Scholar

There are very few human beings self-reflective enough to recognize themselves in the perpetrators of their victimization. The reality is that Israeli's do not feel secure, and the history is too complex to be able to boil it down to a simple moralistic tale of oppressor and oppressed. Such narratives have achieved nothing in all the decades of conflict. There needs to be greater care when you condemn such individuals. Hypocrisy is part of the human condition. When we speak of ethics, it should be recognized that the entire moral conversation in society is profoundly self-centered and biased. The fact that virtually no attention is paid, by you, or anyone else here, on the fact that we torture, rape and slaughter billions of individuals every year, in every nation on this planet, for far more trivial reasons than national security, should tell you everything you need to know about human decency. Notice that ss soon as your mind might get an inkling of the fact that you are no different from the Israeli, in your degree of self-serving evil, ignorance and selfishness, you will seek to distinguish yourself from them. You will seek to find an excuse for why in fact, the Israeli is less evolved than you, that he is more childlike, self-absorbed and blind than you are. You should realize that in that moment, you commit the same sin Netanyahu commits when he oppresses the Palestinian people. Not only are you selfish and evil, you are just as blind as he is to this reality. The only solution to this can be deep compassion, for those you consider most evil and depraved. When you ask "Why does Israel act so indecently?", you should ask yourself, why do you act so indecently? Why do you turn a blind eye to what is happening? Why do you not speak up about it? Why do you contribute to it? Everything that there is to understand about the evil of the Nazi, the evil of the Israeli, the evil of the Palestinians, will be provided if you ask yourself these questions enough. Truly realize, why it is impossible to expect from you, Leo Gura, basic human decency.

This is precisely true. That which is repressed must be denied in oneself. And by denying it, one gives that part of oneself power to influence on from the shadows. It's a profoundly simple psychological reality, yet it's impact is utterly neglected by contemporary society. The more you condemn others for immorality, the more incapable you will be of recognizing your own immorality, because the cost of recognition become higher. The one who is without sin shall cast the first stone. Recognizing our imperfections is the first step to freeing ourselves from it's control. This is why the contemporary cultural manifestation of stage green can be so toxic, because of how profoundly blind to it's own evil it can be when it acts from a position of judgment and peer influence. The greatest insight should be that oneself is deeply flawed. The reason why you have to feel true compassion even towards your enemy, towards those you consider evil, is because it will be the first step to understanding them and their imperfection. And if you understand their imperfection, and recognize it as such, you will be able to recognize it in yourself in equal, sometimes even greater, measure.

This will not work fundamentally, because like you describe yourself the incentives do not align. None of these individuals had a positive impact, because the system from which they operate does not appeal to reasonable and developed individuals, and it actively decivilizes individuals. You are in this way as naive as you accuse the individuals in the video of being. If you are going to play this game (making it acceptable to engage in), it is not you, the reasonable and developed individuals, who are going to be able to exploit this dynamic to "win the game", but rather it will be the most common denominator of unconscious and primitive behavior. What is and isn't on the line is completely unknowable. You think the world is on the line, but in the end none of what you say is actually provably a problem. That a few species die here and there? Who cares? Planetary boundaries? So what, we can adapt. AI superintelligence? There is literally no evidence that this will be a thing in the next century. Yet you seem to not even mention actual systemic issues that make it virtually impossible to resolve all the problems mentioned above, namely the epistemic breakdown that has lead to the very delusional views that you hold as well. You don't notice that problem because it does not sound as fancy, but it is far more relevant because it renders solutions to all of the problems above virtually meaningless, given they cannot be intregrated into reality.

I don't think there are relevant alternatives to paypal given that most alternatives are not integrated into the respective sites that require such payment methods.

The solution is we need to not have a monopoly on every single online media aspect, including online banking. It's simply not good. We need to have various versions of twitter, paypal, youtube and so forth.

There is an irony in which, sometimes, if you are too weak and nice to an individual, you harm them by inviting their instincts to exploit your weakness. On a political scale we can see this with Russia and the West. Russia assume the West grew so weak and pacifist that they would not be willing to fight wars any longer. With a less developed individual, you get the same. If you show them weakness, civility and so forth, it is an opportunity for them to establish their dominance, as you said. There is a reason why the mafia, and many drug cartel leaders, are so religious. Stage blue is basically the solution to the power hungry egoism that they are engaging in, and that brings so many problems for them. From a spiral dynamics perspective, if you lack a solid stage blue foundation in your society, then how exactly is stage red supposed to evolve up the spiral? Stage red only respects power. So, a more developed society can struggle more with adopting individuals with certain development. Stage green has significant limitations in this, the solution to which is stage yellow.

Do you think sometimes feelings of guilt could help someone? Can you see how this statement, if applied the way you did, could be applied to things you wouldn't deem acceptable?

Purple, step outside of the box right now. Look at your own post, and think about why some of the things you wrote here might have deep flaws in them, that you on further reflection might not believe in. Can you spot something?

I am a person who is very much driven by purpose and meaning, making an impact in the world. Doing something that is lasting, that matters. This central to my life. The problem is that the realization of impermanence, beyond a mere intectual realization, is pulling the rug from underneath that foundational pillar. The realization that death will come, and that all things I relate to, I connect to, I love and cherish, I create and work on, all of them will dissolve, dissipate. Life is about connection, love. But this love and connection creates attachment. But all of this will be lost, to such a degree that one day I will even lose myself. All the memories I have will be gone, and I will never again experience them. My friends and family, my art and knowledge, it will simply no longer be. How have you guys truly accepted this? And have you accepted it in the first place? Have you been truly confronted with impermanence, through death and loss of that which you are most connected to?

What does Israel have to do with any of this? No I don't refuse to accept the CIA backed a coup, that never happened.

This is not an honest framing. The "creeping eastward", firstly is exaggerated, secondly it is in response to Russias invasions of sovereign countries. You can't just ignore the reason why NATO acts the way it does. And what you say makes no sense. The US has the capacity to destroy Russia with ease, they don't need to station anything in Ukraine. Nuclear weapons are a thing, what do you think would happen as soon as someone attacked Russian cities? It would end in mutual destruction. The reason why the Cuban Missle crisis was such a big deal was because it happened during the cold war, in a completely different historical context. Today the US, nor Russia, have no need to station nuclear weapons so close to the border of their enemies. The reason why Russia invaded Ukraine is because it was losing it's influence over that country. And it should have lost influence given it was coercive. You can't complain someone will team up with the other side, when the other side will offer them economic prosperity and independence.

Sure, america did many bad things. But it doesn't make sense to be crying about america's past atrocities when Russia right now is invading another country. They are hunting civilians for fun with drones, and happily posting these videos on social media. You can't compare the americans to the russians. Look, in my view every country engages in nazi-equivalent holocausts. What am I to tell you? Yes, humans are depraved, barbaric monsters. But in this instance, we have a sovereign people who wants to be free from russian corruption, so their children can grow up not in a country without hope and perspective, but in a country which offers them prosperity and a future. In this case, the conflict is fairly black and white. Independent of what the US was doing to position itself well, or exploit the situation, that doesn't change the clear perpetrator-victim dynamic here. Ukraine deserves support, and Russia must be defeated if possible.

Yeah, sadly we will have to wait until they die from old age before this gets better. That's the hope at least.

The problem with stage green today is that it is mutating, thanks to social media, into a collectivist, almost stage blue perversion of itself. The most judgemental, hypocrtical and witchhunty people nowadays are stage green, which is very disappointing. Stage green was supposed to transcend things like peer pressure and normalcy, but it is attempting to actually enforce such things. It lacks creativity, looseness, compassion. Deviants are demonized. It's sad, I think Spiral dynamics predictions no longer hold because of what social media does to individuals.

Again, I want to stress that this is unacceptable. Everything in our society is based on norms we abide by. If people stop believing in civility, then civility will cease to exist. And don't think you are going to create some sort of socialist utopia from the ashes of capitalism. What you'll get will be worse than feudalism.

There is always a vying for power, and thankfully, in the 21st century most of that happens through non-militaristic means. People don't realize this, but that is progress. We don't want to go back to a time where countries steal land from each other through military force. That is something that as a world community we should deem unacceptable and punish harshly, even if countries still engage in self-interested coercive ways of manipulating the world. Instead, people here seem to justify this regression by pointing to some sort of hypocrisy in the present. You can argue that the US shouldn't engage in various ways of coercion it does, but using that argument to excuse away the violations Russia engages in is inappropriate and whataboutism. It's just the America-Bad culture. It's the deep self-hatred western societies have engrained in themselves through remnants of self-hating Christian ethics, exploited by various propaganda apparatuses.

But this is not true. Other sovereign nations being worried about Russian hostility, after they experience decades of abuse from the USSR, have the right to invite anyone to their territory including the americans. If Russia doesn't like it, they need to build better relationships with their neighbours instead of invading them. Of course the US will act in it's geopolitical interest, but all of it was justified given that Russia has been invading and attacking nations even after the soviet union fell. If China were to establish trade relations with Mexico, and in Mexico you had corrupt US oligrarchs filling their pockets in favor of a corrupt US regime that keeps the mexican people poor, then of course I would criticize the US for invading Mexico, even if China was playing around in it's backyard.

The logic of this is like, an abused girlfriend cheats on her abusers with another guy, and once the girlfriend breaks up with the abuser, he uses that as a justification to rape her. And everyone nods "Yes, clearly this is the abusers girlfriend, he has all the right to rape her, it is none of the guys business to protect his new girlfriend from her ex! In fact, he is the one who provoked the rape by making the girl cheat on the abuser! His evil non-abusing influence brainwashed the girlfriend into wanting to break up with her abuser, horrific!"

This is a profoundly naive and silly view. The entire world should be interested in upholding the standards of national soveignty. The only reason why nations don't go into wars over territory in this day and age is because we as a world community have decided it is unacceptable. If you no longer enforce this norm, it will cease to be a norm. By your logic, Hitler should have simply been allowed to invade whoever he wants, it wasn't the buisness of the US to get involved. What a silly and myopic view of politics. The fact that Ukraine aligns with western values, and that this is in the interest of the US and NATO in general, they should help Ukraine against this Russian invasion. The genocide alone is a valid Casus Belli against Russia.

CIA didn't orchestrate shit. Stop dismiss the will of the proletariat you capitalist enabler! I don't think this makes sense. The reason why nations join Nato is not because they are forced to, but because the benefit from it. Past soviet slave-states wanted to join NATO because they knew Russia could at any point have the desire to enslave them once again. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If Russia wanted to maintain it's sphere of influence, it should have offered the eastern block a better alternative to the US, rather than using KGB to inflitrate their political systems so they can use dismiss the will of the people in favor of corrupt oligrarch business. The people have chosen, they want democracy, they want prosperity. They don't want corrupt russian politics in their country. Everything else is utterly irrelevant.

No it's not at all as simply as that, this is an absurdly bias and simplistic viewpoint. You are not a systemic thinker whatsoever, you just like to be controversial by playing one-sided moral relativism.

It makes no sense to cooperate with a nation that invades other countries. The whole reason why nations wanted to join NATO is because they wanted self-determination. Putin, as his first act in office, invaded another country and genocided it's people until they submitted to his rule. That's what happens to nations that want to be independent of the corrupt influence of the russian imperialist dictatorship. It's gaslighting. Russia keeps invading soveirgn nations, the nations react in fear and seek western assistance, which is then used as a reason to further invade these countries. Nobody has ever invaded or attacked Russia. It doesn't make any sense because nobody cares to rule over moscovite barbarians. They can have their empty, worthless land all to themselves.

I agree, that is why we must support Ukraine and destroy the Russian empire, with guns.

Given that Kiev is the founder of "Russian" culture and society, maybe Ukraine should invade Russia to get it's vassal in order? Why exactly is it that Ukraine belongs to Russia, and not the other way around?

Everyone understands this perspective. The point is, it is imperialist. And of course western nations, and the whole world, ought to fight for the sovereignty of nations. This relativism you engage in is irrelevant to the discussion.