How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by aub3bhat on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @01:52PM (#14850126)

Microprocessors, Internet, Green Revolution, T-Cell therapy, China & India over the last 2 decades ..... You know the stuff that actually required knowledge and power. Not some feel goodery truthiness.

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Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by matt4077 on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @02:17PM (#14850393)

Yeah, this is the typical dismissal of anything not STEM!!STEM!!

In reality, technological invention has always gone hand-in-hand with progress in our understanding of how to organise a just and productive society. It's sometimes harder to point at specific examples because this change happened more gradually, but ignorance of this progress doesn't legitimise a wholesale dismissal.

Concepts such as the rule of law, democracy, capitalism etc. didn't appear out of nowhere, nor were they always-existing "goodery truthiness". And there's no technology that could be identified as central to their establishment.

In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in a society with the technology of the stone age and today's understanding of law&justice, than a society with the technology of today and the stone age's morality.

In as far as technology had an impact on such progress, Jared Diamond argues that it was mostly in increasing the productivity of farming, allowing more and more people to not work the fields, live in cities, and actually start thinking.

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Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by smokeyj on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @03:17PM (#14850987)

This is like every religious group taking credit for societal advancements.

> I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in a society with the technology of the stone age and today's understanding of law&justice

I'm sure we could conduct an easy experiment.. but maybe that's too empirical for you

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Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by rosser on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @02:18PM (#14850399)

This is so dismissive. You may not find those things valuable, but that doesn't make them valueless.

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Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by abawany on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @03:31PM (#14851115)

Exactly. One can hardly call the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964) as inconsequential.

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Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by ionised on Thursday July 27, 2017 @07:31AM (#14864257)

Feel-goodery truthiness like emancipation of the slaves, women's suffrage, civil rights and the welfare state?

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