Ever heard of the banality of evil?
Ignorance is in some ways worse than being genuinely evil.
You should be worried because the same guys who are resonsible for this web site are now in charge of much more vital systems and there are much bigger threats who just wait do get important data.
I don't think it's ignorance. It's indifference. The vast majority of Americans simply don't give one iota of care as long as they are currently comfortable.
I don't remember the quote, but something about them only learning from catastrophe.
Ironically one of the few wars America objectively and decidedly lost - and on their home turf no less! Terrorism is to enact political change through acts of violence; I think it's pretty inarguable that America is a changed nation with regards to government surveillance, and the powers granted to law enforcement.
Suppose they do care. What would that look like? Posting memes to TikToks and Instagram? Would it look protests in all 50 states? Because 50501 did that and got barely any coverage. If you knew to look for them you could and can find coverage, but it didn't dominate the news cycle on all channels for days on end.
We're not united because they've goaded us into to fighting each other over two topics that really aren't, and there's only two teams to pick from. One was bad, and the other one worse.
> The vast majority of Americans simply don't give one iota of care as long as they are currently comfortable.
Can you blame them? They've been toiling hard for decades while getting poorer and poorer, while the privileged class has lived lives of wealth and comfort from milking these government institutions. Did they care about the vast majority being comfortable or not?
The repubs lost their battles, and decided they wanted to win at all costs. They had people show up to vote, vote in a bloc, volunteer for lower level positions, join multiple different organizations and basically organized them to dismantle the country.
If people can be driven to do that, then its not much to assume that at least a few more people could have done the same thing.
That's just laughable for entire generations of people, like Soviet headlines of how food production is beating all records while the store shelves are empty. People are getting absolutely murdered on rents and real estate inflation. If you're a landlord or can leverage your real estate, then good for you. You have never been wealthier.
Sometimes- it also just rains. The end of WW2 and free trade + technology, have given the futurist ideology that every problem is solveable way to much credibility. Some problems are just hard and inherently not solveable and sometimes not even workaroundable by technology.
Utopists who run into accumulating problems, closing resource windows and simple limitations of humans (tribal creatures) and the meta-machinery they built, are bound to just run around with their pants on fire.
...in the 1700s. It's older than America. Jihadis want nothing else than 100% global sharia law/kalifate. The hate of America is because America is winning and they are losing. Don't be confused. We do NOT want to placate Jihadis. They are worse than the Nazis.
bin Laden and al-Qaida talked a lot about their motivations. For one it was disgusting to them that the house of Saud bowed and scraped for the crusaders in Washington, and so was the rather arbitrary abuse of Afghanistan.
They also were under the delusion that the US was a democracy, and hence the general population could be held responsible for the actions of its leaders. Understandable if they had mainly been exposed to US/Occidental state propaganda.
Today I don't think anyone would be inclined to hold such a belief.
Calling something "evil" is implying an external force (often linked to religion), that I don't think should be used. It reduces the responsibility of the person doing "evil" acts.
I think the missing ingredient is simply not caring about the outcome. It could be because they don't have empathy (sociopaths), or that the society has trained them into normalising obedience to the cause (facsism / communism) or inhumanized their targets (consentration camps).
Acts can certainly be described as "evil", but I don't agree that "evil" is some type of force that affects people.
Not caring about the outcome doesn't make sense, people that are driven by something care about the outcome.
To go back to my original point, the simplistic equation falls apart if you spend a second looking for counter examples.
Sikhs give free food to any who asks, without expecting anything in return. They are deluded (they do to it please god), and need power and conviction to do so.
A good point. You can for sure accidentally do good things by being deluded and having conviction and power. One could also say that they have a small delusion (god) that gives them a bigger truth (being nice to people is good). So like their total delusion level in this regard is low.
I'm not a native speaker, and I see that I may have been unclear.
I was thinking of the human consequences. In my language they are almost synonyms.
They of course care about the outcome, but not the effect it has on the target group
It's strange how one can normalize cruelty. Just think of how prison rapes are joked about in media and movies, as if it is an accepted consequence of committing a crime. It is a cruel and evil act that many choose to simply ignore because it is so common
>There is only delusion + power + conviction. There is no other evil.
If you believe this, your beliefs are out of step with essentially every Western justice system, which hold murder to be a worse crime than manslaughter. The difference between them is solely the intention.
Not that I agree with GP at all, but you are strawmaning him. I'll steelman his argument with your example: Premeditated murder is worse than just murder: for you to commit murder, you have to be convinced you have to do it, and the power to push it through. And in case of a premeditation, the dellusion you'll be able to do it without consequences.
(I still think it's a bad example even presented like this, and I disagree with GP, but your example seemed wrong)
How does conviction (as OP used it) not align with intention? I don't follow your point here about murder vs manslaughter and how it contradicts what OP said.
It seems I interpreted their use of "conviction" in a very different way than you and others. I interpreted it as a word they chose to use because it contrasts with intention, specifically with intention to harm another person.
By "conviction", I understood them to mean a kind of blindness -- an unshakeable belief that what you are doing is right, regardless of what others may believe. That kind of conviction is orthogonal to intention to harm another person. I took the entire thrust of their argument to be that intention to harm another person is neither necessary nor morally important for evil. But that is not how most of the West sees it (as evidenced by the distinction between murder and manslaughter that I pointed out).
If, when they wrote "conviction", they in fact meant "intention to harm another person", then I agree with them. But in that case I'm not sure why they posted their comment at all, since that (namely, the thesis that intention to harm is morally important when actions cause harm) is already the accepted norm, at least in the West.
Manslaughter is when you kill someone without conviction and/or delusion. You can hit someone without the conviction that you need to kill them and they fall really badly and die.
Murder. You can hit someone in self defense where you have no conviction that the person must be killed (because for example they say you had sex with their wife, but you in fact know you didn't, it's a misunderstanding), and you don't have any delusion (you know the attacker is delusional in fact). And then you defend yourself and he dies because he hit his head badly on the way down.
By "conviction", do you simply mean "intent to harm another person"?
Because that is the only way I can interpret your examples so that they correspond with the legal distinction, which is based on intent to harm and TTBOMK never mentions "conviction". If so, we're in full agreement, since that is already the accepted Western norm and my original comment was based on a misunderstanding, and unnecessary.
But also if so: I'm puzzled why you chose to swap the natural and original word "intent" for a different word ("conviction") that is easily misinterpreted as a quality orthogonal to intention to harm, and about which an interesting but fundamentally wrong argument is periodically made (namely, that it, plus power are sufficient for evil, without any need for intent). I'm also puzzled why you made the initial comment I replied to at all, since it's then a defence of the absolutely uncontroversial status quo. It's like posting that you believe in gravity.
> By "conviction", do you simply mean "intent to harm another person"?
No, I mean "the probability function you ascribe to your beliefs". A person who believes something very weakly doesn't put on a suicide vest to blow up civilians in order to further this belief. A person with a strong belief might.
You should be worried because the same guys who are resonsible for this web site are now in charge of much more vital systems and there are much bigger threats who just wait do get important data.