923 karma · joined January 29, 2021
In Berlin, you could see graffitis such as "we will vaccinate you all!" or "covid deniers out". If there was any way to measure it, I'd bet that the net effect of that is negative.
Waste? They'd be using storage that would otherwise most likely be sitting there, unused. Or in other words, wasted.
I don't even know what that means. Do you disagree with anything of her I quoted, then actually interact with it. You spent 2 comments not doing that, and then talk about being even more direct?
> Let's take all the vitriol Kasparov has thrown at the feet of the red team since 2016 at face value.
Why are you not taking this to the top-level? What does it have to do with the quote I posted? You think I posted it to say Kasparov is right about something? I posted it as it is.
> For the same time period, will you (or Kasparov) name 3 brainwashing propaganda campaigns that the blue team has undertaken?
Red team? Blue team? What are you even on about?
Not all propaganda. I mean, the White Rose called their own leaflets propaganda.
Also, are you saying they can't possibly know? I know whether I am sitting on a chair or not right now. Is this being arrogant and closed-minded, or just me knowing what I know? Even though know the word "chair" is a simplification, and ultimately we "know" nothing that isn't based on axioms we came up with -- but to go down that rabbit hole every time for everything would indeed destroy the capacity to form convictions and to organize in groups.
> Another useful tip about propaganda is "propaganda doesn't care how you feel, only how you act"
That's true for the "oldschool" variants. To put a point on it, I'd say the modern variant very much cares about seeking out and destroying all kernels of people owning themselves rather than being leaves in the wind. The point is to break people down to be able to instill and enforce anything on a whim, not to instill a particular conviction that they then make their own, and which would become a problem once the agenda changes. The capacity to make anything their own, as well as anything that springs from within them, is "the enemy".
> The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
> There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
-- both Hannah Arendt
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/10/26/hannah-arendt-fr...
> If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
-- Hannah Arendt, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/10/26/hannah-arendt-fr...
> My understanding of propaganda is not that it necessarily destroys truth
Not necessarily, but this is the new dimension of some of it. I was actually looking for this quote of hers in English, but couldn't find it:
> "So läuft der Unterschied zwischen traditionellen und modernen Lügen im Grunde auf den Unterschied zwischen Verbergen und Vernichten hinaus."
which translates to
> "Therefore the difference between traditional and modern lies basically boils down to the difference between concealment and destruction."
-- Hannah Arendt
But of course, it doesn't destroy the truth. It's a bit like saying poking out my eyes destroys all paintings in the world -- but on the other hand, it's obvious how I would mean that, right? If nobody has mental opposing thumbs anymore, they cannot grasp anything as truth anymore, and there might as well be no truth.
Regarding your article, here is another really good one:
https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-ubiquitous-matrix-o...
> We live in a ubiquitous matrix of lies, a culture of mendacity so pervasive that it is nearly invisible. Because we are lied to all the time, in ways so routine they are beneath conscious notice, even the most direct lies are losing their power to shock us.
You would do well to familiarize yourself with Hannah Arendt, rather than just repeat generalities.
> Kasparov is due for some self-reflection.
That has nothing to do with this quote.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics", https://idanlandau.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/arendt-truth-...
(The whole thing is worth reading, though not necessarily in that particular pdf)
-- Kroc Camen
And they didn't try the one that is the actual subject of this subthread.
> asking “why don’t they just do this?” is not productive
That doesn't make your answer to it valid.
> the answer to that is that copyright is broken
Why not go further back? Why is there greed? Why aren't all humans brothers? If only we could fix that, some of these problems would literally disappear!
This is way too broad a brush. I find these parasocial relations a sign of alienation and rootlessness, here or there, and I'm sure there's plenty of Asians who reject it as well.
> Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans.
-- Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of Studio Ghibli
I believe in plenty of things, they just happen to be real, too, which makes it so much better. I believe in justice, for example. I believe in honesty. I believe in a few individuals whom I have a deep connection with. I believe in the beauty I can find everywhere if I just look at just about anything that, as Sophia Scholl said, wasn't created by humans. I never wake up in the middle of the night wondering whether my belief in those and more things is misplaced and just a substitute for something I'm lacking, they're the real deal. That's priceless to me.
-- Adam Smith
I'm not doing that. I was around and paying attention, and I remember Colin Powell sweating trying to sell this story about scary mobile weapons labs to the UN. And I also remember stuff like that one US news site that reported on an anti-Iraq-war demonstration by school children by captioning a photo of a few blonde kids with open mouths and furrowed brows (since they were likely chanting something) with "Hitlers children: Pro-Sadam demonstrators protest in Munich, Germany". Some people had such a hard-on for war, and it was obvious from day one. Even Christopher Hitchens ended up being a cheerleader for it, so deep was the depravity.
But it wasn't something nobody could have known better, which is why most people knew better. They were proven correct, too, and to call that quarterbacking now, because they were shouted down then, with phrases like anti-Americanism and Bush Derangement Syndrome is kinda rich. If nobody could have known, how come so many called it right away?
> War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
-- from the Judgement of the International Military Tribunal for Germany
It wasn't hard to see, it was just a lot of people had and have double standards.
> No matter how bad a president is perceived to be, I’m not sure we will see him or her jailed for their actions.
It's not about "perceiving a president", it's the simple act of a war of aggression on Iraq. And yes, it's unlikely, which is my whole point.
> Billing and insurance are a mess, but I don’t think you’ll find anyone argue that.
It's a profitable mess for some, hell for others. And to combine that with 9/11:
"Jon Stewart slams Congress over benefits for 9/11 first responders"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uYpDC3SRpM
If you have never seen it, watch it in full. In the face of that and what it stands for, many other things, and not least the war of aggression pitched to it which you agree is "unlikely" to ever have any justice shed upon it, a phrase like "Those who were responsible for the lives lost on 9/11 were held accountable." is just incorrect.
That people help each other in catastrophies, be that earthquakes or anything else, is human. The pattern of war and war profiteering at the cost of the public, of the very same average Joes and Janes that get to die, that's the thing the USA excels at. Just as a random example, look at healthcare: that does not strike me as something that is even possible in a society where caring for others and selfless sacrifice is a priority, much less the ideal.
> If you care about other people, that’s now a very dangerous idea. If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That’s not going to happen if you care only about yourself. Maybe you can become rich, but you don’t care whether other people’s kids can go to school, or can afford food to eat, or things like that.
-- Noam Chomsky
I'm not disrespecting the victims in my own heart, but you could say I'm somewhat unimpressed by the somber display of respect by many people who, with their (in)actions, betray the values that would give such respect weight.
-- Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience" (1849)
-- Bill Hicks
Why are you assuming I wouldn't have prefered the Nazis to have "given up the ghost" as well? Are there any signs of the CCP "giving up the ghost" anytime soon? Given the choices that actually existed, I prefer, as the White Rose put it in one of their leaflets, an end with terror rather than terror without end. Human mortality is a given either way, the dignity that comes with agency and intellectual integrity is what the struggle is about. I don't ask for how long someone lived, but as who they lived.. or as Hannah Arendt put it:
> Once upon a time, there was a happy time when people were free to choose; better to die dead than to be a slave, better to die standing than to live on one's knees. Once upon a time there was a wicked time when imbecile intellectuals declared that life was the highest of goods. Today the terrible time has come, when it is proved every day that death begins its reign of terror exactly when life has become the highest good; that he who prefers to live on his knees dies on his knees; that no one is easier to murder than a slave. We the living have to learn that one cannot even live on one's knees, that one does not become immortal by chasing life, and that when one no longer wants to die for anything, one dies even though one has done nothing.
-- Hannah Arendt via DeepL
> As a fellow European, I can see that communists are somehow still considered better than the Nazis
That's still like saying something with a lethal dose of 50g is better food than something with a lethal dose of 5g. I don't see the point of even ranking them.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Origins of Totalitarianism"
So in your mind, the act of murder "counts for a lot more" [0] than someone's right to their own life, and theft does not exist, since whoever possesses something owns it?
[0] What's the unit we're counting in? How do you "count" intellectual integrity or moral character?
> Not worse, just as bad in a different way, it has nothing to do with geography. It is just that absolute power corrupts absolutely, regardless of the players of this power game.
How are either of these "breathless fulminations"? Or this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28439648 ? To give this as the reason is just reading from the teleprompter without even looking at what's in front of you.
Meanwhile, rants about programming paradigms or coworkers, big companies, all of those and more can be rather colorful, it's mostly when stepping on the boots things get painted as rabid rants at the drop of a hat.
Yet, what intellectual who is more than a vulgar stooge of power doesn't have a violent and uncompromising antipathy against those who would murder people for expressing the wrong opinion, or even simply for acknowledging historical facts?
edit: I love how this was downvoted within a minute.
> If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.
-- John J. Chapman
Hannah Arendt mentioned this: that people who can't be mobilized by the simplified ground truths of totalitarianism will not become more helpful after having pondered and analyzed the issue more, and that furthermore, a full analysis of totalitarianism is only possible after its defeat.
-- Simone Weil
That could justify anything that is new. Just take the people who think nuclear would be a bad idea -- "it's just because that's not how they are used to doing things".
What is there to "learn" about, say, 50 pixels of padding rather than 5 pixels of padding and 1 pixel of border? All of these "arguments" are avoiding the actual subject matter at hand to make grand generalizations.
> It's entirely possible the text editor Kakoune would be even better than vim at doing the whole modal editor thing, but I do not care to find out.
Then speak for yourself, because none of that describes me. I constantly try out new things; some things supersede what I used to that point, others fall short.
> what color links should be and if that color is distinguishable is pretty subjective
Not in the case of two colors being the exact same. There is nothing subjective about that at all.
We're not looking at a box with unknown contents that we would need to go by probabilities. We can just look at the thing.
> The article you've linked has been fairly criticized for it essentially removing controls from their methodology by things like using lower contrast buttons for the 'flatter' designs, which is not essential to the design paradigm.
I can, right now in Win 10, show you plenty examples where there is no contrast and no distinction between an overlay window and what's behind it. Not low contrast, exactly the same color.
> Ultimately, I'm still going to argue that this is a matter of subjectivity and as we age the less accepting we are to change
This is the same indirect reasoning as "people like what they used first", which in my case is provably, objectively, false.
I might as well say "as people age and grow in confidence and experience, they trust their own judgement more, and care less about just going along with whatever is pushed just to fit in" or anything like that.
Nah. I started out with Workbench 1.3, which was flat. Because they literally hadn't the colors available to do more. I didn't use them, but Mac and Atari ST were the same. Then came Workbench 2.0, then MUI ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_User_Interface ), and I recognized and enjoyed the improvements. I love change, I just don't love regression. Why would I?
And as for experts:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-ui-less-attention-caus...