Oooo no not the PLO charter!! Never mind Israeli everyday murder then.

Shut up with these stupid hasbara talking points.

Pathetic and rhetorical, much like the word “apartheid.” — Ennui Elucidator

Ah, see, I have a problem with actual apartheid, and not just the word apartheid. Your allergy to words rather than actions explains your continued attempts to change the conversation along the usual tired, propagandistic lines of 'what about Israel's security'???. Nah, gonna keep it on track and keep talking about how Israel kills random old Palestinian men - and children - on the street as a matter of systemic and encouraged course, thanks. Write your irrelevant paragraphs of obfuscarory shit, calling settler colonialism 'interests'. I will continue to call out Israel's ethnic cleansing. You're welcome to continue sanitizing crimes against humanity as 'interests'. Which, to be fair, is exactly the case as far as Israel currently stands.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/2/4/the-death-of-an-inconvenient-palestinian?sf159643480=1

Israeli 'interests', which anyone who wants to talk about Israeli apartheid is apparently obliged to have to discuss:

On his drive home, Asaad was stopped by Israeli soldiers at a “checkpoint” because he was a Palestinian. The Israeli soldiers had no cause or right to stop Asaad. They did because they had guns. Asaad insisted that he was not a troublemaker. He was, of course, telling the truth. He was an old man just trying to get home after a late night of playing cards with friends.

Predictably, the Israeli soldiers did not believe him because he was a Palestinian with no ID. So, they dragged Asaad from his car, blindfolded him, put a gag over his mouth and tied his hands tight with plastic zip ties. Then, Israeli soldiers marched Asaad – bound, gagged and blindfolded – to a nearby construction site and dumped him on the cold stone pavers. Two other Palestinians who had been stopped earlier because they were Palestinians were there, as well. They saw what the Israeli soldiers did to Asaad. Soon, Asaad was still. One Israeli soldier squatted to check on Asaad. The soldier got up, spoke to the other soldiers. They left. Quickly. Asaad was dead.

The Israeli soldiers would say later that they thought Asaad had dozed off on a chair. That was a lie. An autopsy revealed that Asaad had died of a “stress-induced heart attack” triggered by “violence”. He died alone. His head resting against stone pavers. Within minutes, a Palestinian doctor arrived. Asaad’s face was blue and his wrists were bruised. There was bleeding inside Asaad’s eyes. His clothes were caked in dirt. He tried breathing life into Asaad. It was no use. The doctor reckons that Asaad had stopped breathing 15 to 20 minutes before he reached him. Asaad’s foul death would be a scarcely noticed footnote amid the outrageous inventory of death and despair Palestinians have had to endure for generations because they are Palestinians if not for one detail: he was an American.

So yeah, let's talk about the things Israel is interested in, like ethnic cleansing and wonton murder. Let's use this opportunity to be 'critical' about the 'behaviour' of this man, daring to drive home past Israeli extra-judicial executors.

Abstractions are nothing more than colonial complicity. Calls to discuss those abstractions ought to be ridiculed and treated for the excremental apologia they are.

Anyway, while apologists like Ennui are writing paragraphs about trying to change the subject, here are the 30 Palestinian home demolitions - self-demolished on pain on enormous fines - that took place in January in Jerusalem alone, because Israel is an apartheid state whose current state of existence is predicated on unlimited barbarism:



But I'm sure someone will whine about 'security' or somesuch. Or 'interests'.

Scum.

The only questions I have been trying to discuss are whether there is ever a time where oppression is justified and whether on oppressor must stop all forms of oppression before it can be critical of how the oppressed behave. — Ennui Elucidator

Present crimes against humanity are not your intellectual plaything.

Or perhaps they are, but then your moral vacuity ought not be anyone else's problem.

This is a philosophy forum. Discussing the Israel/Palestine conflict from a philosophical POV (informed by metaethics, ethics, etc.) in a critical way shouldn’t be objectionable. — Ennui Elucidator

One of the nice things about philosophy is knowing when someone is hiding behind abstractions in order to distract from rather concrete issues. Like Israeli state sanctioned murder and land grabbing. "Philosophy" is not your excuse to change the subject. Philosophy, among other things, is why your bloviating can be pointed out for what it is.

but at some point you have to stop denying the obviousness of the fact that populations disagree about what those rights are and the “right” theory is merely the one that is presently enforced. — Ennui Elucidator

I don't particularly care about this kind of blather. I just think it would be nice if Israel stopped kidnapping children, destroying olive groves, bulldozing houses, engaging in wonton torture - that kind of thing. If you want to stratify this into some kind of warble about 'interests' you are welcome to, but I also couldn't give a shit. Nor, as far as I can tell, do the Palestinian subjects of Israeli meted suffering.

This is alot of writing to ask how Israel can be safe without engaging in aparthied and ethnic cleansing.

In any case the question of 'defense' is a non-sequitur. Israel is an agressor, and until that agression is addressed it is entirely true that people need to STFU about 'security'.

Israel's interests involve cleansing Palestinians from the land. This cannot be addressed 'constructively'. One should acknowledge it - if only to demand its utter cessation.

I don't pretend to any special knowledge of these events. I do some online looking and i remember, more or less, the news of the time. — tim wood

Lmao. This reads: "I have no idea what I'm talking about except for what I've passively absorbed without looking too much into it". Just so happens that this includes blaming crimes against humanity on those humans against whom said crimes have been committed.

Israel has been systematically comitting ethnic cleansing agaisnt Palestinian territories for decades now, but sure, just a bit of defensive ethnic cleansing which they "don't start". You ignorant racist slime.

It's funny that racist apologists for apartheid simply quote Wikipedia as though that said anything whatsoever.

I think Israel would be a nicer place without the apartheid. — StreetlightX

That's because you're not thinking clealry. — Garrett Travers

Cool.

I think Israel would be a nicer place without the apartheid, I'm quite happy to be 'on their side'.

Uh huh.

Anyway, Sucks about the apartheid in Israel.

lol OK random.


Anyway, terrible about that Israeli apartheid state.

Would be nice if they stopped doing the whole ethnic cleansing thing.

Israel isn't an apartheid state — Garrett Travers

Ok internet random. I guess I'll take your word over Amnesty International.

what would you have them do? — tim wood

Not commit crimes against humanity.

First I'm racist scum, now a supporter of crimes against humanity - which is it? — tim wood

Well you are racist scum because you support crimes against humanity. These things work quite nicely together in your case.

You're a supporter of crimes against humanity who blames victims for those crimes. You're flith.

Ah, Arendt on freedom is great. She rightly notes that freedom as understood in terms of the 'will' is theological garbage, and she rightly offends the American understanding of freedom, which is just as theological and just as garbage. @Banno, you might be interested in Hito Steryl's essay "Freedom From Everything", which I think is a nice companion piece to Arendt's:

We are accustomed to regarding freedom as primarily positive—the freedom to do or have something; thus there is the freedom of speech, the freedom to pursue happiness and opportunity, or the freedom of worship. But now the situation is shifting. Especially in the current economic and political crisis, the flipside of liberal ideas of freedom - namely, freedom of corporations from any form of regulation, as well as the freedom to relentlessly pursue one’s own interest at the expense of everyone else’s—has become the only form of universal freedom that exists: the freedom from social bonds, freedom from solidarity, freedom from certainty or predictability, freedom from employment or labor, freedom from culture, public transport, education, or anything public at all.

These are the only freedoms that we share around the globe nowadays. They do not apply
equally to everybody, but depend on one’s economic and political situation. They are negative freedoms, and they apply across a carefully constructed and exaggerated cultural alterity that promotes: the freedom from social security, the freedom from the means of making a living, the freedom from accountability and sustainability, the freedom from free education, healthcare, pensions and public culture, the loss of standards of public responsibility, and in many places, the freedom from the rule of law.

As Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” This is the freedom that people in many places share today. Contemporary freedom is not primarily the enjoyment of civil liberties, as the traditional liberal view has it, but rather like the freedom of free fall, experienced by many who are thrown into an uncertain and unpredictable future.

What does this even mean? It's gobbldegook.

Like I said, I don't play pick my favourite murderous imperialist.

First, because Russia sucks too. Second, because the US and Europe was agitating for regime change precisely on account of Ukrainian resistance to neoliberal 'reform', to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars:

During the tug of war between the US and Russia, the Americans were engaged in a destabilization campaign against the Yanukovych government. The campaign culminated with the overthrow of the elected president in the Maidan Revolution—also known as the Maidan Coup—named for the Kiev square that hosted the bulk of the protests.

As political turmoil engulfed the country in the leadup to 2014, the US was fueling anti-government sentiment through mechanisms like USAID and National Endowment for Democracy (NED), just as they had done in 2004. In December 2013, Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European affairs and a long-time regime change advocate, said that the US government had spent $5 billion promoting “democracy” in Ukraine since 1991. The money went toward supporting “senior officials in the Ukraine government…members of the business community as well as opposition civil society” who agree with US goals.

Ukraine was on track to sign an association agreement with the European Union in 2013. Instead, Yanukovych decided to join an economic union with Russia. — Why Putin has such a hard time accepting Ukrainian sovereignty

Maybe one should look into these 'association agreements', hastily papered over in this propaganda piece, before recognising that they amounted to economic imperialism from 'the West' that was designed to fuck over Ukrainian workers:

In Ukraine, the IMF had long planned to implement a series of economic reforms to make the country more attractive to investors. These included cutting wage controls (i.e., lowering wages), “reform[ing] and reduc[ing]” health and education sectors (which made up the bulk of employment in Ukraine), and cutting natural gas subsidies to Ukrainian citizens that made energy affordable to the general public. Coup plotters like US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland repeatedly stressed the need for the Ukrainian government to enact the “necessary” reforms.

https://fair.org/home/what-you-should-really-know-about-ukraine/

Maybe consider that the Ukrainian turn to Russia was on account of the Europeans offering a terrible, dehumanising, deal.

Yeah gee, it's so unlike the most blood-hungry and blood-soaked nation on the planet to be stoking war! So out of character! Must just be good ol' Russian propaganda.

Maybe Ukraine is begging the US to shut the fuck up because the US should... shut the fuck up.

Well, Ukraine indeed has better worker rights than in the US (or in Australia) according to the Labour rights Index, yet the wages are quite low. — ssu

Well yes, because they haven't been neoliberalized to shit by the bloodsucking Western Powers. And yes of course no one wants Ukraine and Turkey in the EU. They are economic basket cases, with the latter being run by an increasingly religious nutjob who fancies himself the next Sultan while blackmailing Europe over immigrants. As they Ukraine, they will no doubt dangle the distant prospect of membership to bash their economy into neoliberal submission in the meantime.

Lol I'm sure Ukraine can't wait to be subjected to more IMF 'structual adjustment' and austerity and have whatever democracy they do have utterly demolished and controlled by a bunch of neolib bureaucrats in Brussels. Can't wait to make Ukraine another factory for my shoes as they utterly destroy workers rights so they can join enlightened Europeans.

Western liberals like to harp on about 'respecting sovereignty', right before they economically devestate a country to turn them into a financial fiefdom for transnational corporations. But Russia Bad and Very Scary oooooo. Ukraine's economy is even worse than the Greeks, who have been collectively shat on by "the West" in a way that a Russian invasion couldn't even match if they tried. But I'm sure they will treat Ukraine much better because they are the Good Guys!

"As a loose definition, Left and Right populists share a profound hatred of indigenous social elites. Right populists in addition hate at least one other, 'foriegn' group of people."

- Wolfgang Streeck

My fav definition of populism I've come across. Also!:

"In the United States, the sacrosanct nature of dreams, never to be critically assessed, may be the most powerful impediment to political radicalization and collective action".

Kill your dreams.

I don't play the 'pick my favorite mass murder' game, but you're welcome to choose the US.

Always nice to see liberals use the death of others as an intellectual plaything to justify warmongering too.

To be fair to frank, the news isn't run by the Pentagon. In fact, they bypass the Pentagon altogether and go straight to the arms manufacturers.



This is capitalism you know. We don't need Big Government to tell the press what to say. I remember coming across the fact that Alex Ward, one of the writers of that piece, also happened to be an ex-contractor at one of those firms, but I can't find the source anymore. All very cool and normal.

Ukraine to US: STFU please you're going to get us all killed

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday accused the West of threatening the health of the nation's economy by causing "panic" over the threat of a Russian invasion. "We don't need this panic," Zelensky said during a press conference in Kyiv, according to BBC News. "There are signals even from respected leaders of states, they just say that tomorrow there will be war. This is panic — how much does it cost for our state?" Zelensky said the Western media's portrayal of the situation gives the impression of "tanks in the streets of Kyiv." He emphasized that part of Ukraine is already occupied by Russia, while contending that Russia poses a constant threat to his country that isn't necessarily higher at present.

https://news.yahoo.com/volodymyr-zelensky-accuses-west-causing-202633897.html

--

Handy rule of thumb: if you find yourself rooting for the US when it comes to *wink wink* defensive actions outside its borders, you are almost certainly objectively wrong and should rethink your life and never offer an opinion on anything ever again.

, I do think that Ukraine - and any country really - has a right to security, in case something goes wrong with Russia. If I were Ukrainian, I would like to know my country will be ready for defense, in case anything arises, which might happen, given the current tensions. — Manuel

Agreed - but the fearmongering coming from the Western media - and then transmitted by those who promote the NYT (lol) as a credible news source - is absolutely insane. It strikes me that this bluster of an aggressive war-footed Russia is designed precisely to distract from US agency in dictating how this plays out; distracting too from the fact that the main energies of war are coming precisely from American backed forces.

The amount of consent manufacturing over conflict with Russia is insane - and obvious to anyone who has seen this happen over and over with every country America has fucked up time and time again.

This article nicely documents much American fucks-ups in the area has directly engineered the so-called 'crisis' going on today. The ultimate bad actor in this whole situation is the US, and anyone who looks at Russia being an active 'bad guy' with Western powers merely 'reacting' to Russian agression has no fucking idea what they are talking about.

In Ukraine, the IMF had long planned to implement a series of economic reforms to make the country more attractive to investors. These included cutting wage controls (i.e., lowering wages), “reform[ing] and reduc[ing]” health and education sectors (which made up the bulk of employment in Ukraine), and cutting natural gas subsidies to Ukrainian citizens that made energy affordable to the general public. Coup plotters like US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland repeatedly stressed the need for the Ukrainian government to enact the “necessary” reforms.

In 2013, after early steps to integrate with the West, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych turned against these changes and ended trade integration talks with the European Union. Months before his overthrow, he restarted economic negotiations with Russia, in a major snub to the Western economic sphere. By then, the nationalist protests were heating up that would go on to topple his government.

After the 2014 coup, the new government quickly restarted the EU deal. After cutting heating subsidies in half, it secured a $27 billion commitment from the IMF. The IMF’s goals still include “reducing the role of the state and vested interests in the economy” in order to attract more foreign capital.

The IMF is one of the many global institutions whose role in maintaining global inequities often goes unreported and unnoticed by the general public. The US economic quest to open global markets to capital is a key driver of international affairs, but if the press chooses to ignore it, the public debate is incomplete and shallow.

This kind of history is totally absent from almost any mainstream discussion on this topic, the latter of which is slavishly regurgitated by people on this forum, among others.

Which you'd know if you read anything outside the Tomasello, Dor, and Everett. — Xtrix

One day you'll cite someone other than Chomsky, and then you'll be allowed to talk.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/01/russia-invasion-imminent-threat-hysteria-panic-washington

In other words, we have Ukraine’s president, its foreign and defense ministers, and a top national security official all urging calm, while denying there’s sufficient evidence to expect a coming Russian invasion, contrary to the tidal wave of messaging from US officials and the press. Of course, you could dismiss this as a country’s leadership playing down a threat they know is real to prevent panic and disorder. But they’re not the only ones saying it.

Earlier this week, the Center for Defense Strategies — a think tank headed by a former Ukrainian defense minister and on whose board sit a variety of other defense and diplomatic officials from both Ukraine and the United States — published an analysis of the risks of a Russian invasion. Its conclusion? That “a full-scale invasion capturing most or all of Ukraine in the near future seems unlikely,” citing the insufficient number of Russian troops and a number of other indicators, including the lack of mobilization of medical infrastructure and strategic military units. (There have been some more troop movements since then).

European governments have said likewise. The EU’s top diplomat accused Washington and Westminster of “dramatizing” the situation, saying that the EU would not evacuate its embassy “because we do not know any specific reasons.” The Dutch embassy in Kyiv similarly told the Telegraph it saw “no reason” to do so, while a French official said they’d “observed the same movements” but “cannot deduce from all this that an offensive is imminent.” And just today, Germany’s spy chief also contradicted the Washington line, telling Reuters he “believes that the decision to attack has not yet been made.”

Remember, the US are warmongering murderers and nothing they say ought to be taken seriously.

With the black hole of Afghanistan no longer supplying the American arms industry, what better opportunity to make up for lost profits?

Yes, because you haven't demonstrated a great understanding of what's being claimed, nor displayed a tone of openness to the ideas. — Xtrix

Yes, because I don't believe that religion ought to be accorded any respect whatsoever, especially religion masquerading as science, still less religion that has effectively set back linguistics by an order of decades. You may not like that Chomsky is a closet creationist, or that his writing is indistinguishable from theology, or the fact that you are an effective temple devotee - but that is your problem, not mine.

Dor again is worth quoting as usual (emphasis in the original!):

After fifty years of research, all that is left is the original assumption of infinite generativity—the idea that everything we ever do and experience, which is finite by definition, is always an arbitrary obstacle on our way toward the fulfillment and understanding of our infinite linguistic potential. This is a philosophical assumption, actually a religious assumption, that goes against the very idea of science. In this sense, the series of articles by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch might be more favorably read as joint statements of resignation: we have tried to find common ground between linguistics and evolutionary science; as far as the periphery of language is concerned, we believe there is no real problem; at its core, however, language still seems to defy the mode of explanation that is at the core of evolutionary theory; maybe, only maybe, what we believe about the core of language might be reconciled with something at the periphery of evolutionary theory; but beyond that, we really have nothing to offer. The mystery is there to stay.

Hence my original claim that the article in the OP is nothing other than a bunch of scaffolding to justify Chomsky's linguistic creationism.

Wolfgang Streeck - How will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System
Mark Blyth - Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea
Tiqqun - Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl
Tiqqun - Theory of Bloom

No, of course not. Recursion is a property of the human language system. Binocular vision is a property of the human visual system. So yes, exploring this won't explain everything, but it's a research goal. — Xtrix

Ah right so you're just restating your claims without addressing anything I said. Well, fun's over I guess.

I have tried to leave room for what I think of as language to be dependent on something more like what Chomsky thinks of as language, which looks more like a mathematical symbol system. I do wonder if the communication-first, social technology sort of view — which, as I said, is where my sympathies lie — can quite reach to certain fundamentals: the distribution of sign tokens into buckets via systems of differences (as in phonology and morphology); the ability to take a sound or a mark or a gesture as a sign at all, to treat it as referential.

It’s hard to shake the intuition that communication is late to the party in some respects, that certain key abilities must already be in place before we can talk about communication, language as a technology for solving coordination problems, and so on. So, as I said, I’ve tried to leave open the possibility that Chomsky’s little syntax engine, even if it’s really a machine for assembling a syntax engine, is one of those things, but that’s all. — Srap Tasmaner

This is why I am really partial to the treatment of grammar as being a matter of social normativity: it places language on a continuum with extra-linguistic behaviour (like gesture, or even music). If grammar is fundamentally a matter of protocol - a conventionally agreed "how" (messages are communicated) - then grammar is, fundamentally, a kind of (set of) behaviour (but not a matter of 'behaviouralism' insofar as behaviour here isn't a matter of stimulus-response, but of active communicative/lived problem-solving). In which case, knowing - or not knowing - whether a gesture is a sign, or a mark is referential, is not a linguistic behaviour, but a semiotic one, continuous with, say, tracking a bear in the woods by means of following its droppings and pawprints.

Dor again: "When conventionalizing a speech-act, what the members of the community agree on is this: “from now on, when we behave this way — when, in these particular contexts, we use this intonation, this word order, this gesture — we mean to ask a question (or make a promise, or tell a story)... When the members of a community mutually identify a norm, what they say to each other, across the experiential gap, is: “here we do the same thing.” (Incidentally, compare Wittgenstein on grammar: "The danger here, I believe, is one of giving a justification of our procedure where there is no such thing as a justification and we ought simply to have said: that’s how we do it".)

This 'embedding' of language in wider structures of living and communicating is correspondent with a broader and more encompassing conception of how learning works: Chomsky's - correct - aversion to behaviourialism shared with it its rather stilted conception of learning. But the kinds of (biological!) capacities involved in learning language are not necessarily language specific. Tomasello: "These skills are necessary for children to find patterns in the way adults use linguistic symbols ... are evolutionarily fairly old, probably possessed in some form by all primates at the very least. [They are] domain-general, in the sense that they allow organisms to categorize many different aspects of their worlds into a manageable number of kinds of things and events (although it seems very likely that when these skills are applied to linguistic symbols — as they are in humans but not in other primate species — some novel characteristics emerge)").

Which is all to agree that communication is late to the party and that it piggy-backs off capacities already developed for other uses, as you said. What seems specific about grammar is that it is a kind of 'calcified semantics': it deferentially specifies what *kind* of information we ought to convey in a message (if an [event] then what about a [temporality] or an [agent]? Was the [event] [passive] or [active]? Should the grammar be indexed to a first, second, or third person?, etc). In any case, it makes more naturalist sense than Chomsky's sui generis, deus ex machnia "account" of language.

That's changed somewhat, to the "minimalist program." I talked before about merge, which is central to this view. It's a computational view of language's recursion property -- i.e., binary set formation. From there the research gets technical -- but none of this is the religious chicanery you make it out to be. — Xtrix

Oh yes, it has indeed changed to the 'minimalist' program, because one-by-one, as the claims of UG have been shown to be trash, it has had to whittle itself down into a theory of almost nothing in order to save whatever claim of explanatory power it could possibly - minimally - have. And, having whittled itself down to recursion (at least for Chomsky), what it has given up is precisely any linguistic specificity. Its minimalism is bought at the price of its generality which has exposed ever more easily how stupid the whole enterprise is. So let's examine recursion. Does it do this?:

The capacity to acquire German or Swahili or Japanese, which every human baby is already equipped with, is what's being sought to explain. — Xtrix

The answer is a laugh-out-loud "No". Evens and Levinson:

1. Many languages do not have syntactic constituent structure. As such, they cannot have embedded structures of the kind indicated by a labelled bracketing like [A[A]]. Most of the suggestions for rule constraints (like Subjacency) in UG falsely presume the universality of constituency.

2. Many languages have no, or very circumscribed recursion in their syntax. That is, they do not allow embedding of indefinite complexity, and in some languages there is no syntactic embedding at all. Fitch et al’s (2005) response that this is of no relevance to their selection of syntactic recursion as the single unique design feature of human language reveals their choice to be empirically arbitrary.

3. The cross-linguistic evidence shows that although recursion may not be found in the syntax of languages, it is always found in the conceptual structure, that is, the semantics or pragmatics – in the sense that it is always possible in any language to express complex propositions. This argues against the syntacticocentrism of the Chomskyan paradigm. It also points to a different kind of possible evidence for the evolutionary background to language, namely, the investigation of embedded reasoning across our nearest phylogenetic cousins, as is required, for example, in theory of mind tasks, or spatial perspective taking. Even simple tool making can require recursive action patterning.

Dor elaborates on point 3, which, frankly, is the most devastating:

"The idea that recursion generates infinity is valid as a logical statement, but this logical statement is only applicable to mathematics. As far as language is concerned, it is nonsensical: nothing in human life is infinite. Recursion has been shown to play an important role not just in language, but also, for example, in toolmaking (Greenfield 1991), but no one would suggest that the capacity to re-apply manual operations to their own outputs—and then to do it again and again—allows for the making of infinitely complex tools. The recursive operations in message construction (in those languages that have them) do allow for the production of very complex messages, much more complex than the messages produced in non-recursive languages, but this is all."

In other words, not only has UG contracted itself to a single, measly syntactic operator, in any case controversial and empirically destitute, it has also abstracted itself to so rarefied a level that it is unable to function as a recognizable theory of language. It's like a dying star, winking itself out into irrelevance.