Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

Your discussion of "legality" here is U.S.-centric. Google has offices in Germany, France, Poland, Russia, Turkey, U.A.E., India, and China, to name a few. How would you feel if Google worked on military technology for those countries? Would you point out that it was inevitable that their militaries would seek ways to use A.I.? Would you point out that the Turkish armed forces' activities are permitted under Turkish law? Would you lament the inability of Google employees to separate work from politics?

Google has users in almost all countries, and even our friends in other liberal democracies do not see the U.S. military the same way we do. Perhaps some Google users' family members have even been killed by the U.S. military. This presents a perfectly reasonable business reason (one that has nothing to do with "the personal, the moral, the legal, and the political") for Google to turn down AI drone contracts.

I'd add Nanking, London, Warsaw, Auschwitz, Amsterdam, and Bataan to your list, and that's off the top of my head.

The British, U.S., USSR, Germans, Japanese, and Italians all practiced atrocities and mass warfare and/or genocide against civilian populations. I'm not challenging the credibility of your list, only the one-sidedness.

I'd love to live in a world where collective action by workers could be considered an abuse of power. The workers would be way better off in such a world.

It is completely insane and probably symptomatic of the extremely successful doublethink anti-union campaign by big business in the US to think organized workers could ever pose a larger threat to democracy than corporations you are grouping with the government as victims.

What a lot of people don't realize is that incorporation under US law is functionally franchising an elected government. The difference is that instead of the members of the business getting the votes the votes are called shares and are controlled by an oligarchy majority of shareholders.

The means by which the vast majority of businesses are run (with exception to many nonprofits, public benefit corporations, and coops) is what many would consider antithetical to how to run society fairly. And then people are surprised that such unaccountable undemocratic systems produce blatant corruption - except people don't even call it corruption despite it being a direct mapping to public corruption, they call it business as usual or meeting earnings expectations.

But no, the influence of THAT system of organization is fine - better, adored. Aspired towards. Workers trying to have more equal negotiations by working together though? Threat to democracy.

This school only makes sense if you throw out the entire section that mentions a well regulated militia. A militia would be expected to have artillery.

Thinking of it as "guns" being a fundamental right is... kinda backwards.

And, for the record, I think that "because the Second Amendment" is a horrible and fantastically lazy argument for gun ownership.

Now, let us take a look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Specifically, Article 3:

"Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person."

From this, I don't think it's a stretch to say that everyone has the right to protect the above -- within reason!

Everyone has an innate right to defend their life, liberty, and security of person. Without that, those rights are meaningless.

This is not the job of the police. You should definitely call them if you have the time! But they are under no obligation to protect you, or even to show up.

(Most people don't know that, by the way.)

When you encounter a threat to the above, you have the right to fight until that threat ends, with some leeway granted for the adrenaline dump of combat.

This is not an indiscriminate license to kill or even to engage in violence!

Even if you "feel threatened". You must be able to demonstrate that you acted in defense of life -- yours or another's -- in order to justify your use of force against an attacker.

Weapons are the means by which individuals use force.

Allowing for self-defense allows for the use of weapons.

There is no such thing as a "non-lethal" weapon.

Your hands and feet are natural, and lethal, weapons. More people die by these every year in the United States than by "assault weapons".

Clubs and knives? Definitely lethal. The difference between the winner and a loser in a knife fight, is that the winner dies on the way to the hospital.

Tasers kill more people annually in the United States than "assault weapons". Tasers are also one-time use only. Miss your attacker? Too bad. Attacker has a thick jacket? Better luck next time. Multiple attackers? That sucks.

Pepper spray is probably the least-lethal thing you can use, but it still can and does kill people. Pepper spray is horribly ineffective. Use it indoors, or against the wind, and you will incapacitate yourself. It is useless in the rain. Or if your attacker is wearing a face mask. Or if you have multiple attackers.

A gun, on the other hand, works in the rain. It works in the wind. It works equally well regardless of how strong or weak you are. It works against multiple attackers.

Guns, even if "silenced", are also amazingly loud, which is a big advantage when you're defending yourself, because you want people to hear that noise and call the cops.

So, in a world where we respect peoples' human rights, allowing gun ownership really is common sense.