pancake

Thanks, comrade, I didn't know about the 16 Days of Activism. There were massive protests on the 25th, I even attended one. The good news is, our current government has responded to public outcry by pushing forward laws to protect women. The bad news is, sexism and anti-feminism is growing at an alarming rate here, so the next government will probably reverse everything... I hate this place.

So, let me summarize...

China has strict anti-terrorism laws that deal with e.g. radicalization. They imprison anyone that breaks those laws in specialized prisons.
People that happen to live in the same areas make a living by manufacturing and exporting goods, including polysilicon cells.
Cutting imports from those areas would increase poverty and thus increase dissent in an already conflicting area; US government obviously decides to do it.
Somehow they want me to believe that making those people poorer will change Chinese laws? Or something like that?
Now they manage to somehow link it with renewables too, and propose measures that would increase their price. So guess we should rely as much as possible on oil, which benefits the US' petrodollar system?
And yet the article tries to make it sound like those panels are being manufactured by forced labor, by not giving much of an explanation, plus mashing it together with actual forced labor manufacture.

Yeah, we've all studied ethics. Ethics (no matter if you believe it's inherent to reality or a useful construct) acts in two scenarios:

If the individual follows it, it makes them act in a way that serves society.
It allows to create laws that apply to all individuals for everyone's good.

Ethics doesn't state that "you should punish others when they act contrarily to ethics". That's law. And the reason it punishes people is because that discourages them from acting in that way again. Free will, if you wish.

Now, at the international scale there are no real laws. Implementation of laws depends on the ability of individual countries to enforce them, for their own interests. If we could create laws that affected every country, then yes, we could simply model these laws after ethics. But we can't.

So, in the example I gave you, suppose you are a citizen of country #2. I already stated that the best course of action for your country would be to side with country #5. But then, since you believe you should punish that country because it acted unethically, you will push your government to side with #1 instead. You tried to enforce laws that didn't exist, and now you've acted against your best interests.

The mistake here is that ethics doesn't deal with punishment. Punishment is specified by laws, seeking the best interest of society. But the best course of action here was not to punish, yet your instinct led you the wrong way.

I'll clarify then. You're assuming individual ethics apply to large groups of people, which disregards the reason why those ethics exist in the first place. They exist at the individual level as an "acceptable" set of behaviors to discourage behaviors outside it. There are two important differences between individuals and countries:

Individuals differ in their willingness to do harm or good, while for very large groups these differences simply disappear in every case. As I mentioned, every country acts for their own good, and if they do good it's simply because that's what it's most useful to them at the moment. I.e. ethics do not offer meaningful judgements at that scale.
Individuals are overseen by governments, while countries are not. This means it's impossible to reward or punish actors from outside the system, and any rules are created and enforced by the actors themselves. I.e. ethics do not offer any utility at that scale.

For these two reasons, ethics do not make sense at an international scale. I'll illustrate with an example:

There are 5 people. 4 of them make an agreement to beat up the 5th. This person learns of the plot against them and decides to attack each of the others separately, one by one, by just waiting outside their homes.

In this case, the 5th person should have simply called the police. What they did was unacceptable, since they attacked first, thus escalating the conflict.

However, at an international scale, things change dramatically. There is no police, so there's just country #5, presented with a choice: either do nothing and get beaten up, or attack first. Did they act right or wrong? Well, it doesn't matter, since there's no way to change the result. The country will always choose the second option, and, furthermore, the other 4 countries will know damn well what #5 will do. In fact, they will not plot against it unless they think they are going to win in every scenario.

Now, imagine this happens, and country #5 has already attacked country #4. Now, the remaining 3 would be able to beat up #5. But let's say #2 and #3 decide to side with #5 and beat #1; maybe in that situation they would suffer less losses, get better profits, etc. But in this case it's in the best interest of #1 to oppose #5, and thus to keep #2 and #3 on its side, so it decides to convince the people on those two countries to hate on #5. Now they can't side with it, since they would face backlash, so they need to co-operate with #1.

While a purely ethical analysis only concludes that '#5 attacked #4' (which doesn't provide any useful course of action), the more useful benefit analysis affords that #1 has managed to obtain the highest benefit, by manipulating #2 and #3 and capitalizing on conflict between #4 and #5. The useful course of action would have been for #2 and #3 to side with #5.

This isn't about ethics. Countries are not people, they only act in their own interest with exactly zero regard for anything else. Russia attacked Ukraine because it was the least bad option for them (Ukraine joining NATO would be very bad for them), and the US imposes sanctions because it is also the best possible move, and now they can do it without facing backlash. And that includes propaganda if necessary, on both sides.

The point I'm trying to defend is that manipulating the public's opinion is part of the global dynamic, and everyone should be aware of, and oppose it, to get what THEY want, rather than what the large-scale political chaos imposes on them. You seem to agree on that, so that's great, I don't see the need for further debate.

But why Russia specifically? You can only demonize yourself or your enemies, and Russia is the enemy here.

In October 2020, the already finished script for the third season [...]

On September 10, 2021, Karl Urban confirmed that the season officially wrapped filming.

Here, if you look for the word 'Russia' it appears in 5 out of 8 episodes. They literally infiltrate a Russian facility, where the Russians appear as the antagonists, plus Russian characters act in other vile ways in the plot.

I can think of new media that vilifies Russia. For example, The Boys.

This is great news! I had read elsewhere that Chevron would not pay taxes or even for the oil itself (which seemed pretty unlikely), but I see it's simply a propagandistic narrative and they are indeed going to pay.

Wonderful read as always, I love Cory Doctorow's essays.

Really cool! I occasionally find time to develop my game, Nodeverse, but have not otherwise played a whole lot. It will be nice to play alongside y'all though. I 100% support this.

You could think that, just as easily as you could NOT think that. In fact, there's no reason to discard either option, or any other. For all you know, you could be a tomato that some scientist tricked into believing it exists.

Thus, one doesn't choose to believe something because it's possible, but because it's useful to do so. So we choose to believe the simplest possible hypothesis that explains all the phenomena we care about. "We live in a simulation" is just as plausible as any other idea, but it adds exactly nothing to our understanding of the world around us.

Thanks for the sources, I find this one particularly interesting. I'll need to look into it more carefully, since we already know there's a great deal of manipulation around this issue.

Edit: tl;dr: "we have extremely hard evidence that the Chinese authorities are putting people in prison for breaking the law".

I'd say I can do it on purpose, but not always.

Well, I can trigger a similar response by contracting specific muscles. The feeling is pretty similar, but it typically starts in the upper back and goes up to the scalp, not the opposite.

I understand. Some kinds of people can be more of a burden for the revolutionary movement, rather than help bring it to fruition. But do you think it is viable to eventually convert them to a favorable ideology?

If there's 100 people and only 1 wants a revolution, they won't be getting it, no matter how hard they try. At some point, they'll need to convince enough other people, and that's a problem I'm seeing far from solved. Not to dismiss your point, but don't you think it's easier to get others onboard when they have already taken a few steps in the right direction?

Well, I read this by IBM, it's mostly aimed at learning how to use their products, but I think it does a really good job at that.

pancake

@ pancake @lemmy.ml

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pancake

[Infographic] Globally, 137 women and girls are killed by a family member or intimate partner every day

Evidence grows of forced labour and slavery in China, Africa and South America

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Washington Greenlights Chevron to Resume Oil Production in Venezuela, Uses Mexico Talks as Excuse

Social Quitting: Doctorow on the Social Exodus

I've Been Thinking of Starting a Minetest Server

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Do you guys think these Concentration Camps in XinJiang are a good or bad thing?

Have you experienced ASMR?

Have you experienced ASMR?

Pan-Leftism; An Infantile Disorder

Pan-Leftism; An Infantile Disorder

IBM announces 433-qubit Osprey quantum processor