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And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

shkspr.mobi

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Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#271

Post by chrismorgan »

Frieren wrote: post #11

> Should multinational corporations instruct local executives to be loyal to their parent company or the rulers of the country they live in? Legally, to the rules of the country. That is not even a question. But if we talk about morality, the answer is to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and what it implies. There is no moral nor legal reason to follow the parent company when it in conflict with the rule of…

Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders (the Nuremberg defence, “we were only following orders”).

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#272

Post by rayiner »

inigyou wrote: post #246
rayiner wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But who decides which rules are neutral You’re correct that rules are themselves to an high degree arbitrary. They can only be imposed by a source of authority that’s beyond question: God(s), elders, founding fathers, kings, etc. In the case of the U.S. it’s historical inertia going back to 1215.

Those aren't neutral, they're just Schelling points.

They don’t actually have to be neutral, people just have to accept them as neutral and elevate them above their own sense of right and wrong.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#273

Post by inigyou »

Otterly99 wrote: post #270
inigyou wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone studied why homeless people refuse help? It's usually because the "help" isn't help. E.g. "you can sleep here but only if you haven't used drugs in the last week, so we'll test your blood before we let you in"

How are you supposed to help a person like that thought? I understand that you cannot reason too well with an addict, so it might be surprising to some that somebody would refuse shelter if it meant being clean. Still, what should be the approach then? Unconditional help?

Are you saying that drug users deserve to be homeless?

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#274

Post by inigyou »

roenxi wrote: post #265
inigyou wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's zero I'll just buy the entire planets worth of oxygen, please and thank you. That'll be $0.00.

I'm sure you're just being silly, but ok. Take what you can. That is pretty much literally how it works. I'm not stopping you.

Where can I buy oxygen rights?

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#275

Post by TacticalCoder »

rayiner wrote: post #117
jameskilton wrote: post #3

A good article, but missing one very important word: trust. Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. Said society also finds it incredibly important to remove or nullify those who aren't trustworthy because "a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch ". Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose, and it only takes one person exploiting the trustwort…

> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing The phrase "the right thing" is load-bearing, to steal a Claudeism. The Muslim Brotherhood that ran the country before El-Sisi thought they were doing "the right thing." El-Sisi also thought he was doing "the right thing." Egyptians mostly thought El-Sisi was doing “the right thing” during this time…

No, no, no and no. There's is right and wrong and there are evil people.

No all cultures are equal: torturing kids for as long as possible before they die, to extract as many tears as possible to please the gods, used to be a thing.

We do not all need to agree on "neutral" rules: we can agree it's an evil thing to do to torture kids for as long as possible, to extract as many tears as possible from them.

Don't be one, two or three of the "won't see" / "won't hear" / "won't talk" monkeys: don't be neutral. Fight evil.

At the moment for example there are 300 million women/teenagers/girls alive that have been genitally mutilated, including in the west: you're allowed to not be neutral and take a stance and fight against FGM.

At the Bataclan in Paris islamists with AK-47s (which are forbidden in France btw) lined up 300 people and slaughtered them: you're allowed to not be neutral and take a stance against islamism.

In January the islamist iranian regime killed 30 000 of its own unarmed civilians: same thing, you're allowed to not be neutral.

I don't care if islamists are convinced they do the right thing by spreading terror: they are evil.

And I'm not a religious person.

And btw western societies are based on rule that are mostly not neutral: we don't believe in harm to others, for a start. Even if in several cultures (past and present), that was normal.

At the moment for example there are lots of talks in french media about the status of women in Afghnistan since the talibans came to power.

For, as a western society, we do not care if others believe it's the right thing to mutilate girls, kill your enemies and enslave their women and daughters, etc.

The fallacy of gray is really a nasty thing and no good shall come to civilized societies for resorting to it.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#276

Post by modo_mario »

blooalien wrote: post #79
jameskilton wrote: post #3

A good article, but missing one very important word: trust. Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. Said society also finds it incredibly important to remove or nullify those who aren't trustworthy because "a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch ". Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose, and it only takes one person exploiting the trustwort…

> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. I was taught as a child that most people deep down genuinely want to be "good people". If only I had known what an absolute lie that really truly was, I'd have chosen a very different path for my life. Going out of my way to be a "good person" to the best of my ability was a total waste of a life th…

I think this worked out quite well when there was a societal expectation of conformity in various ways and so everyone's good actions was either directed to the good of everyone or the good of the tribe depending on the person and their sensibilities.

But we started rapidly deconstructing that in various ways and paired with algorithms and an increasingly harsh world on some fronts this barrels towards certain things. When I grew up colourblindness was advocated for and the assumption that migrants here in western europe would not assimilate was considered racist, a gay person would not be questioned, the future was progress with hurdles to tackle.

Now i've never known society as race centered, expecting assimilation is considered bigotry, there's sectarianism of various kinds, i expect the social safetynet to be built down under it's new pressures, increasing homophobic violence in the major cities that saw lots of migration on one end and the culturewar surrounds trans people and the like on the other end, some of the hurdles like the climate seem insurmountable and yet we grow, etc.

It feels like in a drive towards enlightnment we tripped and fell backwards and consequentially I too have given up some tho not all of my views about being good.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#277

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

fyredge wrote: post #232

Paraphrasing from Plato's The Republic, when the rulers and their auxillaries raise children with proper balance in the body and soul, there will be no need to deliberate on what is the right legislation, for the legislators themselves will be just in their duties. In the end of the day, we need proper education, not only in technical excellence, but also societal awareness, what it means to be good and how to uphold…

"To rear a child and give him an education is easy, but to put a good mind into him is impossible... By teaching you will never make the bad man good." — Theognis of Megara (Elegies, lines 429–438) (quoted by both Plato in Meno and Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics)

Or:

"Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret." ("You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she will always return.") — Epistles, Book I

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#278

Post by bell-cot »

khafra wrote: post #217
decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

Every government should only put people who have worked in a SOC in charge of these systems. There's no way to take the cost of useless alerts seriously unless you've spent some time tuning them and living with the tradeoffs.

Unfortunately, you're asking for every gov't to be reliably competent. With no petty bureaucrats trying to advance their careers by getting their notices prioritized. And no politicians bowing to (say) the demands of a lightning victim's family, to have top-priority alerts sound whenever lightning might maybe-in-theory be possible within 10 or so miles.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#279

Post by roenxi »

inigyou wrote: post #274
roenxi wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you're just being silly, but ok. Take what you can. That is pretty much literally how it works. I'm not stopping you.

Where can I buy oxygen rights?

I recommend Amazon. You can buy a tanks of the stuff to call your own if you feel like paying someone something.

There'd be specialist companies that do bulk oxygen supplies too, a quick search found things like https://www.dswgascylinder.com/product/liquid-oxygen-trailer.... Not a market I'm familiar with.

I suppose I'll just add in postscript; your not going to get much out of the conversation if you don't take it seriously. There are people who make great money selling oxygen. It isn't automatically priced at $0. In some hypothetical world where quality oxygen wasn't just floating around in the atmosphere, people would pay for it in the same way they pay for other essentials like food or water. Paying for water is about as crazy as paying for oxygen, they both basically just turn up out of the atmosphere. And there is precedent for a commons essential good becoming more expensive, food used to be something people just picked up off the ground for free. Or hunted down on unclaimed land.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#280

Post by [deleted] »

ubertaco wrote: post #244
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US spewing all the alarms at the line level employees and fatiguing the shit out of them is a direct (and predictable, but of course everyone who complained in advance got sneered at by the usual demographics) result of OSHA policy. Same bunch of moronic incentives that result in there being a policy against everything and employees technically violating the rules to work normally. Whenever you see an alarm fa…

Yeah, if only the government didn't regulate that pesky checks notes workplace safety, then for-profit companies could be free to act for the good of all, like they always do!

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