Scholar

The more you judge others, the more ignorant you are of your own selfishness and evil. That's it. That's all you need to know. If you knew the depth of your own evil and selfishness, you would realize that the difference between you and Adolf Hitler is an illusion. You are fundamentally the same, all that changes is the shape of your selfishness and ignorance. The more you will judge others, the more evil you will become. This is universal. There is no escaping it. Judgement requires ignorance of your own selfishness, which is what evil is. In fact, judgement is nothing other than the ignorance of your own selfishness, it is evil itself. Your ignorance and selfishness is not that far apart from the likes of Netenyahu, Putin or Trump. It only appears to you that way because you make a big deal out of marginal differences in selfishness such that you can proclaim yourself as "good" as opposed to "evil", which is what allows you to continue to be ignorant of your own evil and therefore to continue being evil. That's exactly how all of the above function as well.

This is how modern politics works because of ease of information distribution: Individuals have values, politicians appeal to those values to get elected. The solutions politicians propose are supposed to get them elected, so the solutions attempt to fit the values of the particular electorate. But it's worse today because now you can appeal to people's values through advocating for problems that people will care about if they think it is a real problem. Trans-scare is an easy example. Virtually nobody is ever in contact with any trans person or negative effects of transitioning, yet people deeply care about it because conservatives know they can get people to care about and know they will care enough about it for them to elect them instead of progressives. So the politicians job today is not just to tell the electorate what they want to hear, it is also to tell the electorate what they should care about. And that's how lobbying works most prevalently. Corporations don't have to buy politicians, they just have to convince the public that they should care about whatever is in their interest. The oil industry did this successfully through convincing the public that the regulations against the oil industry was to take peoples freedoms away. It's just that today you don't just have corporate and political interests influencing what individuals should care about, but you also have individual actors, thanks to the ease of information distribution and monetization, who get people to care about simply because if they care about it they will listen to them more and generate profits that way. Educated voters have always been rare, the issue today is that you can easily politically activate people who should never have engage in politics simply because they are too uneducated to even know what they want themselves, so they are just swept away by various propaganda forces.

That's not true, mariupol alone might have more civilian causalities than the entire gaza conflict. The total civilian death count might be around 40.000 - 100.000 civilians. The confirmed death numbers you see do not include the regions that had the highest death tolls, namely cities that are occupied by Russia as we speak. There is also several asymmetries between the I/P conflict and U/R conflict. Most military conflicts in Ukraine occur in open fields or mostly abandoned city, while the I/P conflict has Hamas employing strategies (officially, by their own account) that maximize civilian deaths on their side. Hamas specifically does not allow civilians to use bomb shelters and have their military infrastructure integrated into civilian infrastructure. Hamas controls civilian movements and often times forced civilians to remain in conflict zones to maximize civilian death or to gain a military advantage. Given the population density, the combatant to civilian death ratio is better than in most other comparable conflicts in the region, including military campaigns by US and various western countries in which insurgents did not attempt to maximize civilian deaths on their side. If you compare them to actors of the region like Saudi Arabia or Syria, the civilian to combatant death ratio is significantly better. While Israel is engaging in war crimes and possibly ethnic cleansing campaigns, it is delusional to claim they are engaging in an attempt to eradicate the palestinian people.

Israel is not intentionally targetting civilians, whereas Russia actually is. Look up "Human Safari", russian drone operators have orders to literally hunt civilians in cities with drones. They themselves prouldy upload the footage on their social media and people cheer it on. Russia literally has been talking about exterminating Ukrainians and ukrainian identity for years now, it's all over Russian media. People regularily call for literal genocide and eradication.

By the way for those who say "Russia didn't want a NATO country bordering them, they need a buffer zone!". There already are NATO countries bordering Russia, there have been for a long time, and they are much closer to the Moscovites than Ukraine.

No it's not merely a objective fact, it's a selective application of realism. You can't just pretend that what Russia is doing is just the rational extention of it's geopolitical aims, but what Ukraine, the US, NATO are doing is not equally a rational extention of their geopolitical aims. But that's exactly what is being done, we pretend like the west has some sort of agency that goes beyond realism, and that they can be held "accountable" in a way Russia cannot be held accountable. This is bias. If you subscrube to this naive form of realism (which has been shown to be simply false empirically speaking), then everything is just the natural outcome of geopolitical aims, and everyone is just acting rationally and actually, the conflict was inevitable. And now Russia will be put out of it's misery. That's reality.

Russia might want a buffer state, but why would anyone in their right mind care about that? Russia has no entitlement to having buffer states. They are a failed empire, they are corrupt and attempt to corrupt the bufferstates we are speaking of because they threaten their political system. Therefore, the surrounding states have every right to protect themselves from Russian influence and embrace western influence. Russian oligarchs might hate that, but we aren't going to allow an authoritarian state to maintain it's "sphere of influence" just because they threaten war if we don't respect their evil wishes. If they want conflict, then we will give it to them. We contain them until they are a failed state, for the prosperity of every country that would have to be a "buffer" state to make the corrupt oligarchs in Russia feel safe. This is what real geopolitics looks like. The West has every reason to put Russia back into the stone age, and that's exactly what they should do and hopefully will do. Too bad if you can't accept real geopolitics because you have some sort of twisted moral worldview where the victim of an abuser has to remain in the relationship with their abuser because the abuser feels threatened by the idea of her finding a new boyfriend. What does that even mean a "mature way to exist", you can't let a corrupt system just proliferate itself because "multipolar world tho!". The mature thing to do is to end Russian influence, which we have the opportunity to do. We destroy them militarily, economically and politically, and the nations surrounding Russia can develop and progress rather than being held back perpetually by a corrupt oligarchy.

It's crazy how people gaslight the victims into thinking they have some sort of obligation to remain with their abuser, because the abuser feels threatened that a new boyfriend will come along to date the victim. It's Russia's own doing that countries are trying to escape it's sphere of influence. The country is absurdly corrupt, and to maintain it's corrupt system it attempts to corrupt the governments of neighbouring countries. Look what people here are arguing, including Leo: That these nations aren't allowed to reject Russian influence, and that the West isn't allowed to embrace and aid them in their modernization. And if the do reject Russian influence because of corruption and embrace the West for security and economic stability, that it is perfectly valid for the oligarchic regime to invade that country because it is just "protecting itself from western influence". The grotesqueness of this is just mind-blowing. Nobody would ever invade Russia, it's a nuclear state, Putin knows this. Russia has absolutely no valid claim of influence to it's neighbouring country, especially not given it's history and even recent imperialistic actions. All of these countries have every reason to reject Russian influence and embrace western influence. It is completely and utterly Russias fault that these countries reject it's influence. The West has a moral obligaiton to help these nations and protect them from corrupt Russian influence. Russia must be economically, militarily and culturally defeated, containment is the only rational strategy until the politicial landscape in Russia changes (which is might never, which just means we will contain them and destroy their capacity for power indefinitely). This is real-politics, not this biased excuse making for corrupt oligarchies.

The evil spirits are you, your inability to accept parts of yourself. Their evil is your evil, their maliciousness is your maliciousness. They are projections of your own egoic self. Jesus is the evil one here, as he rejects parts of himself, framing them as evil, protecting yourself from yourself. It is demonic.

Some sort of obsessive type of perceptive practice. For example, hroughout the day you focus on the nature of visuality. If you create a sufficiently obsessive mind around that, that obsession will carry over into dreams and you will naturally begin to focus on your perception in a dream, which leads to lucidity.

Donald Trump is not the problem, it's the people who elected him. This brainrot will not go away just because Trump goes away. You are lucky that Trump is so incompetent. This is setting the stage for someone truly catastrophic to take over in the next decades.

The Endgame is regime security. Whatever serves that goal will determine the actions of the regime.

It doesn't quite work the same way. To be MAGA, you can be anything: A flat earther, anti-vaxxer, anti-establishment, UFO conspiracy theorist, neo-nazi, libertarian, anti-woke-warrior, gym-bro, crypto-bro, military-bro, red-pill. I mean they just let anyone in as long as you believe in MAGA. The left is more so focused on zealotry and purity testing, meaning everyone has to align on every issue otherwise they are the outgroup. If you are not pro-palestine, you are basically not a progressive and a zionist. You don't buy into every trans issue position, you are transphobic. You don't buy into all the anti-white talking points, you are racist. The right is far more liberal in that it allows more diverse views (any trash that comes their way) as long as the central view is maintain (allegiance to Trump and MAGA), while the left will basically considered anyone a fascist who has a 1% difference in their progressive-DNA.

To most people who engaging in this subforum, I recommend that you establish a radical and clear division in your mind, between your moral judgement of actors in the world and your understanding of why things are happening in the world. This division is essential to prevent identity from distorting your understanding of the world. Engaging in politics, especially in this day and age, requires a baseline of maturity. There is one primary emotion that must be paid attention to. It should be the biggest red flag for you. Once you feel this feeling, you should look inward and recognize what is going. The emotion is "Moral Outrage". This single emotion is capable of hijacking your identity and distorting your view of reality, such that your intelligence will no longer serve to maximize your understanding of the world but instead will serve to fit your understanding of the world to whatever narrative that is tied to your moral outrage. When I say you have to make a radical division, I am saying that you have to do this to what you will perceive as an irrational degree. As soon as you detect this feeling, you must realize that your intelligence is no longer serving Truth but instead is serving your identity. You have to reject any excuse or rationel your mind may provide for as to why this feeling might be appropriate given the situation. This feeling, in and of itself, pushes you away from Truth. Even if your analysis happened to be spot on, the fact that it is tied to an identity of fear, or primtivity, itself removes you from seeing the world as it is. The way your identity gets hijacked in the 21st century attention economy is like this: The algorithm provides you with something that outrages you. Your identity begins to form around the trigger point (moral outrage being one of the most identity forming emotions that exist). The algorithm provides you with examples that threaten your newly formed identity. (for example individuals who express precisely those views that you are morally outraged by) Your identity will feel attacked and seek to defend itself, you begin expressing your outrage in one form or another. Individuals who are caught in the same feedback-loop, on the other side of the equation, will get outraged at your outrage. You fight with those people, your identity solidifies as you do (so does theirs as you attack them), you seek information that confirms your identity and outrage, you become an extention of algorithmic profit-maximization by providing others with more fuel to get outraged by. There is no truth in this endeavor. The psychological mechanisms of your identity are being hijacked, be it for profit, ideology, propaganda or just toxic runaway outrage dynamics. Understanding functions the precise opposite way. When a scientists tries to understand how and why a lion hunts his prey, he will not do so from a moralistic lense. If the scientist would get morally outraged at the lion for killing innocent animals, and begin demonizing him, how likely would he be in his endeavor to understand the lion's behavior? Imagine the scientist would then proceed to go on and spread his outrage, all the evil things he learned about the lion, to his fellow humans. Imagine he would get into debates with zebra-haters who defend the lion, about who is morally righteous, who is more corrupt, the lion or the zebra. Whatever you think the truth is, this whole approach is beyond absurd. Even if you came to conclude the correct thing from time to time, it would still be detrimental to you. Nobody is immune from this, and as these exploitative mechanisms grow in sophistication, your maturity will have to grow, lest you become a mere extention of these dynamics. Ask yourself this: How many of the things you care deeply about, that you are morally outraged by, are part of contemporary pop-ethical debates? What feelings fuel you as you engage with others or seek out information about these topics? How many people did you convince of whatever your perspective is? Yet, do you still argue with people about it? Do you feel like your view must be seen, must be expressed, because otherwise the tides of falsehood and moral corruption will take over? Do you feel deep urgency to push against a narrative that you feel morally outraged by? All of these are indicators that your identity is being hijacked. All of us will be susceptible to these dynamics to some degree, and one of the greatest tragedies of it is that they erase our agency. We become mindless drones, most likely serving some profit-maximizing algorithm, giving us the illusion we are doing something important when what we do is just contributing to the problem.

The reason why it might appear this way is because today, in US politics, stage orange has been integrated into the republican framework as blue is fading away and as green is starting to threaten some of stage orange values. They are sort of banding together to resist progress, partly because there has been to much resistance on both sides (they amplify each others identities and differences). There is also a lot of pathology in progressive subcultures due to social media. Progressive subcultures today are susceptible to peer-pressure dynamics, outrage-farming and ideological capture. Half of progressive culture today basically works like a social clique, where people prove to each other that they belong to the same group, which gives way to a lot of tribal dynamics that should have been transcended at this stage. The "right" appears more open minded to you because the lower stages have banded together to resist stage green, and that includes stage orange which is grounded in liberalism, free thought and independence. Stage green is more collectivist and conformist in that regard, especially given toxic social media dynamics.

This logic can justify anything, including slavery. If you want to be moral you should commit suicide so how can you blame someone for engaging in slavery? What you are displaying here is human supremacy thinking. It's laughable to anyone who is not as biased as you are.

How can you gulp up blatant propaganda completely uncritically like that? Iran has no significant military capacity, their danger lies in funding proxy groups that have been destabilizing the region of decades and lead to countless amounts of civilian deaths. Nobody in the region likes Iran, to Iran, Arabs are subhuman.

Precisely, it's something people miss. The reason why people are hypocritical is because they exist in an environment of higher standards. Ghenghis Khan wasn't hypocritical because he didn't have to be, nobody cared about human rights back then. But from what I understand, it was actually the case that many imperial leaders, including the Assyrians, justified their desire for world domination through the idea that they would bring prosperity and true justice to all of mankind. That seems to be a feature of imperial thinking in general.

We know Iran is enriching uranium via the IAEA. Tulsi Gabbard is a russian implant, I wouldn't really take her word on anything. Whether or not US agencies have evidence of nuclear weapon production (whatever that even means) also has little relevancy given Israel might have intel the US does not. Trump is Israel's puppet so he will listen to them. Whether they are producing nuclear weapons is also fairly mute for several reasons. In terms of building a nuclear weapon, enrichment is the most difficult task. From a purely strategy perspective, you would want to stop an enemy during the enrichment phase as it might be more difficult preventing full construction once that is achieved. But all of this is irrelevant, Israel is being rationally opportunistic, given the president that was elected (in part due to leftist brainrot who can look at world politics only through the lense of marxist oppressor-oppressee dynamics) will support them in this endeavor. Israel has systematically removed the Iranian threat (most proxies as well as the Syrian government) over the past few years and it has every incentive to complete that task right now.

We? You don't get to have any say in this my friend, you're some rando on a rando forum going on moralistic charades incapable of understanding anything about the world. Ignorance is the reason for why this is happening, you are part of it.

Why can't you guys do us the basic decency of going and arguing with Chatgpt before coming here with arguments that aren't even informed on the basic stance of the counter-side. I will copy pasta from ChatGPT, so that you at least have the most basic understanding: I just can't believe that this forum is just infested with brain-dead moralization instead of any desire to understand the world and why states or individuals act the way they do. It's like a moral-outrage circle jerk, only superficially different from spaces like twitter or youtube. You need to stop with these grand narratives and start looking at the world beyond the "america bad" lense, it's simply immature.

I don't think it needs to be illegal, regulation is probably more than sufficient. Again, we have examples of marijuana being legal in other countries which don't deal with the same problems. Regulate the amount of THC that is allowed per plant, make advertising illegal or highly regulated, force educational warnings upon the selling of marijuana. Offer support systems for drug addicts, etc etc There are many things you can do to mitigate most harms without creating negative feedback loops that encourage organized crime, unregulated substances (no control over THC content, heavy metals etc) and basically have people engage in these things in the most unhealthy way possible.

I don't know what book I'd recommend to you, but there seems to be a basic lack of grasping what geopolitics even is. The reason why the US and basically all golf states oppose Iranian nuclear weapons is because it would lead to them becoming basically immune to military opposition, in a similar fashion as Russia currently is. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia will want to have nuclear weapons too, and soon you will have all Golf nations wanting their own nukes to defend themselves from Iranian aggression. The reason why america is invested into the middle east has wider geopolitical reasons, which are important not because of direct security risks, but broader strategic reasons that extend to their global power projection. If you think these reasons are not sufficient, then you simply do not understand geopolitics and should get find some 101 on how state actors behave and why. Making empty moral appeals to hypocrisy is meaningless in geopolitics.

No, the liberal mindset is to not imprison individuals for being drug addicts. What you engage in is thought terminating. You realize Portugal does not criminalize drugs this way at all, yet they are not dealing with these problems. Neither do the Netherlands. What exactly do you think is the difference between them and US/Canadian culture? You think US/Canadian culture is more liberal than progressie european states? There is no problem with the liberal mindset, there is only a problem with short sighted stupidity and fearmongering. Don't blame low IQ, lead-brained american nonsense on liberalism or progressivism. What was achieved is that individuals who might already be marginalized are not being imprisoned in an unjustifiable way any longer. If you want to deal with the excess of drug usage, why do you appeal to outdated conservative notions rather than looking at societies that actually resolved these issues without having to deal with the negative externalities of depriving individuals of basic liberties? You have been captured by a cultural backlash that is more interested in "owning the libs" than it is in finding solutions for any problem.

This has nothing to do with "pro-liberal progressive culture", but is the natural process of liberalization and maturing of society. Every new liberty given to people will come with it's novel problems and challenges, that society generally cannot predict. The solution is simply awareness, education and support systems. One of the reason why the liberal reaction is so vehement is because the risks have been exaggerated by the other side, which tends to cause a reaction into the opposite extreme. Immaturity would be to fall back into pre-liberal attitudes and demonize these substances and their users, rather than having a rational approach to mitigating risks and harms.