Kyiv has said it will use the munitions, banned in more than 100 countries, to dislodge concentrations of enemy soldiers when trying to take back its own territory. Putin told state TV Moscow would respond in kind if necessary.
I think this is trying to ride off the fearmongering behind headlines like “the US is supplying illegal munitions to Ukraine!!!1!!”. These weapons have not been banned by the US, Ukraine, or Russia. This is posturing. Don’t fall for it.
I see a glaring flaw in this analysis, that being companies care far more about cheap labor costs. Supply lines are extended massively because of cost cutting measures of moving overseas for cheap labor. If supply lines are shortened and distributed, they become more durable in times of crisis. The Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS act are ok bills, but both fail to take profit motive into account. It almost feels like this person would rather not have either bill at all instead of giving criticism for the bills that account for ‘profit only’ nature of companies under our current economic system. That’s despite the huge amount of benefits for the people that have come from them like cheaper insulin.
French authorities confirmed that a protest against police violence set to take place in Paris on Saturday could not go ahead due to police shortages. NGOs say the ban signals a “more and more repressive” approach from authorities.
I’m working on family planning with my partner, and we want to have children within the next couple years. While I’m definitely an anarchist, I’m not a ‘studied’ anarchist and don’t know as much as I’d like about the political theory. I watched a video from Andrewism on the topic, which made me think about this...
Remember Longcat? I remember Longcat. Screw whatever we’re supposed to be talking about, I want to talk about Longcat. Memes were simpler back then, in 2006. They stood for something. And that something was nothing. Memes just were. “Longcat is long.” An undeniably true, self-reflexive statement. Water is wet, fire is hot, Longcat is long. Memes were floating signifiers without signifieds, meaningful in their meaninglessness. Nobody made memes, they just arose through spontaneous generation; Athena being birthed, fully formed, from her own skull.
You could talk about them around the proverbial water cooler, taking comfort in their absurdity: “Hey, Johnston, have you seen the picture of that cat? They call it Longcat because it’s long!”
“Ha ha, sounds like good fun, Stevenson! That reminds me, I need to show you this webpage I found the other day; it contains numerous animated dancing hamsters. It’s called — you’ll never believe this — hamsterdance!” And then Johnston and Stevenson went on to have a wonderful friendship based on the comfortable banality of self-evident digitized animals.
But then 2007 came, and along with it came I Can Has, and everything was forever ruined. It was hubris, people. We did it to ourselves. The minute we added written language beyond the reflexive, it all went to hell. Suddenly memes had an excess of information to be parsed. It wasn’t just a picture of a cat, perhaps with a simple description appended to it; now the cat spoke to us via a written caption on the picture itself. It referred to an item of food that existed in our world but not in the world of the meme, rupturing the boundary between the two. The cat wanted something. Which forced us to recognize that what it wanted was us, was our attention. WE are the cheezburger, and we always were. But by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were slaves to the very memes that we had created. We toiled to earn the privilege of being distracted by them. They fiddled while Rome burned, and we threw ourselves into the fire so that we might listen to the music. The memes had us. Or, rather, they could has us.
And it just got worse from there. Soon the cats had invisible bicycles and played keyboards. They gained complex identities, and so we hollowed out our own identities to accommodate them. We prayed to return to the simple days when we would admire a cat for its exceptional length alone, the days when the cat itself was the meme and not merely a vehicle for the complex memetic text. And the fact that this text was so sparse, informal, and broken ironically made it even more demanding. The intentional grammatical and syntactical flaws drew attention to themselves, making the meme even more about the captioning words and less about the pictures. Words, words, words. Wurds werds wordz. Stumbling through a crooked, dead-end hallway of a mangled clause describing a simple feline sentiment was a torture that we inflicted on ourselves daily. Let’s not forget where the word “caption” itself comes from: capio, Latin for both “I understand” and “I capture.” We thought that by captioning the memes, we were understanding them. Instead, our captions allowed them to capture us. The memes that had once been a cure for our cultural ills were now the illness itself.
It goes right back to the Phaedrus, really. Think about it. Back in the innocent days of 2006, we naïvely thought that the grapheme had subjugated the phoneme, that the belief in the primacy of the spoken word was an ancient and backwards folly on par with burning witches or practicing phrenology or thinking that Smash Mouth was good. Freakin’ Smash Mouth. But we were wrong. About the phoneme, I mean. Theuth came to us again, this time in the guise of a grinning grey cat. The cat hungered, and so did Theuth. He offered us an updated choice, and we greedily took it, oblivious to the consequences. To borrow the parlance of an ex-contemporary meme, he baked us a pharmakon, and we eated it.
Pharmakon, φάρμακον, the Greek word that means both “poison” and “cure,” but, because of the limitations of the English language, can only be translated one way or the other depending on the context and the translator’s whims. No possible translation can capture the full implications of a Greek text including this word. In the Phaedrus, writing is the pharmakon that the trickster god Theuth offers, the toxin and remedy in one. With writing, man will no longer forget; but he will also no longer think. A double-edged (s)word, if you will. But the new iteration of the pharmakon is the meme. Specifically, the post-I-Can-Has memescape of 2007 onward. And it was the language that did it, you see. The addition of written language twisted the remedy into a poison, flipped the pharmakon on its invisible axis.
In retrospect, it was in front of our eyes all along. Meme. The noxious word was given to us by who else but those wily ancient Greeks themselves. μίμημα, or mīmēma. Defined as an imitation, a copy. The exact thing Plato warned us against in the Republic. Remember? The simulacrum that is two steps removed from the perfection of the original by the process of — note the root of the word — mimesis. The Platonic ideal of an object is the source: the father, the sun, the ghostly whole. The corporeal manifestation of the object is one step removed from perfection. The image of the object (be it in letters or in pigments) is two steps removed. The author is inferior to the craftsman is inferior to God.
But we’ll go farther than Plato. Longcat, a photograph, is a textbook example of a second-degree mimesis. (We might promote it to the third degree since the image on the internet is a digital copy of the original photograph of the physical cat which is itself a copy of Platonic ideal of a cat - a Godcat, if you will - but this line of thought doesn’t change anything in the argument.) The text-supplemented meme, on the other hand, the captioned cat, is at an infinite remove from the Godcat, the ultimate mimesis, copying the copy of itself eternally, the written language and the image echoing off each other, until it finally loops back around to the truth by virtue of being so far from it. It becomes its own truth, the fidelity of the eternal copy. It becomes a God.
Writing itself is the archetypical pharmakon and the archetypical copy, if you’ll come back with me to the Phaedrus (if we ever really left it). Speech is the real deal, Socrates says, with a smug little wink to his (written) dialogic buddy. Speech is alive, it can defend itself, it can adapt and change. Writing is its bastard son, the mimic, the dead, rigid simulacrum. Writing is a copy, a mīmēma, of truth in speech. To return to our analogous issue: the image of the cheezburger cat, the copy of the picture-copy-copy, is so much closer to the original Platonic ideal than the written language that accompanies it. (“Pharmakon” can also mean “paint.” Think about it, man. Just think about it.) The image is still fake, but it’s the caption on the cat that is the downfall of the republic, the real fakeness, which is both realer and faker than whatever original it is that it represents.
Men and gods abhor the lie, Plato says in sections 382 a and b of the Republic:
[‘Don’t you know,’ said I, ‘that the veritable lie, if the expression is permissible, is a thing that all gods and men abhor?’
‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘This,’ said I, ‘that falsehood in the most vital part of themselves, and about their most vital concerns, is something that no one willingly accepts, but it is there above all that everyone fears it.’]”
Man’s worst fear is that he will hold existential falsehood within himself. And the verbal lies that he tells are a copy of this feared dishonesty in the soul. Plato goes on to elaborate: “the falsehood in words is a copy of the affection in the soul, an after-rising image of it and not an altogether unmixed falsehood.” A copy of man’s false internal copy of truth. And what word does Plato use for “copy” in this sentence? That’s effing right, μίμημα. Mīmēma. Mimesis. Meme. The new meme is a lie, manifested in (written) words, that reflects the lack of truth, the emptiness, within the very soul of a human. The meme is now not only an inferior copy, it is a deceptive copy.
But just wait, it gets better. Plato continues in the very next section of the Republic, 382 c. Sometimes, he says, the lie, the meme, is appropriate, even moral. It is not abhorrent to lie to your enemy, or to your friend in order to keep him from harm. “Does it [the lie] not then become useful to avert the evil—as a medicine?
I’m firmly on the side of “water is not wet” in this debate, but it’s a question that I was asked while I was high and have no answer to it. Water cannot itself be wet because you can’t get water on water. However, what is a fish in a lake? It can’t be wet until it’s taken out of the water, but it’s not dry...
I’ve never seen a sponge sink on its own, so in some sense they will always either wet or dry when not in use. If something holds a sponge under water, it becomes immersed and gains this mysterious new property
Water itself cannot be wet, because wetness is a property applied to something that has gotten water on it. Water can neither be wet or dry, because those properties require the presence (or lack thereof) of water on something that itself is not water. When swimming, you don’t feel wet until you’re no longer in the water. That’s because there is an equal amount of water to skin on your body; (thanks to others for helping me) you’re immersed in water. Describing water as wet is like describing oil as “covered in oil”.
I appreciate your good faith approach. I can see how what I’m saying could be seen that way, and I wish more people would approach these conversations the way you did instead of how the other folks below have so they could get the perspective.
To use good guy bad guy terms, Russia is the bad guy in this war. The good guys are the Ukrainians. However, that doesn’t mean NATO supplying the good guys also makes them the good guys; it’s a convergence of interests. I’m trying to get people to stop seeing Russia as the continuation of the USSR, because they aren’t. The USSR no longer exists, and the Russian Federation is a different country with a different economy and different interests. Trying to conflate them is like apples and oranges: it can be done, but it’s not helpful.
I didn’t shift anything. I want to know what military aggression they’re talking about, because otherwise it just comes off as the ethnocentric and uninformed stereotype of “slavs are violent”.
Pedantry over the use of the word “the” is the most bullshit, liberal shit I think I’ve seen all week. Are you being serious? We need to start referring to this country as United States because it doesn’t belong to anyone, right? Should we ditch that old method of referring to the Puerto Rico which implied it was independent? What use is the word ‘the’ if English articles are policed in the manner you’re trying to do?
Oh got it, you aren’t a serious person. That’s good to know. I have a bachelor’s degree in computer science, but whatever. Why don’t you enlighten me then?
Took a while for someone to finally try and answer this.
It’s because Gorbachev plotted with a small group of people to undermine the Soviet communist party and “reform” it into a more liberal nation to appease the west. What he failed to realise was that the Soviet communist party was the underpinning of the entire USSR (an optional union), as well as the source of his authority as an elected leader. This intentional shifting of power from “we are party for the politicians” to “we are the party that controls institutions” (as well as external pressure, unorthodox party members as elected officials, and historical implications) weakened the Soviet party and the USSR to the point where unity broke down into national/ethnic tribalism with far right reactionaries destabilizing things even more. When the USSR collapsed in political suicide, Yeltsin was President of the Russian SFSR, was more than eager to seize power from Gorbachev, and was one of three that plotted to illegally dissolve the USSR. The moment the USSR collapsed, Gorbachev was out of power. The US didn’t have to do anything to get the same results as the Mujahideen, but they had a reactionary in power that was lukewarm to the west; the results were the same. That is why they recognized the Russian Federation so quickly.
The Russian SFSR and the Russian Federation are distinct countries with different economies and different interests. In no way, shape, or form are they the same. The only thing in common is the geographic region. You hurt your credibility by claiming otherwise.
I will not deny that Russia is an aggressive nation, and I was not aware of some of those things, like the war of aggression with Georgia. Thank you for sharing some examples. Also, holy shit Putin is more scum than I thought. However, these acts of aggression by Russia don’t appear to me as reasons for NATO to exist beyond the collapse of the USSR.
How are these acts of aggression towards the west in a manner that justifies the continued existence of NATO?
Those are all excellent questions, and unfortunately I don’t know all the answers. I’ll try to answer what I can despite their loaded nature, and say when I don’t know.
There are a few different commonalities; they generally identify as slavs (with exceptions, especially in the middle east like Kazakhstan), most former USSR states are member states of the CIS, almost all nations have people within them that identify as ethnic Russian, and naturally most share borders with Russia.
That’s a good point, most former Soviet states don’t have a modernized military and likely wouldn’t be capable of withstanding a Russian invasion, however I think it’s worth pointing out that the majority of the West also thought Ukraine would fall during the initial invasion. Generally, I don’t think I understand your point here and I’m genuinely interested in the reasons you brought this up.
Honestly, I have no idea why the northern Slavic nations haven’t seen more aggression from Russia. It’s possible that the Kremlin doesn’t see them as valuable, though they have seen some disinformation campaigns and political propaganda via proximity to Russia and Belarus.
I don’t think NATO has been a deterrent, but it’s possible that I’m wrong. I think it’s worth pointing out that an excuse for Russia invading Ukraine was explicitly NATO trying to expand into Ukraine. They didn’t have much interest in doing so either, until after the initial invasion saw Ukraine still standing.
Putin says Russia has 'sufficient stockpile' of cluster bombs and will use them if necessary (www.reuters.com)
Kyiv has said it will use the munitions, banned in more than 100 countries, to dislodge concentrations of enemy soldiers when trying to take back its own territory. Putin told state TV Moscow would respond in kind if necessary.
Adam Posen: ‘Russia and North Korea worked hard to be self-sufficient, it has not turned out well for them’ (archive.is)
French authorities ban protest against police violence in Paris (www.france24.com)
French authorities confirmed that a protest against police violence set to take place in Paris on Saturday could not go ahead due to police shortages. NGOs say the ban signals a “more and more repressive” approach from authorities.
Wabtec workers, day 23 on strike against a company that refuses to cover workers' basic needs (Photo credit: "UE Members 506" FB) (lemmy.world)
Support the workers! This will help a lot:...
Meet Amora (lemmy.world)
How to raise children without hierarchy
I’m working on family planning with my partner, and we want to have children within the next couple years. While I’m definitely an anarchist, I’m not a ‘studied’ anarchist and don’t know as much as I’d like about the political theory. I watched a video from Andrewism on the topic, which made me think about this...
Does anyone remember this long fella? (i.imgur.com)
Reddit trying to flex (i.imgur.com)
Breathing rule (lemmy.world)
Potato Jesus
If wetness is the property of having water on something, what is the property of something in water?
I’m firmly on the side of “water is not wet” in this debate, but it’s a question that I was asked while I was high and have no answer to it. Water cannot itself be wet because you can’t get water on water. However, what is a fish in a lake? It can’t be wet until it’s taken out of the water, but it’s not dry...
Longcat is loooooong (lemmy.world)
And don’t you forget it
Let's all agree this is the Jesus we need in our fictional narratives (lemmy.world)
Michael Parenti - Empire and neo-imperialism (speech) (www.youtube.com)
Gaetz Tells Bolling Russia Would Be Better NATO Member Than Ukraine: ‘Probably Provides More Benefit Long-Term’ (www.mediaite.com)