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I think is it a lot easier to convince people what they are doing is ok or not so bad, if it is "legalized" by law. NSA also insists that everything they do is

by _up 12y ago

I think is it a lot easier to convince people what they are doing is ok or not so bad, if it is "legalized" by law. NSA also insists that everything they do is covered by the law or at least their secret interpretation.

notahacker 12y ago
This kind of legalism is particularly puzzling in cases like the Khmer Rouge, which avoided enlisting sympathetic intellectuals and foreign backers to help build bureaucracies and theoretical justification for their actions and instead massacred them whilst being deliberately obscurantist about their aims and beliefs, but still kept meticulous records of their prisoners and the "confessions" they extracted as if they believed such evidence procedures had been followed correctly would assure history judged their actions kindly.
- mtdewcmu 12y ago
  Anomalies like that can be important, I think. Clearly it made sense to the actors, but to us it seems incomprehensibly bizarre; that means our mental model is wrong, or, at least, has a gap. I think we tend to err by confusing cruel governments with common criminals. Criminals tend to be irrational and self-defeating. Governments and larger criminal organizations tend to be cold and calculating, and their use of violence is not random; their goal isn't violence at any cost, like an individual who goes on a killing spree. They wanted to operate a government, after all, and they expected it to be enduring. They could not abolish all order and personal responsibility. Presumably, even if you were doing something abominable as part of your job, government workers could still be fired if they showed up late or got drunk on the job, etc. Maybe record-keeping was considered an essential part of maintaining an organized regime. Edit: I don't want to overstate the calculating aspect-- It's possible that, from the standpoint of the Nazis, persecuting Jews was a drain on resources and served no rational purpose for the organization, and even that some Nazis were aware and privately opposed it. But what matters as far as running a disciplined organization is not so much that orders must serve a rational purpose; what matters is that the orders must come from the appropriate authority. This is actually true in any disciplined organization: in the army, if you are in combat and your commanding officer orders you to shoot that guy, you're expected to shoot that guy, period. But the order makes the difference; you can't shoot people at random.

by _up 12y ago

notahacker 12y ago

This kind of legalism is particularly puzzling in cases like the Khmer Rouge, which avoided enlisting sympathetic intellectuals and foreign backers to help build bureaucracies and theoretical justification for their actions and instead massacred them whilst being deliberately obscurantist about their aims and beliefs, but still kept meticulous records of their prisoners and the "confessions" they extracted as if they believed such evidence procedures had been followed correctly would assure history judged their actions kindly.

mtdewcmu 12y ago
Anomalies like that can be important, I think. Clearly it made sense to the actors, but to us it seems incomprehensibly bizarre; that means our mental model is wrong, or, at least, has a gap. I think we tend to err by confusing cruel governments with common criminals. Criminals tend to be irrational and self-defeating. Governments and larger criminal organizations tend to be cold and calculating, and their use of violence is not random; their goal isn't violence at any cost, like an individual who goes on a killing spree. They wanted to operate a government, after all, and they expected it to be enduring. They could not abolish all order and personal responsibility. Presumably, even if you were doing something abominable as part of your job, government workers could still be fired if they showed up late or got drunk on the job, etc. Maybe record-keeping was considered an essential part of maintaining an organized regime. Edit: I don't want to overstate the calculating aspect-- It's possible that, from the standpoint of the Nazis, persecuting Jews was a drain on resources and served no rational purpose for the organization, and even that some Nazis were aware and privately opposed it. But what matters as far as running a disciplined organization is not so much that orders must serve a rational purpose; what matters is that the orders must come from the appropriate authority. This is actually true in any disciplined organization: in the army, if you are in combat and your commanding officer orders you to shoot that guy, you're expected to shoot that guy, period. But the order makes the difference; you can't shoot people at random.