distic
2mo ago
Now Dmitri Markov is also dead. The probability thatthey weren't both directly murdered is now very low...
distic
10mo ago
The idea that one is not threatened by a neighboring state because there are other neighboring states unaligned with Russia doesn’t make sense. I am not threatened by five enemies because I have four?
Let me rephrase it: Ukraine joining NATO does not improve significantly NATO capabilities regarding Russia. I'm sorry, but the idea of a land invasion through Ukraine is ridiculous. It would mean a nuclear war. We are avoiding to send troops to Ukraine to avoid a nuclear conflict, but somehow we would invade Russia? And even if we wanted to take the risk, it would make more sense to attack from the baltic states as they are a lot closer from Moscow and Saint Petersburg than from Ukraine.
Ukraine is small, it will always be weaker
No, it won't be weaker if it has stronger allies. Russia would never have dared to invade Ukraine if it was a NATO country. And the birth rates mean nothing, as they can change fast. Russia also has declining birthrates, so the population ratio might very well be constant.
NATO violated the promise not to expand east as part of the negotiations involving German reunification.
The Russian propaganda says so, but until "they told us" becomes an international treaty, it's meaningless. If those promises even existed, they were never part of a formally approved treaty. No country has ever felt bound to respect oral promises of former leaders. It is just insane to claim they should. But even assuming that those promises were formally made and broken, I don't see your point. My argument was that Ukraine could not trust Russia security guarantees because Russia violated its security guarantees toward Ukraine twice. Are you claiming that Ukraine should actually believe Russia because NATO also broke some of its promises? It makes no sense at all.
distic
4mo ago
Your example is pretty poor, you cannot tell someone "you don't trust everyone on the internet so no one can be trusted". Moreover, you ca. trust a random person and yet not trust a person arguing that "people just follow incentives"
distic
8mo ago
There is also a psychological element in it. It means that supporters of the regime have to tell blatant lies. "No it was just an accident, we didn't do it". It trains them to say just whatever their masters want them to say.
distic
8mo ago
Or because they had the opportunity this way and they took it. Putin isn't a god who can choose the day, the place and the way you will die. There is still a lot of logistics.
distic
6mo ago
It can be both. Sometime, a white racist says that black people are racists too, and it means two things: (1) they are racists, because there is no such thing as human rights, equality or whatever, everyone just fights for his own people; (2) they are racists, so it's better for us to be racist against them, because they are dangerous to us. Those two claims are complementary. But there are still holes in that theory, the first one beeing how you establish the boundaries between your people and the rest of the world, and the second one that the existence of bad people is no argument against morality.
distic
6mo ago
A world war is when the war is global. Even 10 local conflicts don't make a world war until there are two sides and japan allies with germany even though they are not fighting on the same continent. And by that, I mean that they declare war and peace together, not that they are allies in that they help each other somehow.
distic
6mo ago
What would you do with your statute of limitations anyway? People won't just compensate others or renounce their claims based on that if they didn't intend to. Israeli settlements are against international law, but they still exist. Moreover, it seems that some cases can't be solved by time. Gibraltar has been british for very long, yet the disagreement with Soain will continue for decades.
If you want to have one nonetheless, one important factor would be: how many people living today in the world were alive at the time? Are direct victims still living, or would they still be living if they had not been victims?
distic
7mo ago
I don't think so. I agree that the local government has mire physical power, but its incentives are quite different. The US government has to let americans believe that it acts in their interests. China does not care as much
distic
2mo ago
I think it goes against the common morality because:
(1) Old people aren't supposed to need as much money as their children, they typically don't need to pay their mortgage anymore and don't have children to take care of. A couple of pensioners with 80k$/year is a lot richer than a couple of middle age parents with the same revenue.
(2) When the parents die their money will typically be split evenly and it means that the richest sibling is paying for the others
(3) It's not easy to know what share of the success of the child is a result of the parents' labor and what is the result of the child's own merit. If the children owe something to their parents, it is probably proportional to their average income (because the parents' labor should have been shared evenly among the children and thus any variation between them is supposed to depend only on the individual labor of each child)
distic
6mo ago
You are assuming that the only way the war might propagate to Iran is if Iran decides to. But Israel could very well decide that for them. Iran has been weakened by recent anti regime protests and Israel's government needs to prove they do something about the security of their citizen without hurting Hamas too much because Hamas has hostages. It's not the most plausible issue, but game-theoretically hurting Iran is somewhat sound, just like nuking Belarus as a retaliation against Russia (see The Bomb by Fred Kaplan)
distic
6mo ago
I have no sympathy for the terrorists, but are you sure Israel would have let them become richer? Sometimes they are targeting civilian infrastructures like power plants, it does not help when you try to build a richer country. A rich enemy is more dangerous, it's a risk Israel is perhaps not ready to take.
distic
8mo ago
I'd challenge the claim that he was not stupid. Marching against Putin and then claiming to have reached an agreement was stupid, but setting a foot in Russia was even dumber.
If only those events could serve as a lesson that there is no agreement to be reached with Putin: not for NATO, not for Ukraine, not for Georgia or Moldova. Putin just doesn't respect the agreements he makes.
distic
8mo ago
It's called paradox of value, or water-diamond paradox (water is a lot more useful than diamonds, but the price of diamonds is higher).
distic
2mo ago
He lived for 41 years and was probably a drug addict for 10 years at least, so the probability that he dies the same week as Navalny is not higher than 1/500. Obviously you would need to count all drug addicts that could have died at the same time and perhaps there are more than 500, but I doubt it.
I admit the elections thing are just a hypothesis. However when three people opposing Putin die the same week, at least one of them is mudered and you can't get the body of the most famous, my basic assumption is that the three of them were actually murdered.
distic
2mo ago
Among those people who are projected to die, how many of them are not even in their fifties? Do you really believe the helicopter pilot wasn't murdered?
I can get that you believe it's independant from navalny's death, even if it seems unlikely to me, but to assume that he is just one of those people who would have died anyway is just ridiculous. If I want to be as sacarastic as you I can ask if you think that Prigozhin was also just some unfortunate accident? I mean there are quite a few plane accidents, so it's that impossible, I suppose
distic
2mo ago
I think we won't be able to agree but it's still quite weird that 3 people opposed to Putin in a way or another die within a week... what's the probability that it happens at random?
Why not them?
I guess he cannot just choose to kill anyone, there are practical limits. They must have searched for the pilot since he defected.
distic
2mo ago
Yes he was a drug addict but he had been for years and he dies the same day as Navalny.
And now a pilot who defected to Ukraine and lived in Spain...
distic
7mo ago
Anarchism has never worked, what are you speaking about when you say "able to exist without a state to protect them"?
Anyway that is not really relevant. The fact is that companies get some advantages from modern states. They are more prosperous when the state protects them. So they have to accept the downsides that come with this prosperity.
distic
7mo ago
Nigeria and Niger are two different countries. Probably a mistake from your autocorrect
distic
6mo ago
The original question was "why do neutral people not care?" not "is it good or bad". I think it is right to say that people do not care as it happens only to a small number of children, and also that it doesn't happen to children without their parent's consent. Which means that it may happen to children, but not to those of neutral people. That is why they don't care.
distic
8mo ago
The fact that an idea is stupid does not mean that someone as intelligent as Marx could not have agreed with it. Kant believed that you can know a priori the geometry of space and Popper thought that evolution theory was not scientific.
If machines do produce value, then the capitalist isn't stealing from the proletarian, they are producing wealth together. There is no exploitation and the ethical side of marxism falls entirely.
distic
6mo ago
It's not that clear to me what they mean with "mother/daughter". Looking at a daughter and a mother having sex (incest porn)? Or for a daughter to want to have sex with her own mother? Or for a mother to have desires for her daughter? Because incest porn is quite widespread, but it's not the same as being excited by your own daughter.
distic
6mo ago
will drive them towards other less restrictive platforms.
Why would such platforms survive? Surely, if Google has to exploit "sources of revenues" because "budgets are tighter, bubbles are popping", smaller institution will have to. Or is google in a particularly bad situation?
That was my question too. And also, they should have taken account of the non economical consequences of said removal. Like people beeing sad forbtheir beloved ones. Would they really like to live in a world where their beloved ones can be "removed" if someone thinks they are not productive enough?
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