Now it seems taking Kiev may require door to door fighting. The whole argument of being liberators from Western oppression goes to shit when you are facing a strong insurgency as you try to move in, and it is unclear at this point if taking Kiev would even get them the capitulation they want. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The reality isn't hard to find here. Ukrainian people are united and putting up a brave defence against an aggressor. The Hungarian Uprising comes to my mind. — ssu

One wonders if this kind of issue could cause the Russian army to become more aggressive. There's still no clear goal set for this war, that I've heard. Some say that they want to overthrow Ukraine's president.

Maybe. — Manuel

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday called on the Ukrainian army to overthrow the government whose leaders he described as "terrorists" and "a gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis." — The Moscow Times

One wonders if this kind of issue could cause the Russian army to become more aggressive. — Manuel

One way to guarantee you don't understand what's going on is to dismiss the protagonist as "mad". — Baden

I agree that just saying "he's mad" is intellectually lazy and boring. — ssu

During the pandemic, analysts had noticed a change in Mr. Putin — a man who isolated himself in a bubble of social distancing without parallel among Western leaders. In isolation, he appeared to become more aggrieved and more emotional, and increasingly spoke about his mission in stark historical terms. His public remarks descended ever deeper into distorted historiography as he spoke of the need to right perceived historical wrongs suffered by Russia over the centuries at the hands of the West.

NOS4A2 shows up with the sole aim of spreading an utterly baseless "genocide" narrative. Show one iota of evidence for this or we can just presume you're up to your old tricks of spreading Russian propaganda again. — Baden

For any that don't know, that's Oleh Tyahnybok, leader of the anti-Semitic Svoboda party, later installed into power by the US. — Isaac

In the 2014 Ukrainian presidential election he received 1.16% of the vote. In the October 2014 parliamentary election Tyahnybok was again first on the election list of his party; since the party came 0,29% short to overcome the 5% threshold to win seats on the nationwide list he was not re-elected into parliament. — Wikipedia

Well, as I discussed with StreetlightX earlier, there indeed still is this neonazi party in the Ukrainian Parliament. With ONE SEAT. And it is NOT IN THE GOVERNMENT. Zelenskyi's party was formed in 2018 and he was elected President of Ukraine in 2019, beating incumbent president Petro Poroshenko with nearly 73% of the vote to Poroshenko's 25%. So I guess Ukrainians weren't so enthuastic about Poroshenko. — ssu

Zelenskiy said NATO membership was a remote “dream.”

A possible diplomatic path out of the Ukraine crisis came into sharper focus on Wednesday when a minister in the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine floated the possibility of a referendum that could keep his country from joining NATO.

Why don't we understand everything? — Srap Tasmaner

One concern perhaps relevant to this discussion is to remember that this is what we're doing: it's all too easy to think that by naming what we don't yet understand, we do understand it. Thus we use words like "energy" and "matter" and "force" as if they mean something. We can show how we use those terms in our theories, and thus how they connect up to things we consider explained and understood, but there's some lingering suspicion that we don't really understand our explanations. (If some of our variables are still unbound, the logician might remind us, we don't yet have a proposition -- only something like a proposition generator.) — Srap Tasmaner

we have no way of establishing that our research tools (our own minds) are in good working order (there's no standard we could possibly reach for) — Srap Tasmaner

This I've read now from many various references. When Russia occupied the Crimea in 2014, the lack of a logistics tail fooled Western observers (and they were then focused hunting terrorists anyway). Now the arrival of that logistical tail, field hospitals, ammo depots etc. sends a message. — ssu

I also happen to think the Crimea annexation was a reaction to Western meddling in the internal affairs of Ukraine when it refused to bend over and get anally shafted by the IMF. — Benkei

Kazuo Ishiguro – The Buried Knight — Snakes Alive

Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy — Pantagruel

It’s from “There’s are No Such Things as Ordinary Objects” in the bookThe Nature of Ordinary Objects — Ignoredreddituser

Waving an invasion banner visible to spy satellites is a flamboyant message of some kind, especially when your real opponent knows you have logistical challenges wrt your target. — frank

And costly. Put into the field over 100 000+ troops and then have them there for months is expensive. Usually armed forces don't do it. — ssu

I’ve been teaching myself metaphysics, it’s been pretty challenging since I don’t really have anyway to get feedback. I was wondering if you guys have an ideas how to reply to an argument Steven French makes below. It seems like a combination of the grounding problem and overdetermination to me, but I’m not sure if I’m on the right track or how to reply to it. Everything below is an excerpt from his paper. — Ignoredreddituser

[quote] ... [/quote]

SophistiCat, I read a lot of what you post and generally find it both well-informed and level-headed, but as long as I’ve been reading you, you have remained, shall we say, unimpressed by such expressions of wonder and bafflement. For you, if there’s a theory that works, all strangeness of the phenomena accounted for is banished, and no strangeness attaches to a theory that is successful. I’m exaggerating, I suppose, but have I mistaken your attitude? — Srap Tasmaner

It's studying what the classics - up till Newton - and a bit beyond him, took to be a fact about the world, that we could understand it. We can't. — Manuel

It's the simple view that there are things we can know and things we cannot, given that we are natural creatures. Not in this essay, but in a different one, he distinguishes between "problems" and "mysteries", problems are those questions we can ask and (hopefully) answer. "Mysteries" are those we can ask and not answer, such as say, free will or how is it possible for matter to think? Then there are questions we can't even ask, because we don't know how to phrase them.

This would give an "updated" view on the intuitive aspect:

https://cprtrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/COMPLETE-REPORT-Goswami-Childrens-Cognitive-Development-and-Learning.pdf

Particularly "naive physics" p.6. — Manuel

The 17th century scientific revolution was a reaction to Aristotelean physics, which postulated occult forces that no longer made sense. But of course, Aristotle was taken very seriously and was considered by many to be among the greatest of thinkers, no doubt about that. Aristotle was likely highlighting other aspects of our innate "folk psychology", putting emphasis on different aspects of the world, which were not satisfactory for many of the 17th century figures. — Manuel

I'd only quibble that I don't think physicists have intuitions about how gravity works, they have intuitions about how theories about gravity work and how they can relate to other phenomena in the world. The intuition would be on the theory side. — Manuel

The main topic of the essay, as I read it, is that we've lowered the standards of science, we no longer seek to understand the world, but seek theories about aspects of the world. That's a big lowering of standards of explanation. — Manuel

As for your last question, I think, in the end, the point is going to be person dependent. For me, it's quite crazy that we understand so little and that the world exists at all, it's baffling to me. There's no reason to expect any species to evolve having a capacity to ask and answer questions about the world at all, there's no obvious benefit to doing these things. — Manuel

Russia could have prevented NATO far more successfully by simply NOT DOING ANYTHING AGGRESSIVE. — ssu

What's quite ironic in all of this - these so called "naturalists" and "empiricists" - who look at say, Hume, with much admiration, is that they don't read him, or they read him badly, not only with regard to mysteries, but regarding "innate ideas". — Manuel

I mean, it’s not interesting to me, insofar as I agree with this approach to philosophy and see people who disagree with the main points to be very mistaken. However, if I had to attack it, I don’t see any alternative to people who currently ridicule “mysteriansim”, like Dennett or the Churchlands. — Manuel

You certainly are welcome to keep posting here — T Clark

This thread illuminates what it is to be a philosopher in modern times — jgill

This article in Foreign Policy from a few days ago makes the same points:

Liberal Illusions Caused the Ukraine Crisis — jamalrob

The two main candidates were neck and neck in the first-round vote held on 31 October 2004

The Ukraine is a nation split right down the middle in terms of the views and cultural make up of the people. Crimea is/was basically made up of Russian speaking pro Russian people and the eastern half of Ukraine is basically the same.

If they just let people vote maybe the war would finally end. Instead it has been another ongoing proxy war between Russia and US. — I like sushi

There is plenty of sense in Russia’s view that the US has been steadily encroaching on Russian territory. — I like sushi

The time-clock relation: There is a logical (or conceptually necessary) relation between ‘time’ and ‘a physical process which can function as a clock (or a core of a clock)’ in the sense that we cannot – in a well-defined way – use either of these concepts without referring to (or presupposing) the other. — On the physical basis of cosmic time

Here is another example. You want to skate on a lake and inquire if the ice is thick enough. Other skaters tell you that the ice becomes thinner towards the center of the lake. What this means is that the part of the frozen surface of the lake that is in the immediate vicinity of whoever is skating on it (and hence affords support to that person) is thinner when the skater is nearer to the center of the lake. — Pierre-Normand

I thought I would butt in here to clarify some things. Would you agree with the following? Our ability to act ethically with others evolves as a function of cultural development. To use an analogy, not too long ago it was assumed that animals had no emotions or cognition and did not feel pain. It s hard to act ‘ethically’ toward a creature when you dont see them as having any of these capabilities. Another example : we used to think that infants were a blooming, buzzing confusion. Now we know that they have all sorts of perceptual and recognition skills, including being able to empathize with others. Again, without such an appreciation of the infant’s perspective, ethical treatment of them is limited. I would argue the entire history of culture involves the growth of insights into how others unlike ourselves think and feel. — Joshs

One could call a percept a "quale", but Chomsky doesn't. A percept means a moment of experience, such as you reading this sentence as you currently are. Or looking at the window and seeing green grass, or hearing a car zoom by, etc.

I'm unclear why this is confusing, outside of the terminology itself. It's been overwhelmingly taken for granted up until the 20th century, when it suddenly became a problem to a small group of people. — Manuel

I thought the whole argument was meant to show that experience isn't necessary for a human being to exist as they do. But I also do not see the force to this argument, nor understand the attention given to it. — Manuel

Sure. No problem. I don't agree with Strawson's panpsychism either, though he's pretty clear with the terms "experiential" and "non-experiential". — Manuel

The zombie argument isn't particularly convincing, I don't think, I mean, we essentially have very similar examples in people who sleepwalk, or so it seems to me. — Manuel

Yes, Stoljar is interesting, but I've mainly focused on Strawson. So I can say less about him than others. — Manuel

This answer seeks to smuggle a specific position on metaethics into the very definition of the subject matter — SophistiCat

And this specific position is? — hypericin

What it is is a codification, elaboration, ossification, (and in some cases, perversion),of innate concepts and feelings of fairness and justice that are inborn in most of us, and in most social species. — hypericin

No, it isn't. That's not were Keen went. — Banno

This is because economists made their own predictions of damages, using three spurious methods: assuming that about 90% of GDP will be unaffected by climate change, because it happens indoors; using the relationship between temperature and GDP today as a proxy for the impact of global warming over time; and using surveys that diluted extreme warnings from scientists with optimistic expectations from economists. — Keen