This is such an excellent comment (along with SoftTalker's reply) and made me think. I've long rejected the term "intellectual property", along with the delusional/fraudulent term "artificial intelligence" (as opposed to real things like LLMs and machine learning) and "money laundering" but hadn't previously stopped to think about "identity theft". Now I have.
I believe that it's really important to consider the validity of terms that are heavily adopted and pushed around and whether you should use them yourself or call them out as intellectually vapid/dishonest.
> Financial privacy is a complicated subject, could you perhaps agree that there is a use for transparancy?
No, because I don't believe in income tax or capital gains tax. I do believe in government taxes but they should be made on land holdings (Georgism) and on corporate activities, not on individuals' financial status (their earnings & capital).
The Government is answerable to the public and should serve the public. But conflating the government with the public is simply bizarre, to my way of thinking.
Governments should be transparent as much as possible, yes. But that doesn't mean being necessarily transparent with sensitive information that they know about members of the public. Only with your (bizarre to me) conflation of the public with the government would this make any sense.
> asshattery in your twenties is largely irrelevant to your trustworthiness in your sixties
Do people believe this? I certainly don't. How you behaved in your twenties is a good measure of the sort of person you are and will be for the rest of your life, albeit that you will (hopefully) mature and change some of your opinions and behaviours. So yes, you will have changed but you're also still that person you were in your twenties.
I am not commenting on your specific example of DEI but I want to make the general point that you are always responsible for what you do, irregardless of whether you were told to do it by your boss, or commanding officer, or whatever.
So again, I don't care about the specific example you used but if something is 'in fashion' and you go along with it, including at work, then you are ultimately responsible for that choice. Because it is always a choice, including being a hard choice that results in you losing your job.
But working on DEI on your boss' orders in 2024 wasn't reprobable, anymore than bringing your boss a cup of coffee to their desk was.
The point is that the shift in what is considered "a capital crime" is arbitrary, this is not the Nuremberg trials. You cannot protect yourself by being a decent person, whatever you do today can be a crime tomorrow, and AI can assist those looking for your flaws.
> They were most successful in Japan, creating about 300,000 converts until their activities induced a wave of xenophobia and they were either expelled or killed.
I am immensely glad that Japan was not colonised early on like the Philippines to their south unfortunately was.
I'm very aware, of course, of the horrific crimes that Japan carried out in China and other countries in the 1930s but that is not xenophobia. People going outside their country (to do whatever) are not affected by xenophobia. Xenophobia is a fear of people from outside the country, within that country.
Native cultures (however you want to define that) have always shown some curiousity and openness to visitors from outside the culture but that is balanced by some level of xenophobia too, that ramps up as people inside the culture feel that they are being overwhelmed. Both aspects of openness and shutting out are natural traits in any homogenous culture.
No xenophobia is “the fear or dislike of people who are perceived as being foreign or strange”. Thats just from the dictionary.
You could call the brutal repression of the Ainu and native Okinawans a kind of xenophobic/racist ultra nationalism. Also Japan’s crimes extend far beyond China, and were especially brutal in Korea were they practiced a horrific form of slavery.
The Japanese are so xenophobic they try to exclude the descendants of Korean slaves who have been living in Japan for a century, have Japanese names, and only speak Japanese. Their xenophobia is not laudable.
I am very aware of the history of the Japanese with the Ainu, the native Okinawans , and in Korea and Taiwan (and in other countries, as I have said).
The broader point that I am making, outside the specific instance of the Japanese which you seem to want to fixate on, is that xenophobia can be a useful social trait, to avoid a society being overwhelmed by a foreign ingress. This could work just as well for the Ainu, the Okinawans and the Koreans (and I'm sure they exhibited it too, but unfortunately weren't in a position to act on it strongly enough to defend against colonisation/vassalisation).
I'm clearly pointing out that you were wrong about the definition of xenophobia, and that the xenophobia of Japan was the seed for a fascist genocidal rampage. I would further argue that fearing people perceived as foreign which is what xenophobia is, is not necessary to establish and protect sovereignty or to hold close and nurture cherished cultural institutions.
I'm not fixated, I'm pointing out that xenophobia is actually bad and leads to bad things.
Every organism must have an immune system which is essential to (but does not guarantee) their survival. Just the same, a society has xenophonia as its immune system. That does not make it 'bad', even though it can produce very ugly effects.
I do not agree with your expansion of xenophobia to the behaviour of a people outside their own country. I do not agree that xenophobia is objectively bad. I also do not agree that "the xenophobia of Japan was the seed for a fascist genocidal rampage" and I doubt that many, if any, historians would agree with such a simplistic assertion either.
Since you seem to have a very closed mind on this subject (i.e. xenophobia == bad, bad, bad) and further discussion seems pointless I'll leave it here.
I don't and I see Sam Altman as a greater fraud than that (loathsome) individual. And I don't think Sam gets through the coming bubble pop without being widely exposed (and likely prosecuted) as a fraudster.
I believe that it's really important to consider the validity of terms that are heavily adopted and pushed around and whether you should use them yourself or call them out as intellectually vapid/dishonest.
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