AlexL

I understand that Putin will also demand that Alaska be returned to Russia. King Felipe plans to demand the return of California, but they have less enforcement power.

I see, so you take dishonesty to be a virtue. You don't have the decency to admit who you really are, when encroaching on the public domain. What makes you think you have to right to utter your rants in public? If we IP-tracked you and published your real name and address, would you then be morally bound to cease addressing philosophical questions?

You are not a philosopher, so why are you even commenting on the works of a philosopher?  You see where this is going, I hope.

No, remember that one of the founding members was a dictatorship, the Soviet Union, and one became a dictatorship when the UN illegally expelled China. So I mean the one where Russia dominates with its veto power. The old UN is dead.
Yes and no. We do have an appalling tendency to support dictatorships, but not all of them, for example not Iran, Cuba, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Sudan, North Korea, Venezuela, Red China, Syria, Belarus, Laos etc. We have variable "support" (tolerance) of dictatorships in Russia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, actually lots of Africa. Maybe you could propose a concrete metric of "support" (I mean, do we "support" Canada or Germany?).
Sometimes, the realistic choices are so horrid that it doesn't make a difference. At least presently, there is no decent alternative support-choice for the fake nation "Palestine", nor Algeria, Pakistan, Jordan or even Mexico. Most nations in the UN are appalling dictatorships, which is sufficient reason for civilized nations to leave in favor of a freedom-defending organization.
 
 

I reporting your username to the FBI as a likely supporter of terrorism and as a result you are likely also anti-American. Don't respond under any circumstances.

An even better solution would be for the US and all free nations to leave the UN, leaving it as a pig-sty for 4th world dictatorships. It's not like it's good for anything.

It is described in 1'968 words, in legalese. As you base your opinion on them, please describe these crimes in your words, 3-5 simple lines.
A justified belief is sufficient for ICC to emit arrest warrants, but not to declare "They've committed serious crimes" - a legal guilt!, as you do, but they didn't - yet. Therefore, as I mentioned, as the trial itself did not yet take place, that claim - that they DID "commit serious crimes", is just your personal opinion - yet. So please substantiate it.
As I see, you are somewhat confused about the ICC procedures and about what they already did and did not decide. 
Therefore, before continuing, please heck it out before you jump in again; it's very easy these days.

This forum seems to be on autopilot again.
Hey @Eiuol, @William O, @Pokyt, @dream_weaver !!!

Your definition doesn't seem straightforward to me...
In order to see how this works, could you please give an example of specifying a concept? With, I guess, specific T, A, D etc.
(Your definition is so unclear to me that I don't even know how to formulate my question correctly... E.g., I am not sure if, to show how your definition works, you also have to start from a certain concept - like "table" - and specify T, A, D for it...)

Muscovites sent referrals for fertility tests. Authorities believe that the test will encourage women to think about having children
19:14, 13 September 2024, Source: The Insider, translated from the exiled publication Meduza
Moscow residents have begun to be invited en masse to take an anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) test, which is prescribed to assess fertility, The Insider and  Msk1.ru reported , citing their readers.
Women under 38 years of age living in different areas of Moscow received referrals through the mos.ru and Unified Medical Information and Analytical System (EMIAS) services.
"I have already interviewed 20 people, found one Muscovite, 37 years old, with one child, who does not have a referral," one of the Moscow residents, who gave birth to a child six months ago, told The Insider. She also received a referral for testing. "It came. But there was no accompanying notification, why, for what reason," a reader wrote to Msk1.ru.
The Moscow Health Department explained the mass mailing of referrals as part of a pregnancy planning project designed for women aged 18 to 40 with permanent registration in the capital. Thanks to the study, officials said, Muscovites "will be able to understand whether there is a time reserve or whether it is necessary to plan children as early as possible."
"If the level of egg reserves is reduced, the woman will be invited to the Women's Health Center or women's consultation and offered a full range of necessary measures so that she becomes the mother of a healthy child," the Department of Health stated. Among such measures is the opportunity to preserve eggs free of charge using cryopreservation.
Commenting on the program, Deputy Mayor for Social Development Anastasia Rakova said that in Moscow, the average age of a woman at the time of the birth of her first child is approaching 29 years. According to her, many Muscovites postpone having a child because of their careers, and sometimes “medical indications are to blame.” Although Moscow medicine can “ensure safe pregnancy management, childbirth, and care for a newborn in almost any situation,” the official believes that it is “important for women to know and understand their specific capabilities.” 
Background:
In April, Medvestnik  (popular official medical journal) reported that the Russian Ministry of Health sent recommendations to the regions on screening to assess the reproductive health of Russians. The authors proposed examining men and women aged 18–49 for fertility.

You claimed that the French were raping and were "taking whatever they wanted, by force", now you seem to admit that there still were contracts, royalties and fees !
You still did NOT answer my question: On what basis do you believe that the contracts with the French Orano SA were concluded while “being raped by their French colonial overlords who were taking whatever they wanted, by force”, while contracting with the Russians will be, on the contrary, purely „for mutual profit” ?
In particular: have you established that the Orano contract fees are unfair, that is grossly below the ones paid elsewhere for similar contracts?
Please answer this first. Afterwards we will talk about 
But be prepared to justify every word in it - what exactly were the French (Orano SA) asked to, in what form, what did or didn't they do etc. Also about the "invited Russian military". 
So: please first answer my question "On what basis..." and then study the facts for justifying the rest.
You don't seem to be familiar with the facts of the matter, only with the "anti-imperialist" slogans/catchphrases.

On what basis do you believe that the Niger state budget will profit more from the contract with the Russian Rosatom than from the current one with the French Orano SA ?
(Of course, Orano pays to the state of Niger royalties, taxes, and other fees associated with the extraction of natural resources.)

A lie is not the same as an error. A lie is knowing that a statement is false, yet making it. Your claim that Biden lied is false, therefore by your criteria, you lied. Moreover you even assume the “assertion while knowing it to be false” meaning of “lie”. Bush did not provably lie, not did Biden. I have no problem with asserting that Bush and Biden should not have made statements that they were not certain were true, but that is not the definition of a lie.
You can validly say that “the media” lied, although there is no such thing as “the media”. Some a-hole (or multiple holes) deliberately manipulated the presentation of Trump’s interview. A different a-hole accepted that manipulation as fact, believed it to be true, and responded accordingly. Moreover, a third-order a-hole restated Biden’s text to remove false statements (it is true that there were riots in Charlottesville and that there were white supremacists involved, as repeatedly re-tweeted on social media – that part is not a lie). Your lie, or error, lies in imputing to Biden certain knowledge, without a shred of evidence that Biden knew the statement was false. Had you checked your sources, you probably would have realized that your accusation of Biden lying was not warranted, just as Biden could and have checked his sources before making his accusation.
A question which I don’t think is checkable at this point is the details of creation of any of those hoaxes. Some jackass (i.e. a-hole) posts an unresearched emotional reaction on a public forum and it gets reposted by others. WTF with waiting 4 years for this Snopes report? The explanation is rather simply that emotional ideology overrides reasoning. You cannot immunize yourself from the accusation of lying by playing the “while knowing it to be false” card without granting Bush and Biden access to the same card. Perhaps you can get away with a moral argument that as a lowly peon as opposed to being President of the United States, you have no moral duty to determine what is true before making an accusation. You can blame the media for Biden’s failure and your own. You might also demand original sources, given that media including the million of morons who contribute to social media have a tendency to lie, in the sense of not bothering to do their research. So I am actually not surprised that you couldn’t connect the argument to the axiomatic, because it is pretty hard to do.

There isn’t any serious doubt that Trump is a threat to the American way of life, the best counter-argument in his favor would be that he is no more of a threat than Biden or Harris. By comparison to previous Republican nominees for president, Trump is so bad that he is at least as bad as the previously-presumptive Democrat nominee and current occupant of the office, and then the argument can proceed to the effect that he is actually worse.
This is where it matters what you think the job of POTUS is. Would Trump be better at running the country? Is that what the president is actually supposed to do? Will he increase oil and gas production in the US, and is that what POTUS is supposed to do? Is it good for the US to impose trade restrictions on China and in general to return to a tariff-driven anti-import economy?
A few things stand out as significant w.r.t. a Trump re-presidency. He has a certifiably xenophobic anti-immigration agenda, and will clearly pursue a policy of blocking foreigners from entering the US. This is a flagrantly un-American stance, moreover, his earlier failed Muslim ban was plainly unconstitutional, which goes to the question of whether he is tempermentally suited to be the chief custodian of US law. In balancing the interests of the US in terms of foreign policy, he has demonstrated an unthinkable level of support for the fascist dictators of Russia and North Korea and a shocking animosity towards our allies in NATO, who would be vital to defending the interests of the US against aggressor nations.
Although I do not believe that his weak efforts to engineer a coup d’etat on January 6 rise to the level of crime, his actions unambiguously show his contempt for the law. Paired with the recent court ruling that POTUS is above the law in a special way, we can not assume that he will act in accordance with the law, if his whims tell him to act differently. Which brings us to another potential threat of a Trump presidency.
POTUS appoints new Supreme Court justices, and there is some possibility that Thomas will need replacing under the next president (especially from a voluntary retirement based on Thomas’ assessment that the subsequent POTUS will be a hard-left extremist, so better to fall on a sword held by a softer-left president like Trump than… Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren or AOC. For some reason, Democrat presidents have been better at figuring out which jurists are more in-line with their own legal and political theories (e.g. O’Connor, Kennedy, Souter). The only thing worse than a 4-year POTUS with Trump’s view of the law would be a lifetime appointment of a Trump-like justice. The most we could hope for would be (1) he doesn’t get the opportunity or (2) he is as wrong in is assessment of judicial candidates as Bush I was about Souter.
It is a crap shoot especially since the pig in the other poke might turn out to be a goat, or a rabid dog. Whereas previous presidents (at least in my lifetime) have had the moral character that precludes them overthrowing the government, I see no positive moral character inside Trump, no restraint that keeps the American government on track as an American government. If, in addition, he takes the House and Senate, no forces of government can constrain his desire to rule America the way he sees fit.

 

It seems to me that the most that one can reasonably do is scrutinize the logic of Sapolsky’s challenge: “What is needed to prove free will: show me that the thing a neuron just did in someone’s brain was unaffected by preceding factors”. This is a common fallacy of rationalism, which can only be countered by a counter-challenge. My counter-challenge is “What is needed to prove determinism is: show me your ability to predict the choices made by men”. (Cognitive) determinism is an unfalsifiable pseudo-axiom. What constitutes a proof is not metaphysically given and is not self-evident. A proof is a presentation of evidence and the disposition of counterevidence. Sapolsky does not get to stipulate what constitutes proof, that is an objective question of logic (does all of th evidence support the claim? That is what a proof is).
Ordinary observation of humans refutes the premise that all choices are predetermined. To refute that refutation of determinism, it is insufficient to cry out wittily “You were predestined to make that argument”, one (Sapolsky) has to provide an actual model of the universe from which we can compute any man’s choices, and one must provide at least a modicum of experimental evidence to support the correctness of that model of the human mind. Needless to say, nobody has come within a light year of that gauntlet, much less ever having picked it up.
The underlying logical premise is based on the law of non-contradiction, which says that being whipped and burned is not the same as not being whipped and burned. The universe exists in a definite non-contradictory state. Alas, certain philosophico-scientists conflate epistemology and metaphysics, believing that if one cannot know whether X is the case or denial of X is the case, then the universe itself has an indeterminate state. More traditionally, existence is binary but knowledge is ternary (or more): we have “true”, “false” and “I don’t know”, but the fact either exist, or it doesn’t.
The Sapolsky-style argument is based on flawed burden-of-proof reasoning, that he who makes the claim must prove the claim. I direct your attention to vast amounts of evidence for free will, but the Sapolsky-style argument rejects the evidence because a particular statement is offered as axiomatic, when in fact it is not an axiom. The burden of proof now rests on Sapolsky or his followers and predecessors to provide a model which predicts human choices at the level that ordinary science would hold to “disprove the null hypothesis” (the .05 level, which AFAIK is actually unacceptably lax in physics which I understand requires 99.7% CL to be “evidence” and 99.9999% CL to be “discovery”).
Up until 2001, there was no explicit physical model of the fact that bumblebees fly, but nobody seriously doubted that they do. Likewise, there should be no serious doubt that humans have free will, even if we can’t reduce it to an equation rooted in sub-atomic physics.

Saint Putin
"In his follow-on speech, Kirill highlighted the messianic role of Putin, whom he called a 'wise patriot' who is 'open to people'. In the old Russian language, the term 'people' also meant 'commoners' or even 'serfs'. 

Net Worth of Despot-Saint of Russia

That’s what’s known as context-dropping. The context of the discussion is the video that you didn’t watch, where a number of essential factual observations were made a propos Israel’s defense of its existence (and the anti-Israeli propaganda war). The cat predictably responded (since the posting of the video was directed against her and her ilk as partisans in this propaganda war), but didn’t respond at all productively, instead just making false counter-claims – purporting to disprove major factual claims of the original video, but really just pointing to a huge propaganda document and declaring “The truth is there, you just have to believe!”. I then requested even one concrete instantiation of a case from the document where the law of Israel treats Jews and Arabs differently.
That is the context that defines what is relevant. Your quote, which also lacks substantiation (or source) has no bearing on the question of whether the law of Israel treats Jews and Arabs differently (which, again, it does not). Your quote, if it were true, might be relevant to a different question, for example “Is it the case that all existing government have acted immorally?”. We can stipulate that all governments have failed to implement the ideal of rights-protection as the proper function of government, that much has never need in doubt. Because that fact is so self-evident, it needs not be discussed, except as an instantiation of the concept “self-evident”. Taxes and trade restrictions, I rest my case.
Palestine is not yet a nation, because it is unwilling to do what is required for existence as a nation. The primary difference between Palestine and Nazi Germany or contemporary Russia is that the latter two have better-organized armies and are better able to carry out wars of aggression against their neighbors. The Palestinians are much more overt in their declaration of an intent to drive the Jews into the sea, compared to Russia versus former and current colonies that they are trying to retake.

No, it hasn't. Yet. Read carefully your own quotations. Your activism blinds you.

"Free Palestine!" is not taking positions about a war, because:
"Free Palestine!" means suppressing an occupation, The current war is the one between Gaza government and Israel. During this war no occupation took place. Therefore "Free Palestine!" does not mean taking positions about a war.
Your comment tries to whitewash SpookyKitty's "Free Palestine!" call, which is a call for murder, a call for genocide, more precisely.
There exist, however, also a legitimate call "Free Palestine!".

"Free Palestine!" is not taking positions about a war, because:
"Free Palestine!" means suppressing an occupation, The current war is the one between Gaza government and Israel. During this war no occupation took place. Therefore "Free Palestine!" does not mean taking positions about a war.
Your comment tries to whitewash SpookyKitty's "Free Palestine!" call, which is a call for murder, a call for genocide, more precisely.
There exist, however, also a legitimate call "Free Palestine!".

You mean the 2022 Amnesty International report?
Yes, you are correct, I did not address this and I regret it. I focused on your denial of the principle/rule that, in a rational debate one has the obligation to justify one's claims, if asked. I looked back on your older comments in this thread and I found out that now is not the first time that you deny the legitimacy of this rule.
OK, now about your argumentation with this report. 
I asked you to provide facts justifying your claims/conclusions. But instead of facts, you pointed me to a source claiming those same conclusions.
Yes, I guess that that 280 pages report does list some facts in support of its conclusion, but the problem is : if I disagree with the truth o those facts and/or conclusions, to whom I address my objections?
Therefore: take your claims one by one and justify them. 
(Besides, by unreservedly recommending the AI report, you will also have to justify/prove every one of its claims, if asked. This is how it works!)
Here is a free😁advice for you: Only by researching a subject yourself can you justify your claims; merely reproducing the conclusions of others risks embarrassment.

Boydstun is not smearing you. The problem is in your head. 
Urgently go out and seek psychiatric help.

Ayn Rand once gave some really good advice that went something like this: "The most important thing you can do to help the poor is to avoid becoming poor yourself." I add: The most important thing you can do to stop destructive evil in the world is to not be destructive of yourself, such as by telling lies, using non-prescribed psychoactive narcotics (even if legal), possibly causing damage to your mind such as paranoia and delusions of Galt-level accomplishments made by yourself, mysteriously unheralded, in physics and engineering. From all you have described to us on your personal front and pleaded for us to accept, it looks most likely that if you "will be completely out of all resources", it will be at root due to your own compromised mind and behavior, whether you yourself caused that damage or it happened by the course of nature. If you die "within the next two weeks" it will not be because of evil of someone else. I hope you will still be alive in two weeks and not so out of resources that you no longer can communicate in this medium if you wish.
A sister of mine committed suicide a few years ago (a wife, mother, and grandmother), and from what I know of her physical miseries for which she could get no further help, it was a well-and-long-considered sensible suicide. I don't think she did it just so her loved ones would be pained. I do not know your health potentials, but that is surely the arena in which you need help and protection, assuming you are not just BS-ing the site in a show of fake feelings and mental states (which I doubt). I hope you are not in such a boxed-in and painful health situation as my sister evidently was. Be suspicious of any inclination you have towards suicide. Nature is going to end each life soon enough.
A year ago, a nephew of mine died of alcoholism. It destroyed his organs. He was 52. It had started as a young man, when he had been in the Navy. He knew he was an addict, but refused to let the appropriate professionals try to help him. I hope you are not on a destructive course along those lines, with some sort of long addiction. If so, please get medical help, and realize you can not make the return to health by yourself.
I experienced paranoia myself for a couple of days. I was in a safe place, a hospital I'd come to for what turned out to be symptoms from a bladder blockage. All my regular medicines I take each day to stay alive could not get released from my body and caused malfunctions in my brain. The neurological condition is known as Metabolic Encephalopathy. When I later saw my neurologist, he could predict all the various mental malfunctions that had ensued. I mention the paranoia part because I know first-hand that while you are in it, you do not know you are in it. You just keep putting every bit in every episode of life into a vast plot against yourself and things you treasure. But if there is for you periodic waning of it, get yourself some help, protecting yourself from yourself.
Don't be ashamed of mental derailments. The appropriate model of human perfection is not a perfect crystal, but perfect health, which can be lost and possibly regained. Resilience and recoveries are virtues. I was in a mental hospital myself as a young man, due to my suicidal responses to my existential situation. I began to read The Fountainhead there, and my doctor encouraged me to finish it, which I did. And I lived another six decades (so far, so good) without such problems again, and I achieved difficult things in love and work and in personal projects that, though difficult, were more modest than and more suited to my abilities than stellar physics breakthroughs. (I loved physics and, with engineering education also, I have been able to put what I learned to good use in philosophical reflections.) And I have been happy.
Here's hoping.
–S

A Greek Sham
The fire of the gods stolen by Prometheus was actually stolen by the story maker from man and given to the gods, omitting credit to man of having learned to start, control, and use fires without outside help.