>So which do you prefer? Foreign manipulation of public will, or democracy?
That's a false dichotomy which implies you missed my point. There is no such thing as sovereign democracy in a globalized world with omnipresence and instantaneous communication.
>The Internet allows foreign adversaries to attack America in new and unexpected ways,”
>“Together with our law enforcement partners, the Department of Justice is resolute in its commitment to locate, identify and seek to bring to justice anyone who interferes with American elections.
Sounds like Don Quixote is fighting the internet now. Unless you just shut it down how is it possible to not have world wide "interference" on the world wide web? Perhaps we need to think about how the instantaneous global communications network is obsolescing the concept of the nation state which was formed as a result of the printing press.
>Free and fair elections are hard-fought and contentious, and there will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide, and conquer us.
That sounds like a fitting description of mass media/news corporations everywhere.
If everyone can watch everyone with equal transparency, that would seem to imply a distributed system with information symmetry, which is antithetical to centralized authority. If there was a central authority/super admin in such a system, how would you keep them from covertly creating information asymmetry?
>This is literally Google donating money to charity.
I specifically said "product" donations.
>Even so, many would agree that Facebook and Google are charitable for giving their products away for free
And they would be ignorant of the value of their information, attention spans, and technology in general. Many such people would also agree that "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about"
That's a lot like saying FB and GOOG are charitable because they give their products away for "free". How much money/data are those product donations extracting from the people they donated to?
>The negatives are less tangible: giving up your personal data (this is complicated by the fact that the data didn't exist until you used their services), targeted advertising, I'm not sure what else there is.
You forgot about the elephant in the room: the imminent danger of cyberwarfare.
The reason the Holocaust was so efficient at mass murder was because of "giving up your personal data".
Where the problem arises is the degree to which one is affected by these emotions. Too much anxiety can lead to paranoia, schizophrenia and anti-social behavior, too little can lead to life threatening situations. Too much aggression can lead to irrational mass murder, too little can lead to slavery.
>Emotions are part of the biological machinery that keeps meat-machines alive and active in the world.
Not all emotions are valuable, some are indeed quite harmful and anti social.
Which brings us back full circle to the original point of this comment chain: that western society is extremely emotional about the subject of death relative to other societies. This tendendency leads to unecessary suffering and the prolonging of life at all costs.
The US has come very far from its founding mantra; "Give me liberty, or give me death!" has seemingly been reversed to "anything but death"
>no evidence that total biological death would entail anything but
You seem very certain of your hypothesis. Is there anything that science has had a harder time defining, quantifying, or understanding than the nature of consciousness as it relates to reality? With that in mind it would seem more in keeping with the spirit of science to remain agnostic ("I don't know"), rather than atheistic ("I know")
>Those who raise questions about the God hypothesis and the soul hypothesis are by no means all atheists. An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.
That's a false dichotomy which implies you missed my point. There is no such thing as sovereign democracy in a globalized world with omnipresence and instantaneous communication.