anthony

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Everything posted by anthony

  1. Without meaning, yup. I don't know why it wasn't plain, ( it was, but why stop a war to weaken/regime-change Russia, with Ukraine doing the heavy work?) - that Putin was trying to force Kyiv into negotiations from the start--and that almost worked, until Boris and Biden talked Zel out of it. He wanted to conquer all Ukraine, then to invade Europe, the experts said: all scaremongering b.s. to get the European backing. Hardly-reported was the Istanbul meeting in which Zel was already agreeing to neutrality terms with the Russians. Putin - the only "imperialist" in history with a tiny outnumbered army (to begin with) who sought negotiations only one month into the campaign. Somebody has to say it: RFKjr Volker nonsensically delivers the narrative, Ukraine's innocence and Putin's 'Empire building'.
  2. A very good discussion, I'm only glad some can see the perils ahead by mobilizing more troops over there. It seemed to me that NATO could never and would never back down-- too much prestige and credibility at stake. The time to de-escalate and take the negotiation 'off-ramp' was early in 2022 with minimum losses, minimal concessions to Russia and NATO's reputation intact. But - somehow- they believed their own fantasy, Russia would be beaten (military, economy, Putin's overthrow). All fine and upbeat until the reality of the war set in. Once in, Russia wasn't going away. And they fed the major lie to Europeans: Putin intended to invade beyond Ukraine. Ukraine was dragged down for that, "defending Europe". Now my fears of the possibility of false flag attacks to justify a huge operation gets closer.
  3. Left Woke and Palestine explained by James Lindsay
  4. The Truth About the Hostages and the Israel-Hamas ‘Ceasefire’—Colonel Richard Kemp | ATL:NOW WWW.THEEPOCHTIMES.COM Colonel Richard Kemp is a former British army commander and the author of 'Attack State Red; A Landmark Tour of Duty in Afghanistan.'
  5. Sorry, at the start of BK 's discussion, "You will own nothing and be happy" came to mind. Effortless happiness... No free will - and that's great! Ha, confirms what 'a relief', I suggested I seem to repeatedly see the identical strawman such thinkers raise; Whatever they take it to mean, volition is NOT *a guarantee* of life success, happiness, certainty and so on, but is THE essential prerequisite for them. AND it is not any single "choice", but a series of many. I will watch more. I had to turn for relief to Branden and bits from a passage in HTS: "Free will - in the widest meaning of the term - is the doctrine that human beings are capable of performing actions that are not determined by forces outside their control, that we are capable of making choices that are not necessitated by antecedent factors.... "Freedom does not mean causelessness, this point must be stressed. It is caused by the person who makes the choice, and the choice entails a enormity of issues... {lists several requisites] "While focusing is not synonymous with reasoning, we can see how central the role of reason and rationality is... "Our freedom is neither absolute nor unlimited, however..." [Due to factors including the developmental, genetic and biological] You can see where Branden's heading, free will being one column for his subject, self-esteem. (Was xyz my successful doing (self-earned) or was it 'predetermined' - out of my control?) One more casualty of determinism, the definite cause of the widespread low self-esteem by people, definitely of increasing anti-individualism.
  6. Afaic, the "scientific denial of free will" is the basic cause of everything wrong, bad and evil today. You don't have volition, the men of science have 'proven' - which has seeped into the mainstream (education, media - etc.), what A RELIEF: you won't ever need to take yourself to task, nor be faulted for your bad actions. To a greater degree, your actions, knowledge, character qualities/faults, etc., were ~determined~ for you in your distant or near past by prior causes. Secular leftists for one are most taken with the theory: She couldn't help herself! One's evasion of reality now is at worst a minor mistake, moral judgments of anyone are superfluous or unjust. For the Christian religious - they believed at least that each has and is responsible for their own "Soul", religious or not (and ykw is going to judge it one day). But ever since Western religions began declining - disappearing with them are the last remnants of western free will and self-responsibilty (plus individualism). If I recall those sophomoric experiments, they showed nothing more than that a specific area of a person's brain 'lights up' an instant before he selects and presses a button (or suchlike). His brain told him - "determined" what choice to make? Or the choice made registered on his brain? Causation is key. Self-refuting or inconclusive scientism. The same tests were demonstrated continually on the internet, claiming to nullify free will. The audience responses were all very highly positive giving one a clue of the effects of this belief on the great numbers in societies. The ease with which people are being indoctrinated and propagandized, and submit to authority - indicates that loss. Once volition is eliminated, consistently there also goes the volitional consciousness. Sam Harris was one who stated free will -and- the mind do not exist. Whatever his rationale, he got it right, as far as it goes - you take out the one logically you remove the other. The content of consciousness is all-reliant on the volitional, deliberated efforts that compose and organize a huge input into the mind. These destructive neurologists (and the rest) were not able to locate "the mind" in the most sophisticated MRI scans. They looked for consciousness in biological matter, and unsurprisingly it wasn't there. The culpability for the damage done to masses of mindless minds today must be directed at them.
  7. Most complete of all, "a being of volitional consciousness" denotes one's mind identity, a "will" free to roam, to defocus/focus the mind. I'm suggesting by its nature one self-directs a v.c. in a range - integrated - of levels. "Choices" all the way down to the subsequent actions. "Could have been otherwise" - absolutely.
  8. For fun, I'd call it "three in one" free will in a continuum. The sense-percept apparatus, while automatic to every animal, may still be directed from this to that. LOOK here, listen there, touch/taste here. Right off the bat, one has selective options for attention from a large range. Where it gets most complex, (refer to Rand here) the non-automatic conceptual apparatus needs your highest volitional effort to gather and collate, compare, assimilate - then evaluate - the percepts into orderly form. Last, what does one DO? With one's knowledge/value/character base? When to apply this conception in what situation - then act? And in which way? Again free will. This final "action" stage is where many contra-free will thinkers get tied up and narrow, far as I've read. As though they lose the plot focusing on evident human mechanical activity and look for its pre-determining antecedent causes. In the physical world. And in the brain. Overlooking the good ole self-made (emergent) mind. Naturally, they are also mechanistic.
  9. He employed free will to conclude he/nobody has free will. Bravo.
  10. Son of Hamas RUMBLE.COM This “son of Hamas” will knock your socks off. He doesn’t pull punches and even criticizes his own parents. He doesn’t mince words. There is nothing politically correct about what he says. It is just
  11. Marc, Good find, I was about to link it. Humble apologies forthcoming from BBC's anchors and 'analysts' jumping to conclusions, perhaps? The automatic and prejudiced presumption Israelis dunnit - and they are lying - isn't new to us. It's certain moral cowardice to faithfully accept the word of a (once again recently) proven terrorist gang. (Cynic that I am, I did first consider this deliberate, not by Israel as the "projected" narrative was manipulated - by Hamas. What are the odds of a misfired rocket hitting a hospital? We'll see more. I put no act beyond Hamas. Do the media believe appeasing them will keep future terrorist operations out of their countries?
  12. Ralph is one of the survivors of Kfar Aza the closest kibbutz to Gaza. A schoolmate and long friend of my wife's since before he moved to Israel from SA. He tells a little of his story to an AUS TV
  13. Elon Musk Drops Vaccine Bombshell Personal Story | Facts Matter LISTS.YOUMAKER.COM Musk took to X to challenge the EU's most recent law regarding disinformation, and called out its hypocritical push for censorship.
  14. not about NATO! (until Jens says it was)
  15. Glenn Greenwald, only just found his show and quite impressed with his lucid thinking. Canada and neo Nazis in Ukraine in there. 7 mins in Bill Kristol’s New War Propaganda Reveals the Real Goal in Ukraine. PLUS: Trudeau, Hillary, & Fox Blame Russia, w/ Lev Golinkin; & Update on Govt/Media War on Rumble | SYSTEM UPDATE #151 RUMBLE.COM Become part of our Locals community: https://greenwald.locals.com/ Use code "RUMBLE" to get 60% off everything at CBDistillery: https://www.thecbdistillery.com/ Follow Glenn: Twitter: https://twitter.
  16. The brilliance of the indoctrination machine: inducing in mass minds that Ukraine is/was righteously defending itself - BUT - that Russia is/was not. (And has no moral or legal right to, anyway) The plain reality, both nations are defending themselves, one against NATO, Kyiv and the collective West. The other, Ukr, against a country, Russia, provoked into pre-emptive self-defence, by that combination. If anyone believes that Russia was not under severe threat from a sizable Ukraine/NATO Army, (and, later on, nuke missiles on its borders), and had to instantly respond before matters got much more dangerous, you're propagandized. And believing Russia has no right to protect its borders, the far future safety of its people or of the Ukr=Russian civilians about to be expelled/killed in an "ethnic cleansing" in early 2022 - for the West to grab Crimea/Sevastopol and the Donbass, and presumably, topple the Russian Gvt., create unrest and a probable civil war breaking up Russia ("divide and rule") to grab cheap natural resources and gain a geostrategic foothold over the next country in line, check your prejudices and premises. The nasty plan playing out before our eyes (for those who can see), was in setting both countries - defensively - against one another. (For which conflict self-congratulatory bureaucrats are celebrating is not costing "us" lives, just a bit of money out of the defense budget-- a bargain). They can openly tell the world that without shame. "Monsters", Johnstone correctly observes. This War Wasn't Just Provoked — It Was Provoked Deliberately SUBSTACK.COM In an interesting speech about the way US imperial aggression provokes violence around the world, antiwar commentator Scott Horton made reference to an April 2022 article from Yahoo News that had previously escaped my attention. The article is titled “
  17. Peter, a saying goes - "if you're not part of the solution, you could be part of the problem". That applies I think to the West's poor handling, a huge overreach, of Russia, and somewhat to China. Rather than a show of strength, with Ukraine, what has become apparent to outsiders is how incredibly the West has sacrificed itself. The major problem is identifying Russia and China as joined together, a combined Asian geopoltical threat/peer competitor which needs containing/subsuming, one after the other. (There are big differences, the first being ideology). That's alluded to by generals and politicos as 'we have to make a final "example" of Russia's invasion to send the message to others - they cannot do the same'. I think this is dangerously short-sighted. What it does is notify China that they are likely next, raising alarm there. All of their leaders want their countries to be treated with respect - and, failing that, for NK, apparently with fear. That is where statesmen and diplomatic envoys enter. They don't have to approve of the regimes and leaders, just acknowledge that they know e.g. N Korea has its needs and security worries, as do their own countries, so cut out the attention-seeking display of missiles. A little carrot goes far, with the implicit stick not shown. But diplomacy seems to be a lost art. The perception is today that it is a sign of weakness - appeasement - to deal with dictators and authoritarians. I consider it a sign of character, dedication to reality and value in all humankind. The efforts of treating them as rational beings often reduce tension. The thing is to realize that nations cannot be coerced into some kind of perfection, but people volitionally change along with new generations born, they have to find their own way and the world wlll not be a Utopia.
  18. For all this is a very well-reasoned argument by Peikoff, I was dismayed at one excerpt: "Because individual human life is the standard of value..." Again, there is ambivalence and misunderstanding of "standard" which created confusion for O'ists. I can't resist picking it out again. Exact words matter. Rand was specific: while the individual's life is his/her's supreme value, what is the standard of this value? "Man's life" is the standard of value for Objectivist ethics. That's like leaping from the concrete to the abstract and back again. A metaphysical standard, man's life, is an abstract measure - a gauge - by which one (individual) estimates one's level of application (right, by "the exercise of volition") to all the values/virtues - reason...integrity, etc. - in one's concrete existence. She thereby sets an *objective* justification for her ethics. Briefly - practice all the virtues and - you llve as "man". We'll get various subjectivist interpretations and acts from - your own life - being "the standard of value", which would morally justify all manner of deception, thieving and cheating and preying on others, etc. --in order to preserve and sustain your own physical life. Anything goes to stay alive, no? Then, Rand's system of ethics is just one more predatory "egotism". From which, making (or not preventing) a needless, not self-defensive conflict which you have the power to stop at little cost to you, but perhaps you see 'gain' in it, is irrational, immoral, and by the standard of value, anti-man's life. Those humans are other lives of the same species who have value in themselves, whether objectively explicated in an ethics, or usually not.
  19. An ordinary repressive day under dictatorship.
  20. The numbers (with healthy skepticism) are more readily believable from the Russian side. Simply, they have little 'to prove'. Their reports are hardly seen outside and restricted in several countries. Minimal to zero, compared to the MSM disinformation and lies global reach. They even report their battle setbacks. Also I'd say the more realistic Russian population, from long experience, is not so easily taken in and indoctrinated by their state media. Ukraine (et al) has to keep the victory-fiction running, or Western support will fall away. No one likes and backs "a loser". The vast human or resource sacrifices/self-sacrifices will be vindicated and morally justified - these utilitarian-consequentialists sense - only by victory or 'symbolic victories'. https://youtu.be/DsqIm3F02Rc
  21. You'd have readers believe the wish-list figures in Ukr Pravda, from the Ukr General Staff but not from experienced US military observers with contacts on the ground, like Col. McGregor and many more? Gotten worse, several analysts report that casualties have jumped to a 10:1 ratio since this counter-offensive. The UAF is committing suicide against the Russian defense line. Anecdotes of desertions and surrenders by untrained conscripts shoved to the front, increasing.
  22. Yes, and so said Stoltenberg. Not possibly just after any negotiated armistice, no, your NATO membership depends on "a victory". Which means they will never get it. And many more men to perish in the attempt. To beat Russia, Zelensky is desperately counting on that NATO membership now, that instantly invokes Art. 5, and then - what? Ukraine would not exist any more. The scumbag 'leader' betrayed his country, that is, alll of his Ukraine citizens, and is as much culpable as anyone for its destruction. "Safer", certainly. I wonder how many Ukrainians now are waking up to the realization they ( their Gov anyway) made an awful blunder. Firm neutrality - was their single path to peace and prosperity . They would have benefited richly from both Europe and Russia, in that location. The trend is towards non-aligned neutrality all over the "Developing Nations". "You are either for us or against us!" - the false alternative - will gradually become old history.