Echarmion

And did any of that actually happen? No, it doesn't, since what we're seeing is an entirely different category of conflict. The paper clearly does not...

Calling the war a "US proxy war" implies that the US and not Russia is primarily responsible for the Russian decision to invade. Do you disagree with ...

This is convenient framing that you, like some other posters, like to proscribe for us. Just like the convenient framing that excludes Russian or Ukra...

So you'd agree countries are not literally forced to start an offensive war? That whatever government does actually order it's soldiers to cross the b...

I wonder why noone ever expresses their sadness for all the young Russian men who have to die in Ukraine (and now also Kursk I guess) because their le...

The "firewall" properly goes back to Hume though, Kant's innovation was to introduce synthetic a-priori truths. It is difficult to get around the conc...

This is reminiscent of the old sentiment about the weakness of democracy in a fight with authoritarianism, isn't it? I think the reality is more compl...

Not sure why you're asking, since clearly you already know. But for the benefit of everyone else, I'll summarise all the various explanations I've hea...

If by "Russia" we mean the russian public, it's hard to say. Evidently Putin does not feel safe to order full mobilisation or declare a state of war. ...

Ukraine is apparently destroying the bridges across the Seym in targeted strikes. The Seym runs west from the Salient Ukrainian troops have pushed int...

Right, I falsely remembered that NS 1 was merely shut off by the Russians and only NS 2 was affected. Another odd thing about the timing of the attack...

It does sound like the kind of story that sounds believable because it comes with a lot of situational details, but that doesn't actually make it more...

So apparently the WSJ has published a report, based on 4 anonymous military sources, that the plot to blow up Nord Stream 2 was hatched by some Ukrain...

There are two problems with this story. One is that the German government permanently suspended the certification of the pipeline following the invasi...

Several people, including some western military analysts have expressed concern that Ukraine is risking valuable assets in an attack with no apparent ...

Apparently there have been new incursions across the border, too. Russian officials are apparently worried about a similar attack into Belgorod, thoug...

In a world where everything that happens is a US plot, there is no russian aggression though. It's just an inevitable reflex of US machinations. In su...

War? There is merely an anti-terror operation in Kursk :wink: Reportedly the russian military is using a mixture of conscripts, units from the strateg...

Does consciousness need to be continuous? It only works backwards. Both people would be the same person at the instant of the copy being made, but the...

I wouldn't say it's in disarray. There was a crisis around Trumpism but the party has now reworked it's strategy around it. Adopting Trumpism comes wi...

But that, according to you, was the result of an US-backed coup, wasn't it? How can it be both a US operation and a mistake?

I'd say my argument is that I cannot be sure that the subjective color people see is the same either. I think a problem in this conversation is that f...

I like this explanation because that plan requires only a relatively straightforward sequence of events. Ukraine takes a bunch of territory at relativ...

I don't think that holds. The difference here is that we have a relatively easy way to "share" color (pointing at some colored object) but not for pai...

A sideline to this: it seems to me that most antinatalist arguments apply to animals as well (possibly even more strongly, given the amount of sufferi...

Ukrainian troops appear to have penetrated deep into Kursk Oblast. Some pictures suggest Ukrainian troops (though probably not large formations) have ...

A question which I have increasingly asked myself is whether the secularisation of enlightenment values was ever actually complete. As you note, relig...

I'm doubtful of the notion that public pressure could lead to a change. The political space to organise an opposition movement in Russia is highly con...

So apparently, the Ukrainian attack into Kursk Oblast was not just a larger cross border raid. Ukrainian troops are apparently still fighting in Russi...

Couldn't it be said that logical language establishes a number of precise connections between states, but the absence of a connection is not defined. ...

I'm not trying to win an argument, I'm pointing out false and misleading statements. A peace treaty is a treaty that, if signed, ends the conflict. Th...

It was a ceasefire proposal not a "draft peace agreement".

You're talking about "acts of war" as an abstraction, whereas I am looking at the invasion that actually happened in its concrete form. My argument is...

Because the agreement explicitly deferred these questions to a later date, supposedly to be resolved in direct talks between Putin and Zelensky. The f...

I don't see how they turned on a dime when they spend weeks publicly agonising what to do. I just don't believe Biden ever had much personal support. ...

You're welcome to provide this prediction but again so far as I know Mearsheimer has never said anything as specific as "if NATO keeps expanding eastw...

My running theory is that Musk is just chasing the adulation of the most willing sycophants, and those just happen to be in the Trumpist camp.

As far as I know, Mearsheimer never made any definite prediction that Russia would invade Ukraine. Notably he has not made any prediction on the 2022 ...

To add to this, there are several people who post on this forum who, based on their ability to make insightful contributions, appear to be pretty inte...

What I find interesting is that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was such an unusual event that even Mearsheimer's take on geopolitics - which due to b...

You're telling me you're very, very sure that's what happened but you haven't told me why I should believe that - i.e. what the evidence is for someon...

I'm pretty confident that for 99% of the people who voted for Biden in the primaries, the answer is "yes, actually". It's just obvious nobody cares, a...

I mean it's not like they're going to let the facts stop then. Anecdotally, many people don't seem to know much about Harris' previous career, which i...

I think my problem with this is that it implies that Biden had power or control taken away from him. Which in this context (since he's still the Presi...

It is kinda odd that the Trump campaign and the GOP more generally don't seem to have a ready-made strategy against a Harris campaign. Obviously you c...

I am aware. But there was agreement on that point so I'm bringing up a further analogy to address your rejoinder.

So to keep going with the turbine analogy, let's say we have an airplane turbine which can withstand a number of bird impacts before catastrophic fail...

Unfortunately Seymour Hersh has been on a downward trend for 10 years now, with increasingly fanciful takes on events which, unlike his previous work,...

Naturally. What causes people to disagree with me on a public forum? Must be US agents doing it.

I'm not american, but this is a neat encapsulation of your reasoning. You're emotionally committed to seeing the Great Satan at work, the facts come s...