Grames

Yes, all the news everyday, foreign and domestic, is constant info-war. Curse Alex Jones for taking a perfectly good domain name and then using it for clowning. I myself didn't expect Putin to invade. It surprised me that he pulled the trigger after having massive annual military exercises on the Ukraine border for the last six years. If he didn't want a land border with a NATO country, why attempt a full conquest of Ukraine which would result in a land border with several NATO countries? Perhaps he did not order and does not want a full conquest of Ukraine? The declared goals of the "special military operation" are just Donetsk, Luhansk and securing Crimea further, and de-militarization of rump Ukraine. But a demilitarized rump Ukraine cannot exist without occupation by Russian troops, or else it becomes a NATO member. Certainly there is no credible threat to Poland or Romania now, not after what we've seen of Russian military ops. Conventional warfare with NATO/America would be humiliation for them. This is not my American arrogance talking, they just haven't demonstrated skill at any military operation other than advancing infantry behind a curtain of artillery fire. But the thing is, can advancing infantry behind a curtain of artillery fire work well enough for Putin to secure the stated aims of the operation? How long can Ukraine resist and how long can Russia push in that fashion? We will all find out the hard way I think, the war will persist until one side is exhausted. Russia has the advantage in my judgement.

Fair question, .... Western and Russian judgement alike expected Ukraine to fall over like a house of cards. Ukraine was expected to panic, the troops to rout and the leadership to flee. Russia needed troops moving toward Kiev to prompt that to happen and to collect the prize as it fell into its lap. This was a gamble but seemingly justified as western analysts also had no confidence in Ukraine's ability to resist beyond the first few weeks. What happened was that Ukrainian military forces overperformed the modest expectations of them and Russia underperformed. The forces diverted from real strategic objectives in the south to the Kiev operation were inadequate for a long campaign against legitimate resistance. Russia revealed that it simply cannot conduct war in the American fashion of deep striking maneuvers that also bring along enough fuel, food and ammo to sustain the operation.

The first major crisis Putin faced as Prime Minister was the Second Chechen War. During that war Russia accomplished everything that you describe as so difficult. Since he/Russia did it once, it is reasonable to attempt to do it again. If he is willing to commit to ten years or more of fighting and to grind down Ukrainian military resistance by attrition then Russian military victory is inevitable because Ukraine is smaller. It appears that Putin is willing to pay the cost. It is unknown if Ukraine can continue to get the subsidies it needs to stay in the war that long.

But Chechnya happened. edit: Chechens are now fighting for Putin in Ukraine.

Counter point to the Oliver Stone interview:

Germany Reacts to Trump's UNGA Speech video description: "Watch the German delegation’s response at UNGA when Trump says “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.”

No machine is rational, they are machines for whom determinism is literally true. The last or latest person to program it is the real power behind that throne. Also your equating of rational with moral is contradicted by the entirety of human history. Rational merely refers to a capacity to form concepts and think with them while moral refers to acting on a certain set of values. Not everyone (or everything) that is rational will ever agree to the same set of values.

AI "dictator" and rights coexisting. "You will enjoy the utopia provided to you or die." There are a thousand and one contradictions in this idea, I mentioned the first that occurred to me.

No empire is capitalist, because capitalism is essentially freedom and empires are by definition antithetic to freedom. I suppose we will now enter discourse into what the concept empire refers to and its definition. An empire is "an extensive group of states or countries under a single supreme authority." It imposes authority and often rulers foreign to the people that are ruled. The principle of organization of an empire is the interests of the empire and the imperial core population, not the interests of the people conquered. Examples of empires in history include ancient Persia, the Roman Empire, the early Islamic Caliphate, the later Islamic Ottoman Empire, the colonial empires of Spain, France, and Britain.

Kissinger is right, if they can buy peace by just giving up Donetsk and Luhansk then Ukraine should take that deal. But instead what will happen is that Zelensky and his western sponsors will fight to the last Ukrainian. Zelensky will ultimately be forced out of office and take refuge in Israel. Hopefully Russia will be too weakened by the Ukrainian operation to launch operations against Finland and Sweden.

Propaganda can be created by selective focus on truths. Because competent propaganda is not exclusively lies or threats or appeals to authority it can't be easily dismissed by ad hominem attack. Once some other person has been persuaded by propaganda just attacking the source is inadequate as counter-persuasion. Sincere engagement with the argument and mind behind it might work, but nothing else can.

Off and on since the Hapsburgs and Holy Roman Empire, yes. Two empires that share a land border will find excuses to make war. A European Union dominated by Germany is a default German empire. An EU army would at first be used to enforce compliance with unpopular mandates out of Brussels, and then later for foreign adventures.

Ok, but words are not force.

Why would that matter when propaganda is just words, images and memes? Propaganda works as well regardless of the source, it is the quality of the propaganda that matters.

NATO is America's European army, an EU army would be Germany's European army. Germany has latent imperial tendencies that must be kept in check. In a world with an EU army under German domination then Putin is right and Russia needs forward borders.

No one needs or wants Russia's space because populations are not exploding, the era of lebensraum is over. Wheat covered steppe and long cold winters isn't anyone's idea of paradise either unless one is born there. As long as Russia is peaceful the entire world is able to access their grain, fertilizer, oil and gas and minerals exports by simply purchasing them, no invasion necessary. The era of mercantilist, vertically integrated colonial empires that don't trade much with each other is over. NATO's continued existence and expansion has two good reasons for it. First, it makes the idea of an EU army redundant and it is important that the EU never have an army. Second, as long as Russia keeps to the logic of empire the smaller countries close to Russia continue to want NATO protection and deterrence. Sweden and Finland were quite content to continue indefinitely as neutrals until Russia invaded Ukraine, not much CIA involvement there.

What makes Putin's forward defense strategy difficult for me to understand is that I can't imagine an invasion of Russia from any quarter. No Napoleon or Hitler or Khan is going to come for them, especially in the modern urban era where populations are contracting. With no plausible opponent the forward defense strategy is not moored to reality but still requires keeping non-Russian populations under the control of Russia or in other words an empire. The imperial nature of the Russian strategy is why Putin is against nationalism, even Russian nationalism. Russia's defense strategy is to keep an empire, but Russia doesn't need an empire because they are not worth invading in the first place.

Ukraine has been in play as a political football between Russia and the EU since before 2004. Russian money funded political campaigns and parties friendly to Russian interests while the CIA and European players worked on pulling Ukraine into the EU orbit. September 2004 was a milestone because Putin approved an operation to poison Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-western candidate for president. In January 2010 while on his way out as President Yushchenko "rehabilitated" World War II-era ultranationalist (Nazi) leader Stepan Bandera, awarding him the title of "Hero of Ukraine." Both sides of the Ukrainian dispute have been bad before even getting into the EuroMaidan of 2014. As much as I initially enjoyed seeing the American political establishment's corrupt and cozy Ukrainian money laundering scheme potentially fall apart any good guy-bad guy narrative doesn't fit, in either direction. Remembering the political maxim "all politics is domestic politics" I looked into why Russia chose to launch its war. Apparently Putin is a subscriber to the conventional and long standing Russian understanding of its own security, that to quote Catherine the Great “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.” Who Putin thinks or fears may want to invade Russia is a mystery to me but there is an established pattern: 4 previous military operations have secured potential routes of invasion, Ukraine leads to two more in the directions of Romania and Poland, and he threatens Finland of all places because of the route over Karelia. So here is a guy explaining in three and half minutes a more objective and big picture view than "espionage is bad". Espionage operations have been bad for Ukraine but letting Russia have its way was never going to happen. For a big picture of the near future of the entire world with forecasts of famine, energy shortages and the spontaneous dissolution of China as we have known it I recommend setting time aside (2 and half hours) for viewing the presentation "Energy at the End of the World" given for the (U.S.) Naval Postgraduate School at https://nps.edu/web/nps-video-portal/-/energy-at-the-end-of-the-world

But we are not at war with Russia, so they are not OUR enemy. You've let the ambient propaganda alter the framework in which you understand current events.

FOX news is controlled opposition, it props up the false dichotomy Democrat versus Republican. You won't find anything there that actually conflicts with the establishment narrative in any important way.

But rhetoric is essentially about persuading.

I think a more precise identification of the subject is "what has the pro-life movement gained as a consequence of finally getting Roe and Casey overturned?" What they have gained is the ability to fight fifty more legal and legislative battles to have their way. The pro-abortion movement gains the same. Nothing has been settled, nor should pro-abortion side have ever pretended the abortion dispute ever was or could be settled by an arbitrary Supreme Court decision.

What you are describing as "the knowledge acquisition view of honesty" certainly is virtuous and has support by Rand. But she calls it "intellectual honesty": Intellectual honesty [involves] knowing what one does know, constantly expanding one’s knowledge, and never evading or failing to correct a contradiction. This means: the development of an active mind as a permanent attribute. “What Can One Do?” Philosophy: Who Needs It, 201 Her case for plain old unmodified honesty is framed in terms of not obtaining values by means of deception, because it makes the deceiver dependent upon and even a slave to the deceived: Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud—that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee—that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling—that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others. Galt’s Speech, For the New Intellectual, 129

The disagreement is not massive, but the result (fully banning abortion or not) is. The position of the full abortion ban proponent is merely the fallacious "argument of the beard" applied to the case of the incremental growth of the fetus. The portion of all Americans in favor of a full abortion ban is less than 20%, so when they cannot be brought to moderate their position by reason they can be safely disregarded. Most people that favor abortion restrictions are concerned with the second or third trimester, and even Rand allowed that arguments over the last trimester were to be taken seriously rather than dismissed out of hand. What cannot be taken seriously is Rand's performance here while seemingly standing on one foot during a question and answer session. Rand first attacks William F. Buckley Jr. because he would "deny the right to abortion" without first establishing that abortion is a right. Then she attacks the "gratuitous" nature of Buckley's denial, but an attack on the motive of an opponent is the ad hominem fallacy which has no bearing on the validity of the structure of an argument or the ultimate truth of the conclusion. Then she constructs a theory of the motive of the anti-abortion Buckley and his ilk, that he "obviously" wants to enslave people like farm animals, which is the strawman fallacy. Then she makes a rhetorical pathos appeal to those poor Romeos and Juliets out there having sex and getting pregnant involuntarily as if they had no volitional control over themselves. Then she makes the over generalization that in all such cases the pregnancy is a burden that prevents a budding career by the parents, as if the infant would have no value to the parents and would remain so (and with no budding career of its own in time). It all adds up to nothing of philosophical significance, but it seems to have personal significance to her based on her vehemence. It is nothing more than Rand's personal opinion and is not persuasive.

I disagree. The concern with the welfare of adopted children and fetuses comes from the same source, and they announce it over and over. Human life is a value to them. They count children and fetuses as humans. Protecting human lives and human rights is not an irrational or ignoble pursuit, even if we here disagree with them on when a fetus should be counted as human.