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.

It may be out of date terminology these days. Or climate scientists don’t mention it because it’s too scary and might be counterproductive to efforts to raise awareness of the issues. — Punshhh

I see. But that article says there is no chance it could happen on earth right now. It said that in a few billion years when the sun is hotter, it would be possible.

That seems to be what Ayer has in mind, and it doesn't work. — Banno

Yea, I see what you're saying.

Typing on a phone with big fat thumbs

I haver to differ. He is saying that the difference is purely linguistic - his so-called "two languages" theory. — Banno

He meant that the two senses of "see" are already in the rules of language, and that this is supposed to support talk of sense-data. "Sense data" is the new jargon.

...different senses...
— frank
I think it clear from Austin that there are not here two differing senses of "see". But I take it you are setting out what Ayer is claiming, rather than evaluating it? — Banno

Yes. I think Ayers would say that whether there are two senses or not should be decided empirically. I like that.

So here's a question for anyone who cares to delve deeper. That seems to me to be the argument in Foundations, found on pp 24-25. If not that argument, then which? — Banno

Strangely enough, he's doing an argument from ordinary language use. Pared down, he's saying there are two senses of "see."

1. John sees a star.
2. John sees a speck no bigger than a six-pence.

If there's confusion about the second sentence regarding the sense of the verb, further explanation would insert "what appears to be" after the verb. But Ayers says we usually don't need that extra phrase because we can discern the different senses by context of utterance.

Because these two senses exist in language, we can generalize this case.

Now we forget about John and his star and go back to cases of mistaken perception. I thought I saw two pieces of paper, but there was only one. Again, there are these two senses of "see"

1. I saw two pieces of paper.
2. I saw one piece of paper.

In the first case, what I saw does not exist as a material object. Therefore, it's a sense datum. Here, Ayers is reporting on the sense data theory, he's not presenting this as his own ideas. He says he accepts it, though, with the caution that what the sense-data theorist ends up doing is offering new jargon to explain a hypothesis which can be empirically verified or refuted.

In other words, he's saying that the sense data theorists isn't offering us any needed revisions to everyday speech, but rather offering jargon that's helpful for special purposes.

The problem of course is how do you distinguish between what is real and what is not real. And if you cannot make the distinction you cannot know that what you are seeing isn't real, at any given time, nor that what you are seeing is real at any given time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Somehow people do regularly distinguish real from unreal, for all practical purposes anyway. It's not merely a logical thing, it's more at the level of innate capability.

We know, for instance, that if a person is blind from birth, but then gains sight, they won't be able to distinguish a picture of an apple from a real apple. That's not a logical issue. It's something about perception.

So what is more rational?  I would say stopping believing in something when there is no ground, warrant and reason to believe it would be definitely more rational than keeping believing in something when there is no ground in believing it. — Corvus

This is true. What it shows is that in order to live, you have to be irrational.

When did you last ponder whether the car you're driving was in fact a car having the characteristics of a car as you understand them to be, or instead something else you can never know (if, indeed, it was anything at all)? — Ciceronianus

I have a thing where I lose confidence that the road in front of me will be there when I get to it. I think it's along the lines of OCD. I get through it by humming. For some reason, the worst drive is through West Virginia when the big open valleys appear between the peaks. In other words, philosophy probably isn't for you. :razz:

Bacteria love global warming. — Agree-to-Disagree

I know, they write operas about it. You just have to have tiny ears and they only last about twenty seconds.

They'll use your money for nest material. — unenlightened

I was hoping they would dig up an empty bag potato chips and put it in a museum.