ultimafan
Culture is defined by people not borders- simply crossing an arbitrary line doesn't change someone's beliefs and values.
The immigration boom especially on the West coast has vastly diluted assimilation into American culture- coming from an immigrant, who married into another family of immigrants- too many people move here and stick to their own cultural enclave, building a version of their home country in miniature instead of trying to integrate.
We do things to achieve some end result but it's the journey there that is the most cathartic to me. The "skilled crafts" element of development where careful deliberation and hours of tinkering to get any kind of appreciable output you can admire has been replaced with a one stop dopamine button that skips the whole process that I could find myself getting lost in.
I've taken up carpentry/metal working as a result. Maybe someday we'll have live in robots that do the same for those hobbies that AI did for programmers but I can't see it happening any time soon.
A much better analogy would be showing up to a weightlifting competition with a construction crane and thinking competing with it against human lifters is fair.
I don't play multiplayer games anymore for that reason. Too easy to go on an emotional tilt where you feel like you're suffering from paranoia and suspecting too many players of cheating. It's absolutely ruined competitive games for me.
Both sides have been seen with one member of a squad carrying around an issued shotgun in an anti-drone role- the fact that it shoots pellets in a cone is precisely why it's so effective. Skeet shooting is a great example of how relatively small fast moving targets can be hit consistently at range with a shotgun and they are usually using much smaller/lighter pellets with poorer velocity/range, I would assume the loads used in an anti-drone role are bigger.
But I don't remember it ever being getting anywhere near as heated or pushed in real life conversations. That kind of borderline religious fanaticism mostly lived in online spaces.
For me personally (and maybe for others as well?) there's two parts to this. The first is that it's exhausting to constantly be pulled into "debates" with staunch pro-AI supporters who can't accept that you have some reason to be against it or agree to disagree and move on from the conversation. The second is that I've noticed that even mild anti-AI sentiment lately seems to make people (especially tech people) see and treat you as an anti-science luddite or conspiracy theorist.
It's easier to just pretend I don't care or that I'm not interested in public than be a skeptic.
Stepping outside for a smoke on the job, at parties, while out running errands, in foreign countries as a tourist, to kill time outside an appointment waiting room, etc. was a guaranteed way to strike up an unexpected conversation with all manners of characters from all walks and levels of life that I wouldn't have had the chance (or courage or social skills I suppose) to do otherwise.
Some of the most entertaining or thought provoking conversations with strangers in my life have been a result of this. Approaching random people busy with their random lives outside of a smoking area feels intimidating and often doesn't seem to have the same result (which makes sense- someone smoking is actively not busy)
And in the office, it always felt to me like the smoking areas were the only place you could get real, no bullshit answers from people across teams/divisions "off the record" about actual deadlines/timelines etc.
I've heard people say something to the effect of, just go hang out in a smoke spot and don't actually smoke to get the same perks but as an ex-smoker if I saw a non-smoker doing this I would definitely feel a bit weird about it / less open towards them.
I have little doubt that people looking back in the future on the first few decades of widespread internet usage and adoption without guardrails in place will see it as a huge moral failure on society's part. We've created a system that has enabled predators, scammers, and the like all over the world to cause untold amounts of harm to victims they would otherwise never have encountered, and get away with criminal behavior that, lacking a physical out in the open component isn't seen or caught by anyone until the damage is already done.
Instead of slowing down or reflecting on if a 24/7 deluge of social media / entertainment / bullshit novelties are really worth the harm companies are just ramping up the potential for future danger in the name of profit with all these new AI tools for "innocent" purposes.
The content of their belief system might be known and recorded in that scenario but the teaching of it as a genuine belief/truth to live by and to be passed on from generation to generation probably wouldn't be.
Just that for a specific belief to survive, some number of members need to survive to pass it on to the next generation, which if their beliefs bar them from killing or violence requires them to rely on people who aren't.
I don't think this comparison to early/mainline Christianity is entirely fair. It was murder, not "just" killing that was prohibited by their values.
Being able to endorse extreme pacifism long enough to have your belief turn into a large group with many followers is a privilege of being a subgroup in a society where someone else isn't bound by that particular moral outlook. That's all I meant by offloading the burden. You can oppose the violence of secular society, as you put it, while also accepting that that opposition would only ever have worked at any point in history if only a part of your population agreed with you.
Agree with the general sentiments of your post. A lot of pro self-defense talks online read like thinly veiled "bad ass" fan fiction where someone salivates over the idea of killing someone in a legal manner that they face no consequences for.
But I don't think this last part is very realistic and possibly even very dangerous. Martial arts aren't anywhere near as effective as people make them out to be if you are not highly trained and essentially useless if the other person is armed even with a knife. They are better for training confidence/athleticism than self-defense. Tasers are frequently shrugged off by aggressors (no shortage of videos online showing this) and if you miss you just escalated the situation with no other way out. A gun is really the only thing that puts even the weakest victim on par with the strongest aggressor. But situational awareness for where you are and who is around you is 100x more important.
Just an observation that at any given point in human history such a philosophy could only survive long enough to be passed generation to generation if its members offloaded the burden of having to make that moral choice onto someone else ie police or military. I don't think such a belief could have ever developed and survived in a vacuum.
Every group of humans with surviving beliefs in known history have had some subgroup of (or been a subgroup of) other humans willing to resort to violence to protect the whole.
It seems like in nature or on its own such a mindset would be akin to being in a death cult- you're just going to get rolled over by someone else and your "tribe" won't be around long enough to have this belief "reproduce" and be passed on.
But if you live in the midst of a society full of other people who are willing to kill or be killed to protect those in it beliefs like that can grow and gain followers without any risk of external challenge putting their faith to the test.
Reading my comment I realize it may sound a little bit inflammatory or perhaps bloodthirsty- that's not my intention, I don't know how to word it better. Just a passing thought on this topic
I'm really of the belief that the only reason kratom exploded in popularity the way it did was because it was a legal alternative to opiates. Not necessarily because it's an upgrade (or even sidegrade. ) If morphine could still be purchased in every corner store and pharmacy over the counter kratom extracts would never have blown up the way they did.
Would you feel comfortable if someone made a similar website with the sole purpose of generating photos of your likeness or that of your family?
I'm not saying everyone needs to be glued in butt in seat 8 hours a day 5 days a week to be productive. I'm saying I suspect that for a large and noticeable enough amount of people it is more shameful to slack off in office when they have to spend all day sitting next to / passing by / talking to the people they are accountable to than when they spend their whole day at home with no worry that they're being judged by anyone. It's no doubt much easier to justify goofing off all day instead of working when your boss and coworkers aren't in constant visual range of you.
Companies probably noticed this (I don't think a degree in psychology is needed to acknowledge that most people act differently alone vs in social settings) and are making people go back.
I suspect for the majority of people though, working from home lacks the mixture of accountability and shame that comes from having to work side by side alongside your coworkers/managers/bosses and at least have to do some level of work to appear minimally productive. If no one is watching you and you feel that work is just a means to an end you might be tempted to goof off or drag your feet.
I personally noticed that my productivity plummeted during work from home and skyrocketed when return to office was mandated. Probably it is at least somewhat related to the above. If I'm at home I might be tempted to go on a walk / do some chores / read a few chapters of a book / go workout / take a nap because I don't feel shame for it and no one can tell me otherwise. I would feel significantly more uncomfortable doing any of those things in the office and will more likely than not actually be forced to get some work done out of boredom and with no other options or distractions.
But on a societal level I think it's absolutely okay to look around and say, "Hey, have you noticed the <insert something out of the ordinary> behavior that's starting to happen? What's causing that? How did it become normalized? Is that something we should readily accept?"
Such cases can absolutely be symptoms of larger societal problems and we shouldn't brush them away without examining them first.
It's about dogs as a replacement for children which anecdotally I have definitely seen happening. I've met more than one married couple who are proud about not wanting kids but own a dog and treat it to an absurd degree like one would treat a toddler including but not limited to talking to / about it like one would to their child (imagine the kind of coworker who loves to talk your ear off to you about every single little detail of their child's life, complete with photos, but with a dog), cooking for and feeding it like a child (not just putting a dog bowl out on the floor), hiring babysitters when they go out, taking it to daycare centers for dogs, planning activities for/around it, doting on it like a child (dressing it up, carting it around in a baby stroller on walks) etc. etc.
It's a world of a difference from simply owning and taking care of a dog. It's a perpetual simulation of human childcare projected onto a dog that never "grows up" and without all the struggles and ugly situations that might happen with a real toddler ie tantrums.
Funny to note that at least one inventor who contributed greatly to modern warfare (the creator of the gatling gun) did seem to reflect on his future impact but figured it'd go in the opposite direction- that a weapon that could replace a hundred soldiers with one would make wars smaller and less devastating, not more!
I think the unfortunate reality of human innovation is that too many people consider that technological progress is always good for progresses sake. Too many people create new tools, tech, etc. without really stopping to take a moment and think or have a discussion on what the absolute worst case applications of their creation will be and how difficult it'd be to curtail that kind of behavior. Instead any potential (before creation) and actual (when it's released) human suffering is hand waved away as growing pains necessary for science to progress. Like those websites that search for people's online profiles based on image inputs sold by their creators as being used to find long lost friends or relatives when everyone really knows it's going to be swamped by people using it to doxx or stalk their victims, or AI photo generation models for "personal use" being used to deep fake nudes to embarrass and put down others. In many such cases the creators sleep easy at night with the justification that it's not THEIR fault people are misusing their platforms, they provided a neutral tool and are absolved of all responsibility. All the while they are making money or raking in clout fed by the real pain of real people.
If everyone took the time to weigh the impact of what they're doing even half as diligently as that above article (doesn't even have to be from a religious perspective) the world would be a lot brighter for it.
If the player used the same dice for all rolls, a balance check against biased or loaded die was therefore built directly into the game, with the perk of making it very obvious if a player was using specific dice for specific rolls
It's not hard to imagine ways to get cheated out of a "fair" bet in card games, roulette, slots, etc. whether it's a mechanical cheat, sleight of hand, adjustment of odds, or whatever. Not saying it happens or is even a common occurrence but it's very easy to imagine ways it COULD happen or has happened in the past that are impossible for the player to detect.
Craps is the only game it feels like to me where provided the payout odds used are the same standard you see everywhere and the dice aren't metallic there is virtually no way to cheat the player/a bet in a way that wouldn't also benefit another player/another bet.