Jeremy Corbyn: Britain’s new leader of the Labour Party

This is just your theory, not the historical reality of the South Caucasus. You didn't accept the situation even after reading the Russian wiki article, simply because it discredits Ossetian cause for independence of South Ossetia. You refuse to accept reality that South Ossetia never had been an indigenous Ossetian land annexed by Georgia and that instead Ossetians migrated to the Georgian land (what is now South Ossetia), became the subjects of the Georgian nobility and only after the collapse of the Russian empire in the 20th century, the territory was awarded to the Ossetians by the Bolsheviks for their aiding Russian invasion of Georgia in 1921.

Where are the maps that would agree with your beliefs? They don't exist because your theory is not historical reality. Strange that you even discarded the Russian maps of the 19th century.

And where was exactly South Ossetia in 1917? in 1801? In 1600?
I've posted a link to the historical book explaining how South Ossetia was created in 1922, but you didn't bother to read it.

I know that there were some separatist sentiments in Crimea, but I also said that Crimean Tatars didn't want to join Russia. Your text doesn't mention whether the Crimean Tatars supported the separatist movement.

There is quite a difference between being nationalist and Nazi.

Some of those minorities number in the hundreds of thousands, way more than Abkhazians and Ossetians.

Now, look what your favourite Russia did here. Russia conquered the area, expelled ethnic Georgians and settled Armenians instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javakheti#Russian_Empire

Transnistria bordered ethnically Slavic Ukraine, from which it was separated in 1944. Nagorno Karabakh had the same ethnic population as the neighbouring Armenia.
The Kodori valley internationally was recognised as Georgian territory and was under the Georgian control even after the war in Abkhazia since 1993. That was not an occupation, that was an anti-insurgent operation, in which the warlord was expelled and Georgian police remained.

 

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I expect a moral and ethical code of some kind. Otherwise, why object to the State in the first place?

No, the Golden Rule would not permit the Confederacy to secede as it did - to form an even greater tyranny, by war securing plantation enslavement of millions.

You can't support the secession of the Confederacy without supporting slavery - it's why they seceded, it's the only significant difference between them and the Union, it's why they killed people.

There has never been a day when the common practice of empire was as Machiavelli recommended. Being a realist, he directed his advice to princes.

The Baltimore riots were a full week after the Confederate navy opened fire on Fort Sumter. The Baltimore riots were also started by the Confederate side. And riots are not war.

Not necessarily - some States allow for it. War does, though.

Your guess is wrong. Many of them committed not only oathbreaking, ethically and legally, but treason - Robert E Lee, for example, betrayed the military forces under his command.

So one of them was especially evil and in fact starting full scale war to make its special evil more secure and more widely spread, while the other was not especially evil at the time, and only became so years later due to exaggerated and misleading description of its bad deeds of the future.

Which one did you find to be in the right, again - at the time?

 

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Again, I don't care at all about such historical justifications. I simply reject what I see contradicts common knowledge about the situation in the mountains, based on what I have found. The Georgian nobility has tried to make legal claims about the parts where Ossetins have lived, after the Russians have got power. The Russians have taken a look at what is behind these claims on the ground, and found the following:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/История_Южной_Осетии

You don't get it - all your maps agree with my beliefs, because I do not expect that all those guys who make such maps would care about coloring each valley in a different color, because it is controlled by a different family of the local guys living there. Everybody able to handle a weapon was an independent guy, a free man without a master. His house was a small independent fortress, and his family able to defend itself. Who would care to color a map with different colors for different families????

Which South Ossetia??? There were Ossetian guys living in the valleys, the northern as well as the southern ones. Guys living in small fortresses, with weapons, not afraid of Georgian nobility visiting them, because strong enough to defend themself.

Is it that difficult to understand that I do not claim that there was something like a South Ossetian state, but simply anarchy? So that even if there was no South Ossetian state, there was also no Georgian state, because the Georgian state in the planes had never any real power over those living in the mountains?

Who cares? They are something around 15% or so of the population.

You understand the meaning of "or are not concentrated enough"?

No, it was under Swanetian control up to 2006. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Монадире

 

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Fine. This ethical code is the Golden Rule.

Of course, a secessing state is a state too, thus, violates the moral and ethical code of an anarchist too. But this is not the point. To fight against secessionists is a clear violation of the Golden Rule for the state itself.

I can reject the big state for not allowing secession. That's all I need. I can, independently, reject slavery in the South, because I'm not obliged to accept one of two mafia gangs as moral if the fight each other. There is no simple objective way to decide which of two evils is less. So I can consider above sides as less evil, for whatever private reasons, without violating my moral principles, and without supporting the evil of the side I consider to be less evil.

No one, of course.

 

That depends on the motivation and method of secession. A violent, war enforced secession for the purpose of enslaving a good share of a State's population could not be allowed under the Golden Rule - in the case of the US, it would betray those who had agreed to the equal protection clause of the Constitution and several moral principles involved in forming a State in the first place.

And States themselves do not have moralities. Neither do bulldozers, etc.

Not by the Golden Rule, or any other consistent morality.

 

The text gives some Ossetian blog as source, not an academic publication. I've googled it, but only a few Ossetian sites were citing it, so it could be possibly invented by Ossetian propagandists.

In the Southern United States many families own weapons and have fortified their houses, so the current political boundaries of the United States are inaccurate?

The maps clearly show that those guys migrated to the Georgian territories in the South Caucasus, but those territories did not become part of Ossetia, only in 1922 it became a separate Ossetian entity.

To put things into perspective, Russian-inhabited areas of the former Soviet Union don't equate to Russia.

If there was no Georgian state, then what was this state?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Kartli-Kakheti

Next thing, you will claim that London boroughs mostly inhabited by the South Asians are actually Pakistan and India.

Ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis are quite concentrated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javakheti
Russia expelled indigenous ethnic Georgians and instead imported ethnic Armenians from the Ottoman Empire and settled them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borchali

Swanetians are ethnic Georgians and Georgian citizens. Even your wikipedia page says they were in Georgia.

Still, you can't refute the fact that before 2008 even Russia recognised entire Abkhazia as part of Georgia.


To iceaura
Don't you get it, there is no need to spend your time with this guy. He clearly doesn't understand the history and I've tried to explain the facts backed up by citing reliable sources and maps and he still parrots and defends some theory he just made up.
He also doesn't understand the difference between ethnic maps and political boundaries. I'm already tired, to be frank.

 

This would be correct if the aim of secession would have been the introduction of slavery. It was only the preservation of the actual legal state, which remained legal during the war even in the North. The Golden Rule is quite clear here, you cannot fight those who simply want to do the same as you actually do.

States (different from bulldozers) are organizations of humans. And organizations of humans can and do have moral rules.

Everything you read on Wikipedia can be. In politically relevant questions Wiki is much more questionable than in pure science. In fact this quote was not what I have looked for, because I have looked for different descriptions which describe a quite similar situation.

No, because 1.) Waco has shown that the US has, in case of conflict, the monopoly of power. 2.) owning weapons is legal in the US, 3.) US population is in the large submissive to US law. Instead, the guys in the mountain valleys considered themself as free and independent people, not submissive to any Georgian law. Their weapons and their fortified houses were only the illustration of the means available to them to defend this status.

A Georgian kingdom in the planes. Let's look a little bit how it was conquered by various neighbours:

I somehow miss any descriptions that these conquerors have entered any of the high mountain valleys to establish their new power there. Which is quite natural, given that there was no real Georgian power there, and, similarly, also no such power of Iranian or Russian tsars.

I would not deny that these powers would have been strong enough to conquer each of these valleys with a military expedition. But there was no point of doing this - almost nothing to rob, but a lot of losses fighting the local guys.

The suburbs of Paris are already developing into this direction. One hears that French police is already afraid of entering these areas. Similar for some suburbs in Brazil and parts of Mexico. Of course, it will need some time until such suburbs are really out of control of the state. This would be the case if, say, the French parliament discusses if it is worth to send the army into suburb XYZ to reestablish the rule of law or so, and then rejects this idea.

In this case, I stand corrected, I have not cared about where Armenians and Azerbaijanis live in Georgia.

Sorry, but I don't care in such cases about ethnicity. They had their own military, in control over part of the Kodor valley, which is what I care about.

The point being? As if I would like to refute this.

Nonsense. You simply don't get it that I do not care nor about ethnic maps, nor about political boundaries, but about the real situation on the ground.

Who has the real military power to decide what happens in a given territory - this is what I care about in this discussion.

You seem to think that I want to defend here some south Ossetian justifications for their claims for the territory they actually control. Old political maps as well as old maps about ethnicity may be used for this purpose. But, sorry, I don't care about them. I couldn't care less about such ideological justifications for the actual situation.

I have objected against the nonsensical (not your) claim that Ossetians are Georgians - simply because this is nonsense. And I have objected against the claim that they have been ruled by Georgians, simply because I think they never have been. Not formally, on maps used in St. Petersburg and Tbilissi, on "political boundaries", but de facto, in the real mountain valleys. If these two points are somehow important for some Ossetian nationalists or not is nothing I care about.

Sorry for having posted a link to another quite irrelevant map as an answer to your list of quite irrelevant maps and your claim that no different irrelevant map exists - I had seen this irrelevant map before, and posted the link, simply for your information that such an irrelevant map actually exists - once you obviously like to collect such maps. After this, you have obviously believed that I think this map is somehow relevant, for whatever purposes.

The question if the guys in the mountain valleys were really independent, not controlled by the states in the planes, is, instead, a question which interests me. Not at all because in this particular situation these guys are Ossetians and the guys in the planes have been Georgians. But because it is a particular example of some quite general picture, namely that the effective political units in mountain areas are much smaller.

 

The South seceded in order to preserve and protect and also expand plantation slavery. That is not a sound motive for secession, even, let alone starting a war for it. That is different from what the North actually did, and much different from what the North was about to do in all contemporary accounts. There is no Golden Rule that justifies such morally abhorrent behavior, or forbids fighting against it.

No, they don't. People do, States don't. They don't even have thoughts.

 

First, the Golden Rule is a rule which forbids. So, it cannot justify even in principle, except in the extremely weak sense that some behaviour possibly does not violate it.

Then, I have explained, the Golden Rule forbids to fight those who are doing the same as you do. Slavery was legal in the Union, even after the start of the Civil War, thus, if the Union fights the South for having legal slavery this obviously violates the Golden Rule.

Note: The Golden Rule can forbid you to fight against some otherwise amoral behaviour - if you do the same yourself.

So, states cannot behave in an amoral way? Not even Hitler's Germany? You really mean it?

 

Not usually - you would be specifying the Confucian or Greek formulation, rather than the Biblical one common in Western discourse.

States always behave in an amoral way.

The Slave States of the Confederacy did not do the same as the Free States of the Union. The attempt of the Slave States to secede was specifically and explicitly an attempt to preserve that difference in their citizens's behavior, to protect their citizens doing moral wrong in the face of morally and ethically based opposition. And in that attempt, they - these citizens, using their State - launched war, set out to kill people, in defense of the ability to enslave others.

Because slavery is not a static creation, you know - each new generation is newly enslaved.

 

First, I was unable to verify this, the formulation presented in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule for Greek and Confucian are negative. Then, I see in moral a similar asymmetry as in science (Popperian falsification vs. verificationism), and see an advantage for negative rules (rules forbidding something, instead of rules making something obligatory).

So what I name the Golden Rule is the negative variant, and it is also part of the Bible, "Do to no one what you yourself dislike." Tobit 4:15, and this is the form used in the German discourse, "Was du nicht willst, dass man dir tu, das füg auch keinem andern zu."

Fine ;-)

Your justification of the Civil War as not violating the Golden Rule shows, of course, one of the major problems with it: There is always some asymmetry in the real world, and one can always use to this asymmetry, however minor and irrelevant, to justify that one has not violated the Golden Rule.

This severely restricts the applicability of the Golden Rule in real life - to describe real behaviour in words is always interpretation, one can describe it in other words too. So, essentially, it can be applied only to rules, thus, is a sort of metarule. A rule of type "I can do this, you are not allowed to do this" violates the Golden Rule, and there is no excuse for this.

For secession, this holds. If the seceding state starts with the same constitution as the original one, fighting this state violates the Golden Rule.

 

I also prefer the negative variant, but the book of Tobit is not in the ordinary Bible familiar to Westerners.

The people who formed the Confederacy 1) betrayed their oaths of service and loyalty to the Union 2) started an unnecessary war of secession - formed an army and attacked and killed their former countrymen 3) in defense of plantation slavery, a greater evil even than voluntary war.

No such rule was involved in the Civil War.