Trouble is people aren’t brought up with an understanding of how things should be in a fair and just society. They’re brought up with some mucky mixed up perception that the world is some mashup of Hollywood and what the media says.
There’s no moral compass for society any more.
My personal take is he’s some sort of weird Russian asset and he’s a net negative for our way of life but I still think he deserves the full protection of the law at every single stage. He shouldn’t be sold out and abandoned by society.
It sounds twee but my mother brought me up to care about other people, the less well off and to care about what’s right and justice for all. I think “we’ll theres an awful lot of people in this world who didn’t have my mother. What did they learn?”
What? And there was more of such a compass a century ago when lynchings were much more common for "racial defilements"? Or two centuries ago when slaves were considered bad by the general public for escaping from the brutality of ownership? Or perhaps 600 years ago when witch burning was remarkably common in much of Europe?
Not criticizing your defense of Assange (his treatment really is deplorable, petty and cruel), but This phrase has never been anything less than absurd, and particularly so is to claim it of today's society in comparison to some mythical past morality..
> witch burning was remarkably common in much of Europe
Is that a moral issue, or one of knowledge / technologies?
You can only go on the best information you have, and many theistic beliefs are currently acceptable in the modern world despite being no less plausible than a belief in witches.
A common mistake of modern humans is to presuppose that people from earlier times were somehow less capable of thinking than we are today. No evidence suggests that this was the case. They could be just as rational, they just knew less upon which to base their notions of reason. Even in a 16th century context, it was not hard to see that a lot of supposedly real witch burning was repressive control politics masquerading behind imposed superstitious strictures of morality around women, just taken to murderous degrees.
More basically: if your morality means decisions to justify or reject the torture and killing of another person, then you'd better set some damn high criteria for whether your information is complete enough.
Even medieval humans understood a surprising amount of this. A Book I highly recommend that demonstrates as much: "The Faithful executioner: Life and death, Honor and Shame in the turbulent 16th century" by Joel F. Harrington. It records a lifetime of personal observations through diary entries from a public executioner in the Germanic city of Bamburg during these times. and gives wonderful insights into how well even those charged with the job of killing could reason about the dirty ambiguity of what they were doing.
A "unified sense" of right and wrong was often exactly the problem with many societies in history, because they often fall into absolutism and simplistic notions of morality. I'd call our more nuanced and diverse views of what's moral in today's society an improvement, not the opposite.
If anything, a case like Assange's just 60 years ago would have much more easily been condemned as simple treason and with wide U.S public approval of either a long prison sentence or the death penalty, on the grounds of then much more prevalent and simplistic "patriotic" sentiments in society. Today, there's far more divergent debate on this that is exactly why so many across internet and media defend his actions despite this despicable rigidness from the court.
> I stand by the assertion that 60/70 years ago western society had a more unified sense of what is right and wrong.
That would be 1950-1960. Speaking of America, Montgomery bus boycott started in 1955. Which took a year and started whole civil war movement. President Nixon’s red-baiting campaigns were at exactly that time too.
In Europe, IRA started their border campaign in 1956.
Continental Europe during the post world period until the late 80’s had terrorist bombings, political assassination, dictatorships and plenty of other crap going around, I’m really not sure what level of understanding people have of history these days.
70 years ago was just after Europe decided to murder millions of Jews, Roma, Gays and a bunch of other groups.
Yeah I don’t know, Portugal was a dictatorship until the coup in 1974 which ended the Estado Novo regime and the colonial wars Portugal was waging in Africa, ffs you had European powers conducting outright massacres in Africa in the 70’s still.
And somehow today its feels that everyone thinking that the European Union was formed on Tuesday following the pyramids and its been the bastion of human rights and civilization since.
At least where I live I didn‘t hear anyone say that.
Maybe this is different in the US. It‘s more like our government doesn’t say anything because of US imperialism. And most people don‘t know about him or think this outcome is expected if you dare to mess with the US.
It looks more like pessimism to me. And it‘s to be expected. The US foreign policy was always inhumane. It knows no moral boundaries as long as it serves the economic interest of their corporations. Not that other countries are better in that regard.
Yeah, there are. I know people I generally find reasonable that consider him a traitor, and they're not even American. I think a lot of use have grown up on US culture and propaganda and it permeates our societies to the point of identification with the US, so Assange or Snowden are considered bad guys to a lot of people. It seems to me that it's primarily for pragmatic reasons: "We" profit from crimes, leaking information about those crimes reduces our profit from it, ergo leaking it is treason against us.
I agree. I’m of the opinion that he is a bad person, yet this does not prevent me from saying the USA case against him feels political, nor does it prevent me from listening when the UN condemns the UK’s treatment of him or an international lawyer association condemning the process against him.
You're looking at history through rose colored glasses. Societal justice in the past meant basically "protect those in power, burn everyone else on sight." If you weren't part of the ruling group (be it by race, gender, ideology, etc.) then you had very few protections.
Let me say that Trump is a swaggering, incompetent. Let me also say that I am unsure about how much more I should dislike him on the basis that most of what I know about Trump comes from the media.
Stuff like this demonstrates the media is used to sway public opinion via manufactured narratives; its a bit like the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: If I see clear manipulations if the things I know, I should distrust the same publications in those topics of which I am less familiar, or have no secondary source. The smear of sex-crime allegations, and invocation of the Russian/foreign power boogieman are a suspiciously strong part of the "political establishment" modus operandi.
As such, I'm apprehensive to hate someone for such allegations, b/c I don't know how much I'm being led. Sadly, this suspicious, and willing to give a high benefit-of-doubt to a person like Trump will get me branded a mindless supporter by anti-Trump people primed to believe in the "MAGA crowd" stereotype.
We should all suspect the political theatre, and attempt to figure out the script.
I do think that in term of accessibility and ease of use for some remote services the minitel was quite better than the web is.
I worked for a company that ran a service until the very end of the network. This service was used to track mandatory farming informations. Farmers could use the phone, the minitel or the web to do so. There was a whole generation of farmers who used it until the very end and ended up having to use the phone as a replacement. Having to use a computer with the operating system and browser layer made the web version of the service much more complex by nature.
My father used this kind of service on the minitel (maybe the one your company was running), and indeed it was quite confusing to him to switch to the web version. The later also came with much more information to process.
"The remains of the three Turkish Cypriots, the sources said, were found several metres away from the tree roots during the excavations, suggesting it did not grow from a seed inside the deceased man."
highly relevant: M. Scott Peck "The Road less Traveled", in a nutshell the relationship to ourselves is what gives us the ability to be in a fulfilling relationship with others. I wanted to emphasize this because too many I know (including my former self) would rather be with somebody else ("to fulfill them or -worse- "make them complete") than develop a good relationship with our "self" first.
I've never really liked platitudes like "family is everything" and "nothing matters without relationships" -- they don't seem to come from a good place. People who lack these things may enjoy their lives every bit as much, what's the point of denigrating their life?
Every time it is me that ends up losing interest in the people around me. At some point I decided to recognize that if I was not going to put in the effort to build relationships then there was no sense in putting myself down for not having them built up later. But at the same time when I meet new people, no matter how many things we both like, if they are not purposefully inviting me over then I will stop caring about them and return to having no friendships again. That is entirely on me.
It isn't like they are bad people, but there are other things I will inevitably end up gravitating to instead.
But it isn't like I'm alone because I have other things to occupy my time. There are times that I did wish I had other friendships but I end up putting those feelings aside when I start working on something. For better or worse I am lucky to be able to say this. Some artists say they can only survive and keep working by being able to be alone for extended periods of time.
When I don't get too attached to anyone the pain of losing them doesn't really come. And the people I do care about I've actually made miserable and angry by the number of times I've brought up that I am going to die someday and that I'm trying to live in the moment with them and acknowledge the transience of being alive with them. At some point continuing to acknowledge the fact that being alive and having known them is a miracle in front of them is counterproductive, and in the end it probably doesn't make dying any less painful.
After doing all that I don't understand what else I can possibly do but continue being alive.
It's not the idea itself which seems to me absurd, it's the process - let's take something from abstract mathematical field and apply it on a vaguely "topologically" similar subjective experience and think that "it's proven by math".
Topological similarities can be meaningful as in they often provide great source of inspiration.
However, it's just an inspiration and it must be proven in its newly applied field - proof in context of category theory is not valid in the context of inter-personal relations.
For what it's worth, you asserted above that you are not rude, but telling a stranger they sound like a sociopath is generally considered rude. It may genuinely be that you have transcended social norms, but the rest of us haven't, and I'm afraid you're dealing with the rest of us!
Perhaps that serves to illustrate why it is rude. If that doesn't help, then just remember that it is. Good manners don't always need to make sense to you, sometimes they only make sense to other people.
Hmmmm. Be careful about this. Lots of people do know the right answer.
Youth energy and enthusiasm count for a lot, especially backin the earliest days of computing like when bill gates got started. That was because adults knew very little.
> Experience is only loosely correlated with age
These days age and experience count for a lot. Lots of older people have incredibly valuable answers to common challenges in competing and business.
There is a pretty good book called “the Death or Expertise” that discusses the broad trend towards people with little specialized knowledge feeling they can learn a domain quickly and know more than experts.
So many problems we have in society seem to be caused by this mass weaponized Dunning-Kruger effect.
I personally view this as less DK and more just removing fences[1] until the externalizations blow up. By then you've probably moved on or can divert some profit to putting the fences back.
That’s where we’ve got to.
Trouble is people aren’t brought up with an understanding of how things should be in a fair and just society. They’re brought up with some mucky mixed up perception that the world is some mashup of Hollywood and what the media says.
There’s no moral compass for society any more.
My personal take is he’s some sort of weird Russian asset and he’s a net negative for our way of life but I still think he deserves the full protection of the law at every single stage. He shouldn’t be sold out and abandoned by society.
It sounds twee but my mother brought me up to care about other people, the less well off and to care about what’s right and justice for all. I think “we’ll theres an awful lot of people in this world who didn’t have my mother. What did they learn?”