Tidings of Great Sadness: Measuring the evil that we do

Birdjaguar

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Are there, should there be, standards by which we can determine who are and have been the worst among us? Individuals, governments, terrorist groups, rebels, religions, cults and armies all are the leading contenders for the worst of the worst. How should we measure their acts?

Body count?
Scope of destruction?
Collateral damage?
Cruelty?
Cause?
Means?
Purpose?
Duration?
How many boxes need to be checked to be worse than others?
 
Evil is incredibly subjective because what one person thinks is evil, another can think of it as good, or any shade of grey in between.

Just to take a solid example, Abortion. A lot of people think it's baby murder. A lot of people think of it as a right to healthcare. And a lot of people think it's acceptable only in certain circumstances. Take any other subject, person, or act from history or present day and you'll find somebody somewhere who doesn't think as you do.
 
Nah, too subjective and easy to manipulate after the fact based on who wins and their civilizational mores.
I thought about it and came to a similar conclusion. It's easy enough to get agreement a power is brutal, but the worst of the worst is probably too difficult and disputes too numerous.
 
A lot of people think it's baby murder. A lot of people think of it as a right to healthcare.
It can be both. It sort of has to be.

People are too divorced from where their food comes from to realize what they are: fearfully and wonderfully made.
 
Just to take a solid example, Abortion. A lot of people think it's baby murder.
Vanishingly few people truly believe that, because doing things like bombing or shooting up clinics are the logical consequence of genuinely holding that belief. Even in the US, capital city of the anti abortion movement, that kinda thing is pretty rare.
 
Are there, should there be, standards by which we can determine who are and have been the worst among us? Individuals, governments, terrorist groups, rebels, religions, cults and armies all are the leading contenders for the worst of the worst. How should we measure their acts?

Body count?
Scope of destruction?
Collateral damage?
Cruelty?
Cause?
Means?
Purpose?
Duration?
How many boxes need to be checked to be worse than others?

Add motivation to the list.

And we need to be aware of history, not just recent history (which I'd measure in a few hundred years), but also in a few thousand.

For instance, the recent hockey tournament Canada won. It's nice that they won. But while people are glued to their screens watching hockey, they're not paying attention to what our premier and Trump-loving Leader of the Opposition are up to.

Bread and circuses. Try to make sure you have enough bread, because that's survival. But identify what they're using the circuses to distract you from finding out or realizing.
 
Purpose = motivation in my thinking.
 
Vanishingly few people truly believe that, because doing things like bombing or shooting up clinics are the logical consequence of genuinely holding that belief. Even in the US, capital city of the anti abortion movement, that kinda thing is pretty rare.
Most people aren't vigilantes. It takes a significant amount of brain dysfunction to get to the point where this makes sense.

It has to be trained(the dysfunction) into soldiers to do it when people are actively trying to murder them.
 
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Vanishingly few people truly believe that, because doing things like bombing or shooting up clinics are the logical consequence of genuinely holding that belief. Even in the US, capital city of the anti abortion movement, that kinda thing is pretty rare.
Having a belief, expressing that belief, and acting on that belief are all different things. One doesn't necessarily follow the other.
 
And it isn't free.

Spoiler nope :

Spoiler not at all :
 
This topic reminds me of AI talk about surveillance. People in China are supposed to see AI as an overlooking mother, always there
to help people in need and to confine evil doers. People in USA are supposed to see AI as a genius cousin who is very rational, helpful and reserved.

In the end it might come down to scarcity/ win-win thinking. People do evil things to survive in many cases. If someone lived a luxury life and didn't have to commit crimes to be rich,
but committed them anyway, for fun, just like tyrants of the past, it could be defined as pure evil.

Psychopathy has been named as source of evil, along narcissism. But if you are poor and ugly and the most evil thing you can do is to rob a department
store, because you don't have money for potatoes, nobody is going to call you a psychopath.
 
This topic reminds me of AI talk about surveillance. People in China are supposed to see AI as an overlooking mother, always there
to help people in need and to confine evil doers. People in USA are supposed to see AI as a genius cousin who is very rational, helpful and reserved.

I can't wrap my head around either of these ways of thinking.

I suppose that on the one hand, as a Star Trek fan who has spent decades watching shows in which people talk to the ship's computer as though it's an actual individual, I might be expected to think AI is an interesting tool.

The truth? My artistic self stepped up and got angry when the people who decided to ruin NaNoWriMo suddenly started sneaking AI programs into the winners' goodies and advertising them and encouraging the use of AI, pretending that "it's really for the good of the disabled Wrimos, who just can't compete with the able-bodied writers, so we're giving them some extra help. After all, they can't type as fast and some of them have trouble thinking as quickly or clearly and need help with spelling and grammar..." and on and on and on with their ABLEIST BS.

Pretty arrogant of someone who writes smut just this side of pornographic (she sells on Amazon) to look down her nose at people like me, with physical issues that mean I find it a hell of a lot harder to do NaNo now than I did even 5 years ago, so of course I'd NEED a boost from AI, right?

Wrong. I once did over 8600 words in less than 24 hours, to push myself past the 50k mark. That was in 2018, the first time I used my King's Heir story for NaNo purposes. That was physically painful to the point that my hands and fingers were aching three days later. And I was still writing (though not as much per day).

Not one of those words happened due to AI. I take pride in that, and so do many other physically disabled writers, and writers who have learning disabilities (there are more dyslexic writers than most people might guess). So many of them are saying NO to using AI.
 
Vanishingly few people truly believe that, because doing things like bombing or shooting up clinics are the logical consequence of genuinely holding that belief. Even in the US, capital city of the anti abortion movement, that kinda thing is pretty rare.
Do you follow all of your beliefs to their logical consequence? The ultimate logical consequence is that we are all dead in the long run, so to me the question would be: why do anything?
 
Do you follow all of your beliefs to their logical consequence? The ultimate logical consequence is that we are all dead in the long run, so to me the question would be: why do anything?
Because you might be miserable?
 
I don’t view it as necessary to follow everything to its so-called logical conclusion.

Tied Up​

Dear Diary:

I was running errands on an unseasonably warm October afternoon. As I approached the crowded corner of 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue, I heard someone calling out in earnest.

“Excuse me! Excuse me!” the voice said.

I turned to see a woman in running gear walking toward an older man who was holding a white cane.

“Sir,” the woman said urgently, “your shoelace is untied.”

She paused.

“Would you like me to tie it for you?” she asked.

The man did not hesitate.

“Sure!” he said.

The woman knelt down, tied his shoe and went on her way.

— Meghana Shah
 
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