whyIndeed · HackerTrans

11 年前議論

Really. Quite combative.

Drawing conclusions for whichever labels I present, when I did not specify how I might choose to apply the labels. Do you see where you're jumping to conclusions about my disposition yet?

My last words to you are this:

A burning death after mutilation is cruelty. The aggressors are torturing and burning the victims. The murdered suffering before the mob are victims. Everyone else witnessing the events is a spectator, although some of the spectators may be accomplices to the aggressors. Evidence for many of these events will surely be incomplete, and likely skewed. Without evidence in any direction how would anyone know.

But you, you're lashng out at people on the internet. At some point you marked me as an enemy. Maybe you'll realize you misread my remarks. Oh well, done with this conversation. I won't be replying to you again.

whyIndeed

11 年前議論

I think I get what you mean, but your wording is just slightly off.

The Fallacy: That anybody was a noble actor.

Your wording makes it sound like there's a wrong-headed perception that war is not noble, and that the correction to the fallacy is to find ALL participants VERY noble, valiant and in high regard.

Then, your next sentences:

  It was all self-serving. It's often held up as a just war.

These clarify what you meant to say, and contradict the preceeding statements.

The words "fallacy" and "nobody" inadvertently constitute a double negative.

whyIndeed

11 年前議論

My point is that it's difficult to separate the horrible, malevolent, criminal aggressors from the benign spectators or unwilling particpants, when witnessing barbaric events of human cruelty.

whyIndeed

11 年前議論

Well, these are a different species of insect though. Yellow jackets are wasps, fundamentally different from honey bees.

The behavior of honey bees is one driven moreso by an inherited willingness to engage in servitude, than with wasps. Wasps are predatory carnivores, and their nests are smaller, more distributed, and constructed out of found materials, modified and pasted together. Wasps don't construct nests of secreted wax, they use mud and chewed up wood. Most wasps don't make any honey.

In honey bee hives, the manner of reproduction and sex selection is different. The queen really is the window through which the genome passes, and her capacity to produce devoted offspring, hopelessly obedient to her brand of pheremones, is her mark of success as an organism. And if she produced peers and not subjects she'd never have the spare time or the environment in which to gestate her offspring.

whyIndeed

11 年前議論

  They liked it, they explained, because the trumpets 
  sounded exactly like the brassy screams of captive 
  women selected for feasting.

That's really an author injecting context where it might not belong.

Considering that these people aren't particularly sophisticated in a social sense, you can't interpret a statement like that directly.

It needs to be examined as:

  a. i like this sound, and appreciate what i'm hearing.

  b. gee, it reminds me of that time the woman was 
     tortured, and her cries echoed across the valley. 
     something i can never forget. something that
     cannot be stopped when mobs rule our culture.

To lend some credence to my detached perspective on this, consider the following:

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

Imagine people crafting a sculpture in the likeness of an animal, large enough to load an adult person inside, and being entertained by the noises of people (maybe your enemies, maybe not) being burned to death inside of it. Probably sounds like trumpets, no? Lest we forget what ancient Greece was like.

Cruel and unusual punishment isn't as far into the distant past as we'd like to imagine, either. This is just what that quote happened to remind me of.

Mob rule, in a place where social stratification is not adequate enough to provide for objective behavior modification by third party authoritarian paramilitary forces, takes on similar shapes around the world.

To drive the point home, I like a lot of ridiculous music, and some of the vocalists in the bands I like, they scream like they're being tortured to death. Having never witnessed any form of actual torture, firsthand, I still like the music, even though I'm not gripped by any particular desire to induce screams like that in any of my fellow human beings.

whyIndeed

11 年前議論

This article, though, is documenting the manner in which these tribal groups would, rather than merely condone, but instead actively participate communally in the torture and murder of insiders, their own kinfolk.

As a thought experiment, what does one do, when entering a room only to discover an entire family, all members old enough to know better, is engaged in depraved incestuous rituals?

Moral relativism is always a painful psychological quagmire.

whyIndeed

11 年前議論

This is true, even in situations where you don't care about downvotes.

whyIndeed

11 年前議論

Okay, but I'm trying to figure out why the EFF is getting involved. It doesn't sound like their usual sort of kerfuffle.

Sure, greed, corruption, and low-brow abuse of power is repugnant in and of itself, but where does this start to become a Electronic issue?

How do the shenanigans of court district in Texas endanger an entire frontier of all things electronic?

whyIndeed

11 年前議論

I don't understand why this is an EFF fight.

From what I gather the line of reasoning is something like:

  > eff cares about technology, in particular 
    electronics and communication.

    > sometimes electronic systems, and the software these 
      systems employ, may be patented.

      > patents in general may foster innovation, but
        when misused, they may also stifle innovation.

        > technological innovation, generally speaking, is
          something the EFF cares about.

          > in texas, there exists a group of political  
            activists colluding together to willfully 
            stifle technological innovation through 
            the careful misuse of U.S. patent law.

            > although the manner in which these political 
              malefactors operate may be subtle and 
              convoluted, there is an obvious sense of the 
              goals behind their actions, and those goals 
              threaten to harm, not just a select group of 
              actors mired in interpersonal grudge matches,
              but every participant in the American civil 
              justice system, by establishing dangerous 
              precedents with long reach and odd side 
              effects that may be weaponized to create 
              widespread strife and conflict amongst anyone 
              coming up against an opponent with the time, 
              money, and the awareness of said precedents.

              > how the EFF is so certain of such intent 
                among these political actors remains 
                unclear, but because of this, the EFF is 
                willing to invest not-insignificant 
                resources in confronting and disrupting
                their malignant behaviors.

                > strategically speaking, should certain
                  specific legal decisions come to pass 
                  in an American jurisdiction, it could 
                  spell disaster for technological 
                  innovation as a whole (really?), based 
                  on the implicit logical corollaries 
                  established by carefully chosen
                  legal battles won by this group.

                  > for this reason the EFF seeks to 
                    challenge the validity of their 
                    actions and their authority to operate
                    in general.

Is that about right?

whyIndeed

11 年前議論

The rationalization, should one have trouble inventing imaginative justifications out of thin air, is that they've captured a notorious kingpin, and they want to roll up this super villain's covert network of criminal masterminds, who are also coincidentally despicable child pornographers.

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