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What I continue to find shocking is just how many people commenting on this post are lining up to accept another authoritarian measure for a very small amount o
by andrew_ 5y ago
What I continue to find shocking is just how many people commenting on this post are lining up to accept another authoritarian measure for a very small amount of additional comfort of mind.
Having just watched "No Time to Die," Rami Malek's character has a classic vilian diatribe in which he says:
The thing that no one wants to admit is that most people want things to happen to them. We tell each other lies about the fight for free will and independence, but we don't really want that. We want to be told how to live and then die when we're not looking.
It strikes me that perhaps storywriters keep adding lines like this to movies, books, etc because it's actually true for a significant amount of people. And that's really saddening.
- psyc 5y agoI'm under the impression that a lot of tech / 'rational' people are utilitarian consequentialists, and if you tell a good utilitarian story, a lot of them will sign up. Like, liberty and privacy sound nice, but how many lives do they save? I also have a theory that a lot of programmers think it's natural to fix bugs in society by writing (U.S.) code.
- lyubalesya 5y ago> Like, liberty and privacy sound nice, but how many lives do they save? When considering this question, one should be careful to distinguish between how many lives are saved with "the society we are currently, but without liberty or privacy", and with "the kind of society we will become if we lose liberty or privacy". Lives "saved" are also a poor metric. How much is a life worth, spent inside a cage? Many would be willing to risk death for liberty. In fact, they have.