Doctor Spaceman posted:

It's worth having a look at that essay, since the website is loving unreadable by design.

SedanChair posted:

People who grew up being socialized to have a dick are way more likely to be shitstains. What happens after that is kind of irrelevant.

Aurubin posted:

I know like 9 programming languages. Truly I am a god among men.

Forgall posted:

Hmm, looks like she deleted her twitter...

Jeffrey posted:

Dr.Zeppelin posted:

If you're gonna criticize any tech person for caring about their starry-eyed techtopia instead of the real world, it seems like an odd choice to go after one of the few who backs an actual physical product that has the potential to improve the world instead of an app that exploits the hell out of a regulatory blind spot or a subsistence lifestyle product straight out of a cyberpunk nightmare.

Nessus posted:

You know here's the thing, I actually think this is a stupid and fetishistic idea which does material harm to society.

It is very true that humans do a lot of awful things on a regular basis. There are also some humans who genuinely are sociopathic monsters. They are few, and all gags about politicians aside, the sociopathic monsters seem just as likely to be drifters or assholes working at the Pizza Hut as they do to be politicians.

Humans do have a lot of blinders and prejudices, and these ingrained layers of outer dirt and psychological crap can become so deeply ingrained that someone who on a personal level is empathic, feeds a kitten, writes a check to a telethon, and hugs their children can then take a plane into Washington and vote for bombing a house full of foreign children. However, this is a very different phenomenon from saying humans are 'fundamentally bad,' because it is due to acculturation, not some genetic impulse to relentlessly hurt, dominate, and exploit each other in whatever our current metaphor for the lovely emergent behavior of capitalism is.

But in a crisis most people try to work together. Or at least they don't gently caress each other up, not in the aggregate, not typically. They may abandon their respect for property law (and then be shot by police officers, themselves acculturated into the police-officer head trip, where financial incentives and ways of thinking make it reasonable to shoot people taking food and trinkets from a store when the city has drowned). But for whatever reason everyone in this drat country's media industry is horribly fascinated with the prospect of any bad situation making everyone automatically murder and abuse each other, as if by inner nature, never mind that if this really was the fundamental human nature we would have eaten ourselves to death before leaving Africa.

And since, as "everyone knows," people are all monsters when you let 'em be, you reinforce the ideas that we need strong mechanisms of control and that we need to bomb others into submission at all times; that employees must be kept down, that skilled workers will organize to rip your business apart rather than 'to improve their situation.' Because they have to really be monsters under the surface. Everyone knows.

Sedanchair is right: most (I will not say all) of organized lovely human behavior is due to institutions getting out of hand, not because of Original Sin.

e: If crises aren't persuasive, consider other situations. Even if you swear at someone on your drive to work, think of all the cohesive social situations that led up to you having gotten up that morning, gotten in a vehicle someone else almost certainly built, and gone off to your semi-steady place of work. If everyone was robbing, killing and abusing each other constantly this would not be the case. Obviously systemic discrimination etc. exists, but that's institutions getting out of hand again, leavened by the fact that there are over three hundred million individual humans in the US alone, and some of them are going to act out on any given day. Some! Not most.