Ressentiment is good.

Sorry I'm not a 13 year old boy.

Also I have read more Nietzsche than you will ever have in your life so there's also that.

Maybe you shouldn't project so much?

Everyone here is posting weird stuff on a website.

What is the alternative? ( to US/EU hegemony). That is the question I was asking.

Well? — Punshhh

I don't know. But the thing about mass murderers is that usually people don't ask "what is the alternative to mass murder hmmmmmm???". It is literally: not that. And considering the US has been the number one exporter of democricide across the globe, one would hope for a more fair and just world than this fucking mess would emerge. It may very well not. But to fall back on a dearth of imagination and accept the oceans of blood let loose by Western hegemony is both cowardice and complicity.

one in which the US and the west's relative strategic power is vastly diminished — hypericin

Good.

The West acts with impunity, destroying democracies and assassinating world leaders all over the globe, while supporting dictators and mass murderers on the regular, and now someone who isn't them does it, and all of a sudden the worry is that they no longer have exclusive dominion over imposing their murderous will across the planet. Let them fucking burn.

In any case what concerns me is not who rules but how any such rule is excercised. If we can't get past the reign of capital which continues to spread like a cancer across the globe, it won't matter one bit what the post West hegemony looks like.

It remains entirely the case that nothing the US says should be taken seriously. And of course this has been nothing but a bonanza for the American arms industry, who are making "profits" (read: tax dollar recycling) hand over fist thanks to US actions. And yes, Afghans continue to stave to death thanks to the US decimating their country.

And one way to help Ukrainians is precisely to get the US to fuck off out of world affairs. There is literally no better possible thing to do at this point.

--

I wonder who here thinks that Putin has been responsible for more mass slaughter than say, Biden or Obama. Because they would be objectively wrong.

Anyway, as an Australian this doesn't concern you. — ssu

As someone capable of empathy and who is not a sociopath who enjoys cheering on dead Ukrainians for the sake of American imperialism, this is irrelevant.

Also considering I live on the planet Earth which is currently susceptible to nuclear destruction thanks to war mongering bloodhounds like you, it kinda does concern me.

But what would it look like? — Punshhh

...not sending $33b in blood money, say?

Do you really find this so hard?

No I do not agree that participation in an anti-democratic economically fascist region of control is a good idea.

Also, I imagine people who like seeing dead Ukrainians think: well, Russia just murdered a whole bunch of people thanks to European expansion. In response, let's do more European expansion. This is a good idea and not something only a complete and utter psychopath would think of.

Are you going to make me say it again?

Bu what do you think grammar is shaped by?

Anyway, those who think: the best solution is just low level continued fighting in which a certain population of Ukranians are subject to ongoing arbitrary death, humilation, and fear are probably monsters and should not offer an opinion on anything ever again.

It happens to be the case that this was in fact Ukranian policy toward their own seperatist regions before the war, but this is very inconvenient to mention.

Indeed, these deontic powers, these duties and obligations are the purpose of creating institutions. And they are created by status declarations assigning status functions. — Banno

But all facts bear such deontic forces, by virtue of having a garmmar at all. Witt: "grammar tells us what kind of object anything is". And all grammar has a normative function, obligating us to speak about things in this or that manner, even and especially when we choose to mark certain facts - by virtue of our institutions - as non-institutional.

Well like all good poststructuralists I happen to believe the distinction between sex and gender is a largely bogus and a very dumb American idea that needs to be put to bed permanently.

Again: what we call 'institutional' and 'non-institutional' is a matter of institutions.

How very convenient for you that your concepts exactly align with your politics. It's almost like these concepts are totally arbitray.

I don't exactly know how to be more clear about this: The US ought to fuck right off forever.

Oh ho ho, are you saying that what concepts track differ based on what we decide?

Shut up transphobe and don't talk to me.

Edit: attributed quote to wrong person, disastrously.

I am happy with US and soon to become US/EU hegemony for many reasons. — Punshhh

Yes, I'm perfectly aware that you are comfortable with the biggest threat to world peace that has ever existed insofar as you benefit off the blood it spills globally on a daily basis.

To say nothing of the fact that the renewned transalanticism will come precisely at the of global fracture and instability more widely.

That growing confidence made him to decide that an all out invasion would be a great idea in the first place — ssu

Yeah, nothing to do with NATO or US goading at all. God your regugitation of propaganda is sickening.

No I absolutely read the sci-fi fantasy that was in presented in Push's post but please, continue to wave the flag of blood-hungry murderers who cannot wait to give Russia their own Afghanistan, you included.

It looks to me that the best outcome from here is Russia getting preoccupied and bogged down in eastern Ukraine with continued strict sanctions on Russia and to keep Putin’s army stuck there until they are sufficiently degraded. — Punshhh

Oh wow how coincidental that your views are exactly those of the US imperial agenda wow its like you haven't simply regurgitated US propaganda verbatim at all so cool how you probably came to this view entirely on your own.

Well for the sake of argument I totally disagree and submit that gender is defined by your chromosomes such that "The bishop is made of wood" is no different to "George is a man". What now?

Surely is it more: sure, you go ahead and draw the US into a regional conflict while we continue making inroads to literally everywhere else on Earth. Good luck! It helps too that with the sanctions in place there just so happens to be one major country that can supply a great deal of Russia's needs. Oh yes and the advantage of further fracturing the US dollar hegemony.

And I will register my dislike that the only rationale that you able to come up with is that China simply got sucked into Russian rhetoric. Seems a bit Western chauvinisty to me. Have a think about it.

Analytic philosophers like Searle make careers off stating the obvious - where "the obvious" are just utterly contingent, totally arbitrary demarcations arrogated to concepts. And then they are read by people like @Banno who really ought to know better.

A quick intuition pump to see how incredibly facile the distinction is: is gender an institutional fact, or not?

Realism means that the world is indifferent to us getting the concepts just-so or not. That all facts are institutional facts has no - zero - bearing on the truth or not of realism. That you think it does speaks to your idealism - indexing the world's existence to how we think or talk about the world. Terrible philosophy. And all the more disappointing because you were well aware of this not a few months ago. Such is the intellectual cancerousness of reading a Searle I suppose.

Oh, and you raised the issue here: ↪StreetlightX
; but did not seem to recognise it. — Banno

Funny. The post does not contain the word "real", let alone "realism". That you somehow recognized it nonetheless, speaks to the crappy assumptions built into the insitutional/non-institutional distinction. A recognition that has nothing to re-cognize is usually called projection.

The only person who brought up realism was you, friend. Which tells you something about the governing assumptions at work: if the distinction between institutional and non-institutional facts turns on some commitment - or not - to realism, then the distinction is a spurious or badly founded one from the beginning.

It sorta seems like a lot of people secretly want there to be at least one big war in their life that they can watch on TV. — _db

Yep. It's pretty clear that Westerners are getting-off on getting to spectate what is to them a real life Star Wars episode. - Darth Putin vs. The Western Alliance. Ukrainians are nothing but intellectual sci-fi sex toys to them, used to rub one out on their fantasies of playing "resistance-fighter".

I never add things on.

This is how the grift works: the US can't just hand people's tax money directly to it's weapons manufacturers as a gift (this would look bad), so the money has to be cycled via Europe, only to end up, after a brief detour, in the hands of said arms manufacturers anyway. End result is that the taxpayer gets the privilege of funding yachts for enablers of mass murder. The US state exists to enrich its friends, nothing more.

More than a dozen European allies will get nearly $400 million in new U.S. grants to buy American military hardware to backfill weapons they’ve donated to Ukraine from their own stockpiles, the State Department announced Monday.

Of more than $700 million in newly announced aid for Ukraine, $391 million in Foreign Military Financing is for 15 allies in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, while another $322 million is for Ukraine forces to “transition to more advanced weapons and air defense systems,” State Department Ned Price said in a statement.

Such financing is different from previous U.S. military assistance for Ukraine. It is not a donation of drawn-down U.S. Defense Department stockpiles, but rather cash countries can use to purchase supplies from the U.S.

https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2022/04/25/us-pledges-391-million-for-euro-allies-to-buy-american-to-backfill-weapons-donations-to-ukraine/

One of the great learning experiences of this war is just how fickle people's claim to being 'anti-war' is. I think people like to think of themselves as anti-war. But as soon as a war breaks out, those same "anti-war" people will suddendly start braying for blood like their life depended on it. I think of people like Muhammad Ali who were nearly thrown in jail for opposing war, and all the admiration that people exhibit towards him for that today, and it's clear to me that the majority of those same people would cheer on his being thrown in jail if the Vietnam war took place today.

Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts. Nobody thinks of themselves as a warmonger, but then the spin machine gets going and before you know it they’re spouting the slogans they’ve been programmed to spout and waving the flags the flags they’ve been programmed to wave and consenting to whatever the imperial war machine wants in that moment.

Virtually everyone will tell you they love peace and hate war when asked; war is the very worst thing in the world, and no healthy person relishes the thought of it. But when the rubber meets the road and it’s time to oppose war and push for peace, those who’d previously proclaimed themselves “anti-war” are on the other side screaming for more weapons to be poured into a proxy war that their government deliberately provoked.

Being truly anti-war isn’t easy. It doesn’t look like people picture in their imaginations. It looks like getting smashed with a deluge of information designed to manipulate and confuse and working through it while getting screamed at by those who’ve fallen for the brainwashing. It’s not cute. It’s not fun. It’s not the feel-good flower power time that people intuit it is when they look at the part of themselves that seeks peace. It’s standing up against the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed while being offered every reason not to.

...Because selling the war to the public is a built-in component of all war strategy, the war will always look necessary from the mainstream perspective, and it won’t look like those other wars which we now know in retrospect were mistakes. It’s always designed to look appealing. There’s never not going to be atrocity propaganda. There’s never not going to be reasons fed to you selling this military intervention as special and completely necessary. That will be the case every single time, because that’s how modern wars are packaged and presented.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/04/27/everyones-anti-war-until-the-war-propaganda-starts/

I know. Hard to imagine the world's most murderous empire being slightly less murderous.

Yeah, yeah, the West controls everything, people elsewhere lack all agency. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What exactly has this got to do with anything? I'm saying the US should fuck off. Nothing more, nothing less. This isn't about recrimination any longer, although at one point, it most certainly was.

Basically this isn't just a thing that will go away with throwing money at it — ssu

Funny what you are so passionate about when it comes to money and what it can't solve. No doubt you will continue to offer nice, uselessly picture laden posts about all the latest weapon systems sent to Ukranie while offering your continued amatuer opinion about how they will effect things. But ending homelessness? Oh, no, too big a task! Bloodsucking warmonger.

Right, because if Ukrainians end up having to defend themselves with old Kalashnikovs and improvised explosives, less of them will die. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The US has never given a shit about people dying, not once, ever, unless it is in their strategic interests. And everywhere they have intervened, they have spawned monsters, which, incidentally, have gone on to kill tens of thousands of Americans down the line, to speak nothing, sickeningly, of non-Americans

Israel has bombed Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine in nothing but the last 7 days. Ethiopia is in the throes of a civil war that has killed, and will continue to kill, tens of thousands. The only reason anyone at all gives a shit about Ukranine, apart from the good old fashioned racism of seeing poor dead white people, is because the US gives a shit. Nah, the US should fuck right off, right the hell off, forever.

I was not sure about this before, but it is clearer than ever that Ukraine is nothing but an opportunity for the US, and that it will allow any escalation and any number of deaths so as to keep it's global dominance. If WWIII breaks out, and this kind of fucking escalation is how that kind of fucking thing happens, it will be entirely - en-fucking-tirely - on US hands. Say it with me now: US money, fuck off back home.

Budget to stop the impending irreversible death of the planet thanks to climate change: $44b

Budget to help accelerate the death of the planet: $33b

Securing US hegemony: Priceless.

No# of dead Ukranians: who cares?

You mean if we invested it in crypto and made trillions out of it? — frank

Ahahahahahahahaaaha

Someone(s) at Lockheed and Raytheon is throwing a grand party right now.

Which is great because these guys are keeping the American economy going. Or at least the dead foreigners which they help produce.

I was looking for this stat! But I was getting weird sites so I gave up. But yes. That was what I wanted to post when I said that Ukraine is effectively a US state without representation. They get to die to fight in an American war. How fun for them.

It would cost about US$20b to end homelessness in the US.

And yes, the biggest transfer of wealth into the hands of billionaires by means of legislation took place thanks to Covid, there's nothing surprising about that.

And you are right. $33b isn't alot. Which is why the US will undoubtedly send more, as it keeps doing. This is what, the fourth tranche of money and weapons so far? I mean you can't even buy a single Twitter with that pocket-change.