Re:ASML reports fire at its Berlin factory
by kragen on Tuesday January 04, 2022 @10:33PM
(#29804772)
Thank you very much. There's a lot to think about here.
I think that to a significant extent it's not actually absurd for such political debates "to feel like a fight to the death". Death is the currency of politics; the reason for the anti-China propaganda in the US and the anti-US propaganda in China is specifically in order to facilitate organized killing, because organized killing is how states stand or fall; it's what distinguishes the state from other forms of organization.
Even in arguably less consequential cases, like what happened to my friend Aaron or to Julian Assange, successful political factionalism can provide the factions who have control of the state with the opportunity to kill their individual enemies. (I can't count how many people I saw repeat the argument that Assange should give himself up to stand trial for rape, a trial everyone can now see was never in the cards.) At a scale in between, we have the drug war, which enabled Nixon, Biden, and their allies to imprison tens of millions of hippies and black people (who were inclined to vote against them) and strip them of voting rights. This directly killed many of them, forced others into violent prison gangs, and reduced their ability to organize politically to resist further damaging policies. And of course political debates over the death penalty and healthcare directly determine who gets to live and who has to die.
Even when there's no state, there's factional violence, so politics still determine who lives and dies.
So I don't think the humans are necessarily wrong when they feel that their lives are at stake in discussions about these divisive topics. No individual forum thread will, probably, determine their survival (though the HN thread where Aaron begged for help and mostly got told to suck it up might count as one) but the aggregate shifts in public opinion that emerge from the discourse will, ultimately, kill many of them.
In a broader sense, though, nobody's survival is at stake, because everybody who posting on this thread, every human alive today, is going to die. Their survival is a lost cause; their death is only a matter of time, and none of them has very much time left, a few decades at most. So the survival instinct, strong though it is, is the most futile of all human instincts.
I think that to a significant extent it's not actually absurd for such political debates "to feel like a fight to the death". Death is the currency of politics; the reason for the anti-China propaganda in the US and the anti-US propaganda in China is specifically in order to facilitate organized killing, because organized killing is how states stand or fall; it's what distinguishes the state from other forms of organization.
Even in arguably less consequential cases, like what happened to my friend Aaron or to Julian Assange, successful political factionalism can provide the factions who have control of the state with the opportunity to kill their individual enemies. (I can't count how many people I saw repeat the argument that Assange should give himself up to stand trial for rape, a trial everyone can now see was never in the cards.) At a scale in between, we have the drug war, which enabled Nixon, Biden, and their allies to imprison tens of millions of hippies and black people (who were inclined to vote against them) and strip them of voting rights. This directly killed many of them, forced others into violent prison gangs, and reduced their ability to organize politically to resist further damaging policies. And of course political debates over the death penalty and healthcare directly determine who gets to live and who has to die.
Even when there's no state, there's factional violence, so politics still determine who lives and dies.
So I don't think the humans are necessarily wrong when they feel that their lives are at stake in discussions about these divisive topics. No individual forum thread will, probably, determine their survival (though the HN thread where Aaron begged for help and mostly got told to suck it up might count as one) but the aggregate shifts in public opinion that emerge from the discourse will, ultimately, kill many of them.
In a broader sense, though, nobody's survival is at stake, because everybody who posting on this thread, every human alive today, is going to die. Their survival is a lost cause; their death is only a matter of time, and none of them has very much time left, a few decades at most. So the survival instinct, strong though it is, is the most futile of all human instincts.