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yestoallthat commented on White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA   washingtonpost.com/news/e... · Posted by u/molecule
ra1n85 · 9 years ago
Not seeing what you're trying to argue. Lots of appeal to emotion here. I'll make it simple for you:

1. Me: High levels of defense spending has easily identifiable consequences. But we need to be careful that we also take time to identify the positives and consider them.

2. You: The US has done bad things in the past and war is bad.

I don't disagree with you, but you're not rebutting my point.

yestoallthat · 9 years ago
And why would any positives matter, if there weren't actual people and their lives, and suffering inflicted or avoided, involved down the line? Lots of appeal to robots here. I'm not a robot.

> But we need to be careful that we also take time to identify the positives and consider them.

Yes, and then you need to circle back and consider both, in context, including opportunity costs.

> The US has done bad things in the past and war is bad.

Respond to what I said or don't, but don't appeal to a 3 year old you're not talking with.

yestoallthat commented on The Long Tail of the Attica Prison Riot   themorningnews.org/articl... · Posted by u/DiabloD3
yestoallthat · 9 years ago
> As the prisoners collapsed, choking and retching, the police opened fire. Over the next several minutes, officers poured hundreds of rounds of gunfire into the yard, including, a judge later estimated, between 2,349 and 3,132 pellets of buckshot. The prison yard was transformed into a charnel house. The prisoners, who had no firearms, were sitting ducks, as were the hostages that the police had ostensibly come to save. As hundreds of police and corrections officers stormed the prison, they sometimes paused to shoot inmates who were already on the ground or wounded. “Surrender peacefully. You will not be harmed,” a megaphone announced as unarmed prisoners were mowed down.

This isn't surreal, this isn't random, and it's also not "man being a beast". Some are. Many more are made so, on purpose.

> Behind the blind bestiality of the SA, there often lay a deep hatred and resentment against all those who were socially, intellectually, or physically better off than themselves, and who now, as if in fulfillment of their wildest dreams, were in their power. This resentment, which never died out entirely in the camps, strikes us as a last remnant of humanly understandable feeling. The real horror began, however, when the SS took over the administration of the camps. The old spontaneous bestiality gave way to an absolutely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy human dignity; death was avoided or postponed indefinitely. The camps were no longer amusement parks for beasts in human form, that is, for men who really belonged in mental institutions and prisons; the reverse became true: they were turned into "drill grounds," on which perfectly normal men were trained to be full-fledged members of the SS.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

yestoallthat commented on White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA   washingtonpost.com/news/e... · Posted by u/molecule
ra1n85 · 9 years ago
I think this is a good point, and I'm not sure why it's been downvoted.

It's important to consider the sometimes positive externalities of the current levels of defense spending. Even more so, it's important to consider where we or others have come to rely on those positive externalities.

For example, I'd be perfectly happy with the US withdrawing from many parts of the world and closing foreign bases. However, I do imagine there would be sometimes not so subtle consequences to doing so. Is the current balance of global power sufficient to prevent large scale and disastrous conflict? Do we risk tipping that balancing in one direction at some point?

yestoallthat · 9 years ago
Does the US lending both hands to fucking up the Middle East make anything more stable? What stability was achieved by Vietnam, or all that stuff in South America? Not disastrous enough for you? Would you swap with even just ONE of the millions of people affected by some of the more insane atrocities this knight in shining armor committed? Thought so.

Another fact that is generally completely omitted is that best, soldiers defend against other soldiers (and in practice, they kill a lot of civilians because war is tough), so in a way those people justifying war machineries in other countries are not the excuse, they are the counterparts. It's an axis of sociopaths and conformists against humans, and this rift goes through all nations, even some families. The root causes for these rationalizations matter, not so much the rationalizations, those always shift. A child kicking a dog and Abu Ghraib differ in scale but not principle, as does looking on to either. Those onlookers love to use "we", but there is no "we" here, speak strictly for yourself.

yestoallthat commented on Japan's Universities Are Failing   foreignaffairs.com/articl... · Posted by u/Arkaad
nihonde · 9 years ago
There is such a huge gap between your incredibly bleak image of Japan and the lively, optimistic and impressive Japan that I live in. I've lost count of the number of gaijin experts on Japan who want to tell me about how wrecked Japan is, and how Japanese people are in denial, and all the ways they need to emulate the West to get with the program. I've also lost count of the things that Japan does measurably better than every other country I've lived in. In the real world, the Japan that I live in is a country that by almost every measure is unrivaled in terms of intelligence, thoughtfulness, convenience, social justice, curiosity, work ethic, respect for tradition, ambitions for the future, and the ability to live your life in peace.

But of course, Japan is very hard on itself and sets insanely high standards for itself at every level of society. If you are bullish on Japan, you're easily dismissed as a nationalist or racist or as living in denial.

I guess the ultimate revenge is living well, so I've already won from that perspective. I feel genuinely sorry for people who can't see a good thing for what it is.

yestoallthat · 9 years ago
> There is such a huge gap between your incredibly bleak image of Japan and the lively, optimistic and impressive Japan that I live in.

Yet you manage to tackle not a single one of those criticisms head on. Of course, nobody read anything into that.

And revenge? For what? For someone not liking you? That right there points directly to what I don't find particularly sexy about lots of Asia but Japan especially, the obedience and the obsession with appearances, apart from not dealing with WW2 a whole lot. Why would you need revenge the opinion of someone else?

And you are saying that Japan among other things is unrivaled in ambitions for the future.. how do you measure that? By almost every measure even. I don't care if you lost count, I'll have the list of those measures the areas in which Japan is number #1. Not because I agree or dispute it is, I just find that in itself so odd that I'd even be just keen on hearing the dimensions you think there is a clear "best" at all.

Meanwhile, here's my first association when it comes to ambitions for the future:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan

And to tie in with the above,

> Cultural tolerance of suicide in Japan may also be explained by the concept of amae, or the need to be dependent on and accepted by others. For the Japanese, acceptance and conformity are valued above one’s individuality.

Is this totally off the mark? Edit the article then.

> I feel genuinely sorry for people who can't see a good thing for what it is.

It's not about not seeing the good, it's about seeing the bad. In my case, it's about saying "thanks but seriously, no thanks". People who think patriotism or friendship include blindness should start with being a friend to themselves. I don't behave differently towards individuals of any stripe, why should I treat individuals cloaking themselves in the vague word "culture" or "tradition"? If it helps, you can consider that my culture, my personal one.

yestoallthat commented on How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide   nytimes.com/2017/03/03/te... · Posted by u/coloneltcb
DaUR · 9 years ago
Not sure how civil disobedience leads to authoritarianism rather than the opposite. Also, by your reasoning, civil disobedience is never justified. And does Trump being President change your reasoning at all?
yestoallthat · 9 years ago
Disobedience would be refusing to take part in such scummy schemes, and making a huge stink over it.

> Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws

PROFESSED. To twist that on this on its head, and use another sociopath to excuse it is hilarious. But since you ask: no, that's even MORE reason to not accept this bullshit.

yestoallthat commented on How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide   nytimes.com/2017/03/03/te... · Posted by u/coloneltcb
mindcrime · 9 years ago
It's easy to imagine engineers working on small parts of the system, and never really connecting the dots that the whole point is to evade law enforcement.

I would volunteer to work on that project because its whole point is to evade law enforcement. A lot of us (hackers/technologists) take a pretty dim view of arbitrary State regulations and "laws" and are quite happy to work to evade them. Most people who fit the techno-libertarian or cypherpunk mentality would probably feel the same way.

yestoallthat · 9 years ago
> arbitrary State regulations

They're way less arbitrary than Uber's action, so that's just projection. You want out of the social contract, be my guest.

yestoallthat commented on How Uber Used Secret “Greyball” Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide   nytimes.com/2017/03/03/te... · Posted by u/coloneltcb
oculusthrift · 9 years ago
I'm not excusing Uber at all because what they've done is extremely bad in multiple cases but find it strange all these hit pieces are coming out of the wood works. There is a large section of society that hates Uber and will spring at any chance to bring it down. Which is partially what I think happened with the whole #boycottUber thing and the new video of kalanick yelling at the driver.

However, the sexism and dysfunction in the company is extremely disturbing. It almost starts to undermine the case against them when there are all these hit jobs coming out and it starts to seem that the media is biased or relishing their fall.

yestoallthat · 9 years ago
While I don't like the company either, I wouldn't be surprised if competing companies had some PR peeps trying to stoke the flames. Why would they pass it up?
yestoallthat commented on Frustrated Snap Social Influencers Leaving for Rival Platforms   buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowi... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
adventured · 9 years ago
Street magicians shill for products once they become very successful, which is what these 'social influencers' represent. They went from being the equivalent of street magicians, to another level of having a show at a venue or touring etc.
yestoallthat · 9 years ago
If they're successful, it means they managed to survive on their craft even before a lot of people wanted to see them. So why wouldn't they be able to continue to do that after they became better and more successful? You simply assume everybody sells out, you don't even say "many street magicians shill for products", or most, no, they just categorically do. I guess you can't tell me the exact threshold when they do? Is that different for everybody, but everybody still does (or would if they were just successful enough) at some point?

And why still call them street magicians then? Why not marketers? You don't call people who make advertisement spots filmmakers like you would call Hitchcock a filmmaker, and you wouldn't call those who write "copy" authors like you would any of the ones serious authors aspire to. But most importantly, you don't call someone who sings loudly to distract someone so another person can pick their pocket a singer, you call them an accomplice.

yestoallthat commented on Frustrated Snap Social Influencers Leaving for Rival Platforms   buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowi... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
Disruptive_Dave · 9 years ago
> it's an attempt to capture forced attention from people who do not have an interest in the product by intermixing it with something they do have an interest in

you mean the $200bn+ advertising industry? yes, that. separating entertainment from advertising isn't as easy as you'd think.

yestoallthat · 9 years ago
Speak for yourself, I find it super simple.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp4l7eASeOk

yestoallthat commented on Frustrated Snap Social Influencers Leaving for Rival Platforms   buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowi... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
FullMtlAlcoholc · 9 years ago
> Am I just having a senior moment here? Has everyone just gone nuts?

Don't worry, I'm sure we'll all get there at some point. But yeah, you're having a senior moment. They are entertainers. They become social influencers because people enjoy watching them. It's no different than a street magician or a busker at scale.

yestoallthat · 9 years ago
Since when do street magicians shill for products? The way I see it, it's an attempt to capture forced attention from people who do not have an interest in the product by intermixing it with something they do have an interest in. There is a difference for being payed by people to entertain them, and by being a Trojan horse essentially.

u/yestoallthat

KarmaCake day146February 19, 2017View Original