The reasons for war are rarely absurd, and are about groups competing for limited resources. Saying it's anything to do with 'macho-ism' (which is certainly nothing like an ideology, if it is anything at all) is smug feminist nonsense.
18 karma · joined June 27, 2022
All it can do is issue a warning: 'you have 8 minutes to say your prayers'.
Security indeed.
Who do you think built the US military?
Re SCU and the Conspiracy: that the SCU was first used against the Gracchi tells you something about its political motivations. The Senate was always a bastion of the Roman plutocracy. Also the SCU has been retconned, somewhat, by Cicero's partisans. It was invented late, during a bitter class war, and certainly doesn't count as one of the ancient traditions of the Roman republic.
Most Roman historians were knights: most classical historians were gentlemen. This profoundly shapes our view of Roman history.
Yes, certainly populists can be dangerous to all of those groups, as can elites. Political violence is certainly not limited to populists: indeed their contribution is small in historical terms.
This doesn't make any sense, unless it's to point out that GraphQL is not a query language at all.
Obviously this is dangerous to those in power, and is therefore demonized by them.
Your last paragraph is simply wrong: populists have effected major development and social change. Huey Long in Louisiana is a good example.
Sulla was a reactionary mass murderer.
In the end, through Caesar, the Populares won, despite decades of political killings on behalf of the Optimates to defend their theft of public land.
What is the purpose of philosophy? In its most basic sense to teach one how to live a good life. Abstract concepts like justice, fairness, ideal social structures, social values flow from this basic question.
Any precise definition of any of the above concepts is open to question, and societies and institutions to some extent embody sets of answers to them. The domain evolves over time, ideas change, pressures brought about by various outside phenomena change.
After all, we are simply a collection of organisms evolving in an environment that we don't understand, according to rules we dimly discern.
This is not to contribute to any STEM vs the humanities fight: it's fundamentally an arbitrary division of knowledge, and neither side benefits from the division. The STEM side is prone to a naive scientism and an amorality that is much to the detriment of the species. On the other hand, the humanities has unfortunately largely devolved into a sort of philosophical rag and bone yard.
Frankly, both sides should get together and have sex for a while. Something might come out of it.
Prince comes from princeps (the first), a title used by the Emperor Augustus.
It's the US that took out international law and beat it to death in sight of the entire world.
Basically Germany's entire foreign policy is economic suicide and very much driven by a US stooge (Baerbock). The total penetration of the German Green Party (formerly pacifist) is an excellent example of American influence.
Are we winning?
But it lacks the historical dimension. Capitalism is a historical and technological phenomenon. One of the replies talks about it emerging in the Late Middle Ages. Of course it existed previously, in the form of a landed aristocracy, but the potential for concentration of capital didn't exist.
With the industrial revolution concentration of capital created the order we live under today. To describe it as natural is an unhappy choice of words. It is certainly engaged in the large-scale subjugation and destruction of nature.
Concentrated capital turns the machine up: it exponentially increases inputs and outputs, ramps up the engine, increases production, consumption, everything. It is a system that may be completely unsustainable.
You deal with the benefits of the system: good ideas, smooth returns, sophisticated investors. I don't see any appreciation of the costs: increasing inequality, environmental damage, immiseration of people in developing countries.
There may never be a permanent revolution against capitalism: it will simply be impossible to sustain.
Just because you copied the cookbook doesn't mean you now own a restaurant.
Especially in compute-intensive activities such as neural nets/ML, capital is very much a factor.
The destruction of Libya alone, and the sociopathic gloating on daytime television, should disqualify Clinton from holding high political office again.
She also brought the neocons into the State Department with predictably appalling results.
By Bellingcat, the Western intelligence services' pet wikileaks.
Assange did 'citizen journalism' wrong, and he has been deprived of normal human freedoms for more than a decade because of it, while never being charged of any crime.
Even now he resides in quasi-solitary confinement in one of the UK's most notorious prisons, still he has never been charged with a crime.
The treatment of Assange is, with Guantanomo Bay, an obvious and continuously damaging rebuke to the West's posturing about human rights and freedoms. In retrospect we should not have been surprised by the EU's blanket censorship of Russian media and 24/7 pro Ukrainian propaganda.
What is happening to Assange is a warning to all of us. If we choose to pettifog about the definition of a journalist, or complain about political partisanship, we are missing the larger point completely.
Rugby - one team for the island
Soccer - one federation for each polity on the island, but Derry City plays in the League of Ireland (Republic of Ireland). Two international teams.
Cricket - one team for the island
Etc etc. There is some tiresome hand-wringing every time an athlete has decide on their allegiance.
Basically, Ireland is a political Mandelbrot set.
We can split hairs about what is and is not democratic until the end of time, but the debate takes place in a historical vacuum: the creation of Northern Ireland was a response to a very specific set of circumstances, and I don't think yak-shaving about democratic niceties casts any light.
It is moot anyway, because there is no prospect of changing Northern Ireland's status without democratic sanction. Which vote of course takes place at the pleasure of His Majesty's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.
The IRA derived their 'legitimacy' from it.
The Brits left split polities in quite a few places as they decolonized. Almost as if it was policy.
2) Please, don't embarrass yourself. Ukraine was explicitly on the path to NATO membership (as of 2008), and the place was crawling with NATO trainers and advisors.
NATO probably won't exist in a decade. The US is not that committed to European security, and nobody else is worth a spit.
I'll wait.
This kind of aggressive know-nothing 'naivety on the warpath' is all too common at the moment. It might get us all killed.