Inu

Well, here's how Karl Marx put it:

"What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor? First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. The worker’s activity is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self."

One shouldn't forget that some practices that appear pseudo-scientific from today's point of view made sense historically:

"It made perfect sense for ancient man to believe in astrology. The influence of sun and moon on earthly affairs is obvious. Likewise the stars can be seen as influential by their association with the seasons. Heavenly bodies are the prototype of self-motion, which is a property also possessed by beings with a soul as opposed to inanimate objects. This leads to the idea of the soul being a "piece of the heavens" and thereby to personal horoscope astrology. The heavenly bodies are associated with personality traits in a manner that have a straightforward justification in terms of objective astronomical properties of these bodies."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCFvtiAig7I

I'm 99% sure that I read an interview in which Anno said that he included the Christian symbolism simply because he thought it looked cool. Of course, that doesn't exclude the possibilty of it still making sense somehow.

A different perspective:

"Björnsson describes how Ok shrank rapidly during the 20th century, as shown by its area on various maps: 38 sq. Km. in 1901, 15 in 1910, 5 in 1945, and under one Km. in 2016. Most of this was before anthropogenic warming became the dominant cause of warming. [...] If Ok died during the Medieval Warm Period, it was born again during the Little Ice Age. It may have lived and died countless times during its long life. Its latest death is another example of weather converted into propaganda."

https://fabiusmaximus.com/2019/07/24/we-killed-okjokull/

They already tried this kind of thing in the late 18th century:

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

One shouldn't underestimate the intelligence of stupidity. It can have its own utility, strength and creativity within certain parameters.

As others have pointed out, the original article features an ideological undercurrent that remains mostly implicit. I referred to another article of the same author which makes those ideological assumptions explicit, thereby clarifying his political stance. If this is considered flamebait, then it seems that clarity needs to be avoided where it might cause controvery.

The author's answer to the question 'How do mainland Chinese feel about the protests in Hong Kong on the extradition law amendment?':

https://www.quora.com/How-do-mainland-Chinese-feel-about-the...

The rise of secularism probably is a factor. The social function of religion was to create a link between people and to regulate and control their coexistence. It provided a set of collective rituals, customs, festivities. Take that away and what remains is essentially the family unit and the market forces.

> I don't think anyone has considered Nietzsche a Nazi for a long time.

A recent example would be Steven Pinker:

"It’s easy to see why his sociopathic ravings would have inspired so many repugnant movements of the 20th and 21st centuries, including fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, the Ayn Randian fringe of libertarianism, and the American alt-right and neo-Nazi movements today."

https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/08/why-nietzsche-has-once-...

Might sound good in theory, but in effect it means that some low ranking Facebook employee will have to decide whether Jordan Peterson is allowed to publish on Facebook or whether he is to be categorized as a white supremacist, a decision the outcome of which will vary according to ideological disposition, the ability to read and comprehend texts, and the power to navigate the realm of ambiguity and conflicting interpretations.

"Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech." - Noam Chomsky

Reminds me of Raymond Chandler's technique:

"Raymond Chandler and I discussed this once, and he admitted to the most bitter reluctance to commit anything to paper. He evolved the following scheme: he had a tape recorder into which he spoke the utmost nonsense – a stream of consciousness which was then transcribed by a secretary and which he then used as a basis for his first rough draft. Very laborious. He strongly advised me to do the same … in fact became so excited that he kept plying me with information for months about the machine that helped him."

(from an interview with S. J. Perelman)

Maybe a case of the Cotard delusion?

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

I detect traces of Jordan Peterson. ;)

> One of Napoleon's great gifts was in compartmentalizing pieces of his life. His tumultuous and frankly soul-crushing personal life (which affected him deeply) with Josephine never got in the way of his military victories. I wonder if that's a good model, up-to-a-point for people and groups. With people, by compartmentalizing some unsavory perspective someone has, you have the ability to change it later on through discussion.

Also, the Napoleonic Wars killed 3 to 6 million people.

So the author joined the CIA in 1951 and "spent the next 24 years working with the Directorate of Operations." [1] That means that he probably participated in some of the disastrous covert operations of that era. [2] I don't know if that makes him a trustworthy authority on intelligence analysis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richards_Heuer

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

> UFO‐spotters, Raelian cultists, and self‐certified alien abductees notwithstanding, humans have, to date, seen no sign of any extraterrestrial intelligent civilization. [...] If large telescopes, NASA satellites, and omplicated mathematical data analysis are involved, it becomes harder for outside observers to mistake the work for the ramblings of UFO‐nuts and other crackpots.

The author makes it clear that for a serious scholar "UFOs" can a priori only be a subject of ridicule.

"And never choose Times New Roman or Arial, as those fonts are favored only by the apathetic and sloppy."

Why? Can someone explain this?

I think the general danger with computers is falling into a trap of repetitive behavior. In the age of letters you'd check your letter box maybe once a day. Now everywhere we have systems of immediate responses. It creates these loops of repetition where the constant stream of new data drives the user to be constantly aware of the possibility to respond and consume. What if letters could arrive at your home invisibly, at any time, without you knowing it? The problem with technology seems to be that when things become too easy, they often seem to acquire a potential of being destructive in a way that they hadn't before.

> Someone that does not want to be tracked by facial or gait recognition, either because he's a criminal or a political activist, will always be able to do that.

But if the system is not able to assign a face to a specific identity, it might immediately mark them as "suspicious". You'd have to bypass the system by really putting on the appearance of a face within the database.