'Evil' is a human characterisation, and is not applicable to animals imo; to apply it is to anthropomorphise the animal.
An applicable use of 'evil' for an animal, would be if you believe the animal 'knows better', eg a dog that knows right or wrong (in its way) but does something it thinks it shouldn't.
The longer I live the more evidence I see the barrier between humans and other animals is thinner than we would like to imagine.
So I counter you with a practical question: can a crow commit a social transgression that will result in punishment by other crows? My strong suspicion is that the answer is yes, though I would love documentation as it would suggest a crow-cultural definition of morality
I agree. But I don't think pecking the eyes of a deer, thereby providing all the crows food, would be considered 'evil'/'bad' by other crows. I think crows would acclaim the action as 'good'/'right'.
We have rescue dog (abandoned on the street) and it seems to have a notion that violence within family is bad.
I was quite surprised to see that when I mock threatened my wife with a broom in his presence he jumped in to block. Not only that, he took the broom away from me and secured it away. I initially thought it was play, that he wanted to play with the broom. Seems he was just interested in separating me from the broom. He is our household saint.
We have a much younger dog (another rescue) who is not very nice at all to our saint. However, if my body language has even a hint of a threat to our little devil, he sure gets perked up and ready to protect.
This probably comes from pack behavior instinct. Fights inside a pack is bad.
Re matters of degree, I would disagree. The opposite of selfishness would be selflessness. This sounds like a good thing, eg being altruistic is assumed to be 'good', but then, it could also be about imposing one's values on someone, and devaluing the self. It could be a means of control (was forced altruism in communist countries 'good', for example). It seems that 'selflessness' - selfishness's opposite - can also be characterised as 'evil'. If it's not clear whether selfishness or selflessness is evil, it's not clear that it's a matter of degrees.
Ayn Rand argues in the "The Virtue of Selfishness" that selfishness is a good thing, if you want to see a lovely alternative argument.
Which might or might not be safer than synthetic ones. Fundamental job of pesticides and herbicides is to kill stuff. Just because it appears in nature does not mean it is safe.
But "organic" also targets soil health, biodiversity, animal well-being, and the environment in general.
Some synthetic pesticides / herbicides / fungicides hardly break down in the environment. Which leads to accumulation of a cocktail of such chemicals in soil & ground/surface waters. Ultimately appearing everywhere in air, drinking water & food. Not unlike microplastics, PFAS etc. How this affects humans' health is largely unknown.
Generally, chemicals produced by plants also break down naturally. So they don't accumulate in soils over time.
So it's kind of "exclude nature as much as possible, cleanroom style" versus "work with nature to keep things in a healthy balance".
They (developers) did what they did for money. Just like everyone else. And they would do it all again.
At a corporate level, no one cares about lots of freedoms, except if it is a selling point.
If 'keeping freedoms' is a selling point then the ideal position is to gain the kudos of appearing to support this whilst also getting the benefits of the loss of freedoms. Why not get both?
But.... you can get statistics on anything you like, if you are prepared to fund (or defund) them. If you pay to see the relation between crime and how many cats there are in a neighbourhood, you can get that! Ie statistics themselves are part of the game.
Given that you can just throw money at the solution you want to engineer, and create the illusion of science, perhaps believing nothing is a better position to be in. At least you're not buying into what is essentially just another avenue of corporate or governance marketing.
And sorry for bringing information to your attention. Just wait till you hear about how corporates fund law.
I'm presuming that is the case, because you are questioning my straightforward and obvious suggestion that funding by corporations can provide whatever statistics you like. Feel free to explain your actual position if you want.
You are putting words in my mouth. And not answering anything.
I made a statement, have defended it, asked your position, and in order to sign off with a bad faith message you put words in my mouth (that I admitted my logic has no basis in fact).
I presumed based on your complete and utter disregard for facts, logic, and scientific data, that it was all you understood, and it appears i was correct.
So you're saying that the government engineers the situation (more crime) in order to justify the solution (more surveillance) that they already intended. Once the surveillance is in place, they would then clear the blockage (start prosecuting crime again) which will be a big win for their solution (more surveillance).
So the whole thing is actually about greater control of the law-abiding (not decreasing crime), and how to engineer the circumstances to get the public to accept the unacceptable.
We used to have them. Devices so simple anyone with a hammer could fix. Maybe not open source as we understand it today, but rather - trivially reverse engineerable, often with schematics included. Most complex would be rewiring the motor on a washing machine.
Did their job fine, but you can't sell them forever, so more complex devices were introduced. Nowadays motorcycles would probably be the closest equivalent, they're often very simple to work on.
That was even the norm for complex electronics for decades. But since it makes it easy to reverse engineer it, it's no longer being done due to fear of cheap clones (often inferior, and still doesn't stop anyone these days).
And have been convinced there is no alternative. And if you suggest investing in public transit or building mixed-use neighborhoods that don't require car access they'll pop their suburbanite heads.
You're asking for new legislation written by governments that a/ want that data to spy on you too and b/ are lobbied by corporations to write the legislation corps want.
It's a closed loop of crap, that goes in one direction only.
No worries, next generation won't even understand what we are blabbing about. Look at that cute cat video! Privacy what? Oh that puppy is rolling on his back!
Once your intergenerational wealth is offshore you can pick any of your nepo offspring and make them a hollywood star or unicorn startup CEO with a clean wikipedia page. Their wealth is also tied to national security jobs, because those make you immune in front of the law plus you have the benefit of constructing identities (and death certificates) out of thin air.
For example very rich people in the US receive vanity SSNs. Ghislaine Maxwell has one that spells out "Leet Babe". It's like number plates to show off.
“Leet Babe” is not even the right number of letters. Doesn’t seem like “leet” would even be in her generation’s vocabulary. Are you trolling? Very rich get vanity numbers? Where is there evidence of that?
Bothered to check it? It's not literally the letters "leet babe", it's in "leetspeak" as the parent said:
"Ghislaine Maxwell's Social Security Number (133-78-4883) is recorded in U.S. law enforcement documents, such as historical NYPD files, as part of her official identification and background records".
1337 84883 --> LEET BABBE in leetspeak.
It's a stretch, but to be fair, apparently they already had no problem getting visas and other documents with 3-4 variations of their names (to make database lookup more difficult)
I did check but did not find the reference. What exactly are you quoting? I do not see that in any of the parent comments. I also doubt Maxwell was well versed in leetspeak. She was a career socialite.
Getting visas and documents under different names is not anything other than garden variety use of aliases. All kinds of people who are not mega-wealthy do this, legally and illegally. I am specifically questioning the ability of ultra-wealthy choosing SSNs. I had never previously seen this assertion.
> I did check but did not find the reference. What exactly are you quoting?
I mean man, I didn't ask you to search for my verbatim quote (it's an one-off llm answer). Search for her SSN. You can google it, it's here on the first page under "'Application Info" for example:
I genuinely gave you the benefit of the doubt. I used duck duck go and searched several combinations of related terms and also asked chat gpt, “man”. And found nothing. Why would you quoting an “one-off llm answer” as a fact remotely be responsible? We all know how reliable that is. Why would you not cite your source in the first place “man”? This is straight up conspiracy theory BS but I wanted to understand where you were coming from and give it the benefit of the doubt. Nobody is changing their SSN to a vanity SSN and you know it.
She is British citizen and received the vanity SSN with her first H1B visa application which was done through one of Epstein's companies. Her family was involved with the software for identity management.
That's exactly it. There was a time before widespread fingerprint checks and facial recognition where they'd all been swapping their first/middle/lastnames around like crazy between passports, and for GM we have the actual immigration documents she filled out with the clear intention to fool the government - for each government entity she sent the form to, she used a different name. She was working in NY without a visa, and after Bush was voted out there was a sudden scrambling to get her an H1B and it was done via one of Epstein's companies.
The vanity SSN thing looks even weirder because someone who I assume was Epstein's great-grandfather was head of US social security administration in the 1920s, a crazy coincidence [Trump family was more department of agriculture]. The 133784883 SSN is clearly a five-eyes meme and one day FOIAs will show what other interesting VIPs have a 1337-range SSN.
Even Donald Trump's officially-curated Wikipedia lists some of his fake identities, and he has some Epstein-related pseudonyms which are not widely known yet which are miraculously also associated with the Kashoggi family name.
Anyone can write anything, it doesn't make it true.
Eg, I can say: "ai wrote this comment".
Or I can say: "ai did not write this comment".
Looking at the comments alone does not tell you whether they were or were not written by ai. Same for videos.
What is going on is that you are trusting the disclosure is significant and real. So, when you see the disclosure you are concluding something on the basis of TRUST. Same for the video itself.
Seeing something on a screen does not make it a true representation of reality. You do not know reality; you only know that you saw a video. This applies to disclosure, video, comments - anything on a screen.
An applicable use of 'evil' for an animal, would be if you believe the animal 'knows better', eg a dog that knows right or wrong (in its way) but does something it thinks it shouldn't.
reply