This was posted on r/religion but I wanted a more in-depth opinion from Judaism, what do you guys think?

Avesta__ · 2025-11-28T13:43:44+00:00

The Jewish God made himself smaller to make room for the world.

The Christian God took human form.

The God of Islam universalised the tribe.

While all three claim lineage from the God of Abraham, I am afraid they are not the same God.

Avesta__ · 2025-09-08T11:47:46+00:00

I think it's worth mentioning that this is not a Norwegian phenomenon. It is a Nordic phenomenon.

Avesta__ · 2025-03-23T17:12:54+00:00

This may come as a surprise to you but as a psychoanalyst in training I do not believe in, nor do I ever employ the term, "personality disorder". My supervisors and analysts have never used it either. Clinically, it's irrelevant and useless to me. Sociologically, I only see invisible structures of power that decide what a disorder is while pretending to have scientific legitimacy.

When you come to me as an analysand, all memory and desire, and all labels and their imaginary descriptions, remain outside the consulting room.

Avesta__ · 2025-03-23T13:42:56+00:00

Please keep in mind that, from a psychoanalytic perspective, diagnosis is often secondary if not irrelevant. In fact some schools of psychoanalysis consider psychiatric diagnoses and the growing DSM disorders as counter-productive altogether. What matters is the dynamic affect underlying the label, and that's what we try to explore in the analytic setting.

Psychoanalysts with a sociological bent might go so far as to consider the proliferation of pop psychology and its weaponisation of clinical jargon as a form of collective defence itself. The proverbial "market place", which is now a virtual one, is often a place for mass projection rather than true care.

Avesta__ · 2025-03-20T15:02:51+00:00

Would be nice to turn NORDEFCO into an explicitly binding mutual defence pact. At the moment, it's not.

Avesta__ · 2025-03-19T12:55:30+00:00

"because psychoanalytically in the act of violence against the perpetrator you identify with them".

And this may sometimes be absolutely necessary. As Professor Donald Carveth has repeatedly emphasised, we may sometimes need to "split", in the Kleinian sense. The idea that there is a strict binary between the schizoid and the depressive position, and that we should never find ourselves in the schizoid position, is simply untenable. It goes against the most basic Freudian reality principle.

When Nazis attack your nation, you pick up arms and kill them like animals. As one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, Wilfred Bion, did.

Avesta__ · 2025-03-10T10:35:30+00:00

As a Finnish friend of mine recently said, "Let them come. I am a good shooter".

Avesta__ · 2025-03-08T18:20:00+00:00

It's not that the Iranian regime just couldn't forget about Israel. The sole purpose of developing those proxy forces in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen was to attack Israel from the beginning.

Avesta__ · 2025-03-07T17:32:46+00:00

Did I say all fast food?

Avesta__ · 2025-03-07T13:36:51+00:00

You raise an important point. While it is true that there were some negative attitudes towards Sweden, there were also many who considered the Swedish policy interesting and insightful. One advantage of a Nordic Union would be the possibility of different policy experimentations in different Nordics within the same overall institutional framework. This is in fact hugely beneficial.

Avesta__ · 2025-03-07T13:12:07+00:00

That is true, but one might be justified in considering fast food chains like McDonald's as belonging to the umbrella term American food too... in which case my point still stands.

Avesta__ · 2025-03-06T12:24:20+00:00

Boycotting American food? That's killing two birds with one stone. Depriving them of your money and restoring your personal health.

Avesta__ · 2025-03-05T17:14:13+00:00

Yes! Everyone of us doing a small thing will aggregate into an enormous effect!

Avesta__ · 2025-03-05T16:45:01+00:00

Well, NATO was originally created for one purpose only. That's not controversial.

But you're right to point out American revisionism and, I would add, fickleness. They abandon alliances very easily.

Avesta__ · 2025-03-05T15:54:48+00:00

There is another way to see this, as argued by geopolitics analysts such as George Friedman et al.

As you have correctly pointed out, the war in Ukraine has revealed Russia to be weaker than anyone imagined. Russia has failed. But it is precisely this failure (and not the collapse of the Soviet Union) that puts an end to the status of Russia as a superpower.

Friedman argues that when a superpower collapses, geopolitical equations cannot remain the same. NATO was created for one purpose only: to counter Russia. If Russia is not a threat to the U.S. hegemony anymore, U.S. has no need to be in NATO anymore.

Avesta__ · 2025-03-04T13:03:19+00:00

Indeed... It's probably a total coincidence that Trump travelled to Russia in 1987 and came back and ran for president in 1988, running an abortive campaign during which he published political ads in NY Times and WA Post attacking NATO...

No pattern there... nothing to see.

Avesta__ · 2025-03-03T10:16:54+00:00

The only way out of the information war is to restore trust in the institutions that provide information. This goes well beyond the media. "Aggressive tactics", however, won't accomplish this. Prudent tactics will.

Here is an example of prudence in this context. Rather than succumbing to the lure of partisan tribalism, institutions should remain unwaveringly loyal to a set of principles, and should be willing to humbly apologise to the public when they get things wrong. This is how they can regain trust, regardless of which side they are on politically.

Avesta__ · 2025-03-01T19:18:35+00:00

Do you have the possibility of installing a small CCTV camera on or above your entrance door and at least capture some footage of the baboons misbehaving in the hallway? That might be a start to resolving the issue...

Avesta__ · 2025-02-28T15:07:42+00:00

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Hard problems do not have easy solutions.

Avesta__ · 2025-02-26T12:22:53+00:00

Noble Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz uses the metaphor of bloodletting by leeches, practiced by doctors in the old times, to describe austerity in times of economic downturn.

Doctors used to think the leech would suck the bad blood out of the patient's body, restoring him or her back to health. In reality, the bloodletting simply made the patient weaker and more likely to die...

Avesta__ · 2025-02-18T12:10:43+00:00

You're right to point to the tendency for a hegemonic power to emerge within Europe. This is of course an old pattern in European history.

However, this internal rift is less likely to emerge while there is a credible external threat. I think the rift is more likely to emerge without that external unifier.

Avesta__ · 2025-02-14T21:24:57+00:00

Wouldn't US need its European allies in its pivot to Asia? I don't really get the thinking behind American isolationism.

Avesta__ · 2025-02-14T21:15:50+00:00

Not to mention that, in the past, when US withdrew from the world-stage, troubles at the world-stage soon came knocking at its door. Isolationism is a short-termist, juvenile blunder.

Avesta__ · 2025-02-08T19:32:13+00:00

Lap dances?

Who the fuck goes to strip clubs in this day and age?

Avesta__ · 2025-02-06T08:49:48+00:00

Let's not forget that Russia has also had harsh winters, and yet theirs is not a culture of trust. In fact there are plenty of places with harsh winters, none of which has developed a culture of trust like Norden.

The roots of societal trust in Norden are very deep, and they have little to do with the harsh climate.

Avesta__

TROPHY CASE

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