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You have to understand your fallacies, namely hypocrisy and double standards for what you focus on or advocate. It’s bad enough you do it in your own thinking,
by EGreg 4y ago
You have to understand your fallacies, namely hypocrisy and double standards for what you focus on or advocate. It’s bad enough you do it in your own thinking, but expecting others to be swayed by, say, guilt-tripping them based on total hypocrisy, should not work with rational or fair-minded people. It’s like a guy who’s been beating kids up and then one time he’s punched and he implores everyone to see the injustice and says they’re terrible people if they support it.
However, that analogy is unfair, because YOU didn’t invade Iraq. And this is the core of many of your disagreements with libertarians like me. The other fallacy you commit is a category error of conflating individuals, countries and their governments, when applying moral reasoning, which I go into below.
Allow me to illustrate it with direct questions, that I expect you to actually answwr. Is there any point at which you’d readily admit funneling MORE weapons into Ukraine is harmful to its civilians, since they all explode in Ukraine and according to the UN investigations they are the #1 source of civilian casualties? In Afghanistan, one MILLION civilian casualties was the price for USSR withdrawing, as US and Saudi fought “to the last Afghan”. Ask yourself whether you’d just as readily support a million of YOUR countrymen and families being killed for a flag. Do a time lapse on youtube of European flags and see how quickly they change — is it moral to volunteer other people’s families to die for a political outcome you yourself arent willing to have your family killed for?
Whataboutism isn’t a fallacy. To see this, answer my direct question: how can one point out hypocrisy and flaming double standards, no matter how serious, without engaging in “whataboutism”?
You are also wrong that I don’t advocate for more peace and cooperation. I have been screaming from the rooftops what needs to happen, for years. I even wrote some of it in a sibling comment. The difference is that I advocate solutions consistently and everywhere. And not just hypocritical one sided solutions.
The victims here are the Ukrainian people. When I criticize politicians for not doing their job (of preventing pandemics or wars) you only think I am engaging in victim blaminng because you have a very widespread “statist” mentality. You identify Zelensky’s government and Arestovich with Ukrainian civilians. You identify Putin with Russia. And so on.
You speak of countries as if they are people, when in fact they are composed of many PEOPLE, who think very differently, and who are pushed around by coercive forces and bullied into what to think, what to say and who to fight.
But the reality is that the Ukrainian civilians do not want this war and were not ready for it as much as Arestovich was, just as US Americans were not as ready for the pandemic-related market crash as members of Congress (greatest traders ever, amirite?) And the US public did not want to invade Iraq and the Russian public did not want to invade Ukraine, but the mass media and social media gradually radicalized them just as democrats vs republicans do here. The politicians could have allowed trade with BOTH Russia and EU, implemented something like Minsk II, NATI members could have heard Russia’s red lines and security concerns and taken them seriously, Zelensky’s government could have met with the separatists and taken them seriously, Erdogan could have met with the PKK instead of threatening to invade Syria as he does now. The CCP could take the concerns of Tibetans or Falun Dafa or Hong Kong residents seriously, etc.
The reason these normal statements that most regular people agree with, are considered unrealistic and laughable, is EXACTLY because politicians and imperialists are given a free pass when they escalate to wars where civilians pay the price. It is like crypto investors shrugging when they get rekt in rugpulls. This is the 21st century and we can do better. But we won’t as long as they have us at each other’s throats, talking past each other and engaging in total hypocrisy rather than asking our own government and industry to do better.
I have advocated actual solutions for years… go back on https://magarshak.com/blog https://magarshak.com/blog and read since 2014 when I was writing about Gaza and Ukraine.
But I don’t just write about it. I build the solutions, which are by the people and not just for the people: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf
I have put more effort and invested more of my work life than most people in solving these problems bottom-up instead of trying to “change the system” by being a single voice in a top-down statist environment everyone is used to . So you could not be more wrong that “it does not advocate for world peace”.
The sooner you understand that we have to hold the system and politicians to account instead of blaming individuals for not recycling or getting obese or engaging in whataboutism, the sooner YOU can make real change. Like Steve Jobs and Mark Z and many other tech pioneers and CEOs have done. They do more to improve the world and communication than any politicians do. But even more good is done by founders of open source projects, like Linus Torvalds with Linux, Igor Sysoev with NGinX, the teams behind MySQL and Postgres and Jimmy Wales founding Wikipedia etc.
I don’t care if I become a celebrity, I care about getting real solutions adopted and building tech that lets people on the ground organize positive things to collaborate instead of being held captive by a system of statist politicians and media.
- eveningcoffee 4y agoJust admit that you hate America and by proxy you hate Ukrainians. You are not a libertarian. So is not your idol Chomsky. You are just an uninformed person who does not have any idea of the actual situation. You have absolutely no idea against what Ukrainians must stand. If you paid just a little bit of attention, you would advocate for sending more weapons and training such that Ukrainians could push Russian invasion out of Ukraine completely such that civilian suffering could end and would not lead to complete genocide. Maxim Katz has made nice video (he includes English subtitles in case you actually do not speak Russian). I linked to the most important part of it for you. Watch this, this section is only about 3 minutes long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaRUepc-7VQ&t=443s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaRUepc-7VQ&t=443s Now again, should Ukraine surrender to Russia? If you were libertarian, you would not advocate surrender to the most dangerous Fascist regimes of current time. But for some reason you do. Do you have an explanation for this? Again you have chosen the victim blaming with your Afghanistan example and somehow again favorable toward Russia. Somehow Russian military pretense that happened after they assassinated last elected Afghanistan president it is not a problem. Somehow Russian Army (lets be honest here, decorating it with words like Soviet does not make it less what it is, Russian army) killing civilians is not a problem. The problem is resistance to the killing. Somehow again everybody must surrender to Russia. I think you are indeed fairly consistent: US bad, Russia good, just like Chomsky. This is also the core idea of whataboutism: US bad, Russia good. Always, no mater what. It is not: US bad, Russia bad, no. I do not think that you have right to make decisions for the Ukrainian people. You are not the one. You do not know what they want. I admit that, I actually do not know what they really want. Perhaps they all want to die so it would be already over. Who knows? What you are instead doing is assuming that what people want is the opposite to Zelensky and Arestovych. Somehow people are tricked by them. Does it sound familiar? Does it sound exactly what Russia is claiming? I think it does. Why do you think Zelensky or Arestovych wanted war? It looks to me that for you preparations for the inevitable is wanting it. If you prepare for war, it must mean that you want it. Si vis pacem, para bellum has no meaning to you, I guess. The truth is, this war would be already long time over had Ukraine not prepared for the war. But it had. It must be incredibly inconvenient for the Russia supporters. Why did Ukraine just not lose? The war would be over, Russia would have just killed not much more than few 100k and not deported more than few 1000k, but the life would have gone on, the business would have gone on. With Russia of course, because Ukraine does not exist, it is a fake country.