Stalin truly believed what he was doing was for the greater good of the USSR. It's extremely easy to justify bad deeds and fool yourself that the ends justify the means.
There will always be some megalomaniac, whether dictator, president, cop, or some authority figure, who "knows best".
Individual rights are the brakes. They're the lines we've agreed not to cross as a society, even when we're really sure we "know best". Example: property rights. No matter how sure you are that there's stolen property in the building, even law enforcement doesn't get to enter without a warrant.
Individual rights limit what others can do.
Imagine if each of your cells had individual rights or every bee in a hive has freedom to do its own thing.
Sometimes (most?) having centralized systems of power can be misused but that doesn't mean that centralized systems shouldn't be tried, there are evolutionary advantages to them.
How am I not surprised that you're the founder and CTO of a proctoring company that does facial recognition + AI to detect lying with "100% unbiased results". Fucking gross, man.
> Based on established models such as Big 5 and intrinsic values, TBI adds AI-powered Natural Language Processing to process data and help you make unbiased hiring decisions 100% of the time.
> TBI stack ranks candidates according to their performance in the assessment with regards to the competencies predetermined by the enterprise, ranging from 'essential' to 'good' and then 'critical'.
> Leverage psycholinguistics to analyze a candidate’s response and predict behavior in half the time.
So this company has layered AI on top of pseudoscience and is selling it as an automated hiring tool. I guess the hiring decisions are 100% unbiased if the results are indistinguishable from noise? Or maybe your hiring decisions are "unbiased" if you launder them through this software to produce a team that looks like your existing team?
Either way, this Talview company is doing some really evil stuff.
To be fair, that is actually true, although I don't think that's the (false) claim they're actually making.
A personal attack is not appropriate for this forum. I wouldn't have a made personal attack on you even if you had put what is you do in your profile.
FWIW I am proud of what I build, our products for half a decade have helped people to be able to take assesments from their home, whether it's disabilities or those cannot lose time on their jobs or would have to travel hundreds of miles just to an exam center to be certified. I am proud to have helped all of them.
There are plenty of discussions to be had on universities or certification bodies insisting on stringent requirements to do remote assesments to protect their integrity but a personal attack is not really the way to engage on this topic
Cells or bees have nothing to do with the wrongfully imprisoned minors in question.
Hitler as well.
I went to Catholic school. Had quite the debate with a nun over why I thought Hitler and Stalin both went to heaven, since both thought they were doing the right thing and were just horribly misguided.
I think a better way to phrase this would be that Stalin often said that what he was doing was for the greater good of the USSR.
Stalin remained true to the Marxist ideal of a classless and stateless world society until his death in 1953. This is the conclusion of researchers at Amsterdam University (UvA) who studied Stalin's annotations in books by Marx, Engels and Lenin in his private library.
The notes originate from the period between 1917 and 1953 and show that the dictator continued to adhere to such Marxist goals as the abolition of the state and the creation of classless society. Moreover, Stalin's correspondence and discussions with such Communist leaders as Mao Zedong and Palmiro Togliatti show a continuing faith in the spread of communism and "world revolution".
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2000-02/NOfS-SwfM-22...
A false preacher using his power for selfish purposes will carry a bible for show, maybe have a few stowed away. A false preacher certainly wouldn't have accumulated years of theology literature in his personal/private library over his lifetime. Seems like a true believer to me, but you may see it differently. Him being a true believer and having done what he did makes his particular flavor of human nature even more frightening.
Still I'd think that primarily important thing for him was himself and personal power, and that if he had had to make a choice between ideologies and himself, he'd done what was better for him personally. I wonder if he looked at communism etc more like a powerful tool (or so he thought) for him to use, and then not surprising if he spent time studying it
From the article:
> show a continuing faith in the spread of communism and "world revolution".
That'd almost made him the dictator over the world? Who knows if that might have been a main goal, and communism a tool?