mellow2020

As a counterpoint here's something Franz Kafka wrote in a letter to Elli Hermann 1921, badly translated by me.

> Parents have an animalistic, senseless love for the children, which confuses themselves with the child all the time, the educator has respect, and this is much more valuable for education, even if there is no love present at all. I repeat: valuable for education, because even though I call parental love animalistic and senseless, that does not value it lowly, it is just as much a unknowable mystery as the artful, creative love of the educator, only in the context of education however it cannot be valued low enough.

For the totalitarian claim to rewrite history all territories are ultimately problematic.

> We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet.

- Hannah Arendt

I would add that several totalitarian singularities, that each are closed off from one another or perceive each other through a completely controlled ideological filter, might also constitute such total control.

Well, there's any kind of person anywhere, anyway.

I think it's not wrong to be pre-emptively wary of that (and prepare arguments for it), considering the way F.U.D. about "cookie banners" [1] got many people worked up against a supposedly useless and clueless law that (again, supposedly) "forces" sites to show such banners -- because their desire to track, which is the first link in this causal chain, is being ignored or assumed as given and benign.

[1] banners sites put up because they would prefer to track everyone on the first visit, rather than having an opt-in link somewhere in the footer for example.

Yes, I know, that's still shifting goal posts from

> "being put in jail because you say publicly that tibet should be free"

and if merely pointing that fact out is getting me downvoted, that's the problem of the people who are doing that.

So what you're saying is, when I post that Catalonia should be free and go on holiday in Spain, no spooks would follow me around, and no pressure would be put on German companies to fire me, and this isn't even remotely comparable.

Maybe to people who made "rapey" part of their vocabulary because of internet "humor".

If you remove "in a post-911 world" from that comment the point stays exactly the same.

> The last guy who touched upon it

On the other hand, people like Chomsky aren't being persecuted. Though all in all, I would also say they get ignored very efficiently, Chomsky still isn't exactly unknown either. Is there a Chinese author and speaker with decades of real harsh criticism of their government under their belt, who is living in China with their works being translated in all sorts of languages and also available in China?

> The rationale behind that statements leads to the attitude of not even attempting to be objective.

What is "the rationale behind that statement", other than intellectual honesty? The statement is true, not even attempting to be objective does not follow from it. Denying it to achieve something that isn't even gained by its denial is a refusal to be more objective, plain and simple.

> So while you are correct the statement on its own does not state that

.. I'm still at -1. Not because what I said is wrong, but because some would prefer it to be wrong or something.

> I believe that to be dangerous because it then allows you to engage in sophistry.

That also doesn't follow. I would even say that is sophistry. The statement is true, it doesn't become untrue because of things you claim would follow from it, even if you had shown how they follow from it, which you did not.

Sure, but that has nothing to do with the comment it was in response to, which does in fact not say that.

Nobody said you shouldn't try. But part of that is calling out those who talk of being "unbiased" or "objective" not as a shorthand, but as something they seen think is actually within their possession.

> It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.

-- C.S. Lewis

> We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

-- Werner Heisenberg

The less agency people have, and the less expertise is teached to them and expected of them, the less capable and the more exploitable they become.