"Banality of evil is a phrase used by Hannah Arendt in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her thesis is that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal."
I see huge potential for use in agriculture. I talk to wine growers in California and we figure out how much money they can save using one of our products instead of using a tractor. I see that as a good thing, but perhaps I am simply living the banality of evil.
The evil that is coming from it and will continue to come from it is perpetrated by those that, as said earlier, accept the premise of the State/government that they work for.
If it's a person's job to use technology such that it results in innocents being killed, injured or sucked up into a byzantine legal system and that person keeps doing that job, that's an example of the banality of evil.
Making quads to replace manual labor isn't banal or evil.
I guess McDonald's fits that bill as well, as diabetes and obesity are among the biggest killers in the US.
Because it's been going on since time immemorial.
But if you want to stick with the U.S., you might find that stuff that President Lincoln did quite atrocious from a civil liberties point of view as well.
Possibly. Since we've already gone godwin, IBM sold computers to Germany. Those machines were used for something we do these days as a matter of routine - a census. It's hard to get more banal than a census. Yet that census was invaluable in identifying and segregating large chunks of people based on ethnicity. It was so instrumental to the Third Reich that James Watson of IBM was given a medal of honor.
The tech is just a tool. It's who you give it to and what they do with it that matters. The question is, what do you do about it? You can't really restrict the dispersion of technology. Every attempt to do that so far has failed, for everything from munitions to cryptography. You can make certain uses illegal. That doesn't seem to be stopping the government or police these days. All that seems to do is put a lot of private citizens in jail. The only solid solution I can come up with is to come up with countermeasures of some sort.
How to solve a problem like human nature. It's quite a humdinger.
Specifically the "Order of the German Eagle", if anyone else was confused about this.
Hey Central - we have another "Alzheimer's patient" who has driven out of his low-class zone to a more affluent one... send a squad car over to help "remind him" of his place.
If you agree that what is being presented is good, then this quote does not apply. Instead, then, we have to have a discussion about what policies need to be in place to prevent the things that we agree are, in fact, bad.
"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil." -Hannah Arendt
Or maybe you did not mean to imply those things. Which is rather my point that without context, there's not much value in dropping a quote. I find quotes are great to illustrate or support discussion. But they are not discussion itself.
I fail to see why my intentions matter one whit in a discussion about increased surveillance by the government.
"the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.""
Let's say there is a topic about how a flaw in the SSL implementation of browser X can be used to take over the machine of a user by sending them to a specific link; and someone says "yeah but without that bug SSL is quite useful actually". It's at least kinda missing the point, and in a way that's in the playbook of PR firms to boot. To start out with "I am amazed at the disconnect" and the continue trying to create a disconnect is kinda rich, if you think about it.