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Historic Context Of The Referenda In Ukraine
Voting for membership in the Russian Federation has started in four oblast of Ukraine:
Russian proxy officials in four regions — Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, and Kherson and Zaporizka in the south — earlier this week announced plans to hold referendums over four days beginning on Friday. Russia controls nearly all of two of the four regions, Luhansk and Kherson, but only a fraction of the other two, Zaporizka and Donetsk.
Ukrainian officials have dismissed the voting as grotesque theater — staging polls in cities laid to waste by Russian forces and abandoned by most residents.
President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked Ukraine’s allies for their steadfast support and said “the farce” of “sham referenda” would do nothing to change his nation’s fight to drive Russia from Ukraine.
The Ukrainian regime has resorted to pure terrorism to prevent the votes from happening:
Ukrainian partisans, sometimes working with special operations forces, have blown up warehouses holding ballots and buildings where Russian proxy officials preparing for the vote held meetings. Ukrainian officials have acknowledged that they are engaged in a campaign to assassinate key Russian administration officials; more than a dozen have been blown up, shot and poisoned, according to Ukrainian and Russian officials.
Such behavior by the Zelenski regime against its still Ukrainian compatriots will only encourage the people in the four oblast to vote for an alignment with Russia.
The propaganda in the 'west' will declare that the vote is irregular and that the results, likely to be pro-Russian, will be fake.
But a view on historic election outcomes since Ukrainian independence in 1991 show clear geographic preferences in east and south Ukraine for pro-Russian policies:
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The graphic above is from research published by the Eurasian Research Institute of the International Hoca Ahmet Yesevi Turkish-Kazakh University. Its author writes:
As we can see, the have always been a clear-cut geographical split in the way the regions of Ukraine vote for particular candidates. The East and West division or also referred as Southeast and Northwest division was always present throughout the electoral history of the independent Ukraine. It is conventionally believed that the eastern part of Ukraine is more influenced by Russia politically, economically and culturally. Therefore, the presidential candidates proposing more pro-Russian agenda usually gain much more political support in eastern regions than in other parts of Ukraine. On the other hand, the western part of the country has traditionally been more pro-European with strong reference to traditional core Ukrainian ethnic traditions and values. Consequently, presidential candidates with pro-European political agenda and traditional Ukrainian appeal usually had strong support in western regions of the country. It is interesting to note that preferences of the electorate were not related to the geographical origin or background of the presidential candidates and any candidate could easily become popular in the east as well as in the west. Moreover, the same candidate could be both pro-eastern and pro-western in different periods of time as did Leonid Kuchma in 1994 and 1999, who is the only Ukrainian president to serve two consecutive terms from 1994 to 2005.
The division is consistent with ethnic and linguistic differences between those parts of Ukraine.
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In 2014, after the violent fascist coup in Kiev, one of the first laws implemented by the new government removed the Russian language from official use. Instead of overcoming the differences between its people it only sealed the predominant split in Ukraine.
The election promise of the current Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelenski to make peace with the Russia aligned rebellious Donbas region by adhering to the Minsk 2 agreements was rewarded with a large share of southeastern votes for his presidency. However, after having been threatened with death by fascists, Zelenski has made a 180 degree turn and has since posed as Ukrainian nationalist. In consequence he has lost all support in southeastern Ukraine.
The southeastern parts of today's Ukraine have for centuries been part of the central Russian empire. They were only attached to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine under Lenin's rule in 1922 and, in the case of Crimea, in 1954 under Nikita Khrushchev who himself had grown up in the Donbas region.
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A likely high turnout and majority vote for membership in the Russian Federation will only correct the historic misalignment created by those illogical transfers.
@429 aristodemos
Well-reasoned and articulate.
Believe me when I have examined myself to try to see if I have been just a useful tool of Jewish-Babylonian-Khazarians with my Christianity. I understand that Christianity, on its face, is a nice way to be. Consequently, in its Christendom, vile exploiters can rise to the top as we see currently with the Khazarian-globalists.
What better way to keep the goy down by giving them a religion, right? Best, then, to turn back to the noble-pagan side of things with its darwinian-morality.
But if the Pagan way of life was so naturally strong and unmoving, why did it fall to Christianity? Certainly, the emperor could not have forced the entire population of the west to bend the knee to Christ or risk death! Certainly, there would have been pockets of ancient customs and traditions that would survive, just as the Khazarians have managed to survive being thrown out of countries for millenia and persecuted for pulling one over on the economic system de jour.
I do not need to retrace the origins of thought around the Logos with the ancient Greeks through modern Christianity, but I will offer the writings and thought of Soren Kierkegaard, whose breadth and scope of his seminal works this small blog post would prove to be a drop of water into an ocean of meaning and edifying practice by summarizing it.
If I could recommend an offering from him, however, I would say give “Fear and Trembling” a go. The Sacrifice of Isaac shows why Abraham is our Father in faith, and it is not due to blind or dumb subservience to God. The totality of ethical life, of marriage, family, being a pillar of the community, is harnessed and then sublated by the action of the Knight of Faith. It is the ultimate betrayal of the other by obeying the Other. The communion with the Word, with the Logos, requires a betrayal, as Kierkegaard laid out, and how Derrida continued in his thought as our modern Kierkegaardian.
But Abraham before this action WAS a pillar, was a good man, who did not live a life of immediacy. He took his family from Babylon during the construction of the Tower of Babel because he saw the corruption of immediacy, that was without the self-sacrifice of the ethical life, to the goal of usurping God to take his glory.
And it was only in this ethical mode that Abraham existed and so was given the task worthy of him: to sacrifice his own son.
Kierkegaard also thought that Mary, being the Mother of God, was the other Knight of Faith in history. To be given the task to bring the Son of God into the world would ultimately alienate her from her family, her friends, and all others who would heap scorn upon her for claiming a virgin-birth. But still, she agreed to sacrifice her place in the world for an even greater one: to be the Mother of God.
Blessed be Joseph, her spouse, for finding his way to accept this truth.
That’s enough for now. But I appreciate your posts, because, as you can see, the depth of your appeal recoils in me the need further to examine my faith and reaffirm it through thought and writing.
God bless!
Posted by: NemesisCalling | Sep 24 2022 18:35 utc | 426
The world is certainly preparing for a nuclear global suicide.
We have to avoid the mass suicide that is oncoming and we have to change the whole structure of the world so that a third world war itself becomes impossible.
If we can make the people of the world… not the politicians, leave them aside, they have the power but without the consent of the people of the world, their power is not of much use.
They can create war only if unconsciously we are ready to commit suicide, if in some way we are supportive to them.
It is our support that has given them power.
If we withdraw our support, their power disappears.
They don’t have any power of their own.
Stop listening when politicians talk, tune out of all legacy news media, they only want to convert you to their sick opinions, to spread their obscene war narratives.
When they talk they want to indoctrinate you, because everybody who has a doctrine is deep down afraid about whether it is true or not.
Politicians are talking to others so that they can believe in what they are talking.
The only way that they can feel that it is true is if they can indoctrinate as many people as possible and can see in their eyes conviction, conversion.
Why until now, is the Western intelligentsia not really fighting back against nuclear weapons?
The problem is that the Western intelligentsia is fed up with life, so there is no real resistance from the intelligentsia against nuclear weapons, against a third world war.
In fact, it seems deep down the Western mind is somehow hoping that it happens soon, because life is meaningless.
Once we can understand the problem clearly that miserable people are dangerous, for the simple reason that they don’t care whether the earth survives or not.
They are so miserable that deep down they may feel that it is better if everything is finished.
Who cares, if you are living in misery?
Only happy people, ecstatic people, dancing people would like this planet to survive forever.
People who are happy, contented, are not the people to be forced to kill other people who have not done any harm to them.
The West is suffering a severe sickness of the soul.
If all of the armies simply say, “No, we are not going to use nuclear weapons.”
If all of the scientists simply say, “No, we are not going to produce any more nuclear weapons.”
If the whole intelligentsia of the world unanimously creates a great uproar!
We need in the world more love to balance war.
We need in the world more creativity to balance the destructive forces.
We need in the world more enlightened people to balance the blind politicians.
If the globalist warmongers have nuclear weapons, then we have to create something equivalent, or more powerful, and enlightenment is certainly more powerful than any nuclear weapon.
There is time enough to withdraw our support; there is time enough to create a non-political humanity.
And the times are such that it is possible.
In ordinary times you cannot convince people to withdraw their cooperation from the politicians, but the times are abnormal and every day the war keeps coming closer.
In this moment, people can choose very easily not to cooperate, because cooperation simply means committing suicide.
We won”t have such an opportunity again.
In the past there was never such an opportunity.
It is not to be missed.
A great adventurous moment is coming close to us, there is nothing to be feared.
Humanity has lived only under the illusion of freedom.
But there is no such thing as freedom as far as the history of man up to now is concerned.
Slaveries have changed, new forms of slavery have taken their place, but freedom has not happened.
Freedom is still a dream.
As long as there is US/NATO political dependence all over the world.
There is no democracy, and there is no freedom.
It is just complete enslavement of the sleeping global masses.
Whenever some illusion is sold as beautiful you want it to be true, you want to believe in it, but whether you believe in it or not, an illusion is an illusion, it makes no difference.
Billions of dollars are being poured into Ukraine with one aim, to destroy Russia, and which Ukraine can never repay, and America never wants them to be able to repay it, so that they remain burdened, under economic pressure.
And America has promised them billions of dollars more in the coming years.
Their whole economy is now in the hands of America.
With those dollars you cannot buy peace, you cannot buy love, you cannot buy silence, you cannot buy compassion, you cannot buy anything valuable.
In fact, accepting those dollars Ukrainians have sold their souls.
If people are really silent, peaceful and loving, they will throw out all of these globalist politicians, who are nothing but warmongers, psychopaths and murderers.
That is the only hope for which people of awakened consciousness go on working.
Freedom is the greatest value and the greatest achievement in life.
Everyone should be free from all kinds of fetters – political, economic, psychological, spiritual.
Unless we can create a world which is really free, we are living only in an illusion of freedom.
Posted by: @lienChrist | Sep 25 2022 6:33 utc | 443
Reaching for psychological and emotional balance in light of discussions surrounding the upcoming referendums in the Ukrainian oblasts. Let’s start with semantics.
Semantics is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to sub-fields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and computer science.
In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. “the price of peace is rising”) or the understanding of time in terms of money (e.g. “I spent time at work today”). When I am depressed why do I feel down?
A conceptual domain can be any mental organization of human experience. The regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, often perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain. This theory has gained wide attention, although some researchers question its empirical accuracy.
This idea, and a detailed examination of the underlying processes, was first extensively explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work Metaphors We Live By in 1980.
She’s hot! He’s like a Greek god!
Conceptual metaphors are useful for understanding complex ideas in simple terms and therefore are frequently used to give insight to abstract theories and models. For example, the conceptual metaphor of viewing communication as a conduit is one large theory explained with a metaphor. So not only is our everyday communication shaped by the language of conceptual metaphors, but so is the very way we understand scholarly theories. These metaphors are prevalent in communication and we do not just use them in language; we actually perceive and act in accordance with the metaphors.
George Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people’s lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.
The conceptual metaphor thesis has found applications in a number of academic disciplines. Applying it to politics, literature, philosophy and mathematics has led Lakoff into territory normally considered basic to political science.
In his 1996 book Moral Politics, Lakoff described conservative voters as being influenced by the “strict father model” as a central metaphor for such a complex phenomenon as the state, and liberal/progressive voters as being influenced by the “nurturing parent model” as the folk psychological metaphor for this complex phenomenon.
According to him, an individual’s experience and attitude towards sociopolitical issues is influenced by being framed in linguistic constructions. In Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf (1991), he argues that the American involvement in the Gulf war was obscured or “spun” by the metaphors which were used by the first Bush administration to justify it.
Metaphor has been seen within the Western scientific tradition as a purely linguistic construction. The essential thrust of Lakoff’s work has been the argument that metaphors are a primarily conceptual construction and are in fact central to the development of thought.
In his words:
“Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”
According to Lakoff, non-metaphorical thought is possible only when we talk about purely physical reality; the greater the level of abstraction, the more layers of metaphor are required to express it. People do not notice these metaphors for various reasons, including that some metaphors become ‘dead’ in the sense that we no longer recognize their origin. Another reason is that we just do not “see” what is “going on”.
Propagandists, public relations, social media marketing and advertising capitalize directly on these inherent blind spots.
In intellectual debate, for instance, the underlying metaphor according to Lakoff is usually that argument is war (later revised to “argument is struggle”):
He won the argument.
Your claims are indefensible.
He shot down all my arguments.
His criticisms were right on target.
If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.
According to Lakoff, the development of thought has been the process of developing better metaphors. He also points out that the application of one domain of knowledge to another offers new perceptions and understandings.
Lakoff argues that the differences in opinions between liberals and conservatives follow from the fact that they subscribe with different strength to two different central metaphors about the relationship of the state to its citizens. Both, he claims, see governance through metaphors of the family.
Conservatives would subscribe more strongly and more often to a model that he calls the “strict father model” and has a family structured around a strong, dominant “father” (government), and assumes that the “children” (citizens) need to be disciplined to be made into responsible “adults” (morality, self-financing).
Once the “children” are “adults”, though, the “father” should not interfere with their lives: the government should stay out of the business of those in society who have proved their responsibility.
In contrast, Lakoff argues that liberals place more support in a model of the family, which he calls the “nurturant parent model”, based on “nurturing values”, where both “mothers” and “fathers” work to keep the essentially good “children” away from “corrupting influences” (pollution, social injustice, poverty, etc.).
Lakoff says that most people have a blend of both metaphors applied at different times, and that political speech (advertising and propaganda) works primarily by subconsciously invoking these metaphors and urging the subscription of one over the other. (See there, another metaphor was used.)
Lakoff further argues that one of the reasons liberals, environmentalists, social democrats, the left, have had difficulty since the 1980s is that they have not been as aware of their own guiding metaphors, and have too often accepted conservative terminology framed in a way to promote the strict father metaphor.
Lakoff insists that liberals must cease using terms like partial birth abortion and tax relief because they are manufactured specifically to allow the possibilities of only certain types of opinions. The semantics being applied are not by accident – but intentional. See the success of Cambridge Analytica swinging political tides in social media campaigns.
Tax relief for example, implies explicitly that taxes are an affliction, something someone would want “relief” from. To use the terms of another metaphoric worldview, Lakoff insists, is to unconsciously support it.
Liberals must support linguistic think tanks in the same way that conservatives do if they are going to succeed in appealing to those in the country who share their metaphors.
Lakoff also offers advice about how to counteract politicians’ (and media) lies. He maintains that the act of stating that a lie is false reinforces the lie because it repeats the way the lie is framed. Instead, he recommends what he calls a “truth sandwich”:
1. Start with the truth. The first frame gets the advantage.
2. Indicate the lie. Avoid amplifying the specific language if possible.
3. Return to the truth. Always repeat truths more than lies.
Lakoff calls this a “truth sandwich” even though the baloney is in the middle (and that baloney was another metaphor!) The position of the lie avoids both primacy and recency effects.
When Lakoff claims the mind is “embodied”, he is arguing that almost all of human cognition, up through the most abstract reasoning, depends on and makes use of such concrete and “low-level” facilities as the sensorimotor system and the emotions. Therefore, embodiment is a rejection not only of dualism vis-a-vis mind and matter, but also of claims that human reason can be basically understood without reference to the underlying “implementation details”.
Lakoff offers three complementary but distinct sorts of arguments in favor of embodiment.
First, using evidence from neuroscience and neural network simulations, he argues that certain concepts, such as color and spatial relation concepts (e.g. “red” or “over”; see also qualia), can be almost entirely understood through the examination of how processes of perception or motor control work.
Second, based on cognitive linguistics’ analysis of figurative language, he argues that the reasoning we use for such abstract topics as warfare, economics, or morality is somehow rooted in the reasoning we use for such mundane topics as spatial relationships. (See conceptual metaphor above.)
Finally, based on research in cognitive psychology and some investigations in the philosophy of language, he argues that very few of the categories used by humans are actually of the black-and-white type amenable to analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. On the contrary, most categories are supposed to be much more complicated and messy, just like our bodies.
“We are neural beings”, Lakoff states, “Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything — only what our embodied brains permit.”
Lakoff believes consciousness to be neurally embodied, however he explicitly states that the mechanism is not just neural computation alone. Using the concept of disembodiment, Lakoff supports the physicalist approach to the afterlife. If the soul can not have any of the properties of the body, then Lakoff claims it can not feel, perceive, think, be conscious, or have a personality. If this is true, then Lakoff asks what would be the point of the afterlife?
Then there is the notion of Framing. In the language of the brain, words and thoughts are defined relative to narrative frames and conceptual metaphors. Maybe for another time.
Posted by: SeanAU | Sep 25 2022 9:16 utc | 448
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