Eiuol

You been taken to task for linking nothing but RT articles. If you linked other sources as well, or even compared and contrasted RT articles with articles from others, then I wouldn't have said anything. You haven't joined in on the skeptical analysis of RT articles, as you proposed we do. Worse, when we ask what your point is about linking a particular article, you don't really say.
Read a bit more carefully, one notable thing that they have done here is take a quote and then chop it up within the same sentence, not as a simple gap like a pause in what somebody said. This is a way to get it to feel like a paraphrase, but it gives just enough room to exaggerate or minimize a phrase by the words the insert in between.
"NATO should still “increase force presence in the east” but focus on “defensive” capabilities and re-evaluate activities such as drills “to avoid creating a false impression of preparation for offensive action,” the researchers said."
See how the word focus is put just before defensive? We don't have any context for the word defensive, and the word 'but' is in there even though increasing force presence is not necessarily offensive. It's trying to suggest that NATO is obviously planning an invasion or assault and there's no way it could be defensive. The paragraph here by RT makes you want to believe that increased force presence is the opposite of defensive, and anything that appears defensive is actually an attempt to hide preparation for offensive action which is in the form of increased force presence. 
I think this kind of quote splitting is always on purpose, it is a pretty good way to notice a subtext. Your first reaction should be to look at the report that it is quoting, did you do that? 
Here it is:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA1971-1.html
This isn't some special attention I'm giving to RT because I hate it, I do this thing with any kind of article I read about world events. 
Democracy Now is not so bad as an information source for this conflict, or at least because it isn't one of the actual participants in the conflict. 

Yup, it would be nice if you did that, I agree.

I didn't say it's not, I'm responding to the weird notion that RT is relatively reliable and enough so that it is by far your preference for any new source. 
So, what, you're telling us to look at this propaganda just to bring us awareness of the different kinds of propaganda there are? Yeah, that's what we are saying: RT is a propaganda machine. Yet part of your disagreement is that RT isn't really that bad and it tells the blunt truth! If I start to tell you about how they don't tell the truth in any transparent way, you will then start telling me about how everyone is doing propaganda, and RT is no different. 
You are worried that people might read your opinion and agree with you without analyzing what you wrote?  But you did the exact opposite just above with the video you linked! 
Different sources have different standards, for different topics even. I'm not too concerned about what RT has to say about new movies, or what it says about fashion. The fact that you don't see it as objective to judge the standards and motivations of a media outlet, makes me wonder if you believe that the standards one has with the truth has nothing to do with what a person claims the truth is. Like with epistemology, proper thinking standards lend themselves to truthfulness and reliability, even moral respectability. 
Indeed, which I guess explains why you have grown a fondness for RT. 

He's just posting "thoughts". Nothing to see here. No motive. Just innocent links. The facts reveal themselves. If you don't see it, no explanation is possible. If you do see it, you get it. If you disagree, you missed the point. Because after all, if you understood the point, you would agree. Then again, if you don't follow his point, you are hopelessly lost. 
Yeah, who knows what they're saying? In fact, who even knows why you showed us the link if you don't even know how much reliability and understanding the source provides? 
The US is surprisingly more free than you would think. 

RT is more guilty than the rest. 
You literally said that authoritarian governments have less interest in propaganda than democratic governments, and that democratic propaganda is more corrosive. Here you make a post that says RT is a bad source, and other sources are bad sources, but then you will later on clearly say that RT is the most preferable and the most truthful. You want us to be properly skeptical about news articles, but when we do this about the RT articles you link, you accuse us of demanding too much, don't bother responding to the parts we object to specifically, don't bother to give us follow-up information or secondary sources where we want to know more about your claims. You ask us to peruse everything we can find, but quite literally, you refuse to show us anything else you find besides RT articles. The very few non-RT articles you have linked, you either misunderstand the article or refuse to engage in discussion about the meaning of the article. 
It seems more likely you have a job at RT and get paid for clicks for articles you link. 

Not really, because authoritarian governments actively suppress a lot of information while simultaneously presenting information that would justify their authority as something good and desirable - and thereby making people even easier to hold under their thumb. 
Would you show me the RT article that demonstrates your claim? Also, I would like some articles by Xinhua. After all, if authoritarians have the least need to manipulate the truth, their news sources should be the most accurate and truthful.

It's like you can't conceive that someone would say unequivocally that Russia is significantly worse than the Ukraine and is responsible for great moral fault. You have rationalized that by saying you have lower standards for Russia than the West morally speaking, refusing to engage many questions unless you can blame NATO or the Ukraine for irritating Putin (you don't bother answering questions about what you think), and your only source for any claim is RT. 
I already went over before how one story was not putting forth facts and statements, but using adjectives and descriptions that directly distort factual information. Adopting an official language was portrayed as banning the Russian language. If you don't notice this, you aren't paying attention.
Why should he bother? You aren't going to bother responding, you don't typically respond to people breaking down arguments.
Did you literally not understand what I said about the difference between something being authoritarian by nature by its very functioning, and something being authoritarian as merely an individual act? But hey, if you think you are really living in an authoritarian dictatorship, and Russia is no better, I guess enjoy your fantasy? Jon Letendre is enjoying his with his qanon LARP campaign. 
You didn't verify it and present the evidence to us (I looked) and it was a big part of your claim for Putin's justification for invasion (you never did say Russia's invasion was moral, explicitly, but defense of justifications indicates moral defense). It doesn't help when your only source is RT.

But that's the thing, it's not informative because the very way that it is stated shows that it leaves things just vague enough that it sounds true and right, but is quite open for interpretation. It doesn't say Russian was banned (whatever that means) despite claiming that at first, it just says Ukrainian was adopted as the official language. I'm not a fan of official languages, and it is probably a good idea to keep Russian literature in any school curriculum in any country, but I would not call that authoritarian. If you have other sources besides RT I will look at those, but if you want to promote critical thinking about news media, you should do the same with this article. 
 

I don't know what your moral position is, you never did say at any point in the entire thread. Was Russia morally justified invading the Ukraine? That's all I'm asking. 
I mean, people who make those decisions already know far more than you about Putin. Authoritarians don't have legitimate concerns, or if they speak of something that would be legitimate, they have an ulterior motive where they want something illegitimate in the end. 
That's not a coherent position, unless you want to say that all immoral actions are equivalent. But I asked: was Russia morally justified invading the Ukraine? 
You also skipped over the previous 2 questions again.
Pressure to do what? That's like saying "I raped her in my car after our date because she was so hot wearing a short skirt, how could she innocently maintain that she couldn't have predicted I would eventually respond to the pressure!?" It's not that anybody thought that Putin wouldn't do it, but he had every opportunity to make a different decision. There wasn't any pressure, nobody was doing anything to Russia, so that's why I'm asking you what pressure you think there was. You mentioned the potential for NATO borders to be closer to Russia, but NATO has never invaded a country, and don't suggest any plans to do so. 
Sounds like a pretty good thing to do to an authoritarian government. 

Q would be proud of your bravery. 

You clearly don't know the difference between a state run propaganda outlet, versus a state funded media outlet. RT isn't the Russian equivalent of BBC. We are talking about something like Chinese news media. BBC tries to provide some attempt at the truth, while something like RT has an overall interest in promoting all Russian interests as its goal, instead of the truth. And even if you disagree about my comparison about the BBC, RT has a far greater degree of state propaganda, and does propaganda better. Trusting the message of RT is like trusting the message of Chinese media. I'm obviously not saying that privately run and owned media can't be wildly non-objective, but state run media propaganda is far worse, and historical record shows the same thing. If I have to explain to you why the government being involved with private matters is especially bad, it's like you never read Rand.
Yeah, that's RT, and backed by an authoritarian government, this is what you get. 
 

Seriously, you are a true believer in Q, and your Savior never showed up, after which you abandoned posting for a very long time. I don't think you know what evasion is, or even epistemological principles. You haven't even mentioned the fact that people don't like, and when Alex requested more details about the fact that you claim, you didn't bother to post evidence or mention anything about these alleged eyewitnesses and the veracity of their testimony. 
I mean, I guess you haven't read enough of his posts. 
 

You don't need to be at war with someone for them to be your enemy. I told you some of the reasons I think Russia is an enemy, but I didn't mention anything why I think those matter to US interests. I'm not sure if you think I'm saying that the US should get involved, I'm not. I'm saying that whenever the interests of Russia are harmed these days, that's a good thing. I don't really care enough about RT to say that it needs to be a banned, but it sounds like a potentially reasonable thing to do. It doesn't bother me.

What point are you trying to make? Why are you spending time on stupid and uninformed people? I just find it curious when people opt for self-mutilation rather than something interesting and productive even in their own eyes. 
 

What point are you trying to make? Why are you spending time on stupid and uninformed people? I just find it curious when people opt for self-mutilation rather than something interesting and productive even in their own eyes. 
 

Agreeing with Grames, politics should not be synonymous with government. Aristotle had the right idea beginning his thinking about politics as an investigation into the way humans organize themselves, and the way that those forms of organization lead to (or detract from) living life in the most complete sense. Broadly speaking, he considered that many species of animals organize themselves according to what they need to acquire food, and thoroughly investigated the organizational structure of beehives. In other words, organizational structure is grounded in biology, and that structure is what the actions of individuals move towards ultimately. The difference from animals though is primarily the city. Maybe not necessarily city as we think it, but as the primary political unit with an upper limit to the size of the population.
I don't think that the basic political unit can be the family. Organizational structures of animals usually need something larger, otherwise they don't serve the necessary biological function. Humans are the same. Even more, it's quite natural for families to create a greater level of organization to attain more human needs, eventually settling down at the level of the city. Family might be a basic part, but the primary unit of analysis should be the city. This is the level where we know if the objective purpose of social organization is being met. Any smaller, we have an incomplete way of living out human life. Any larger, and it becomes chaotic. Cities can combine for coordinated action, but these combinations don't have the same level of integrated lives across the population - the level of integration where culture can grow from sharing meals, living in the same ecological environments, communicating the same words or related ideas, and observing others live their lives.

Agreeing with Grames, politics should not be synonymous with government. Aristotle had the right idea beginning his thinking about politics as an investigation into the way humans organize themselves, and the way that those forms of organization lead to (or detract from) living life in the most complete sense. Broadly speaking, he considered that many species of animals organize themselves according to what they need to acquire food, and thoroughly investigated the organizational structure of beehives. In other words, organizational structure is grounded in biology, and that structure is what the actions of individuals move towards ultimately. The difference from animals though is primarily the city. Maybe not necessarily city as we think it, but as the primary political unit with an upper limit to the size of the population.
I don't think that the basic political unit can be the family. Organizational structures of animals usually need something larger, otherwise they don't serve the necessary biological function. Humans are the same. Even more, it's quite natural for families to create a greater level of organization to attain more human needs, eventually settling down at the level of the city. Family might be a basic part, but the primary unit of analysis should be the city. This is the level where we know if the objective purpose of social organization is being met. Any smaller, we have an incomplete way of living out human life. Any larger, and it becomes chaotic. Cities can combine for coordinated action, but these combinations don't have the same level of integrated lives across the population - the level of integration where culture can grow from sharing meals, living in the same ecological environments, communicating the same words or related ideas, and observing others live their lives.

"What about-ism" isn't a counterargument. It's a distraction. Communism and Maoism are more like Marxism+, that is, there are elements of Marxism. What would change about her argument if she mentioned them? She easily could condemn them on grounds of expropriation. An anticapitalist could say that every attack on Marxism should mention imperialism of the US, but you would rightly respond that the essay is about Marxism, not about the ways that capitalism has been corrupted in the US. The essay is about capitalism, so let's talk about capitalism. 
By the way, my basic response would be what 2046 wrote, but I felt some things were worth analyzing in more detail. 
First we need to consider exactly how she is defining capitalism.
"By definition, a system devoted to the limitless expansion and private appropriation of surplus value gives the owners of capital a deep-seated interest in confiscating labor and means of production from subject populations. Expropriation raises their profits by lowering costs of production in two ways: on the one hand, by supplying cheap inputs, such as energy and raw materials; on the other, by providing low-cost means of subsistence, such as food and textiles, which permit them to pay lower wages."
For us, we probably would usually respond by saying that capitalism requires individual rights. Expropriation is an explicit violation of individual rights, so what she is describing isn't actually capitalism. (Although low-cost means of subsistence sounds like a good thing to me, so even the description is a little weird, unless she is claiming something like exploited at poverty levels). Fraser seems to anticipate such a response from a capitalist. 
"The common thread here, once again, is political exposure: the incapacity to set limits and invoke protections."
She is saying that capitalism and rights are incompatible. As much as capitalists like us might want protection of rights, she would say that we will never get what we hope to achieve. But I think she fails to make this argument. She gives examples of expropriation, without making a clear-cut case why capitalism necessarily requires expropriation. 
Look at the definition before. It amounts to saying that it is advantageous for capitalists to expropriate people, especially with imperialism. But I'm not seeing why we must assume that a system of rights cannot exist that is rigidly enforced. Her argument might apply to anarcho capitalists, and that would make sense. Rand made arguments against anarchism on grounds that it would necessarily lead to rights violations. If Fraser were talking about capitalism without government, she'd probably be right. But when you throw in everything about exploitation, she is trying to talk about any kind of profit as denial of workers of what they earned. 
"Advantageous even in “normal” times, expropriation becomes especially appealing in periods of economic crisis, when it serves as a critical, if temporary, fix for restoring declining profitability. The same is true for political crises, which can sometimes be defused or averted by transferring value confiscated from populations that appear not to threaten capital to those that do—another distinction that often correlates with “race.” "
All she really has to go on is that expropriation is "appealing". This is about as strong as her case seems to be that capitalism *cannot* protect rights. For the most part, she goes over the ways that people can be expropriated:
"And it is largely states, too, that codify and enforce the status hierarchies that distinguish citizens from subjects, nationals from aliens, entitled workers from dependent scroungers. Constructing exploitable and expropriable subjects, while distinguishing the one from the other, state practices of political subjectivation supply an indispensable precondition for capital’s “self”-expansion."

If they are not arbitrary, then you have some positive evidence for the claims. Then those claims can be discussed, and argued about. 
But in your examples, the only evidence for these claims is apparently your ability to imagine them. In that case, you are basically asking "how can I be sure that something I imagine is not true? I can imagine that the government is sending signals from cell phone towers in order to control our computers, how can I be sure that this is not true?" This wouldn't be evidence. 
 

She was very strict and hard-nosed about it because she want anyone to misinterpret what her philosophy is. I mean, she never talked about Objectivism as anything besides exactly her views and what closely follows from those views. Especially since she was even resistant to acknowledging her influences besides Aristotle. What does it matter though? Why do you need to call yourself an Objectivist? If a closed system would make you not an Objectivist, who cares, it's not like I'm going to call the Spanish Inquisition on you. 
 
It doesn't encourage you to always agree. It just means acknowledge when you disagree. You don't need to be so concerned about how you label yourself. 

I found it. It is the third to last post on this page

https://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/topic/722-a-question-of-sanction/#comments

We aren't at almost-fascism, no one's breaking the rules of Constitution, "the bad guys" is a vague generality (which bad guys? Is Bernie Sanders equivalent to Nancy Pelosi? Are bad guys any people that you disagree with?) The principles you state sound fine, but when we get to evidence, and discussing evidence, discussing the concrete things you see in the world, your arguments and reasoning fall apart. I'm fine with breaking the law if the laws themselves are no longer grounded on a legitimate government.
What you talking about? You can say anything you want except incite violence. Try it. Say anything you want. You'll find out that nothing happens to your ability to act and think. Other people might not like it, but you have every right to say it. Freedom of speech is alive and well, with exactly the intense arguments and debates that are expected when freedom of speech is preserved. I can't prove a negative. I can't provide evidence that there are no protections. 
An example of what? Lacking free-speech protection? People alleged that he incited violence, and they are investigating it. Until and unless he is legally prosecuted, is freedom of speech is not been hindered in any way. But it sounds like you're conflating freedom of speech and consequences of speech. Your claims get muddled and confused, smashed together, where I don't even know what you're claiming anymore. All I see is emoting.
 

That's basically just reductionism.
But in any case, your reasoning doesn't really get at defeating indirect realism. If the mystical version of the soul did exist, that doesn't necessarily exclude realism, and even if were just bags of meat (which sounds like your position) that doesn't necessarily exclude indirect realism.
This would be something like indirect realism in terms of an analogy. If this image were presented to consciousness (to make the analogy work for conscious entities), that would mean that there is another layer of perception or interpretation between reality and consciousness. Direct realism would be like saying that there is no image in between, just going straight from reality to consciousness. There would be no need to create the photograph of reality. 
Yes, there is a biological process of perception that results in awareness of reality in a specific form. But if an image or form is constructed, then interpreted, then brought to awareness, you would have indirect realism. 

By divisible I mean having parts. Water is not made up of parts. Parts would be distinct things that the whole is composed of. You seem to mean infinitely indivisible, where you can't even section off itself. That's even less reasonable. 
If you can't take sections of space, then objects passing through space can't pass through sections of space. They would either instantly pass through any distance, or never make it through.

You brought this up about the QAnon movement to suggest that you are being given a loyalty test implicitly. Then why are you trying to prove your loyalty? No one asked you to prove anything with loyalty, but you went ahead and did it anyway. Of course I told you to get out of here, but that was to dispel any illusion that a QAnon supporter is any more welcome than a Communist. 
For the same reason there is no loyalty test, no one really cares. 
 
That would be psychologizing. You are an interesting case study though. What are the motivations of believers in Q? Are there common personality traits or personal histories? How does the conspiratorial nature of QAnon relate to that radicalization of otherwise reasonable people? Does QAnon radicalize people in the first place? How does a QAnon supporter validate their beliefs? The one commonality that I see is an inclination towards feeling victimized or persecuted.