I understand your point, but remember Marx regards capitalism as a necessary phase in the development of a country, and Lenin regards socialism as a period of gradual change after revolution. When almost every country in the world is capitalist, you need to use market forces to survive and thrive, keeping capital accumulation and corruption under control to make sure that full socialism will eventually be achieved. The point here is not whether what China is doing currently counts as socialism, but that Chinese leaders are indeed Marxist-Leninist, and intend to follow the path towards socialism as the brutal competition against the US permits, eventually becoming what US officials most fear: a successful socialist state with dominance in the world.
I’d frame the “obsession” in another way. Currently, in the present, the actual present, Russia claims and has control over some territories. Other countries reject this on the premise that those territories, before the invasion, were Ukrainian. Putin’s stance is simply that, before being Ukrainian, those territories were Russian, so the position that they should belong to one or the other is indeed arbitrary.
The Donbass was basically invaded by Ukrainian troops in 1918, and Crimea was literally gifted to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, so why should those territories even be under Ukrainian control in the first place, if the majority of their population is culturally Russian? When Albanians in Kosovo started to protest against Serbia, NATO bombed Yugoslavia; now Russians in the Donbass are protesting against Ukraine, so why doesn’t NATO intervene? Why does NATO support Ukraine against an operation identical to that which NATO itself performed? Well, the answer is simple: NATO bombed Yugoslavia to weaken it, and, as McGregor admitted, the US was planning for Ukraine to attack first. We could also draw a parallelism to the Cuban missile crisis: why is it okay to put missiles in Ukraine but not Cuba?
So, all of this nonsense about aggression, culture, etc. is ridiculous. The US and Russia are fighting each other, both on the battlefield and in the media. There’s no ethics here, both will do whatever it takes (the list of American, Russian and Ukrainian war crimes is nauseating) and will weaponize public opinion as they would weaponize missiles or rifles. There’s no lesser evil, just pure evil everywhere, just think about what the victory of either side would bring about to the world, then choose your evil.
Yeah, sorry… Eliminative materialism is the belief that subjective experiences like consciousness can’t possibly be defined or explained because they simply don’t exist. According to this, they are just an illusion. As extreme and counter-intuitive as this may sound, it is a plausible explanation for the phenomenon of ego death, which I have experienced myself (in the medical, non-spiritual, drug-induced sense, an extreme form of depersonalization), and would under this school of thought simply entail a temporary malfunction of the mechanisms sustaining this illusion.
Since eliminative materialists deny that consciousness can be defined at all, this meme implies that they feel contempt and frustration towards repeatedly failed attempts to do so.
Current AI are regression models, they are trained on some input and thus encode any rules and patterns that may govern this input. So, by definition, it does have conceptual understanding, as any information that may constitute this understanding is encoded within the model in a form in which it may use it for any purpose it needs.
For example, if you give an AI many examples of long multiplication, it will eventually learn the rules that govern it, and it will be able to perform any multiplication by itself. There’s no practical difference between this and actual understanding (also it doesn’t help that our brains are just analog tensor-multiplication machines, much like the AI we’re creating).
It’s not a matter of intelligence. We humans use paper, pen, computers to assist us, and visual and sound perception in combination with language, rather than separately. AI, as it works right now, is doing the equivalent of reciting an essay from scratch or imagining an artwork in perfect detail in a second. Give it the chance to draw diagrams and process them iteratively, and it will do your and my jobs, and do them well.
Yeah, I know. But the word “aggression” is (intentionally, hats off to US propaganda) vague; the user I was responding to interpreted it as “launching an attack into a territory generally recognized as foreign”, so I’m going with that definition. I generally do not argue on terminology, since it’s not practical to do so. But thanks for the heads up!
I agree to your comment. A democratic country can easily be strong against enemies. But I’d like to point that the current confrontation (Cold War, if you wish) is in such a delicate state and happening on so many fronts that even a blink, a bad move, a seemingly innocent regime change in Russia has a good chance to bring about its defeat. And surely the US is trying to promote such change, under every possible pretext. The US is playing all cards at the same time, resorting to military means, monetary policy, espionage, propaganda, censorship, foreign coups… all widely confirmed. So whatever our view on Mr. Putin/Putler/…, we must let him do his thing for now, worry about him later. Just think that every country will be so weakened after this new Cold War that toppling them will be easy ;)
My point is simply pragmatic. I’m proposing a strategy that’s actually viable: doing whatever little we can to avoid the destruction of Russia so the world eventually fights into a multipolar, unstable state wherein we can actually bring about change by force. What you propose is destabilizing Russia, letting it fall, then somehow banishing curruption and authoritarianism from the all-encompassing, paranoid, armed-to-the-teeth, almost Orwellian US via a strategy comparable to resorting to the power of friendship.
As a medical professional, I don’t understand all the fuss about this. I mean, it doesn’t need to be 100% reliable, just more reliable than us, which is not too hard to achieve… In fact, given its benchmark scores (75% percentile in the Medical Knowledge Self-Assessment Program) and emergent abilities, I’m pretty sure GPT-4 is already more reliable than most real doctors at my workplace.
NATO could have entered the war in Ukraine at any time
And it has. They are spending on this war as much as they did on Afghanistan. They are sending intel and commands directly to Ukrainian officials. And not just weapons and information; according to the recently leaked papers, there are NATO troops on the field too. They are fighting the war in all senses except legally, and, by extension, in the PR sense.
this war -like any war- doesn’t make sense
Every war makes sense. Countries start wars when that’s what benefits them the most. And countries carefully plan and set up future wars.
Why so?
There are two sides in this global-scale hybrid war. Finland and other countries have joined what they believe to be the winning side, or at least the side whose victory would be more beneficial to their political interests. Other countries are siding with Russia and China. Countries joining an alliance voluntarily doesn’t mean the alliance isn’t a threat to the other side. NATO has gradually turned itself into an alliance with the power to defeat Russia.
then we would “magically become democratic”
No, nobody would. The US has just passed the RESTRICT Act, which imposes stronger restrictions than even China has. If you suggest that your country should just let the authoritarian guard down and allow every foreign psy-ops to have a meaningful effect on it, they’ll just laugh at you or you’ll be killed by thugs in an unfortunate and unrelated turn of events.
The only way to get what we want is to wait until the existing superpowers have fought each other into an unstable state, then seize power by violence. Anything else is just wishful thinking to feel better about something you don’t actually ever expect to change.
What does that mean?
NATO will act according to their interests. If they can defeat an enemy, they will do so. If your point is that the US will simply point all its weapons towards Russia and China and then simply smile and let them peacefully develop to overtake the US in every aspect as they are doing, you’re wrong.
Who started the aggression in Ukraine?
Russia did. But I don’t think they should just sit back and watch as the US prepares to deal a lethal blow to them. The US has set up bases all around Russia, formed military alliances with countries near its border. The US has also promoted coups in many post-Soviet states to make their governments US-affine. Even after the 2014 pro-US coup in Ukraine, Ukrainian citizens voted for the seemingly pro-Russian Zelensky, who had promised to normalize relations with Russia and embrace the Russian culture and language in the Donbas region, and were fooled by what turned out to be a new US puppet regime and continued war against the Donbas. Even US officials admit they were planning for the war, just that they didn’t think Russia would strike first. At this point, who even launched the first missile in this particular development of the 2014 war is just a small technicality in a complex hybrid war that’s been developing for years.
Let’s hope for democracy everywhere.
If two authoritarian behemoths are fighting to death as they are, randomly biting and scolding both in hopes that they’ll magically become democratic is a stupid strategy. At best, you will achieve nothing. At worst, one of them will weaponize your innocence against the other, which is quite the case.
Of course. If anti-war activists achieve their goal, Russia will withdraw from Ukraine. Then, NATO will set up bases there, including nuclear weapons, in the most strategically relevant outpost at the Russian border. This, of course, will allow NATO to easily defeat Russia, the largest military power barring itself. Unopposed, it will take on China, the only real contender to the US on the economic front. This will eventually result in the US keeping its hegemony for the rest of our lifetimes, which by simple imperialist logic is detrimental to current global South nations. So as much as I dislike authoritarianism, those activists don’t know what they are doing (or, worse, know it damn well) and stopping them by any means will help the rest of us.
So, if I’m not mistaken, according to the article…
- Those children should not be institutionalized.
- They are also in danger from the war.
- But they were institutionalized in Ukraine, not Russia.
- And Russia is bringing them away from the war.
So, apparently, Russia should immediately return those children to the frontline, so they can either die or be evacuated somewhere else where they’ll remain institutionalized? Because evacuating orphans from a war zone and finding families for them is apparently “a war crime” (it isn’t btw, the Rome Statute doesn’t even come close to making that a war crime).
Click ‘active last month’, either for the whole Fediverse or after selecting a platform from the list.
You are absolutely right… I posted a while ago about a solid-state lab project I was working on. I made pretty large steps towards that, but I eventually realized that it would only make a difference if I could leverage the latest technology. So I’ve spent the last months working on a smaller-scale project (a very low-cost ultrasound imaging machine) and finally I’m starting to see some tangible results; I will build and present the final prototype in collaboration with my university, but the important thing here is that I’m getting both experience and reputation, plus I’m convincing a friend (an engineering lab researcher) to join an eventual, larger-scale, solid-state lab project. The idea is not to get “something that works and is open source”, as it was before, but to research cutting-edge technology.
Hi, sorry for not responding earlier. You seem to be very knowledgeable. I was trained in ethics as part of my medical training, so the extent of my knowledge may not be as great as yours. Anyway, these are the specific pieces of knowledge I was invoking:
- Ethics only applies to entities with free will. I don’t believe countries have free will since they act in a deterministic fashion.
- Ethics deals with principles that must be upheld. These principles include not causing harm, acting for the benefit of others, etc. I understand that these principles are the main mechanism for making choices.
- In the paradigm I was trained on, ethics only states what one should do, and doesn’t deal with punishment.
- A nexus of causality transfers responsibility. I believe there is a nexus of causality when any deterministic process is involved.
So, my point is that this specific situation must not be resolved by you stated means since:
- Here, punishment is incompatible with seeking the good of others.
- Since countries are deterministic, ethics doesn’t apply to them.
- Since countries are deterministic, even if ethics were to apply, responsibility is transferred (e.g., since I know 100% sure how a country will respond to my actions, I am triggering their response as much as them).
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- 9M
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I’d say it is indeed a chelating agent, albeit one with a wider spectrum and some degree of specificity for heavy ions.