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Right on. If you are dumb enough to censor, you can only censor content and the frame you are looking through doesn't make any difference. Imagine in a totalit

Right on. If you are dumb enough to censor, you can only censor content and the frame you are looking through doesn't make any difference. Imagine in a totalitarian regime, you would like to inform people on system critical thoughts others have been executed for, so people can avoid them.

tyler_sf 5y ago
I can imagine a regime like this having enough people who simply enjoy the killing.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  Ask Argentines. I'm not sure how many killers they had during the Proceso, but however many it was, they killed many. And, crucially, people knew, and they looked the other way, and if need be said of the victims that "they must have done something". (What else were they going to do anyways? If you live under a murderous regime, maybe the best thing to do is not rock the boat and hope you survive, and the last thing you want is a knock at 3AM and the cattle prod put to your genitals a few hours later and your drugged broken self tossed out of a plane into the ocean a few days later. There's a always enough people who would enjoy the killing, if only someone would employ them to do it. And most people would probably deal with it as long as they aren't the victims. It's really sad. Our societies are very vulnerable to falling into such messes.
noduerme 5y ago
That's the purpose of newspeak and doublethink. To ultimately communicate by their absence from official channels the list of things that cannot be said. Of course, Russia has has more experience with this than anyone. But as a sibling post says, they've reached the point where plenty just enjoy killing, and the west could too, at some point.
- scantis 5y ago
  It scares me, that some of us actually enjoy the killing and the carnage. The problem of newspeak is that most of us don't see it, until it's too late. When we feed the machine with our fears, it will cut us off. Most of us still like each other.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    Most of us do still like each other, if we can get past the mediation of our conversations by platforms and the kind of tribalism it inculcates. I just wrote this rant here. It's hard to put into words what I see happening, but I'm trying desperately because I think there needs to be a framework for understanding it. Which I'm not eloquent enough to state, but I hope people can build on these simple statements like "Most of us still like each other". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30584851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30584851 The machine thrives on fear. Twitter is a rage machine... its function is to generate tribal anger and mass hysteria, and its mechanism and chief innovation for doing so is shortening the language. When everything is a soundbite, nothing real can be expressed, only affiliation with one group or another. Any thought that tries to explore both sides of a conversation and weigh their relative merits requires more characters than Twitter allows, and that's by design. We sleepwalked into this. /Rant. About your point about enjoying killing and carnage, it was also something Hannah Arendt talked about extensively, and we can see it on both sides of the political spectrum in America now, both "mobs" of totalitarian/authoritarians. It's the end equilibrium of the totalitarian state to have generations of killers weaned on brutality who enjoy it for its own sake, and in theory the normalization or stabilization of a state which breeds those minds is the most frightening thing for the future of humanity. Nazi Germany was almost there. I'm still trying to formulate this. But I've begun to come to the conclusion that the only important thing is to stop thinking in terms of who's right or wrong. The only way for civilization forward is to re-introduce the civic principle, to enforce the rules of debate; to ingrain the reflexive ability to absorb the other person's point of view and see them as a human like yourself; even if you believe they are wrong. The ability to put their wrongness into context so you can accept it and treat them as an equal before you go about dismantling their arguments. Without that, we're just bloodthirsty savages. And that, sadly, seems like the way it's going.

tyler_sf 5y ago

I can imagine a regime like this having enough people who simply enjoy the killing.

cryptonector 5y ago
Ask Argentines. I'm not sure how many killers they had during the Proceso, but however many it was, they killed many. And, crucially, people knew, and they looked the other way, and if need be said of the victims that "they must have done something". (What else were they going to do anyways? If you live under a murderous regime, maybe the best thing to do is not rock the boat and hope you survive, and the last thing you want is a knock at 3AM and the cattle prod put to your genitals a few hours later and your drugged broken self tossed out of a plane into the ocean a few days later. There's a always enough people who would enjoy the killing, if only someone would employ them to do it. And most people would probably deal with it as long as they aren't the victims. It's really sad. Our societies are very vulnerable to falling into such messes.

noduerme 5y ago

That's the purpose of newspeak and doublethink. To ultimately communicate by their absence from official channels the list of things that cannot be said. Of course, Russia has has more experience with this than anyone. But as a sibling post says, they've reached the point where plenty just enjoy killing, and the west could too, at some point.

scantis 5y ago
It scares me, that some of us actually enjoy the killing and the carnage. The problem of newspeak is that most of us don't see it, until it's too late. When we feed the machine with our fears, it will cut us off. Most of us still like each other.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Most of us do still like each other, if we can get past the mediation of our conversations by platforms and the kind of tribalism it inculcates. I just wrote this rant here. It's hard to put into words what I see happening, but I'm trying desperately because I think there needs to be a framework for understanding it. Which I'm not eloquent enough to state, but I hope people can build on these simple statements like "Most of us still like each other". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30584851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30584851 The machine thrives on fear. Twitter is a rage machine... its function is to generate tribal anger and mass hysteria, and its mechanism and chief innovation for doing so is shortening the language. When everything is a soundbite, nothing real can be expressed, only affiliation with one group or another. Any thought that tries to explore both sides of a conversation and weigh their relative merits requires more characters than Twitter allows, and that's by design. We sleepwalked into this. /Rant. About your point about enjoying killing and carnage, it was also something Hannah Arendt talked about extensively, and we can see it on both sides of the political spectrum in America now, both "mobs" of totalitarian/authoritarians. It's the end equilibrium of the totalitarian state to have generations of killers weaned on brutality who enjoy it for its own sake, and in theory the normalization or stabilization of a state which breeds those minds is the most frightening thing for the future of humanity. Nazi Germany was almost there. I'm still trying to formulate this. But I've begun to come to the conclusion that the only important thing is to stop thinking in terms of who's right or wrong. The only way for civilization forward is to re-introduce the civic principle, to enforce the rules of debate; to ingrain the reflexive ability to absorb the other person's point of view and see them as a human like yourself; even if you believe they are wrong. The ability to put their wrongness into context so you can accept it and treat them as an equal before you go about dismantling their arguments. Without that, we're just bloodthirsty savages. And that, sadly, seems like the way it's going.