@Hanover

Say there was a situation where one of your loved ones was being used as a human shield by villainous entities. Would you still say it's ok to blow the shields up for the purposes of defense?

I thought that opposites attract — Agree-to-Disagree

I guess it's you and your shadow.

after all, the question of how we experience the world at the most basic level might be an empirical one, best answered through scientific research. — J

I was thinking of this lately in terms of the residents of the two-dimensional world. If they ask about the nature of their world, they might be

1. Asking from a vantage point outside their world, which they can't have due to conceptual limitations, or
2. Asking from within their world, looking for signs, such as when a spoon passes through their world, they see a dot which gets wider and then shorter, then disappears into a dot again.

I actually don't think either 1 or 2 works. They can't know things about their world. As for whether there's an outer world, maybe that's a different question. Did you see Chalmers' book Constructing the World? He goes on and on about Laplace's Demon. I'm not sure he really establishes anything though.

Love is the recognition of yourself in the other.

That is true. If you prefer, he says that it is only sense-data that we see directly, and that "material objects" are "constructions" out of sense-data. So material objects, according to Ayer are not what we think they are. — Ludwig V

But I think we all know that observers who are looking at the same object each see a different scene. Each one could draw out what they see and we could compare, and note differences. No one concludes from this that the observers aren't seeing a material object. I think Ayers was fully up to speed on how this is playing out in language.

I think Austin's criticisms aren't toward Ayers. They're toward a version of sense-data theory that does say we don't see the world around us.

That's interesting. I spent a while reading about the Franciscans. They became sharply apocalyptic for a while.

OK. But the argument in question here is the argument that we never perceive reality, only sense-data. — Ludwig V

Ayers doesn't present that view. There may be advocates of sense data who do believe that, but Ayers agrees with the view that what we see is real, whether it's sense data that we see, or material objects.

Russia is invincible and will never fall out. — javi2541997

I agree. A million years from now the surface of the earth will be covered in a swirling mist that is basically Russia waiting for some aliens to visit so it can morph itself into their form and confuse the hell out of everybody.

:up:

see Russia as a failed state now — Punshhh

But hasn't it been failing off and on for like 800 years?

I expect it would be Washington versus Beijing. In which case I don’t see it happening. — Punshhh

That would be cool if they avoided war and just had the occasional cold war.

Maybe they expected Zelensky to flee. I was a little surprised he didn't. Maybe he turned out to be the wildcard the Russians weren't expecting.

:grin:

I'm the kind of soil that likes to know if the seeds are for plants worth growing. — Tom Storm

You're rocky soil.

I was going to say Naughtius Maximus or Biggus Dickus, but don't want to be offensive. — Ciceronianus

Incontinentia Buttocks.

I imagine the literature appropriated and adapted this, like it did with many other items. — Tom Storm

Indeed. Let me tell you a parable. A farmer went around throwing seeds. Some of the seeds fell on rocky soil and did nothing. Some fell on crappy soil and sprouted, but then died. Some of the seeds fell on fertile soil and gave birth to a forest.

It's not who said it. It's where the seed fell. The question is: what kind of soil are you?

Ta da!!!

It wasn't Jesus. It may have been no guy at all. Or Guys. Or someone called Frankus. — Tom Storm

Nobody said the meek shall inherit the earth? Was it computer generated?

We have no independent evidence of a Jesus, — Tom Storm

It wasn't Jesus. It was some other guy named Jesus.

War, or perhaps we should be more neutral and call it direct military action, has worked for Putin. — Echarmion

Yep.

Right. That's what I meant by saying he rose to power by starting a war. I realized Yeltsin had already picked him as a successor.

It" was a dog's breakfast of conflicting views and accounts that needed hundreds of years and much violence to even begin to appear consistent. — Banno

Between Augustinians, Franciscans, Benedictines, and Dominicans, Christianity was diverse. Conflict creates dynamism. That's a good thing for an ideology.

I wish more people perceived the grandeur and beauty of Christianity. Maybe some are too close to it to see it.

My point is that defending Christianity as a religion because it assimilated the doctrines of much older religions/philosophies isn't much of an apology, as you're merely saying it's derivative and proposes nothing new. — Ciceronianus

I was trying to explain that a religion is great by virtue of its power to transmit ideas from one generation to the next, not by its inventiveness. Religion is a conserving business. New stuff is anathema.

Establishing that Christianity borrowed heavily from other religions or philosophical traditions wouldn't seem to indicate there's anything unique about it. — Ciceronianus

It uniquely took over Rome and subsequently became a uniquely ideologically complex religion by virtue of being a forum for diverse perspectives.

That's not quite true, Putin was elevated to power by the Jelzin family. But his success in the second Chechen war did much to secure his rule. — Echarmion

Supposedly he was chosen because he demonstrated that he was corrupt, so Yeltsin, who was also corrupt, believed Putin wouldn't prosecute him for his crimes. War increased his power?

And nothing cements the authoritarian rule like a common external enemy. — Jabberwock

He rose to power originally by starting a war. More war would pull the country behind him?

so the triumph, even at the cost of some hardships, could be just what Putin needed — Jabberwock

Needed for what? To remain in power?

But that would have damaged trump, possibly beyond repair. — Echarmion

I don't think Trump can be damaged. If ten snakes popped out of his head and announced that they were from Betelgeuse and they were here to destroy the human race and started beaming lasers out of their eyes to blow up everything in sight, his followers would be like: hell yea!!

Taken together Putin might well have assumed that his military would pull off a blitzkrieg campaign so shocking that the Ukrainian military would be unable to respond, while the west would look on helplessly and just pile on some more toothless sanctions. — Echarmion

Something like that. I think he thought Ukraine would fall quickly.

I think if the invasion was just a land grab, Putin's timing is a little strange. Why wouldn't he have done that a few years earlier when Trump was president of the US? Trump would have cheered him on.

Waiting until Biden, a hawk, to become president, makes it seem that he wanted to engage the US military somehow. Since he also declared some sort of new world order after the invasion, indicating that the US was no longer in charge of global affairs, it seems like he thought he was going to easily conquer Ukraine and flaunt this win in spite of Biden's public threat to punish Russia for interfering in US elections.

In other words, I don't believe the invasion was about NATO, but I think it may have partly been about demonstrating Russian military strength and simultaneously demonstrating that US supremacy was over. He just miscalculated his own military capability?

I think Washington and Moscow could possibly be gone in a couple of centuries from nuclear war. We won't be around to see it tho.

He's going to be on his ass by the looks of things. :razz: — Baden

It's too soon to tell.

Biden is one badass oldie.

do you have anything to contribute? — BitconnectCarlos

I was actually curious. Keep it to yourself if you must.

Hamas uses the civilians as shields and then stopped them from fleeing south to avoid the IDF. You can't assure the safety of the civilians without first engaging Hamas because they use them as their weapons. — Hanover

@Count Timothy von Icarus

Do you agree with Hanover's assessment that bombing was the only way to defend Israel?

biblical interpretation; it just seems when he does this he'll assume high degrees of certainty/knowledge. The gospels note how he speaks with authority unlike the rabbis/pharisees of the time. — BitconnectCarlos

Did you just start reading the gospels a week ago?

I don't think the invasion is going to defeat Hamas. If they kill all the present crew, a new bunch of Iranian backed wackos will takes their places. Israel would have to occupy Gaza, and Blinkin has already signaled that that's not going to happen.

Bottom line is that Israel is ultimately going to have to rectify what they created in Gaza. Bombing the shit out it first is just going to make that harder. Going after Hamas by first securing the welfare of the civilians would have been smarter.

You just justified the Holocaust. Congratulations.

Just make sure it isn't a kibbutz either. — schopenhauer1

But then I'd have the freakin US Navy backing me up!

My base of operations for this discussion is in a neonatal intensive care unit, so I should be good.

When Mikie is wrong she aggressively doubles and triples down. Anyone who's interacted with her knows that.

But the example was when a person was under the influence of LSD. It is in this situation that the real parts of the experience are not so easily distinguishable from the unreal. — Metaphysician Undercover

I guess if you take so much you have a psychotic break. I don't know. Datura apparently does take away the ability to distinguish real from unreal. It's said to be extremely traumatic.

During the European dark ages, there were times when monasteries were like fortresses, protecting the last vestiges of civilization Europe had left. If you wanted to see a library, they only existed in the monasteries.

I'm guessing it will be that way for a while. Who knows what will follow from there. Something really cool probably.