NewSocialWhoDis

@NewSocialWhoDis@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shout out to my engineering homies.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Not sure I follow, this seems to be what I was saying. Read it back. The difference is that now we have technology capable of remotely erasing huge populations, and no means whatsoever of keeping it out of the hands of the freaks that invariably take power.

  Were you initially arguing then that today’s weapons are worse because they make murder further removed from oneself or because the scale of death is larger? Or both?

  If the first argument, I disagree. Murder is no more moral for being gritty and physical. Tasting the blood of your victim doesn’t redeem the act. Perhaps you would argue that it is worse to allow the murderer to obfuscate the brutality of his actions from himself. But either way, he is a murderer just the same, with the same suffering resulting from his actions. Others should not be held accountable because he found a way to lie to himself. Removing the killing from immediate vicinity of other allows it to be more targeted and involve fewer innocents, and that far outweighs the mental gymnastics it enables for the murderer.

  If the second argument, I agree the scale of death, especially the scale of imprecise killing, affects the morality of a weapon, hence why I mentioned nuclear weapons. I kind of thought you did NOT agree with that though, based on this argument:

  So the difference between them then is just one of scale.

  The amount of innocent deaths enabled by a fusion bomb in a single instance far outstrips that of a conventional bomb. And I would argue it is a weapon that could not be used in any way that would not involve millions of innocent deaths. This inability to be harnessed in any productive way (besides as a threat I suppose) is where it clearly falls into the realm of immoral weapons, and this is fundamentally different than (e.g.) designing sensors that enable us to better monitor the activities of our adversaries. You are making an argument about the cumulative effects of people’s actions, but still the net effects of the people who worked on these two examples are very different.

  the next technology turns all of your enemies into steam, but as a side effect, also does the same to their families…I would argue that creating a new weapon, or developing existing ones further is not made more or less moral on the basis that your enemy might be doing it,

  I argued that arming yourself was moral based on the fact that psychopaths would likely attack you. I am not trying to justify absolutely every type of weapon in existence, but the post is saying ALL weapons and their production is immoral which I do disagree with. And again, I would largely view a weapon that cannot be effective without harming innocents as immoral (another example: chemical warfare that cannot be removed from the environment). I do not think the morality of any object is based on whether it can be used to harm innocents though, because as previously argued, that is every facet of existence in the hands of a psychopath. One facet of military development is development of CONOPS (Concept of Operations), and there are absolutely immoral CONOPS of weapons that I do not think are immoral on their own (like carpet bombing).

  But look at what you’re mixing up here: the psychopathic megalomaniacs who are sitting barking orders a world away from the lethality radii, and the grunts and (invariably) innocent collateral who are atomised inside them.

  I feel like you are arguing that because grunts are being exploited (I can agree with this) that they are innocent. But if you are hired to kill others on behalf of a psychopath, even if you really need the money, you are still accountable for carrying out the orders to kill on behalf of the psychopath. They are not innocents for having been duped. They are tools of destruction in the hands of the psychopath and must be disabled as much as a bomb or drone.

  Find another job, where you can look back at your life’s work and honestly believe you made the world a better place.

  I think it is a tall order to demand everyone dedicate all of their energies only to improving the world. Most people do a job they think is fine (especially since ideological work usually doesn’t pay) and contribute to the world and their communities as they can. My husband and I went around and around about this with Trump’s most recent election. We settled on working programs we don’t think to be actively harmful, donating generously with time and money, and political activism as it seems useful. The issues I worry most about require collective action (climate change, the malevolence of the current US administration), and I have never been one skilled are persuading others.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shout out to my engineering homies.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If a pacifist somehow held in their hands a button which would kill every non-pacifist in the world, should they push it?

  Did you intend this to be paradoxical? If a pacifist pushed a button to kill non-pacifists, he would obviously die from it too.

  Yet psychopathic megalomaniacal leaders are a feature of the human race further back than recorded history, where remote mass destruction of estranged populations is a very recent development

  This is likely wrong. In Sapiens, Yuval Harari discusses at length how genocide is as old as humanity. Some of us would brutally murder each other with sticks and stones if they had nothing better.

  And, in creating any new technology, we do need to ask, “is introducing this worth the risk of it falling into the wrong hands?”

  I guess I can more or less agree with this question. But most defense work is not creating the atomic bomb. Most of it is incremental improvements aimed at more effectively engaging a military target. Which is why the US did so poorly against guerilla warfare in Afghanistan… But that’s beside the point. Excuse my tangent. I am a defense contractor, I have left programs I was uncomfortable with existing.

  Anyway, we agree that psychopathic megalomaniacs are a feature of the human creature. And whether or not they are flying drones, driving tanks, or a leading a hoard of mounted Visigoths at your village, I think most of us would rather remove them as a threat from a safe distance… Like with a missile.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shout out to my engineering homies.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Israel’s primary weapon is starvation via blockade. Yea, it’s not very precise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shout out to my engineering homies.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Was the person you’re responding to sincere? Fuck. I thought it was heavy sarcasm.

  Sigh. The Internet has killed satire.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shout out to my engineering homies.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know man. Even cell phones seem pretty dangerous in Israeli hands.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shout out to my engineering homies.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the issue is that there are people for whom it is necessary and proper to use military violence against, and when you don’t continually invest in it, you find yourself subject to those who have (see: Europe vs Russia and/or the US).

  Further the decision and event chain that you mention has been used just as frequently by the US military to head-off and prevent escalation of violence.

  As I pointed out elsewhere, putting psychopaths in charge can make most things dangerous. The Trump administration is currently weaponizing financial fraud against all of us so the billionaires can feast on the remnants of the middle class. Now obviously, military tools are made to be dangerous, which is not in line with a pacifist morality. But most people aren’t pacifists, and sociopath leaders will always find a cornucopia of tools to murder their opposition.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The ancient Greeks or Chinese should have already had words for this.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My mom had a stroke that was caught early, and she was this way in the first couple years afterwards. I had to ask her to stop talking to me so I could read a menu, and she was self-aware about it. She was like “I’m sorry. Just tell me. I just have to speak my thoughts into existence these days.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stupid recipe ⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Link approves this comment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The whole reason China winning would be bad is because of their surveillance state ensuring no one gets around their curtailment of civil liberties…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Controversial startup's plan to 'sell sunlight' using giant mirrors in space would be 'catastrophic' and 'horrifying,' astronomers warn⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Reminds me of this other terrible dystopian idea I saw the other day: …yahoo.com/elon-musk-announces-plan-control-18284…

  Glad billionaires think they can steal the sun and sell it back to us now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why isn't the rest of the world doing anything about the USA?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As a Trump-hating American working in defense, I always tried to tell people that our economic dominance was enforced with the barrel of a gun. Friends working in international relations would also reference books like “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” that also pointed to usage of the CIA and international lending terms to enrich ourselves at the expanse of the 3rd world, especially Latin America. I completely agree that a capricious, bi-polar US is an untenable world leader.

  But in general, it’s very hard to get most Americans to care about our relationships and interactions with the rest of the world, much less acknowledge the ways we are dependent on it. There is some US-centric vanity involved, as well as some stubborn ignorance due to never interacting with the rest of the world at all. But I think in part it’s also due to the hyper competitive nature of simply trying to live in the US, such that there is no brainspace for anything not directly affecting you. Stressors include corporate expectations that everyone should live to work, so many people a few paychecks away from losing their homes and lifestyle with no social safety net, the struggle to afford to live in areas with good schools for your kids, etc etc. In some ways, I’m hopeful that losing global pre-eminence could make life easier for us, especially if it being about government reform.

  China, the obvious successor to American influence, assuming a more commanding role on the world stage is a mixed bag. On one hand, they certainly prize stability above almost everything, and an authoritarian state run by technocrats indeed seems more effective at addressing climate change than a Corporatocracy that profits from destroying the planet. On the other, there’s not even acknowledgement of unethical practices (e.g.: labor conditions in Chinese companies in DRC, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) when there is no free press. As the US spread it’s influence and democracy after WWII, I kind of worry that the entire world may be forced to get in line.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why isn't the rest of the world doing anything about the USA?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Look, as an American, all I’m asking for is a little extrajudicial redition of Musk and Thiel by South Africa. If we could just get rid of some of the malevolent billionaires that have made the pilgrimage to the land of greed, we might stand a chance of holding on to some of our civil liberties.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why isn't the rest of the world doing anything about the USA?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t you worry. Civil War is still on the horizon. Gotta see how 2026 goes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨School pickup lines are wild⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As if he’d ever see a kid walking in front of that thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨necessary read⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, but whether you’re talking about military might or economic might, more people is more leverage. That was my point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apparently Palantir can access the content of social media accounts that were deleted a decade ago.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This “too dangerous to exist” argument is seemingly more true for nuclear technology, but the world recognized the threat and came together to manage it.

  I will grant you that database and ability to search it lends itself easily to popular oppression, but it still requires thinking, breathing humans to do the oppressing.

  Most technology is not dangerous without psychopaths in power, and damn near everything is dangerous with psychopaths in power.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apparently Palantir can access the content of social media accounts that were deleted a decade ago.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I came here to make this comment less cogently. You have it exactly.

  Now, does it violate US law and multiple Executive Orders to search the database to get dirt on US Citizens and use it against their election campaign? Yes. Yes it does. But this administration thinks laws are for sissies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨necessary read⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the argument to make space for them is more practical that compassionate. WTF are we going to do if we just refuse to speak to or have any dealings with 1/3 of the working age population. Are we relocating all Trump voters South of Virginia and splitting the Union here?

  Setting aside our own authoritarian problems for a second, if you want to have a wealthy country that can oppose authoritarian regimes (like China and Russia), you need all 350 million of us. (And you need Europe, India, and democratic Asia on board, perhaps even some middle eastern countries, all people you may have philosophical differences with that you have to learn to work with).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨necessary read⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The US has needed rank choice voting since Nixon at least.