> 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.

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"

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

Do humans do this a lot, or do some humans not snap out of it? I've been minding myself ever since my early 20s. Starting with articles like this: http://arachnoid.com/lutusp/symbols.html which I can't thank the author enough for.

But there's much more on this written during the 20th century, so to me the question is, why do people stubbornly ignore that? This expert here does it to, by just going "humans do this, shrug". No, it's one of the failure modes of the human mind. Humans also go on killing sprees, after all, or hack their children up and throw them in the garbage bin. You can't usefully talk about humans by first fusing all of them into one huge blob.

> The problem, Druin said, is that this emotional connection sets up expectations for children that devices can’t or weren’t designed to meet, causing confusion, frustration and even changes in the way kids talk or interact with adults.

I like how this implies that the problem isn't worshiping the things we made as a higher power or some sort of mystery, but could be solved by those devices matching our expectations more. If "humans anthropomorphize things", we obviously have to make more objects that have human features. Never mind the flip side of humans getting an increasingly object like quality. Just limit their access, and otherwise sit and wait, it'll be fine. I mean, what's the alternative? Just say no to products corporations insist on pushing?

> Or take the weather, particularly in winter. Instead of asking Mom or Dad the temperature that day, children just go to the device, treating the answer as gospel.

Perfectly obedient machines, on top of that achieving compliance levels highly paid humans can't consistently on their best days -- what's not to love? It's unclear though whether corporations and the military are paying any attention any of this, at all ^_^. They'd have to give us in writing that they do for us to have any further thoughts about this, certainly too critical ones.

> Upside: No more fights over what the temperature will really be and what’s appropriate to wear. Downside: Kids will go to their parents less, with both sides losing out on timeworn interactions.

The what not? The downside is "losing out on timeworn interactions"? That's like saying the downside of the sun exploding is having to use more electricity on street lights.

Here's what you miss out on, for starters that is, or I would be doing the same: empathy, which I wouldn't be surprised is very much linked with of growing your own person. Both abuse and extreme pampering are harmful. I don't know if it's been proven, I just know that the literature I read on that matches what I saw and experienced myself. The machines of the future will do what we tell them to, and take our abuse with a smile -- except all those instances where we have to do exactly what they tell us, and do without question. Then there is taking what the machine says for gospel -- certainly doubly so if it tells you anything you like to hear. Why think when you can "know", right?

From the Third Reich to Milgram's, this is such a huge can of worms, I can only stand in awe with how non-chalantly this bit is treated here. Missing out on timeworn interactions. I'm still reeling a bit.

Just one random thing because I don't have time on the one hand, but am also not just being contrariarian, or lying when I said I spent a LOT of time reading and thinking about this shit since the 90s.. you know, since I saw a bunch of corpses being shoved into a mass grave by a caterpillar while changing channels as a kid and started to wonder wtf kind of world I'm in, and how magically people in the past were obviously wrong, but currently, everything is just a-okay.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959354314542368

> The perception of a convergence between the views of Arendt, Stanley Milgram, and certain Holocaust historians inspired the situationist argument that ordinary people become mass murderers because they find themselves in circumstances that subvert their ability to make or act upon individual moral judgments.

We already have this problem as as, no technology required. It's already swept under the rug all the damn time. But using technology to amplify it so much on multiple levels, while not addressing the human problem, by constantly working around it and trying to have dysfunctional human beings be functional cogs in a system that grows for its own sake, leads predictably more war, more terrorism, more drugs, more happy slapping videos, more babies in microwaves, more everything, and more people who just can't seem to find the connection between a leak in a boat and that boat sinking.

> “Alexa,” they’ll say, “you’re such a butt.”

And some of them even might grow up calling other kids "fun-sized terrorists" as they have a great time blasting them with drones on command.

If this is true, that's wonderful, and if more games became more like that again, I'd be interested in them again. Even just the fact that the reviewer mentioned this as a good thing made me smile.

That's not the argument, kind of like the argument for not having unprotected sex with strangers is not that if you use protection and have sex with someone who has HIV, you will be immortal and live forever.

Furthermore, it's really not just about you. Say, you're gay or have a spine in country X or Y, there are so many possible cases. Those people matter, not those who are content that they themselves are not threatened at this very second, or intend to remain on the "good" side of power.

> But these are niche products for a reason: most people lead innocuous lives.

Most people are complicit. Most of us are not dangerous to any murderers or crooks, while lending support, so we are innocuous to them. And congratulations to all of us, too. Well, at least we have ads that are "more appropriate to us" I guess.

I'd say that's individuals outsourcing their decisions to the perceived or real pressures and expectations of others. Also, while you can surely describe individuals making decisions as groups in aggregate, as a simplification, groups don't actually decide anything. They don't even do anything. And where those external expectations are also based on outsourced decision making, you can sometimes ignore the whole chain.

Interestingly, when individual people are powerless but no single person is responsible, and also nobody is responsible for doing what they "have" to do, that's kind of even more anarchic and desolate than even the anarchy of everyone against everyone. I mean, in the latter case there are even still "ones" there, not just one blob, one river of people flowing where they can't help but go.

Interestingly, the old Greeks' kind of self-servingly considered slaves as obviously born to be slaves, because if they weren't, they'd simply kill themselves rather than be slaves. The Spartans certainly were big on that, at least if the writers are to be believed. Not that I want to glorify their outlook, but I find it fascinating how people constantly pretend anyone has to do anything other than die at some point. As in "I can't do that, or I would get fired" -- fine, but own your decision, don't call it anything but a decision. I would rather argue with someone who says they decided to be a selfish or cowardly person, than tolerate someone who is "good" just because that's more convenient or others expect it.

Anyways, here's someone who did pay orders of magnitude more attention than we are today for the most part:

> Private interests which by their very nature are temporary, limited by man's natural span of life, can now escape into the sphere of public affairs and borrow from them that infinite length of time which is needed for continuous accumulation. This seems to create a society very similar to that of the ants and bees where "the Common good differeth not from the Private; and being by nature enclined to their private, they procure thereby the common benefit."

> Since, however, men are neither ants nor bees, the whole thing is a delusion. Public life takes on the deceptive aspect of a total of private interests as though these interests could create a new quality through sheer addition. All the so-called liberal concepts of politics (that is, all the pre-imperialist political notions of the bourgeoisie)-such as unlimited competition regulated by a secret balance which comes mysteriously from the sum total of competing activities, the pursuit of "enlightened self-interest" as an adequate political virtue, unlimited progress inherent in the mere succession of events -have this in common: they simply add up private lives and personal behavior patterns and present the sum as laws of history, or economics, or politics. Liberal concepts, however, while they express the bourgeoisie's instinctive distrust of and its innate hostility to public affairs, are only a temporary compromise between the old standards of Western culture and the new class's faith in property as a dynamic, self-moving principle. The old standards give way to the extent that automatically growing wealth actually replaces political action.

> Hobbes was the true, though never fully recognized, philosopher of the bourgeoisie because he realized that acquisition of wealth conceived as a never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power, for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits. He foresaw that a society which had entered the path of never-ending acquisition had to engineer a dynamic political organization capable of a corresponding never-ending process of power generation. He even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat.

> For a Commonwealth based on the accumulated and monopolized power of all its individual members necessarily leaves each person powerless, deprived of his natural and human capacities. It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power-accumnulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law.

> The ultimate destructive purpose of this Commonwealth is at least indicated in the philosophical interpretation of human equality as an "equality of ability" to kill. Living with all other nations "in the condition of a perpetual war, and upon the confines of battle, with their frontiers armed. and canons planted against their neighbours round about," it has no other law of conduct but the "most conducing to [its] benefit" and will gradually devour weaker structures until it comes to a last war "which provideth for every man, by Victory, or Death.

> By "Victory or Death," the Leviathan can indeed overcome all political limitations that go with the existence of other peoples and can envelop the whole earth in its tyranny. But when the last war has come and every man has been provided for, no ultimate peace is established on earth: the power-accumulating machine, without which continual expansion would not have been achieved, needs more material to devour in its never-ending process. If the last victorious Commonwealth cannot proceed to "annex the planets," it can only proceed to destroy itself in order to begin anew the never-ending process of power generation.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Leaves each person powerless? Check. Everybody is a slave to warfare, those who don't wage war perish, and there isn't even a tyrant you could assassinate. Planned obsolescence so we can hustle harder? Check. And oh boy, we can't wait to do this other planets. And we'll be driven by corporate, brainless greed even before we set foot on any on them, it's going to be so much more efficient than the destruction of this environment.

But the real kicker to me is

> It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power-accumnulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine

that is, the fact that many today don't consider this degradation, but elation. That's all we have, our "communities", our hopes and dreams for this utopia like world with constant new things to consume, and other abstractions. Reflecting one oneself as an individual in the naked here and now? Not so keen on that.

Plenty of people stop all the time, plenty never started.

> In the meantime our world is such that any company or person who refuses on ethical grounds will be outcompeted, and go out of business.

Again, no. Plenty of individuals and corporations refuse to cut plenty of corners that would give them 0.N% more profit on purely ethical grounds. If the world was actually like you described, nobody would even survive the first day after their birth, they'd just get eaten.

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https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/CSS/cursor

What? Never would have happened? So Malcolm X was totally lying when he described [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kf7fujM4ag ] how it was bubbling at every street corner, while King and others squabbled about money, and that it was for fear of people walking on Washington and shutting it down that suddenly it was channeled into some kumbaya style thing? I'm not a huge fan of his, maybe I find him racist, I don't know, but I can't deny the principledness and energy, and I find his version of events way more realistic than "an impassioned speech making people realize they didn't want to be treated like shit anymore".

But actually, I quoted the above because it reminded me of a thinker who might disagree:

> What frightened me in your essay was the gospel of love which you begin to preach at the end. In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in the private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.

-- Hannah Arendt, Letter to James Baldwin, November 21, 1962

> they're not "policing" it in any sense of the word.

I didn't say they do, I say it's double faced. Which it is.