Google helps Pentagon analyze military drone footage–employees “outraged” • Hacker News Board

Re: Google helps Pentagon analyze military drone footage–employees “outraged”

#41

Post by dang » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 5:30 AM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #38

dang wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you please stop posting flamebait and ideological fodder to Hacker News? Whether you mean it to be or not, it's vandalism. This wretched subthread is exactly what we don't want on HN. It is exactly what will trash the site. An experienced user like you ought to be more familiar with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and ought to take better care of the commons. Everything that's good about Hacker…

Vandalism? I expressed views based on facts about the world. I mean, I don't think you can see your own overreaction. First of all - do I really have to be the one to point out that "ideological" is not a pejorative term? Ideology is literally "a : a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture; b : a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture; c : the i…

I mostly don't disagree, but that's beside the point. The point is that flamebait and flamewars destroy HN. HN is for intellectual curiosity, not "you are a moron" and "literally fuck you". It's not like this is hard to understand.

If the food we're ingesting is poisoned, it doesn't matter whether it's also nutrient-rich.

Re: Google helps Pentagon analyze military drone footage–employees “outraged”

#42

Post by peterwwillis » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 5:35 AM UTC

ztratar wrote: post #13

peterwwillis wrote: post #8

I think this is a good example of how their old ethos of "Do no evil" was a narrow-minded fantasy by privileged white people who never had to face the world they were born into. Sitting in your expensive apartment (raising rents so that the former neighbors can no longer afford to live here), sipping your Starbucks (a global commodity dependent on trade deals to somewhat stabilize paying farmers around the world abou…

"narrow-minded fantasy by privileged white people" Apparently not wanting to be evil is now reserved for privileged white people. I'm a liberal, and I consider this type of logical & sentiment to be the exact thing that alienates independents and right-leaning individuals. Peace is something that is commonly desired and should be promoted. "Good" is the same. Beyond that, I personally think you're casting a wide net…

In a very literal sense, "markets" are just a venue to buy, sell, and exchange goods. They are economic, not idealistic. They aren't concerned with equality, unless it's the equality of the exchange of goods and service. According to every principle of "markets" that I am aware of, none of it includes the principle that it should decrease poverty world-wide. So this was what, a happy accident?

Or perhaps the reduction of poverty is simply a side-effect of increases in efficiency. Increases which themselves sometimes hinge on things like ruining the overall health of soil so that we can produce more crops in less time, producing potentially harmful runoff that affects other people, animals and plants.

And an increase in equality - was that purely economic? Or perhaps, with the reduction in material needs, and the increase of civil rights, there's less need for dogmatic religious control and tribalism, leading to more egalitarian beliefs, as people are no longer as tightly wound to the organizations that led them before.

You can certainly say that markets influenced these things. But that doesn't mean that these things can't simply go back to the way they were - the markets don't prevent backsliding into less equal treatment of marginalized groups. Just look at the rising wave of nationalism and populism across the otherwise stalwart symbols of freedom and democracy! Markets are doing pretty damn well, but we're electing leaders (or allowing leaders to tighten their iron fist) who sound like despots with their insular fear-driven way of life under threat.

Re: Google helps Pentagon analyze military drone footage–employees “outraged”

#43

Post by peterwwillis » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 6:01 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #41

peterwwillis wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vandalism? I expressed views based on facts about the world. I mean, I don't think you can see your own overreaction. First of all - do I really have to be the one to point out that "ideological" is not a pejorative term? Ideology is literally "a : a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture; b : a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture; c : the i…

I mostly don't disagree, but that's beside the point. The point is that flamebait and flamewars destroy HN. HN is for intellectual curiosity, not "you are a moron" and "literally fuck you". It's not like this is hard to understand. If the food we're ingesting is poisoned, it doesn't matter whether it's also nutrient-rich.

I get that we should strive for less emotionally charged discourse. But as I'm sure you're aware, that's actually really hard for most people to do. It's very easy to get riled up and hard to calm back down. Most of the time, people don't intend to be hostile, they are just reacting to the stimuli around them.

So there's poison in our food. Are we going to keep just wandering around looking for sick people and then saying "please stop poisoning people", or are we going to try to find what causes people to be poisoned to begin with and try to prevent it? In other words, what active steps can HN or its users take other than simply telling them to be nice to create civil polite discourse?

Re: Google helps Pentagon analyze military drone footage–employees “outraged”

#44

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 6:33 AM UTC

riku_iki wrote: post #26

IntronExon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh for sure, you can get much more bang for your buck out of a swarm of MIRV’ed ICBMs carrying megatons of hydrogen bombs than bayonets and muskets. I mean, just try ignoring intersecting blast waves and thermal pulses! And chlorine gas? Pffft, piss on your socks and you can breathe through them but try that shit with VX! Get it?

because superpowers have ICBMs, we don't see large scale wars with 10s millions of casualties for 70 years.

> we don't see large scale wars with 10s millions of casualties for 70 years.

The long amorphous war(s) in Indochina alone seems to likely be on that order of magnitude.

Re: Google helps Pentagon analyze military drone footage–employees “outraged”

#45

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 5:32 PM UTC

riku_iki wrote: post #35

IntronExon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-mil... That’s tens of millions, and I’m being generous in ignoring how you’ve moved the goalposts. Your thesis is simply unsupportable, sorry. Besides, we don’t know what the future holds, but in terms of raw possibilities we can now end all human life on Earth thanks to technology. That’s also new in the last 70 years. Hopefully we’ll never do it, but we could…

> That’s tens of millions It says "This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths ", which is not "tens". Now imagine death toll if US would directly fight war with USSR over Europe. And yes, it includes Vietnam and Korean wars, where high precision weapons weren't used yet.

> It says "This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths ", which is not "tens".

The total casualties in the wars between the superpower-led coalitions substantially exceed the casualties caused by the US military in those wars. (And, in any case, yes, in the normal way terms of scale are used, a number ≥ 10^7 and < 10^8 is usually described as “tens of millions”.)

Re: Google helps Pentagon analyze military drone footage–employees “outraged”

#46

Post by maxander » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 1:45 AM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #39

maxander wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to participate in injustice in a multiplicity of implicit, difficult-to-see ways and yet still object to participating in explicit, obvious injustices. Doing so is still far preferable to not objecting to obvious injustices, regardless of what you're up to in your spare time.

I see what you're saying, but you must see the flaw in this logic. This theoretical person objects to the explicit injustice, because it's right in front of them. But then they still do nothing about the implicit injustice, because it's not right in front of them. It is my opinion that most of us in society are well informed enough to know about those implicit injustices. We read about it in the newspaper, or hear ab…

Are you saying someone has to either be a paragon of virtue or just give up on ethics altogether? No one is at either extreme. As you pointed out, even wearing clothes makes you complicit in the moral turpitude of pennies-for-the-hour overseas sweatshops. Are you committed enough to justice that you'll go naked the rest of your life? I'm not, I'd I'm wearing several things that I'd assume were made by terribly oppressed people, as I write this. But when I see the military (or police, or whatever) engaging in wanton destruction, should I just say "well, I'm wearing pants, so I guess I can't complain"? That's preposterous.