The idea that 'Ukrainians' are all fighting for the same reason is, again, patent nonsense.

As such, we cannot possibly 'take into account' their agency — Isaac

The matter of agency is whether the common response to being invaded has been to fight back. The issue has come up here in the context of those saying that such a response is insignificant because the people fighting are only ciphers in a proxy war. Your observation about personal reasons is an equivocation between different ideas. If there had been no willingness to fight back, siding with Ukraine would have been merely a feeling of regret rather than a life-or-death attempt to repel invaders.

Your argument is similar to boethius in the way the invasion itself plays no part in how the participants in the struggle are seen to have responded to it. Your willingness to take note of all the different motivations leads to an odd inverse assessment of their relevance.

What distinguishes your account of irrelevance from Putin saying Ukraine does not exist outside of Russia?

I am not convinced that a 'valid' proposition excludes the possibility of error. That suggests an environment where arguments would be true if made clean of attempts to make them look better than they actually are. One can make a valid argument, free of sophistical persuasion, and still be wrong.

I agree with that call for courtesy. I have to admit I just used the reply function to add them to the conversation and I still haven't practiced the @ at method yet.

This is an improvement from when you did not see any kind of Ukrainian identity as being germane to what is happening. It takes Ukrainians for them to do bad things to each other.

The compulsion to serve is an important issue. It has been a deal breaker in many wars. The way you present it as an elective is odd. That would be more a reflection of intent if Ukraine was trying to invade Russia.

I see the resemblance. Part of my bringing it up was to separate the issue from a 'ghost in the machine' matter that you have been charged with introducing.

I think you can argue for a general resemblance between Chalmer's argument and the earlier Cogito arguments of both Descartes and Augustine. — Wayfarer

I think there are important differences between Chalmer's approach and these two philosophers. The experience of being oneself is given as a necessity that must be accepted before attending to what else exists in the Cartesian mode. Chalmers starts from a different direction:

Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open.

The explanatory gap Chalmers discusses is not an impassable barrier by definition. This is not a polemic against attempts to use reduction to find causes for events. The need to introduce complexity is a stepping back from assuming the 'first person' is synonymous with 'consciousness':

This is not to say that experience has no function. Perhaps it will turn out to play an important cognitive role. But for any role it might play, there will be more to the explanation of experience than a simple explanation of the function.

Given that all Ukrainians share the same motivation? — Manuel

I referred to the ones who are fighting and the ones who support those people. There are a lot of them. I won't bother posting more evidence for that as it is dismissed as propaganda. Nobody has yet to post evidence to the contrary unless you count the polls conducted by Russia.

Obviously, there is more than one perspective. The politics before the invasion has been interrupted by an attack upon the whole country. The willingness of Russia to kill civilians seems, in part, to divide those who want to fight. Please report when you hear of that happening.

Your observations do not support the little regard you have for Ukrainian motivations.

They do show why you view their agency to be unimportant.

I want the conflict to end now. I am not the one fighting it, however.

Once again, you would have the Ukrainians merely be pieces on a board game.

Yes, neither you nor I are fighting. But you are willing to explain to the one's fighting why they are dying. To leave their view out of the picture comes from standing above them.

The people in Ukraine who are fighting Russians are fighting because they were attacked by Russians. Whatever arrangements could have been made before that are not germane any longer. To only view the unfolding of events that might have been is to ignore what is happening now.

As far as smug self-righteousness goes, it is difficult to surpass its glory when you dismiss the will to defend oneself as a slavish pursuit of an ideology.

If I understand your report of what Withey is saying, he is comparing different kinds of persuasion rather than presenting a self-evident truth revealed by our experience. Taken by themselves, the emotions are not an argument unless they are made one. I have to write a story to pit them against another narrative.

I was thinking more along the lines that it would be good to stop the party sooner than later.

I respect your decision.

Well, I have to say the banning looks kind of fun.
I shuffle around the set like Mr. Rogers.
Chances are low that I will get banned for my sweaters being improperly buttoned.

But this is all besides the point, which is that once a religion accepts certain writings as scripture, then the writings cannot be repudiated. — Art48

The writings themselves have been understood in many conflicting ways. Unfortunately, many violent struggles have been involved with such differences.
In addition, many writings do not agree with each other in an accepted tradition. There have been convergences through dogma. There have been many divergences as well.

The situation is dynamic. Whatever sentiments were prevalent before the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the Russians have been busy. There is the departure of Ukrainians and the theft of their property as noted here:

Since 2014, Russia has been employing traditional Soviet resettlement practices and forcibly changing the demographic composition of the population in Crimea (see EDM, May 30, 2019 and August 6, 2019). The imposition of Russian Federation citizenship on residents of Crimea (nearly all residents of the peninsula had Russian citizenship less than a year after the annexation), forced deportations, the unlawful conscription of local men into the Russian military, persecutions and imprisonments of pro-Ukrainian activists who stand against the occupation, repressions against the Ukrainian Church, as well as closures of Ukrainian schools triggered a mass departure of Ukrainians (including Crimean Tatars) from Crimea. According to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, almost 48,000 people left the peninsula for Ukraine during the last seven years (Krymr.com, January 6, 2021). The number of those who moved to other countries may be higher. — Alla Hurska

The same article notes the influx of population into Crimea:

Since illegally annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, Russia has been forcibly shifting the region’s demographic composition and trying to replace the native Crimean population with its own loyal citizens. Moreover, these transformative migration flows enable the occupying authorities to create a Trojan Horse against any future efforts by Kyiv to return the peninsula to its control. The saturation of Crimea with siloviki and military personnel is also done intentionally, helping further militarize the region and populate Crimea with trusted armed people. According to Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and Article 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), “the transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” is completely prohibited and considered a war crime (Crimeahrg.org, January 6). — ibid

Before the 2022 invasion, the problem of Internally Displaced Population in Ukraine was still a major issue years after the annexation and the establishment of the Independent Republics. It is difficult to find exact numbers of IDP's and refugees who have fled the country since 2/2022.

According to the 2001 census, the breakdown of ethnic identity in Kherson was:

Ukrainians - 961.6 (82.0%)
Russians - 165.2 (14.1%)
Belarusians - 8.1 (0.7%)
Tatars - 5.3 (0.5%)
Armenians - 4.5 (0.4%)
Moldavians - 4.1 (0.4%)

Gosh, that can't be right. When Russia annexed it recently, they had a vote where over 90% of the population approved. That is a lot of heart and mind to win over in just 20 years.

If Kant was astute, he would in my opinion have regarded his phenomena/noumena distinction as being a practical distinction made for the purposes of epistemology, as opposed to a metaphysical distinction, for obvious reasons pertaining to the creation of philosophical pseudo-problems. — sime

To some extent, was not part of Kant's project to meet Hume's challenge regarding the pursuit of causes? The idea being that we could pursue them as significant agents worth the effort rather than dismissing them as stories we tell ourselves that accidentally get confirmed by experiences.

You mean like this;

Well, I am not a very good representative to give an account of the matter since the majority of my interests fall outside the common terms of discourse here but I have noticed that many of the banned only got to that place after attempting to dominate all other conversations in a discussion.

Are you sure about that?
Perhaps we should call it Pandora's Box.

As Bowie said:
"Don't hold your breath but the pretty things are going to hell"

Maybe Shoutbox 2 can become a kind of TPF Bible? — Baden

And lo, there was a thing. But nobody could agree what it was or tasted like.

That does sound fun.
Just got my first test saying my cholesterol is too high.

"Battle cries and champagne just in time for sunrise."

That's interesting. Can you tell me a bit more? Is this to do with identities of work or etc? — Baden

It does have something to do with work. My life in the trades has been an interaction with stuff and learning or not learning how to be better at shaping it. That has happened in the context of production as exchange that you refer to but there is a personal element where the good and bad decisions pile up for me to notice for myself rather than only being a value translatable to a social currency.

On a more general level, there is a way we are stuck with ourselves that is not fully represented by mapping the roles we play. I am not suggesting the opposite approach of viewing experience only as an isolated event. I don't know what sufficient reason addresses the difference. I view the difference to be self-evident.

What I gathered from Chalmer's argument is that no amount of science can approach why consciousness is possible as whatever it is. The assumption that such a possibility can be directly associated with our experience assumes that they must be connected. And that assumption is what Chalmers is directly challenging.

The subject is subjected to the social insofar as it cannot coherently arrange itself in opposition to it, or at least in opposition to its failings, because it has internalized conflicting psychological forces that prevent a coherent response. And a society that systematically protects its failings at the expense of its subjects is antithetical to the notion of meaningful human progress. — Baden

This makes sense to me as how I am caught up in process and processes where the 'identify' I experience appears. I have no idea how to compare that with experiences of identity that seem to come forward on their own account.

I don't present that as an argument against some kind of completely 'objective' narrative but do feel something has been left out.

Since he's more expert than you, you're not really in a position to judge whether the inclusion of these developments is meritorious or mistaken. You can only decide who to believe and you don't have sufficient expertise to do so on technical grounds. — Isaac

Arguments based upon authority are the weakest kind.

I never referred to the Ukrainians as "soulless" - that's a misrepresentation of my argument and a tasteless one at that, aimed specifically at framing me as anti-Ukrainian. — Tzeentch

I did not mean to represent your argument as a matter of intent.

You have yet (to my knowledge) to represent the Ukrainians as choosing to fight for their own reasons rather than at the behest of others outside the country. My charge is purely a deduction from that observation.

Your point is well taken that the influence factor from the U.S. and Russia is not equivalent in terms of coercion and punitive consequences. I read Smoleńsk and Dutkiewicz to be saying that the U.S. helped prevent a repetition of the Lukashenko effect rather than manufacture a coup. The authors are looking at it as a local struggle with different lines of support. In their efforts to acknowledge a center of gravity in Eastern Europe, they look back at a history of sometimes being helped and not helped by nations in the 'West'.

From that perspective, seeing wars as proxies fighting in the service of others is a self-fulfilling prophesy. And that leads to your observation:

It is pretty insane to think that Ukrainians defending their country against Russian invasion are merely doing someone else's bidding. — SophistiCat

Agreed. I am interested in how the zero-game perspective is accepted by default. The authors of the article are challenging the notion that nations following their interest in other places render these conflicts to be only about them.

Seen (heard) them twice before. They keep circling into their own groove.

If what Leibniz and Descartes presented are apologies of sorts, are you seeking for something else?

So, what sort of verification would compel you to take these charges seriously?

If you want people to take you seriously here, you'll need to take the strawmanning down several notches. — Tzeentch

How is my comment an example of the strawman argument? You charged that the Ukrainians have to accept one set of conditions or another. You say that neither possibility involve choices they are making for themselves. You pour crocodile tears upon them with:

It's not a matter of agency. It's a matter of power, which they have comparatively little. It's unfortunate, but that's the way the world works. — Tzeentch

It doesn't get more imperial than that.

I am still curious if you have a particular objection to Lough's actual argument.

Which particular statement of Lough's are you referring to? Or are you only responding to my description of it as a point of interest?

The Ukrainian people have been given a choice - fight or surrender. That's all the influence they have in this war. — Tzeentch

Many of them have expressed that as their choice. Your version of them as soulless puppets is as dismissive of their agency as any version of colonial right you charge being exerted by other states upon them.

Danke — Agent Smith

Never read him. Or her.

On a more serious note, didn't Leibniz present the possible as the restraint applied to perfection? Sort of along the lines of "this sucks, but you should see what didn't happen."

I just realized that I had not provided a link to the first article. I edited to fix. Here it is again: https://newrepublic.com/article/165603/carlson-russia-ukraine-imperialism-nato

What makes sense to me in both articles is that the simplicity of there being only a U.S. position or not leaves out important parts of how the war developed. The criticism of the U.S. is fair on many levels but it often becomes too U.S centric in itself. Everything between Washington and Moscow becomes flyover country. So, the following paragraph points to an element studiously avoided in Mearsheimer's argument:

This is crucial when it comes to understanding the current war. However tempting it might be to analyze it in terms of a proxy war between NATO and Russia, Ukraine is an active participant in this historical process. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine several times attempted to assert and defend its westward course, including in 2004 and in 2014, both times to great resistance on the part of the Kremlin. There is no point in denying that the West actively intervened in this. But so did Russia.

Beyond not accepting the zero sum game of the Great Powers argument, the merit of Lough's approach is that he considers developments between Europeans left out of the U.S. centric narratives. He also raises the question of how promises made to the USSR relate to one of the nations that appeared after it dissolved. I don't know if Mearsheimer every expressly addressed that.

Did you read the articles?