Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing'

You mean like Republicans vs Democrats?

Each utility fought a real battle when being initially established. It's very interesting history. For awhile I was researching it pretty deeply, interested in whether my ideas were total lunacy or what and possibly considering writing a book about it. I started off with the question: What criteria was used to say 'yes, water should be a utility, natural gas should be a utility, electricity should be a utility, telephone should be a utility', etc? How did that actually come about?

The question weighed for those things in the past turned out to be a fairly simple one, but which can be tricky to approach honestly and fairly for both sides: Would the benefit to society be greater than the damage caused by the elimination of competition in that space? To judge it correctly, one does have to attempt to quantify and judge how much damage would be done by eliminating the competitive aspect, because that would have to happen. Then one lines up the benefits society would garner by having it available ubiquitously and cheaply.

Personally I think the call isn't even close. The Internet meets the requirement of providing more social benefit by being cheap and everywhere by miles, much moreso than some of the other public utilities even do. (First off the bat, you can get rid of the phone utility. And the TV quasi-utility.) You can actually close a gigantic number of government offices and let their employees work from home. You can tell people to 'do it online'. You can't DO that, ever, in law if universal access is not guaranteed and it remains a luxury. Small businesses would get huge with it, no longer chained to a "business class" connection that bleeds them dry and hosting companies that manipulate them, they could just run their servers themselves on their own lines. There are all sorts of other benefits to having a guaranteed-present communications network which is not a luxury but a basic service.

And sure, the companies like Comcast that originally made their money from distributing media and then got into the ISP market to try to stop or destroy or control it to prevent the threat to their cash cow will go nuts about it. Their death warrant was signed the day the Internet came about. Distribution is a solved problem. Sure 50 years ago if I made a video and wanted to show it to 10,000 people I'd HAVE to sign up with a distributor and beg and scrape and HOPE they only skimmed 99% of the value out of that transaction. Distribution was flat-out the single most valuable economic activity and dominated the entire global economy from the advent of factories (it made factories possible) up until the Internet came along (computers helped). Now distribution is something a clever 12 year old can do in their spare time for fun. And most importantly, the 12 year old will do it faster, better, and at a radically lower cost compared to the established gigantic players who feel entitled to still be kings. They love capitalism and the free market until they're stuck holding a huge order of buggy whips and watching everyone driving around in automobiles. Suddenly they wish their lobbyists could get the government to require cars to have a buggy whip installed before they'd start up.

What extreme risk? I mean, I'm a skinny weakling. I've pretty much always been a skinny weakling. I've had threats, but always been able to talk my way out of things. I don't really base my personal view so much on the fact I've never been in a fight, or that I live in the world with the lowest incidence of violent crime since the advent of agriculture or any of those sorts of things. I base it on neuroscience. We're built to NOT hurt people. We have to be pushed pretty far to be made to hurt people, and even then we usually can't go through with it. Mirror neurons work. They reflect what you do to others on yourself, and it doesn't feel good at all. If you're trained to kill on reflex, as soldiers are, and your body goes ahead and does it before your conscious mind can catch up... once it does, that causes a neurological cataclysm that manifests as PTSD and can take years to recover from.

The 'producing sustainable organizations' changes the topic completely. Human beings, as individuals, are absolutely and fundamentally different from human beings as a group. America went to war with Vietnam in the 1960s. That is a true statement. Even though there were tons of protestors who had no desire to fight Vietnam. Talking about groups and about people as individuals is starkly and completely different. People in groups can be easily driven by 'mob mentality', especially if they have been trained to be especially susceptible to this by things like team-based competitive sports in their formative years. Acting in a group 'disables' a great deal of a persons individual moral code. The same is true of people in a position of subservience. "I was just following orders" makes sense to the person pulling the trigger because they earnestly feel no moral responsibility for their actions - it's how they protect themselves. It's a dangerous defense that needs to be consciously acknowledged and resisted by all people. Failure to do so makes people very dangerous. And it is not an easy thing to do at all.

Organizations also pretty much always form to facilitate some form of control. And control is poison. It is inherently harmful, regardless of either the aim, intention, or end result of it. It is also, I think, cumulative. There's no one law that turns a country into an oppressive regime, it's an accumulation. And it doesn't matter if every single one of the restrictions is "for your own good". Unless the 'good' produced by the restriction outweighs the cumulative damage it does by inflicting the control upon each individual in the society, it is overall harmful. People often ask ridiculous questions like "Why should X be legal?" which pre-supposes that everything ought to be illegal unless there is a 'good reason' to permit it. They ask "Why should you be allowed to X?" as if every action a person takes needs to be justified as beneficial in some meaningful way. It's a very dangerous mindset that has undone many societies in the past. And control poisons not just the people being controlled, but those dishing it out as well. I'm uncertain whether their damage is greater than the damage to those controlled or not. As far as I know it's not been studied and that sort of thing would be hard to quantify. I mean, prison guards are killing themselves in massive numbers and always have for a reason, obviously, but the prisoners are tattooing themselves, joining gangs, and fighting as well, so which is having more harm inflicted? They're both responding in pretty extreme ways (ways identical to how people in oppressive nations, in oppressive cults, in high-control prisons everywhere, and increasingly in American high schools respond).

> Only you can control how you react to any given idea.

this is a bit simplistic. receiving information is a physiological process and not purely a cold and analytical affair. that's why a particularly vicious insult can drive some into a fit of violent irrational rage.

> And how common is it for them to drive it into a crowd and kill and injure people? Run the numbers. You're more likely to die from being hit by a meteor, so concern yourself with that instead.

there is a tremendous amount security work that contributes to this. many billions of dollars (possibly into the trillions, worldwide). a lot of dissuading machinery in legal and social systems.

however you quantify them, the dangers people face are not a simple consequence of unwilling perpetrators.

> Where is the law that doesn't say "if you murder, you go to jail" but instead sets things up so you physically can not murder?

is the only way to prevent murder a physical impediment?

does talking an attacker out of their plans count as preventing a murder?

> I pointed out the case of extreme punishment, death, not even THAT being capable of preventing the simple stupid crimes like stealing a pair of shoes.

again, you seem to be suggesting that 'deterrence doesn't real' because crime still exists. it seems you're presenting deterrence as an all-or-nothing dichotomy.

> 'Some' are individuals. I was speaking of humans overall.

indeed, and that's the point. pointing to a vague generalization about humans doesn't keep your kids safe.