It's also that they are afraid of change, they are afraid of freedom, and novelty. They want to be slaves. They are comfy in their lack of freedom. They like it this way, when there is no way out, no solution. — Olivier5

We have on the one hand people arguing in favour of the status quo and on the other those who say that the status quo sucks and you manage to conclude from that the latter group is against change? It would be funny if it wasn't for the fact you actually believe the shit you write.

What's scary is the uncritical assumption democracies work. That must be why special interests and lobby groups do so well in almost all of them (*Brexit* cough, *billions for defence*)
Or the confusion among people that democratic elections automatically lead to democratic decision making, which it obviously doesn't and really is a kindergarten level of thinking about democracy to begin with.

Especially France with it's insane disproportionate influence on training civil servants, top managers and politicians in ENA is a joke from a democratic legitimacy point of view.

Edit: yes, I know Macron has stated ENA will be closed at some point.

Modest reasons for optimism. Russian minister of offence has promised to decrease military activity as a gesture of good faith resulting from the discussions in Istanbul today. Let's hope they keep their word and peace talks are indeed constructive.

I'm talking about the derivative contracts to hedge your exchange rate risk. Those aren't currently exempted from what I understood because that's a regular financial contract between financial institutions and not commodity energy trading.

I don't know how much Norway can up its production but the Netherlands has a large reserve of gas we stopped pumping because it caused earthquakes and damage to buildings in Northern Netherlands. If prices go up enough or Putin switches if the gas, at least gas for heating won't be an issue. Electricity though...

But what about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock?!

Or reporting on "maybe the negotiaters were poisoned". I thought the news was about reporting facts? Since when is, maybe something happened and maybe it didn't, news?

God I hate mainstream media.

Neither chess nor naked men are my thing but to each his own!

That post wants me to go off on a tangent how the capitalist system commits violence against workers every day that Jeff and the Kochs can definitely be held accountable for. Paying a living wage? Hell no, we'll make you suffer with anxiety about debt, not reaching your target if you take a toilet break or drop you in poverty if you ever need healthcare. Worst thing to happen to the environment? Let's just throw away all these things that didn't sell or were returned at over a million items per year.

If we weren't all sold so much on the capitalist ideal (as idealised by Rupert "Goebbels" Murdoch) we'd be hanging Jeff, rupert and the Kochs from the trees for crimes against humanity.

This gets more interesting with the SWIFT sanction. So the oil and gas business is not a spot market, most of it is locked in with forwards. So you have to pay in rubles, based on a price that looks ok today but which could absolutely suck in 3 or 6 months time due to changes in the exchange rate. So you want to hedge that exchange rate risk with a forward, in which you agree to pay X EUR on the forward date for Y rubles. Who holds rubles? Russian banks. How are you going to pay for it when they're no longer on SWIFT? Unless they exempted derivative contracts from the sanctions, this is going to be a problem too. And if it's then exempted as well (as it will have to be), we have a nice financial loophole for Russian banks to exploit.

On a related note, my daughter independently decided to sell some toys to raise money for Ukraine. I asked her if they talked about this on school but she said no. She's a better person already at six then the rest of the family or my friends. I actually got shit from people that we're offering to temporarily take in refugees. Too distracting for the kids, too long, too costly. The reactions have been interesting. I just smile and nod.


She also came up with buying a gift for her little brother with her own money and she insisted in the store in buying the gift herself. Walks up to the counter, explains to the woman what her brother likes and then asks what she can buy with 5 euro. Admittedly, she picked something they could play together with simultaneously. I'm melting.

I wasn't talking about outright lies, I'm talking about framing.

Baden had some good examples of propaganda by Western media outlets. Brushing that off as bias is in my view problematic because it suggests all journalists collectively suck. Or it suggests the capitalist drive for profit is such that only certain narratives are profitable so that's what's written just to get unique visitors.

Comrade, as they say where we are from, the goat with the longest beard is wisest.

Ashes.

Is that sort of thing off the table already? — jorndoe

Absolutely not! But I thought that was implied with my post history in this thread. :wink:

But yes, a negotiated settlement is best for everyone involved even if I'm sure certain US hawks will see their hopes dashed.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Caw2XsbJjaR/?utm_medium=copy_link

Geopolitics in a nutshell.

I think he's referring to Appolodorus.

Talk of an overreaction. Weren't you born during the Cold War? Seems you have been blissfully ignorant about nuclear deterrence or how it works. — ssu

I see you have no argument against my argument other than "this is how we've been doing it for decades!" Pretty cool of you to assume ignorance instead ofengaging my argument that clearly disagrees with nuclear deterrence as an acceptable policy.

Mutual Assured Destruction, or the idea that after innocents are killed due to the use of a WMD that is totally indiscriminate it then is a great strategic step to kill more innocents, is fundamentally flawed.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/466473

Some more just war theory background.

It's the only rational position in any conjoint analysis of this issue.

variables:
1. Putin doesn't use nukes, no escalation
2. Putin uses nukes, no escalation
3. Putin uses nukes, escalation

costs:
1. Ukrainians and Russians die, I pay extra tax funding Ukrainians
2. Ukrainians and Russians die, I pay extra tax funding Ukrainians
3. everybody dies

If Putin uses nukes, we shouldn't do anything. So yes, Putin trusting in me making the only reasonable choice seems about right. I can only hope the jingoist leaders in the West aren't as hubristic they think there's anything to win here.

It's only a risky move because apparently there are some idiots who like to entertain dying in a fiery ball of fire or radiation poisoning because they think it's heroic to stand up to a bully. Let's take the kindergarten morality out of hese equations please for fuck's sake I'm begging everyone before you cause the death of my children.

Don't underestimate yourself. Just in comparison, would you have thought Western people would fold so quickly in line with covid lock downs? Also, now it might look that West Europe is bound to have the energy ties to Russia. In one year it can be different. — ssu

I will welcome Russian tanks in my street if it avoids a nuclear war. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is worth a strategic nuclear escalation. Freedom be damned. I prefer to live and find the relative freedom possible even in the most autocratic regimes.

Empires come and go. I'm not willing to die for one. I'm not willing to risk the lives of others for one.

What's exactly the point about being able to categorise them as Europeans other than to highlight someone's racism?

Let me add to that: https://www.counterpunch.org/2008/02/18/nato-s-kosovo-colony/

I don't share your optimism. I think he would use it, particularly tactical nukes.

Your view is shared by quite a few politicians but for less savoury reasons.

Putin has surely his limitations on what he can do. Don't think otherwise. — ssu

I can't do anything with this. What limitations? Why? What would stop Putin from shooting a 1 MT tactical nuke into Kiev or Mariupol if he can't do it by conventional means? You think NATO or the US will all of sudden get involved?

That has exactly nothing to do with what I said but thanks for posting.

:roll: it's not a fucking Mike Tyson fight you're betting on. There's actual people dying. The likelihood of the Ukrainians winning is inversely correlated to what type of weapons Putin is willing to deploy. Unless you can convincingly argue that Putin will not escalate until he's assured of victory, it's exactly this fantasy that will lead to unnecessary deaths of civilians.

LOL. Never tried that.

And don't forget the are many steps of escalation steps available to Russia between this conventional war and nukes. He'll probably drop a tactical nuke before surrendering his states goals in Ukraine. So a long war actually increases the risk of escalation as well.

Don’t be silly. You can figure that out for yourself. Minimal force is fine, be this grabbing arms or pushing away - both of which can result in some injury being incurred. — I like sushi

The point is that in almost all circumstances of someone hitting you, you can walk away. If there are weapons involved you run away. Only an idiot overestimating his martial abilities will try to fight. Thanks to 10 years of Aikido (and some other martial arts) I know 12 ways of disarming someone with a knife, depending on whether they are in front or behind me, but I will fucking run if I have a chance.

Sadly social media is filled with the fantasy fighting an armed person bare handed is realistic or even smart.

under which circumstances can't you walk away?

My wife hit me once, I told her if she did it again I'd get a divorce. Never happened again. Our dustbin has a dent though.

I'm pretty confident the REUTERS picture happened. Not so much about the dumpster. It's possible and even likely, I'm just saying that there's plenty of proof out there of fake pictures and videos. We're being flooded with fake news in normal times, it's even worse now. I'm just saying, be careful with what you believe and source your pictures so we have a chance of vetting it.

After Putin's stadium performance, flags dumped into garbage. Sometimes a picture tells a lot, actually. — ssu

In this day and age? Like people cheering the destruction of twin towers which never happened. I don't trust images especially if they're unsourced and don't quite understand why you would.

Ukrainian-American Yuliy Dubovyk writes the following:

Like any other US puppet regime, Ukraine doesn’t have any real independence. Kiev has been actively pushed to confront Russia by every US administration, against the will of the majority of Ukrainian people.

...

The support for Ukraine that fills the Western media now is not out of real solidarity with the people of Ukraine. If that were the case, the US wouldn’t have overthrown our government twice in a decade; it wouldn’t have supported the policies that made us the poorest country in Europe; it wouldn’t have fueled a brutal civil war for the past eight years.

The reason US media outlets and politicians are all backing Ukraine now is because they want to use the Ukrainian military and civilian population as cannon fodder in a proxy war with a political adversary.

This is a philosophy forum, not the watercooler. There should be more to one's moral arguments than "gut feeling". — baker

So you don't know what ius ad bellum is. You do realise this reply just makes you sound like an idiot, right?

Jesus fuck, just read about sex traffickers targeting fleeing women and children. :vomit:

it also incorrectly identifies "being hit" as "being in a fight". It's only a fight once the person being hit, starts hitting back.

I think all socially directed violence is illegitimate. Only personal self-defence is legitimate. Whenever someone decides for others to go forth elsewhere and fight to the death, whatever the reason, it is ethically wrong whether we label that war a just war or not.

We're not made for this, and I mean that in a very real biological and mental sense, to serve large abstracted entities called states with weapons that can flatten cities. We're supposed to throw a stone or two and maybe accidentally kill someone with a an unlucky strike. Everything more than that is just the horror of civilisation combined the failure of imagination to feel empathy for nations and its people because it's too far removed from ourselves and a system that enables sociopaths to rise to the top.

They're not prophecies. You can analyse the situation and have an understanding of war and history and current geopolitical decisions to get to a decent conclusion.

What I think is at play for your reticence here is you're worried that in fact Boethius might be right all along, that cheerleading the continuation of the war and sending armaments (to "bleed the Russians" as Niall Ferguson quoted a US official), could be an immoral position.

A ruin can be rebuilt, that is very easy, but a fascist regime cannot improve. It cannot be reformed into a less fascist one. Russia is now a fascist militarist petrostate, and will remain so for quite a while. This can't be good for them Russian, although of course it's good for the leaders.

If Ukraine manages to remain a democracy, it will rebound. Of course this reamains to be seen. — Olivier5

The war isn't contributing to Russian socio-economic organisation. It was a fascist military oligarchy before the war started.

Ukraine was a democracy in name only. Riven with corruption.

What I'm missing from your analysis is number of deaths and deplacement of people. I'm somewhat less concerned with economic damage; the ruins seem to suggest a lot civilian death. I suppose that wasn't very clear. Russia doesn't have to rebuild much, except military equipment so far. So again, under which realistic circumstances will Russia come out worse than Ukraine?

I'm happy it illicits disgust because that's precisely the emotion you should be having when people are dying in war. My vulgarities are intended as functional. And I suggested you and frank find a log cabin. @ssu already has one for his savusauna.

Still curious what circumstances you think can realistically arise where Ukraine isn't the party that is worst off. Just going by the destruction in various cities seems difficult to reproduce elsewhere.