil organization (as a condition); civil order." It comes from the Ancient Greek: polis. The Republic by Plato is titled: Politeia. A better translation than the 'Res Publica' of Latin would be 'What makes a City. The City refers to a place. Different places have different polities.

Polities obviously include formally articulated forms of governance. But they cannot be recognized 'as a condition' without placing them alongside other institutions, both those formally established and those preserved through custom. Who gets to do what varies greatly. Perhaps any discussion of polity requires the context of history. Conditions in a Hindu caste society are much different than a community in the Iroquois nation, for example. Participation and exclusion take place in the context of polity.

This central element of life in society is not recognized by your statement:

The aggregated views of {all the people who live within that border} has no meaning. — Isaac

This atomizes the participation of each individual in their location to the point that they are not in a place. It is like a theater filled with a hundred Descartes who have nothing to do with the other Descartes sitting next to them.

I grant that if one takes this condition as a premise, any sense of a shared space becomes arbitrary. But nothing you have presented demonstrates that people actually live like that.

What role does science play from that perspective?

I think that for Godel, the matter of valid forms of demonstration was paramount. Aristotle certainly was concerned with the matter but also saw first principles as being a proper fit for what was to be inquired into. Some natural things had particular differences that required different primary points of departure. There were other qualities they all shared.

There is substantial debate amongst ancient scholars regarding such a distinction in Aristotle's text. MELINA G. MOUZALA gives a nice summary of the issue.

My impression is that Aristotle was not trying to provide the last word on these matters.

To some extent (currently in dispute), the desire to find out how Nature works is the desire to learn something beyond the aim of accounts given merely to tell a story.

When you say: "There isn't any phenomenal aspect to the third person account, that is to ignore the role of paying attention to phenomena has in moving toward that prize of objectivity. One can recognize the difference without pitting them against each other in a zero-sum game.

He is taking aim from the balcony, not rebutting your thesis.

I carry an umbrella in case it rains.