Keep commenting, keep getting critique, listen learn and grow

Focus isn’t the thing that helps. It’s iteration.

You are raised in a conceptual framework that predisposes you to think about new things in specific ways. To get a more accurate worldview, you need more iterations, you need to explore new experiences, you need to see the same things presented in slightly different ways.

Above all else, though, you need to make posts and comments like this, and you need to have live conversations where you express your current understanding and you need to receive feedback. Sometimes you’re wrong, sometimes your omitting something, sometimes you have a good grip on it. You can’t just focus and read and hope to have correct understanding. These things are not dead concepts that can pinned to the pages of a book - they are living dynamic understandings generated through dialogue.l

Got it, so how many ukrainians should die in order to prevent a point of inflation?

One critique I can offe: these thought experiments are reductive to the point of being useless.

Cannibalism can lead to prion diseases. If the strong eat the week to survive, and then die from prison diseases later, how does that change the equation?

But that line of thinking exposes the situation for what it really is: a fetishization of living that goes beyond all moral intuition.

The presupposition here is that these individual people surving in this specific moment is more valuable than literally anything else except making other/more people die in this specific moment. That’s just clearly not included in ANY moral intuition anyone has across all cultures. The only place you see this sort of thinking is in European philosophy which is obsessed with the fear of impermanence and mortality.

6 sailors, 5 strong, 1 weak. They over power the weak one to kill and eat them to survive. They live for about 3 more weeks, maybe. But if they can’t get fresh water they’re dead in 5 days. Was it moral to do it then? They have fresh water but still haven’t extracted themselves after 3 weeks so they kill the next one and they’re down to 4. In the end, is it morally for the strongest soldier to participate in killing and eating ALL of their comrades only to die in the exact same place they had been this whole time because extraction never came?

Is it moral if they all survive the shipwreck, get back home, and then get killed in a war? Killed in a car accident? Turns out they contracted a fatal disease during their travels?

This idea that only this moment is allowed to be considered and also no other considerations or complexities matter or exist is actually the behavior of a sociopath. The reductive framing is how we justify literally everything evil. By stripping all the context that could make it immoral, and only leaving the considerations that could be moral, we are literally doing the immoral thing.

Not to be movie-brained but the scene in Spiderman when Goblin tries to create a trolley problem for Spiderman by putting the survival of the love interest against the survival of a subway car full of people is exactly the example of what I mean. Choosing to create these conditions IS the immoral act. Doing it in the safety of the classroom where no one gets hurt and then pretending like it’s not intellectual sociopathy is gaslighting students.

Can to just consider what you said here?

It’s better that bullets, missiles, and drones kill people and destroy infrastructure than it is for Ukraine to devalue their currency.

Is that really the position you hold?

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Money isn’t real. Sovereign governments can’t run out of it. Of course issuing more can cause inflation, but are you gonna tell me that inflation is worse than not having defenses?

Geopolitics understander, right here

I guess? If you’re selling literally weapons, body armor, and shielding from a fucking warzone to somewhere else, I would think corruption would simply not be a forceful enough word to describe that action

Man, you are just itching for nuclear war aren’t you? You really want a nuclear-armed transnational force with zero democratic accountability to go and fight another nuclear armed power that is currently fighting explicitly to prevent that nuclear-armed transnational force from expanding its control of the region? That is literally nuclear escalation. You gotta get out of the death cult you’re in.

But why do they need money? They got their weapons for debt. They can just do a Keynes and employ their people to build what they need to build. Is it just that they weren’t importing protection materials like concrete and rebar and stuff?

It was an industrial war. Yes, the command was critical. Yes allies were critical. But Stalin directed the economy on the basis of a prediction of the war in a way that I don’t think any other economic thinker at the time would have

Do we think that the level of development of the local Soviets and the higher order Soviets was sufficient enough to coordinate the necessary response to the threat of the Third Reich? As far as I understand it, even with Stalin’s significant control he still had opposition to the idea that Germany would be such a near-term threat and such a massive one. Maybe I am wrong about that.

Precolonial non-European societies had sports. The precolonial societies of what we call the Americas had sports. The precolonial societies of what we call Australia has sports.

It is useful to have the concept of a winner when you are trying to promote excellence of a capability that inheres in the individual. Running is a great example. There’s a reason why running has individual competitions and group competitions. The sinple foot race promotes excellence of an individual capability in all that participate, raising the level of the capability for the whole group while having an individual winner in any given competition. But the relay race has teams that win, not individuals because the problem being solved is a combination of individual excellence and excellence in communion.

Problem solving competitions are far better as team competitions than group competitions. There is a winning team, but no individualism. But, for problem solving competitions, even the losers can produce novel solutions that benefit everyone after the competition.

There are plenty of “games” that are fully cooperative and simply have a shared objective. Hunting big game is a classic problem, but the stakes are high so high that you need similar games/play to build up the skills. For this games you create a single shared objective and everyone is on the same team attempting to achieve it. Sometimes the single team is opposed to a single person or small group who are tasked with making the objective harder, as in a “find the mcguffin” style game where the elders hide the mcguffin. But sometimes games like this can ALSO be broken into teams for competition - orienteering competitions come to mind. Which team can hit the objective fastest? Similar to a relay race, while there are teams competing, they are not competing like on a football pitch.

It’s ableism to believe that team sports are limited only to the temporarily abled. Team sports are enjoyed by people across a WIDE spectrum of ability and disability.

Your tribalism point literally has nothing to do with playing a sport and everything to do with fandoms. Most people who have played sports know this, hence my derisive comment.

CTE happens to people who play sports where heads get knocked. What does that have to do with anything we’re talking about? What a ridiculous bullet point. At this point you’re just spraying and praying that just saying stuff will give you a win. Competitive much?

Arm wrestling is literally a competitive sport. People have been doing it for centuries, it developed rules and techniques, people train for it so they can compete, and eventually leagues have formed to recognize excellence in the sport.

Competition always exists is nothing like it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism. In the latter, it’s a problem to solve and people are so immersed in the problem they think it’s impossible. In the former it’s literally built into the hormonal reward circuits of humans and many other animals. Play is crucial and competitive play is a form of play. Foot races are competitive.

You remember being told during nursery how to excel at a given task? Do you remember being told it’s important to wash your hands before eating, or that it’s important to clear your work area before painting, or that it’s important to hold the drum stick just so in order to bang on things to make noise?

Hell, throwing the ball in from the line isn’t even much of a competitive action. I would have thought you would say “I remember in nursery they told me to keep track of the score and make sure my team was winning”, but no, your example isn’t even about competition it’s about performance, excellence, etc.

I see you’ve never played a competitive sport.

The tribalism you talk about is branding and fandoms. Competition will always exist. People will arm wrestle, people will have contests to see who can do something better than others.

Under communism we will still have sports.

Step away from the goddamned lathe, Yog

How about this one

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/america-just-quietly-admitted-cant-crush-russias-economy-bw-120125

DSA does not in any way fill the role PSL has decided to take up. Again, PSL is not a militia. It does not engage in physical confrontation and it does not encourage physical confrontation. It is not a decentralized leaderless org that is immune from disruption by the state. It is a mass movement building engine along Leninist revolutionary lines.

If you think PSL and DSA are equivalent, then your obviously poorly informed and if you’re poorly informed and also encouraging people to abandon the PSL then you’re a wrecker