Comments

  • Ukraine Crisis
    I thought... Didn't the thread already establish that everyone is bad, evil, something like that...?
    I guess then a follow-up is: therefore...?
  • “Supernatural” as an empty, useless term
    Words like Pegasus prompt us to differentiate fictional/imaginary and real.
    The winged horse does exist (in stories) but just isn't real.

    Seems to me the word "supernatural" can more or less be replaced with "unknown" without incurring any informative loss.
    As an explanation, when has "supernatural" ever done away with ignorance/errors?
  • The American Gun Control Debate
    The Ameriguns (2021) by Gabriele Galimberti

    Are you allowed to open-carry a flamethrower in the US? :chin:
  • Ukraine Crisis
    The US president and an Ukrainian anarchist have something in common: they both see Putin's Russia against Ukraine as totalitarianism/autocracy against democracy. I imagine they disagree on a few other things, though.
  • Ukraine Crisis

    Yep, the numbers alone matter and Russia has them.
    Similarly, Russia has an additional degree of freedom, being the attacker; the Ukrainians are already home.
    We're talking fairly large populations here; I can see attrition leading to a lot of hate in the Ukrainian population.
    Where things were supposed to improve, less corruption, less hate, more freedom, more opportunities for anyone, ..., Putin has instead ensured some regression.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    30% information, 70% sarcasm and insults.Xtrix

    You might be a bit generous.

    I'm not wading though these pages of muck to repost all the times you have played Nazi PR specialist, but you are welcome to search my posts for when I have called you out on it. Although probably don't bother as you wouldn't be able to read them correctly anyway.Streetlight

    Meanwhile, life goes on in Ukraine (for some at least), just a bit differently.

    Bakhmut family with no gas or power cook outside (May 31, 2022)

    Would it be worthwhile listing some peace-makers?
    No NATO membership for Ukraine wasn't one apparently.
    An obvious one is Putin taking his land-grabbing attempts down a notch, moving his troopers (and Nazi mercs) home, out of harm's way, well, if they also stop bombing.
    ...?
  • The American Gun Control Debate
    Mass Shootings Can Be Contagious, Research Shows (Aug 6, 2019)

    After Uvalde, mass shootings continue over the weekend across the U.S. (May 29, 2022)

    :o And legislators just keep sitting on their hands, as they've done for years. Expect more.

    In the days before the shooting, posts featured a photo of a hand holding an ammunition magazine and another photo of two AR-15-style rifles
    [...]
    The gunman legally bought his weapons soon after his 18th birthday and days before the attack, law enforcement officials told state lawmakers
    Texas elementary school shooting: What do we know so far? (May 27, 2022)

    The conclusion is the same. I'm not seeing any of my Republican colleagues come forward right now and say, 'Here's a plan to stop the carnage.' So this is just normal now, which is ridiculous.Cory Booker (May 25, 2022)
  • The American Gun Control Debate
    I suspect a mental health crises.Moses

    With someone like Ted Cruz being an elected official, you might be on to something.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Russia slashes rates in effort to cool rouble’s rapid ascent (May 26, 2022)

    Doesn't seem to be a sign of a booming economy.
    Demanding trade in rubles (oil, gas, whatever) might push the ruble up some?
    What can Russian companies import? (Chinese toys?)

    Filtration and forced deportation: Mariupol survivors on the lasting terrors of Russia’s assault (May 26, 2022)

    Anyway, it's a land-grab alright, an attempted conquest, like an up-scaled "finders keepers". (As if Russia wasn't large enough already, must be hard to protect against the barbarians at the door.)
    The diplomats (when not just for display) may have to wait until Putin's generals/strategists have worked out what they think is feasible, maybe after they've tried a few more things.
    Ruinage, looting, killing, displacement, ...
    Doubtful that Putin's Russia will pay up, but I'm not going to quit holding it to them either.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    ‘Putin’s terror affects everyone’: anarchists join Ukraine’s war effort (May 26, 2022)

    They have a standing invitation, apparently.

    We are fighting to protect the more or less free society that exists in Ukraine, without which there would be no space for activism or underground movements.
    Putin’s terror is happening [in Ukraine] and it is indiscriminate. It is happening against every part of the population, but especially against the Russian-speaking parts of the population that Putin supposedly came here to liberate,
    His regime is an ultraconservative, rightwing dictatorship that represses anarchists in Russia, the free press, LGBT networks. It scares even the most banal, grassroots initiatives, like animal rights activists. We see the conflict between Ukraine and Russia as a conflict between a more or less democratic state and a totalitarian one.
    We have a strict screening process. We don’t want people who just come here to kill; we want them to understand what they are fighting for.
    — Dmytro

    Putin has appropriated the word anti-fascist and he exploits it to justify his war. [Ukrainian] nationalists say if you’re anti-fascist, you’re pro-Russian, but that’s not the case.
    I think both sides of the elite did a lot to create a situation whereby Ukrainians argue a lot about language and versions of history instead of how Kryvyi Rih Stal was privatised.
    The cause of the war is the Russian Federation.
    — Movchan
  • The American Gun Control Debate
    If you are going to use historical precedence to justify your argument you ought to look at actual examples of US militia fighting against and being defeated by superior federal forces.Maw

    Waco started this war. Hopefully, Oklahoma would end it. The only way they’re going to feel something, the only way they’re going to get the message is, quote, with a body count. — McVeigh in prison in 2001

    :o Ough ... chilling.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say hereIsaac

    It was fairly straightforward. I thought your response to , missed a bit, so I added it.

    (I guess some may knowingly walk into a minefield and expect pity when a leg is blown off, others may or may not feel schadenfreude if those unfortunate people walked in there to blow others up. I'll abstain, but that's just me.)

    Don't bomb others' home. If you do, then don't expect them to just lie down and die. The Ukrainians aren't anyway.
  • The Supernatural and plausibility
    Hm ... wondering ...

    In what cases can "supernatural magic" not be replaced with "unknown" without incurring informative loss?
    In what cases have "supernatural magic" as an explanation done away with ignorance/errors?
    What does "supernatural magic" derive that's differentiable?
    For that matter, is there anything that "supernatural magic" couldn't be raised to explain?

    Such cases seem few and far between (if there are any).
  • The American Gun Control Debate
    As far as I can tell, it's not about "taking our guns away" (common slogan), but about regulation.
    Especially for weapons that are for killing humans.
    Maybe I've misunderstood the suggested legislation?
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Does your passion for getting other people to die for your moral didactics know no bounds?Isaac

    The Russians (and their Nazi compadres) can head home, the Ukrainians are already home.
    The Russians (and their Nazi compadres) have homes, the Ukrainians are running :fire: shorter.

    Unless ... "You can check out any time you like / But you can never leave" ...
  • Intelligent Design - A Valid Scientific Theory?
    naturalistic accounts for abiogenesisPaulm12

    Incidentally just scrolled by ...

    In Test Tubes, RNA Molecules Evolve Into a Tiny Ecosystem (May 5, 2022)

    That is similar to the much-vaunted 'principle of causal closure', which is that every event has a physical cause.Wayfarer

    Just to nit-pick, I think says that physical effects have physical causes.
  • Intelligent Design - A Valid Scientific Theory?
    The big bang does not have falsification qualificationL'éléphant

    If I remember right, it does. Something to do with recombination, that's fairly specific. Or, I guess it could just be shown that the universe isn't expanding after all, or only started expanding, say, 10 billion years ago. Or, a 100 billion-year-old galaxy could be found, ...
    By the way, we already know that the theory only can go so far (at the moment), since it relies on relativity for the most part. If relativity was to be falsified, then it could take big bang with it.

    (↑ edited a couple times, past my bedtime, Zzz)
  • Intelligent Design - A Valid Scientific Theory?
    For intelligent design to become a scientific model, there would have to be falsification criteria, the more the better.
    For intelligent design to become of much use, it would have to (stabilize and) make reliable predictions.

    By the way, I don't think it's in the cards that intelligent design can (ever) derive, say, the 10 commandments, that one should pray to the Sun for inspiration and atonement, that Muhammad was the (final) messenger of Allah, or whatever. That's the marked gap from these sorts of apologetics to the (elaborate) religions that have adherents.
  • Gensler's Golden Rule
    Gensler at least is trying to give people some guidance as to how to live ethically.Marvin Katz

    Yep. :up: Gensler's treatment is fair enough.

    On the other hand, I'm thinking there's a kind of futility in devising such rules — not as rules-of-thumb, but as morality-defining rules.
    (Another example could be the Hippocratic oath.)
    So, we ought to cultivate and nurture moral awareness towards individual autonomous moral agency; easier said than done.

    (Thanks much for the comment; will read the document you linked as time permits.)
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Something like this, for instance.Olivier5

    You have 49.25% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.

    I gather they're saying that Ukraine sort of happens to have been caught between

    democracies versus autocracies (e.g. Biden)
    "old world order" versus "new world order" (e.g. Jinping)

    Not sure what such a new world would be (except Uyghur culture probably won't be invited).
  • Can there be a proof of God?
    So the best we can do is to accept that there are two objective realities.Hillary

    Don't think that can make sense.
    What about, say, Nettles' and Applewhite's fantasies...?
    There are such things as fiction, fantasies, imaginations, hallucinations, etc — things that aren't universal/extra-self, but experienced by someone nonetheless, right?
    If people believe contradictory things, then it stands to reason that they can't both be right.
    How would such contradictory things play out anyway?
  • Ukraine Crisis
    The next master stroke of Putin is to revive the Russian car manufacturing industry and the much-ridiculed Moskvich sedan. Lessons in how to re-animated a corpse.Wayfarer

    The "good old days" :grin:
  • Can there be a proof of God?
    , well, if you think such claims are applicable to everyone/everything...

    Maybe you could start providing claims (the more the better) that others can then go out and check?jorndoe

    Slap Trump in a dream, check if he has a bruise the next day, don't forget to apologize?
  • Can there be a proof of God?
    The mere telling is no proof no. But the experience is.Hillary

    The methodology of Carlos René Romero described at "Did Jesus Really Visit the Americas?" (Jul 2008)

    Argument from inconsistent revelations (Aug 2018)

    You're free to believe whatever, but you're not going to convince anyone else by this methodology.
    Maybe you could start providing claims (the more the better) that others can then go out and check?
  • Can there be a proof of God?
    ...

    Correction, it's attributed to Wittgenstein, not sourced, here's my paraphrase:

    Wittgenstein overhears someone saying “5, 1, 4, 1, 3. Done.”
    He asks what that was about, and they respond that they just finished reciting π backward.
    “But, how old are you?”
    “Infinitely old. I never started, but have been at it forever and finally finished.”

    Why finish right at that time, and not some other time, any other time in fact?
    Counter-intuitive implications, no sufficient reason.

    James Harrington: Time: A Philosophical Introduction
    Craig Skinner: Ask a Philosopher: Questions and Answers 47 (2nd series) #94

    So, sufficient reason is violated in both of those two cases, counter-intuitive (but not contradictory) implications.
    Limit of sufficient reason.
    Futile pursuit.

    In other news:

    Ethan Siegel: Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore (Oct 13, 2021)
  • Can there be a proof of God?
    (Ignoring for a moment that this sentence is a bit non-sensical ...)

    3. therefore there is no space for any further events because infinity can't be used in mathematical operations. (Hillbert hotel problem)SpaceDweller

    It's a futile pursuit.

    Hilbert's Hotel is counter-intuitive but does not derive a contradiction.
    Wittgenstein gave a simpler (less technical) argument to the same end, not a contradiction either, but rendering an infinite past counter-intuitive more easily.
    Seems they fall back on sufficient reason, so that's what's meant by "absurd" here (yes, Craig has used that word as well) — no sufficient reason, our intuitions violated.
    Craig's 1st premise is a special case of sufficient reason.

    Yet, what about a definite earliest moment, then? Say, 14 billion years ago (as of the other day)?
    Well, why not 20 billion, or, in fact, any other age?
    Again, no sufficient reason. Not when temporality is of the universe, and that's what we already asserted.

    So, we've hit a (logical) limit of sufficient reason. It's metaphysics anyway, so kind of inherently suspect.

    By the way, cosmology typically considers another option: no definite earliest time, and not an infinite past duration. Call it "edge-free" if you like. This option itself seems counter-intuitive, at a first glance at least. Yet, it might be worthwhile.

    There are other reasons to bin these cosmological arguments.
  • Can there be a proof of God?
    if one begins an argument by assuming what is to be proved, this implies that argument is "deductive"?jgill

    I think meant it the other way around, sort of.

    Purely deductive arguments are non-ampliative.
    So, if a purely deductive argument is put forth to prove that G's exists, then it's begging the question.

    @Jackson, feel free to correct me if I misread.

    (edit: forgot to quote jgill)
  • Ukraine Crisis
    What Turkey Wants From Sweden and Finland in NATO Expansion Spat (Bloomberg; May 17, 2022)

    No Kurds
    No restrictions on Turkey's arms trading

    Mainly targeted at Sweden.
    Might actually speak in Sweden's favor? :chin:
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Some of Ukraine's success repelling Russian forces is apparently due to some training sessions with UK military personnel. Efforts that came about after Russia assimilated Crimea.

    Doesn't Russian law prohibit sending conscripts into war outside Russia? (If captured, they'll hopefully not be sent back in Putin's arms, whether having the law on their side or not.)

    Putin's Russia, the invader, failed to swiftly take over Kyiv and capture Ukrainian leaders, succeeded somewhat with nuclear intimidation, succeeded in ruining parts of Ukraine (destroying, looting, killing), prompted Sweden/Finland to seek NATO membership (the rest of the north are founding members), succeeded in suppressing/removing other voices at home (for some time), succeeded in propagating particular narratives (propaganda-style), failed to respond timely to concessions thus making diplomacy increasingly harder when allowing bloodshed and ruinage, may have triggered making haters out of many Ukrainians (including Russian-speaking), ... Some successes some failures, with Ukrainians on the ground being shelled?
  • Ukraine Crisis
    And thus Putin's narrative (propaganda-style) has been adopted and propagated. :up: :grin: Worked.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    With the kinds of raving and ranting here (and roughly everyone, including in history, being evil), maybe one shouldn't have high hopes for peace (in Ukraine), eh? :D

    A unified European defense has been mentioned here and there.
    What timelines might that take to implement anyway...?
    For something to become effective?
    As far as I know, it's not particularly on anyone's desk.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    , diplomacy :up: The more the better

    I don't think anyone is simply declaring that Ukraine is winning, will win, militarily.
    Yet, note that Russians like Yuri Podolyak and Vladlen Tatarsky have commented on Russian military failures and criticized Russian efforts. (Careful with the words people, cf polonium.)

    My comment was about the continuing implicit denial that the Kremlin can be moved.
    (And, in contrast, Ukraine can be moved and should be convinced to give up.)
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Russian Tycoon Criticized Putin’s War. Retribution Was Swift.
    The New York Times
    May 2, 2022


    Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 14
    Institute for the Study of War
    May 14, 2022


    Whatever NATO's decision, Sweden/Finland aren't threatening Russia. Putin's Russia is threatening...a few others. Going to be costly. Hopefully a nation of haters isn't in the making with Ukraine. Some progress seemed to be underway.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Are there any indications that Putin wants to see Russia (sustainably) surpassing the Chinese neighbor? (in the usual ways, power in particular, economically, control, being heard/respected on the world stage, whatever) Having to rely on China might be like a thorn in the eye. Resources/territory could go some way.

    Maintaining peace often means a measure of friendly, reliable relations among societies, at the very least dependable indifference. And internally, reasonable treatment of people. Openness/freedom/fairness can help, fear/posturing/subversion/aggression the opposite. And making genuine efforts (in good faith) can help. (No one is expecting France to attack the UK or to interfere significantly in internal UK politics, despite past centuries of hostile action; it can be done, it's non-hypothetical.)
    "Politics and governing demand compromise."
    How to achieve something like that with respect to the Ukraine-Russia situation...?
    In some ways that ship has sailed, new orders coming out of the Kremlin would do it, ...
  • Unwavering Faith
    , in 1543, the founder of Protestantism launched a rather anti-semitic treatise.
    It's an aspect of what religious faith is, like "Unwavering Faith".
  • Ukraine Crisis
    , and it's ruined an impressive amount of Ukraine.
    Don't have the figure handy; some engineering firm made some estimates a while back.
    I doubt the destroying party is willing to pay up.


    @Apollodorus, instead of all your quote mining and kooky comments, you should try spending some of that time drawing up connections between and activities of these people (incomplete list):
    • Dmitry Gorelov     • Nikolay Tokarev  • Sergei Ivanov
    • Leonid Tyagachyov  • Viktor Ivanov    • Nikolai Patrushev
    • Viktor Medvedchuk  • Viktor Zolotov   • Alexander Bortnikov
    • Yakov Kedmi        • Alexei Sedov     • Sergey Chemezov
    • Yury Kovalchuk     • Dmitry Rogozin
    
    Not an oligarch list as such, but they're in "The Club". Hic sunt Dracones.


    want an aggression punishedOlivier5

    Deterred at least (apropos) :up:
  • Ukraine Crisis
    One cannot declare peace if another declares war. One can engage either way. Peace is gone with one assailant. The (logical) structure is akin to war taking one, and peace taking all. Simple enough, though not heartening when(ever) peace is preferable over war.

    Russia shelling Ukraine is like that. Presently, peace (and less suffering) requires Putin making such a decision, giving such a command. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be in sight right now.