Russia seems to have lost contact with its first lunar probe in half a century
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
So, first off, not really. At "best" Russia can expect a negotiated peace where, eg., Ukraine recognizes your claim to Crimea in return for pulling out of mainland Ukraine. At "worst", the West continues funding and escalating the equipment quality until Ukraine fully kicks you out... frankly, I think the second is far more likely; I'm vocally in support of my country continuing to give Ukraine everything they need, and I know many others who are as well.
Second:
It makes me sad that you've been propagandized into thinking this is a good thing. This is a war of aggression by a dictator trying to reclaim his glory days and build his legacy before he dies, and to think anything else is to have been made a fool.
Upvote
37
(37
/
0)
Minimum would have been "zero" since Russia could have simply not invaded Ukraine.
Including Crimea.
Instead, Russia made the conscious decision to purchase some disputable territory at the price of its own military might, the blood of both nations, a reputation for kidnapping children, an expanded NATO, and the marginalization of Russia as a good-faith international partner with open access to the global banking system, to name just a few of the things Russia has traded.
Upvote
34
(34
/
0)
How about no? Russia has put itself firmly in the position of bad guy, through its own actions, through its own assaults on others. It doesn't have the tech to make this happen. It doesn't have the money. It doesn't have the people. And every time it ends up being proven to be at the shortcomings of its approach to the world, it's another victory for every decent person in the entire world.
You can fuck off now.
Upvote
28
(28
/
0)
"So the new government after the fraudulent elections in Germany is grabbing up areas of The Sudetenland and forcibly deporting, mass murdering, raping, and terrorizing the population while going on and on about how some segments of the population just need to be eliminated for the glory of Germany."
"Yeah, but would you just ignore the politics and look at their advances in rocketry!"
"Yeah, but would you just ignore the politics and look at their advances in rocketry!"
Upvote
23
(23
/
0)
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. For one thing, I'm not equating "ethics" with "common morality." They are not the same thing, and the distinction is absolutely different. Nor am I referring to, or trying to promote, an "objective" morality. The closest thing to objectivity, even in an ethics which transcend cultural morality, is the understanding that humans are to be treated humanely. A moral system does not have that requirement.
Yes, circumstances will always play into decisions, the trolley problem will always bedevil us, but those aren't really questions of morality, as far as society is concerned. Those are issues that are independent of the social system.
I didn't invent this, it's been out there for ages. Ironically, the concept is referenced by Jesus himself in the New Testament, in some of Christianity's most carefully ignored examples from their own literature. The tale of the Good Samaritan is one, where the people who walk past the injured victim in the street are the fine, upstanding moral law-keeping Jews, and the one who helps him is the looked down-upon immoral Samaritan. Jewish moral and secular law at the time forbade "work" on the Sabbath, and pundits of the time often discussed in fine detail the exact definition of "work" within the law. Jesus said that if someone's donkey falls in a ditch and gets stuck, the owner is going to do whatever it takes to pull it out, regardless of how "morality" defines the act.
More recent literature also gives us plenty of examples. In Huckleberry Finn, Huck has to struggle with the dilemma of whether he should do the good and moral thing by returning the escaped slave Jim to his owner, or assist Jim in his bid for freedom. Huck is convinced that helping Jim is immoral, and he'll go to hell for doing so, but eventually he decides to do the right thing rather than the moral thing.
To me, in simple terms, that's what ethics means: doing the right thing for other people, regardless of whether society considers it the moral thing.
Upvote
0
(4
/
-4)
uesc_marathon
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Only half? Man, it hurts knowing that Russia is still beating the US at something.
Upvote
4
(7
/
-3)
Oke... This article really touched on something here. 565 replies to a single article is heavy, even to ars standards. 
Upvote
1
(2
/
-1)
I wanted to come back to this because my attention has been brought to yet another facet of Russia's kidnapping habit.
Do we all remember this article which was written ahead of time and published prematurely early in the war? It spilled the beans on Russia's plan to erase Ukrainian identity and bring the entire nation under permanent Russian annexation.
Same guy is back bragging about how Putin's plan to remake the USSR all along will also entail increasing the population of this new Russia to 220-500 million, by conquest if necessary, for the sake of being self-sufficient and cutting itself off from the necessity of global trade and reliance.
Google Translate: https://ria-ru.translate.goog/20230...l=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Upvote
10
(10
/
0)
127 could also indicate an issue with the variable size used. 127 is the largest integer of a signed byte. But that is almost certainly not the case here.
Upvote
7
(7
/
0)
I would be very surprised if one-second was the shortest interval that could be commanded for a burn. That's an eternity and less than 1% of the intended burn time.
Edit: is less accurate than 1% of the intended burn time or is more than 1%. Take your pick on which edit makes more sense because my original statement is crap.
Last edited:
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
AirLibra may be stupid, but there's nothing adorable about him. When Putin's bunker finally burns, I hope he's one of those locked in there with him.
Upvote
13
(13
/
0)
FFS, why does seem the usually cognisant Ars commentariat tend to totally mix up "ethics" and "morals"?
Ethics is a branch of philosophy, concerned with the search for what is right and wrong. A search, like all philosophy – as ontology might not definitely answer the nature of being, so ethics might not answer all the trolley problems and others, even as it strives to.
Morals are more or less a moral code, specific to some society. It could be totally moral to kill firstborns in a certain (shitty) society. It could be totally immoral to help the homeless in a certain (equally shitty) society. @llanitedave is right on that one, IMHO (though I might have missed the earlier posts that actually started this tangent).
Perhaps there might be a language barrier causing all the confusion? In my primary language (not English) and philosophy lessons, the distinction between ethics and morals was always pretty clear.
Ethics is a branch of philosophy, concerned with the search for what is right and wrong. A search, like all philosophy – as ontology might not definitely answer the nature of being, so ethics might not answer all the trolley problems and others, even as it strives to.
Morals are more or less a moral code, specific to some society. It could be totally moral to kill firstborns in a certain (shitty) society. It could be totally immoral to help the homeless in a certain (equally shitty) society. @llanitedave is right on that one, IMHO (though I might have missed the earlier posts that actually started this tangent).
Perhaps there might be a language barrier causing all the confusion? In my primary language (not English) and philosophy lessons, the distinction between ethics and morals was always pretty clear.
Upvote
13
(13
/
0)
The entire branch of discussion started from a statement about the "higher" morality of one code vs. another. Kind of, by definition, each morality is superior to all others from within the society that subscribes to either moral code. That was the point of my original objection. There is no objective higher morality.
Upvote
8
(8
/
0)
Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
Ethics: will this action make me an asshole and possibly upset the balance of our society?
Morals: does god want me to do this or not?
Upvote
-7
(2
/
-9)
Ah, I see, thanks. I'll still have to dig deeper into that tangent, it's been pretty interspersed among all the 15‑pages of snarky Roskosmos comments there so I might have missed a lot of it ;-)
I'd quite agree that there can be no superior morality per se, or by definition, as all moral codes are inherently bound to their societies and obviously considered superior there. But one moral code can still be much less ethical than the other, at least per most philosophies of ethics and their understanding of it. Like it might still be "moral" for Russia to try to genocidally annex a neighbouring country per Russian moral code (which would still be considered the superior code among Russia itself and the vatniks), but that doesn't make it any less unethical in the general sense, because it deprives both the country and its citizens of choice. Like the choice to exist, the choice to not be tortured or raped, et cetera. And choice and existence are pretty high up on most of the philosophy branches...
You can substitute "god" for "the party" or "Putler" or whatever else there, it works the same way. It's still the 'good' old "XXX told me to do it" excuse...
ETA: And no, ethics originally strived to transcend the whole "our society" (and many branches still try), as unless you try that, you are back to just morals, which are still bound to the society in question.
If I may paraphrase you, "will this action make me an asshole" works pretty fine from an ethics point of view, IMO ;-)
Upvote
2
(4
/
-2)
Even that approach has its problems. For example, would it have been more ethical to avoid upsetting the balance of Nazi society, or to overturn it in favor of a human rights respecting free democracy?
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
The latter, of course!
Unless perhaps you were Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's 'progressor' hero stuck on a "Nazi" (more like thinly‑veiled Soviet) planet in their Inhabited Island novel, where your overturning the regime makes it all even much worse (or does it?). Ah, the questions, questions...
Reminds me that as much as I enjoyed philosophy at the uni, I am glad I didn't choose it as my major! Debating with a philosophy‑major ex was enough of a headache for me (they were usually right and I conceded defeat) – can't even think of just what a quagmire some possible (highly unlikely) future intergalactic ethics might be ;-)
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
Don't even want to go there. Puzzling, but it seems much easier to debate the ethical ways to treat gorillas than it does humans from aggressively different moral philosophies.
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
Oke... This article really touched on something here. 565 replies to a single article is heavy, even to ars standards.
Few things more satisfying than the bout of Schadenfreude when a violent, morally bankrupt bully finally gets himself a bloody nose.
If someone is in the business of constantly terrorizing and beating the shit out of his neighbors, he can't really be surprised when those same neighbors rejoice if he slips on a banana peel, falls down and cracks his head open.
FAFO, indeed.
Upvote
14
(14
/
0)
Yeah, comments can be... hysteric sometimes. But it depends on the topic in my experience. Most of the times they are still a good read. Compared to slashdot, I think the ars public is still a lot more mature. To get where slashdot is now is still a long way downhill.
Regretfully your last paragraph brought it a bit closer. Stay sober. It is not worth it.
Upvote
11
(11
/
0)
Philosophers use the words "ethics" and "morality" in various overlapping senses. They often use them with the senses more or less reversed from what you say above.
It's common to argue whether something is or is not actually "immoral," which isn't just quibbling about various readings of some arbitrary societal rule book.
One sense of "ethics" (as often used to talk about "professional ethics") is an agreed-upon set of fairly specific principles applicable to certain people in certain roles (e.g., for physicians, about informed consent, not hitting on their patients), hopefully grounded in more basic and not-wrong principles of morality.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says:
the term “morality” can be used either
- descriptively to refer to certain codes of conduct put forward by a society or a group (such as a religion), or accepted by an individual for her own behavior, or
- normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational people.
Last edited by a moderator:
Upvote
9
(9
/
0)
Yeah, it's a semantic mess. What professions call "ethics" are really codes of specialty morality. I think the primary reason for that is that ethics in the purer sense is really more of a broad overview, and can't be so easily codified. It's discerning right or wrong in a human sense rather than a narrow professional sense. Hopefully they will usually overlap, but there's no guarantee of that.
Upvote
7
(7
/
0)
Upvote
14
(14
/
0)
I'd essentially agree it can be a mess of terms at times – as human languages tend to be. IIRC both 'ethics' and 'morals' come from the same (if different languages') root for basically "custom". Yet the common meaning of them is often (but not always) different. I like to differentiate the two as I wrote above, for simplicity's sake of online discussion (as I feel differentiating between a 'custom' and 'mostly universal ethics' is important), but even in the very field of ethics their use can be a bit fuzzy. See "moral psychology" and "professional ethics" you mentioned, et cetera. But for all the confusion, at least IIRC in philosophy in my language, there is (I think) a slight, but significant agreement on the difference between the two terms. Could be a bit arbitrary and a simplification, but I think it has a point. Of course, some philosophy schools might not agree, and as I wrote earlier, I am just a laic in that field.
And yes, terms like "professional ethics" could muddle the semantics up quite a bit...
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
The philosophers I've talked to tend use "moral" to talk about the more basic and general thing, and "ethics" when talking about more specific codes or systems of thought. It has always struck me as weird that the field is often known as "ethics," because that's not usually how philosophers actually talk about it.
I've heard it the other way (with "ethics" as the broader term) mostly from non-philosophers who (unlike philosophers) are allergic to the words "moral" and "immoral" because it makes them think of dipshit codes of biblical sexual morality, sex as sin, obedience to God's arbitrary dictates as the highest virtue, etc.
Philosophers, in my experience, use the words "moral" and "immoral" more freely and unironically, and generally aren't worried about what people do with their genitals or what prophets say a god wants; that kind of bluenose "morality" is usually not even on the radar. Given that context, the words "moral" and "immoral" tend to have much more force than "ethical" and "unethical," because they're more directly about what's actually right and wrong (and why) vs. what violates some specific rule in a legalistic code by crossing some arbitrary line drawn through a grey area. "Ethics" can mean the whole schmear, but often has a whiff of being about the semi-arbitrary details.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
Not to mention the Russian GDP is about barely larger than Canada's to stat with.
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
The Cold War joke I remember is that small towns in Germany are ten to twenty kilotons apart.
Upvote
7
(7
/
0)
And that's the reason your usage is opposite of mine. I'm not a philosopher, and I grew up with the more "rustic" usage of the term, such as "she's dating a black man! How immoral!" or "If that guy was more moral and upstanding he'd cut his hair and dress decently!"
Yeah, it's a bluenose standard, but that standard is in much more common and widespread usage than the ones used by the academics. I never heard anybody say that being a loud drunk was unethical, only that it was immoral. So when I think of the distinction, I think of how it is more likely to be perceived by the nonprofessionals.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
Well that's a complete load of bullshit since you claim to be in your 60s and thus could not possibly have been alive at the time. By that same measure, however, I was a target of the same thing at all times int hew cold war since I lived in areas that were certainly strategic targets of Soviet nukes.
Yeah, you know nothing whatsoever about me, clearly. Moreover, you're obviously just a lying troll now so you're getting blocked.
Upvote
5
(7
/
-2)
How well does NASA know the impact site? LRO could image it within a week or so if they knew where to point the camera. But NASA wasn't tracking it, it was most definitely not on course to an announced landing site, and I doubt the Russians are sharing their estimated location of the crash site.
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
I doubt if the Russians have any method of locating it anyway.
They could be miles off course!
"That's impossible, they're on instruments."
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ7cxAUeZZw
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
Leaving aside how boneheaded your timescale is, which ini itself demonstrates your near complete ignorance on the matter, if by "sitting around" you mean independently inventing a written constitution, democracy, and an equivalent to the United Nations by the Haudenosaunee, iron mail by the Olmecs using small beads made of non-smelted iron, actual iron smelting by unknown peoples in Ohio whose sole remaining trace is now the iron smelting sites that have been found, use of iron by the Etowah people in modern Georgia, and much earlier than any of that, being the earliest documented culture to have smelted and used copper near Eagle Lake in Wisconsin which predates the earliest known old world smelting of copper by a couple millenia. This also ignores that people the Spanish conquistadors encountered were documented to have built towns with multi-story stone buildings, let alone the Pueblo peoples who built and later abandoned entire cities that exist even now.
But, sure, just go ahead and ignore all of that and act as though the Native Peoples of the Americas did nothing much of consequence, you fucking racist shithead.
Edit: Typos
Last edited:
Upvote
8
(9
/
-1)
Interesting – my (admittedly quite limited) academic experience has been to the contrary, in terms of the usual meanings of the two terms' use in philosophy. "Ethics" supersedes "morality", as in (oversimplified) the "science of studying morality". Hence the commonplace use of "ethics" as different from "morals", outside (and often inside) of philosophy (where the terms might be much more strictly defined still).
Could really be a language or cultural thing – no idea! Philosophy, as much as it likes to tend to strive for the ToE or whatever, tends to lug quite all the language baggage along with it. Which is pretty much understandable, IMO, but it doesn't make it all easier.
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
Technical question – was it visible from Earth and would any impact be possibly visible by amateur telescopes looking for stuff like meteorite impacts? I pretty much guess not, even for the latter (I think the energy would be way too low to produce even any barely visible flash there), but not really sure.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
The International Court of Space Physics has rendered its decision - Not today Mr. P - not today. You have been found to be somewhat wanting shall we say. (In too many ways to accurately calculate no matter what level of AI gets used)
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
I understand the motivation, but there are problems with that.
Normal people understand moral vs. immoral as being strongly about what's right or wrong, often very right or very wrong. It's not clear to me that they have the same clear sense of ethical vs. unethical. I don't, myself, so I don't assume they do.
To me, being "unethical" can sounds like cutting some corners here and there, maybe in ways that don't matter too much. I would guess (but don't know) that a lot of other people react similarly. "Unethical" seems like weak tea.
I don't think we should give up the high ground of using the language of morality and immorality. IMO the problem is not that morality and immorality aren't what actually matters. The problem is that many people are mistaken about what is or isn't immoral. Butt sex isn't immoral. The powerful not giving the weak a fair shake IS immoral.
The problem with Falwell's "Moral Majority" wasn't that they were moral; it was that they weren't. They pretended to be moral, but were self-righteous hypocrites promoting a "morality" that was profoundly wrong.
We should take back the language of morality from the bluenoses, and not let it seem like we don't care about morality. Of course we do, enough not to let them own the concept or the word. It's not that we don't care about morality. We care enough to not accept bullshit standards of morality.
You might not agree it's worth fighting that fight, for those words, but I'm never going to agree that they own "morality" and I just have "ethics." That is not true, and it's not how the definitions actually go.
Often you can bypass that distinction, and just talk about right and wrong, but IMO you shouldn't get twisted in knots avoiding talking about being moral, and the last thing you should do is say anything that sounds like you're "not moral." You should usually say you disagree with THEIR "morality."
(This reminds me of weird knots some atheists twist themselves into to avoid using the word "believe" and especially the phrase "believe in." There's an unfortunate meme in atheist circles about saying you don't "believe" anything, you just "accept" some things "as true," as if there was a difference. Those atheists are lettiing religious people ruin a perfectly good and necessary word by association with religious belief.)
Upvote
2
(3
/
-1)