I’m sorry you assume this is in bad faith. Internet text messages leave a lot to be desired when it comes to conveying a message. I am sincere, but I’m afraid I often come off as know-it-all, arrogant, holier-than-thow, in an attempt to make my point. I’m afraid it is self-defeating. I need to learn how to communicate these things better.
I sincerely hope you can enjoy your day also.
You can also dig up his body and rape it still: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/jeffrey-epstein-final-resting-place-183719617.html
You can, but you shouldn’t.
My post wasn’t meant it present an equivalence. It was meant to illustrate that both acts are degrading to the person performing them, with the latter being more extreme in its harm. It isn’t meant as some kind of “proof” that I am right. I was hoping that if someone agreed that the more extreme dehumanizng acts are harmful for them, then maybe they would consider that the lesser ones could also be. But I guess my real mistake was trying to convince people not to hurt themselves.
My point is that saying: “You have to have a storm if you want flowers” or “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelete” or “We must burn the old grass so that new grass can grow” are all just other ways of saying that “the ends justify the means” and have been used by people throughout history to justify whatever horrible thing they wanted to do.
That quote is from Adolf Hitler BTW. Replace [a] with Germany.
Will this coming storm be [a] death-struggle or the birth-pangs of a new and better age?
I’m not advocating tolerance. The key difference is laughing at someone’s death isn’t just an expression of disapproval, it is a devaluation of human life in general. It isn’t a question of being justified in laughing at their demise because they laughed at horrible things; the very act of laughing degrades yourself.
Let me put it another way: Epstein and his accomplices deserved to be gang raped by all of us in prison. Should we run a train on them? No! Because that defiles us as much as it does them.
You do you. I cannot change your mind.
I will not laugh though, because I look at myself and I see the same potential for evil in myself. I can see how I could become a Hitler or a Pol Pot and orchestrate horrific things while convincing myself I am right. Laughing at the death of a man who espoused violence and shunned empathy isn’t going to complete that transformation, but it is a step in that direction.
P.S. I originally posted a meme, but I thought it was too glib for this conversation.
The same logic does not apply because their motivations are different. The CEO is motivated by greed and the facist is motivated by hate.
If you are motivated by greed and selfishness in spite of the suffering of others, and you see there is a risk of losing everything because you were too exploitive, then it is in your own selfish interest to avoid that outcome.
If you are motivated by hate, then seeing someone with your ideology get shot is going to make you even more hateful and even give you the confidence that you were right all along and your hate is justified.
This is very ironic, but not at all funny. While the irony may be satisfying, it isn’t going to improve things appreciably and reveling in it is not a healthy thing to do.
If you laugh at someone getting shot because they supported gun violence, then you have just lowered yourself to their level and now everyone is just back to tribal violence.
This isn’t even potentially as beneficial as the killing of someone like Brian Thompson, because you can at least make the argument that it might make CEOs think twice before systematically exploiting people for profit. As ironic as it may be, this is not going to move the needle in a positive direction or change anyone’s mind for the better.
If you like this book, you should also check out: “The cat in Redhat” and “ripgrep and PAM”.
We should keep in mind that thousands of people work at large corporations like Microsoft and many of them do not agree with company policy and positions, including people in senior roles.
Scott Hanselman is a VP at Microsoft who has given some of the best presentations on AI from a social, ethical, and technical demonstration standpoint that I have seen. I have been spreading his NDC London talk around to everyone I can: https://youtu.be/kYUicaho5k8
It is worth the watch.
To be clear, aside from the part I quoted, I agreed with everything else in your post and thought it was an interesting take, but again I have to take issue with this:
as far as I’m aware, they don’t carry the clinical state-sponsored efficiency that is a hallmark of the Holocaust.
I’m not going to analyze every single atrocity since 1945, but the Cambodian genocide was certainly state-sponsored, efficient, and horrific:
“20,000 people passed through the Security Prison 21, one of the 196 prisons the Khmer Rouge operated,[4][28] and only seven adults survived.[29]”
"The executed were buried in mass graves. In order to save ammunition, the executions were often carried out using poison or improvised weapons such as sharpened bamboo sticks, hammers, machetes and axes.[6] … In some cases the children and infants of adult victims were killed by having their heads bashed against the trunks of Chankiri trees, and then were thrown into the pits alongside their parents. The rationale was “to stop them growing up and taking revenge for their parents’ deaths.”
“People were imprisoned and tortured merely on suspicion of opposing the regime or because other prisoners gave their names under torture. Whole families (including women and children) ended up in prisons and were tortured because the Khmer Rouge feared that if they did not do this, their intended victims’ relatives would seek revenge. Pol Pot said, “if you want to kill the grass, you also have to kill the roots”.[169]”
"There are many accounts of torture in both the Security Prison 21 records and the documents of the trial; as told by the survivor Bou Meng in his book (written by Huy Vannak), tortures were so atrocious and heinous that the prisoners tried in every way to commit suicide, even using spoons, and their hands were constantly tied behind their back to prevent them from committing suicide "
“all medical experiments were systematically conducted without proper anesthetics.[173] A medic who worked inside S-21 said that a 17-year-old girl had her throat slit and her abdomen pierced before being beaten and put into water for an entire night. This procedure was repeated many times and carried out without anesthetics.[174] In a hospital of Kampong Cham province, child medics cut out the intestines of a living non-consenting person and joined their ends to study the healing process. The patient died after three days due to the “operation”.[173]”
“Twenty-six-year-old John D. Dewhirst, a British tourist, was one of the youngest foreigners to die in the prison.[17] He was sailing with his New Zealand companion, Kerry Hamill, and their Canadian friend Stuart Glass when their boat drifted into Cambodian territory and was intercepted by Khmer patrol boats on August 13, 1978. Glass was killed during the arrest, while Dewhirst and Hamill were captured, blindfolded, and taken to shore. Both were executed after having been tortured for several months at Tuol Sleng. Witnesses reported that a foreigner was burned alive; initially, it was suggested that this might have been John Dewhirst, but a survivor would later identify Kerry Hamill as the victim of this particular act of brutality.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide
Israel is suddenly the state committing the closest thing we’ve seen to the Holocaust since the actual Holocaust.
I don’t say this to excuse anything Israel is doing, but this is gross recency bias that is glossing over numerous genocides that have occurred since the Holocaust, including:
Not technically genocides, but also worth mentioning in the same vein:
So ya, other than those events, this is the closest thing to the Holocaust since the actual Holocaust.
The Weddell Sea, north of Antarctica, brought to you by the department of redundancy department.
Is it really screwing up the education system, or is it just revealing how screwed up it already was?
Source: https://youtu.be/1162ouPHH3Q
My point is that memes like this use religion as a strawman because they don’t actually want to discuss the foundational concepts expressed by the meme. Which is what I addressed, in my admittedly very lenghy, response.
The TLDR is that science requires a much faith as religion, and that people aren’t willing to take ten minutes to read more than a couple paragraphs and contemplate the fundamental nature of reality, because you know, it’s not as important as a meme…
While trust and faith aren’t perfect synonyms they are closely related: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/trust
As for math, are you familiar with Gödel’s incompleteness theorems?
This is a good explanation/interview for anyone who is not: https://youtu.be/u3GYrEOoKGk
I do what I always do: run to the trolley, then jump up and pull the emergency stop because I hate false dilemmas.