I gotta ask, do we have any way of contacting Amity? I PM'd her awhile back but no dice. This round will be a bit less exciting without her around. — Noble Dust
I would presume that people on a Philosophy Forum would back up those who are against authoritarianism and imperialism. — ssu
I posted this in the Ukraine discussion but it's now lost in the propaganda war that's going on there, so I'll post it here, just because I think it's good to see this reaction to the invasion from inside Russia.
Russian Celebrities, Public Figures Speak Out Against Ukraine War
(The Moscow Times is an independent Moscow-based English language newspaper that's often highly critical of the regime)
— jamalrob
Russian activists sign open letter calling for end to war in Ukraine
Campaigners write manifesto in broadest anti-war statement by Russian human rights community
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/25/russian-activists-sign-open-letter-calling-for-end-to-war-in-ukraine
“Russian citizens are being involved in military operations on the territory of Ukraine, where they become accomplices in war crimes and die themselves,” a draft statement says. “Our first goal is to help them avoid this, relying on the constitution and Russian legislation, and to assist all those who are illegally forced to participate in hostilities.”
The activists’ second goal is to provide legal assistance to the families of Russian military personnel who “find themselves in an information vacuum”.
“There is no official updated information about the dead, about the transfer of bodies to families, about prisoners, about their release or exchange,” the letter says. “It is difficult or impossible for relatives to find out what has become of their sons and husbands, or to get the bodies of the dead.”
----
In the letter the activists write that the war in Ukraine was a consequence of a culture of impunity for human rights.
“The war that has broken out in the centre of Europe is a consequence and continuation of Russia’s long-term refusal to protect the rights and freedoms of its citizens and all those under its jurisdiction – once again recalled the unlearned lesson of the second world war: a state that grossly and massively violates human rights within its borders sooner or later becomes a threat to peace and international security,” the letter says.
“The lack of a proper reaction of the international community to these processes during the post-Soviet decades also contributed to the tragic development of events.”
I posted this in the Ukraine discussion but it's now lost in the propaganda war that's going on there, so I'll post it here, just because I think it's good to see this reaction to the invasion from inside Russia.
Russian Celebrities, Public Figures Speak Out Against Ukraine War
(The Moscow Times is an independent Moscow-based English language newspaper that's often highly critical of the regime) — jamalrob
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/25/russian-activists-sign-open-letter-calling-for-end-to-war-in-ukraineRussian activists sign open letter calling for end to war in Ukraine
Campaigners write manifesto in broadest anti-war statement by Russian human rights community
“Russian citizens are being involved in military operations on the territory of Ukraine, where they become accomplices in war crimes and die themselves,” a draft statement says. “Our first goal is to help them avoid this, relying on the constitution and Russian legislation, and to assist all those who are illegally forced to participate in hostilities.”
The activists’ second goal is to provide legal assistance to the families of Russian military personnel who “find themselves in an information vacuum”.
“There is no official updated information about the dead, about the transfer of bodies to families, about prisoners, about their release or exchange,” the letter says. “It is difficult or impossible for relatives to find out what has become of their sons and husbands, or to get the bodies of the dead.”
----
In the letter the activists write that the war in Ukraine was a consequence of a culture of impunity for human rights.
“The war that has broken out in the centre of Europe is a consequence and continuation of Russia’s long-term refusal to protect the rights and freedoms of its citizens and all those under its jurisdiction – once again recalled the unlearned lesson of the second world war: a state that grossly and massively violates human rights within its borders sooner or later becomes a threat to peace and international security,” the letter says.
“The lack of a proper reaction of the international community to these processes during the post-Soviet decades also contributed to the tragic development of events.”
Sorry, I don't have anything to contribute to this discussion. — SophistiCat
And any closer to a solution? — Benkei
If the government sets it up and it offers a tax break (since redistribution is build into the system) it might actually just work within the existing system. — Benkei
Introducing social credit system as an economic system of value or even promoting digital currencies may help but we have to see this completely as a failure of the west or the west loses the right of hegemony as a superpower (which it's already had chipped away). The sanctions are further arguing against any proper western hegemony.
For history this will be viewed less as "Putin's war" and more as a continual fall of western hegemony that started with its domestic issues, went through afghanistan and the covid conspiracies and finally here. — Shwah
How do we deal with that?
— Amity
Through revolutions, like we did in the past — Olivier5
Self-criticism. This is my way. If a person practices self-criticism, that person cannot be so destructive, because that person will continuously ask to herself: “What am I doing? Is it good? Is it intelligent? Will it help progress?”. If Hitler had a habit of self-criticism, he would have thought, every second of his life: “What am I doing?”. — Angelo Cannata
Yes, sorry for not staying too much on topic. I guess the intricacies of these issues push me into abstractions even further without a clear way to get there. — Benkei
I think it's been over-said that your conversation topic being limited to the 5 essays will never answer your question and that you should've been clear you wanted no more answer than what the 5 essays professed. — Shwah
Understood and understandable.'m less concerned with fixing Russia before my own country and the EU are fixed. — Benkei
I think an intermediary step that is getting traction more widely is a stakeholder capitalism. — Benkei
Your title is "How to solve a problem: like Putin" and I thought it may be about the different archetypes of "problem-solving" using Putin as a stand-in for an archetype and as a case study. — Shwah
I think more economic and tax justice in our own countries will mean they are less prone to abuse by foreign oligarchs as well. — Benkei
In a nutshell, declare "action taken", general population applauds, no extra money or effort just a few letters added to laws we don't really enforce, no change.
If we want to be serious about change, the change needs to be fundamental, which means more, better and more effective democracy, not just political but especially economical. — Benkei
This is further complicated by hero worship having shifted to business men. We look to oligarchs for answers in fields they don't know anything about. — Benkei
So we need political, cultural and economic change and these changes need to be fundamental. The incremental or technocratic tweaking of liberals and democratic socialists is never going to be good enough. — Benkei
As a finance minister of UK or Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak will get salary around £71,090 so if we make prediction then his net worth would be around £2 million. Apart from this, he is also a director of the investment firm owned by his father in law named Catamaran Ventures.
She described her act as a desperate attempt to cleanse her conscience for having “zombified” the Russian people.
The mental model of Putinism, the worldview it constructs with propaganda of word and deed to keep Russians under control, is built on several foundations: it appeals to nostalgia; it projects a conspiratorial perspective and it insists that Putin can get away with anything, that there is no alternative to Putin.
The nostalgia narrative allows the Kremlin to transfer its own brutality on to a shadowy outside “enemy”, and then help people relieve their pent-up anger through aggression. The abusive, sadistic tone of Putin’s speeches, and the ones of his leading TV propagandists such as Vladimir Solovyov, give people an emotional path to articulate and validate their darkest and most violent feelings. It’s OK to be vicious and mean, this propaganda implies, it’s all history’s fault.
Thinking about the future means concentrating on political reforms, cleaning up the courts, abolishing corruption – all things Putin cannot achieve, as they will put his own system in danger...
Media and communication with the Russian people needs to focus on these questions about the future. Both on the personal level, but also in terms of the future of the country.
...a group of Russian academics led by historian Alexander Etkind propose to create a university in the Baltics that will bring students from Russia and its neighbours to work on common challenges such as the environment.
They will have to rely on tracing documents and open-source investigations. We will need a whole new iteration of what the Russian journalist and editor Roman Badanin, founder of the investigative online media outlet Agentstvo, calls “offshore journalism”: exile media that uses modern tools to stay as close to the home country as possible.
Putin will turn to the power ministries to use oppression rather than ideas. This has always been his final argument: that he can carry out any crimes at home, any invasion abroad, any war crime from Grozny to Aleppo, and get away with it.
In Ukraine, Putin is purposefully targeting humanitarian corridors, bombing refugees and hospitals in order to break the will of the people. It’s a message to the world that all statements about humanitarian values, the UN’s “responsibility to protect”, “safe zones” is guff.
His argument is that might is right, and in the futureless new world the ones who are most ruthless, from Beijing to Riyadh and Moscow, will flourish.
One small, first, but hopefully important step has been taken by the human rights lawyer and author Philippe Sands, who is trying to create a Nuremberg-style tribunal for those who began this war, not merely for war crimes but for having started a completely unprovoked invasion in the first place.
Neutrality is largely in the eye of the beholder, and if the Kremlin regards states as de facto allies of the US, lack of Nato membership is unlikely to protect them from whatever forms of aggression it will be capable of after Ukraine.
However hostile the relationship between Russia and the west becomes, dialogue on nuclear matters needs to be maintained.
Putin himself calls the Ukrainians Nazis, as if this unprovoked aggression is somehow a rerun of the Soviet people’s self-defence in the second world war. That accusation is disgusting, but it’s harder to dismiss the parallels between Putin’s own behaviour and those of the dictators of the mid-20th century.
He is driven by a perverse misreading of history to deny his neighbours’ humanity. Russian officials and politicians are aggressive in their patriotism. The orange-and-black striped medal ribbon became the nationalist symbol when Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014, and the air-recognition-mark “Z” has rapidly morphed into an equivalent for this new war.
Putin is a bully who invades his neighbours and kills his critics, and whose government lies compulsively, even about facts that are so self-evidently true that denying them seems self-defeating...
...The Russian elite’s patriotism and anti-western posturing is performative...
Much as I share Tolstoy’s scepticism about the individual’s impact on history, to a significant extent this is Vladimir Putin’s war. Determined to reverse the entropy for which he blames Gorbachev, Putin believes in the transhistorical unity of Great Russia, Little Russia and White Russia. Ukraine as such does not exist.
Listening to voices from the region. A good place to start is Ukrainian activist and historian Taras Bilous’s essay, A Letter to the Western Left from Kyiv (published recently on openDemocracy), which corrects many of the British media cliches about insuperable linguistic, cultural, historical and geographical divides and the influence of the far right...
... Rather than ostracising works of art, try to understand the complex history of Russian imperialism. Pushkin’s To the Slanderers of Russia (1831) told western critics that Russia’s repression of Poland was a family affair. But Evdokiya Rostopchina’s The Forced Marriage (1845) presented Russia and Poland as an abusive husband and defiant wife – provoking outrage in Nicholas I.
They only reference the kleptocracy of russia in the first essay (and once in the third) and never "kleptopia" (which is a much larger discussion).
So you just mean how to solve kleptocracy as detailed in the first essay (business elites get passing mention in the second)? — Shwah
Not the focus of this discussion.The question is more what's happening — Shwah
Personal anecdote: I briefly met Peter Pomerantsev in Prague when he was a still boy living there with his parents. I haven't had contact with him since then, though I've met his dad in London, a Russian-speaking poet and writer, originally from West Ukraine.) — SophistiCat
What do we think happens to the money we pay for Russian gas? How do we imagine western multinationals secure oil-drilling rights dispensed by a regime we know to be corrupt? Who do we think is behind the companies of anonymous ownership, registered in places like Guernsey, Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands, that we continue to allow to participate in our economies?
* How do we deal with that?Sanctions-busting deals between Iran, Venezuela and Russia – respectively kleptocracies with Islamist, socialist and imperialist masks – reveal that this alternative is already taking shape. The leaders of the Chinese kleptocracy will use this opportunity to bolster their position at the head of this new order
We are watching the rise of what I’ve called Kleptopia.*
An undeclared, unconventional war between kleptocracy and democracy has been under way since long before Putin’s troops marched into Ukraine.
I stand corrected. ↪Cuthbert Twice.
You have not presented any kind of argument here.
— I like sushi
That's right, we are speculating and imagining. The global prevalence of patriarchy makes the evidence thin to the point where it is almost impossible to disentangle social nature from social nurture. That's why I am as interested in the fiction as much as the anthropology. There is a thread within patriarchy, of virtual nostalgia for matriarchy. — unenlightened
When it comes to leadership both masculine and feminine traits serve society. The biggest error in colloquial thought is that ‘masculine’ means ‘male’ and ‘feminine’ means ‘female’. I don’t see how society can shift this thought without destroying the truth of these reasonably distinctive categories that shed light of human psychology. I see it as rather bizarre that women who act like men - buy into power structures and act aggressively and competitively) think they are empowering women … they are neither empowering women nor disempowering women, they are merely empowering the system that is already in place.
And it's not as if women don't compete, just in other ways. So I'm not convinced it's just a male thing (which is worrying if true, because that means there's no clear way to avoid wars). — Benkei
But not always.the weakness of old men as being incapable of compromise — Benkei
One can always argue that everything is fake: things just become more and more complex and more elaborately staged and larger conspiracies. — ssu
Can I take over here when Putin opens Scottish Gulag? — Baden
Now I think at the heart of all this drive for competition, the show and spectacle one makes of oneself, is to show ones virility, if not individually than socially — Tobias
The language of war, the movements of its pieces, the dancing of thr protagonists, are all sexually tinged metaphors. — Tobias
It is off topic but may ask you what your PhD is about? I am interested — Tobias
I firmly believe that sexual frustration is at the root of all wars started by men.
— Amity
Based on what exactly? That sounds utterly ridiculous and I don’t really understand the obsession with the idea that sexual relations are somehow inextricably entwined with violence/war. — I like sushi
It's been a couple of hours now and I feel bad for attacking your coffee hipster bollocks.
— jamalrob
Your sensitivity is inspiring. I'm thinking about feeling bad about something I said once. — Hanover
So, show me your soft spot :razz:I have a soft spot for Supertramp. — jamalrob