Hacker News Reader

Comment by franga2000 | Hacker News Reader

franga2000

What do you mean by "exactly these kinds of attacks"? Besides both mentioning power infrastructure, they are completely different things.

One is "hey, terrorists or enemy states could destroy our entire grid, we'd all be fucked if this happened, here's what needs to be done to protect ourselves", the other is "hey, these powerful groups are destroying the planet for personal gain, do you think it might be justified to sabotage the tools they use to do that?"

Mass outages harm the public, sabotaging fossil fuel infrastrusture protects it. Even if the methods of the grid talk were applicable to such sabotage, which they really aren't, I don't see how hosting both of these discussions is a bad thing.

View on HN

Sabotaging any infrastracture harms people. Transitioning to clean energy can be (and is being) sped up by actual peaceful actions.

The second talk is especially ridiculous when the speaker suggests to sabotage datacenters, because they use a lot of resources. I guess it is part of the "degrowth" ideology, which I find deeply flawed.

> Sabotaging any infrastracture harms people. Transitioning to clean energy can be (and is being) sped up by actual peaceful actions.

It's entirely arbitrary to propose that only "peaceful" (an inherently relative term depending on your personal belief system) action can speed this up, while non-peaceful action cannot, that this property is a necessary requirement.

Unless of course your definition of "peaceful" is "thing that speeds up this transition". Would be pretty different from the average definition of the word, though.

They didn't say anything about peacefulness being a requirement to speeding up a transition to clean energy.

They also didn't say that it's the peacefulness aspect of the ongoing peaceful changes that is accelerating transition.

You're trying to outreason an opinion, and not only that, but you're also attempting to do so by putting words into their mouth. Please reconsider.

Debating the unspecified nature of a word isn't exactly the most productive thing in the world either. The vast, vast majority of natural language is that way. Kind of a pivotal feature of natural languages really.

I think it's very reasonable to take "Sabotaging any infrastructure harms people. Transitioning to clean energy can be (and is being) sped up by actual peaceful actions." as arguing for the sole usage of peaceful actions. If you feel that's an unfair take, feel free to clarify, but that interpretation seems pretty average.

No, that is a fair take. It's just not what you seemed to have been discussing before.

> It's entirely arbitrary to propose that only "peaceful" (an inherently relative term depending on your personal belief system) action can speed this up, while non-peaceful action cannot, that this property is a necessary requirement.

Do a mental experiment, flip around the sides. Is it OK to propose for oil executives to sabotage the lives of ecological activists with violence? Perhaps, burn their houses, deface the headquarters, that kind of thing?

What is the point of this experiment? Is it OK to propose for Ukrainians to sabotage the lives of Russian generals?

I'm trying to apply good faith, in which case I'm going to assume you're not arguing that there has never existed a set of circumstances under which such actions would be "OK". Could you explain directly what your PoV is instead? If it is that "It's OK if Ukrainians take such actions against Russian generals, but not if Tuvaluans/___ take them against oil executives", then why?

> What is the point of this experiment?

To see if your methods will actually result in anything good.

> Is it OK to propose for Ukrainians to sabotage the lives of Russian generals?

Of course. Top military personnel are a valid target in a war.

> I'm trying to apply good faith, in which case I'm going to assume you're not arguing that there has never existed a set of circumstances under which such actions would be "OK".

Pretty much. If you have to resort to terrorism, then your goal is probably indefensible.

Violence is defensible only as a response to violence.

If I turn up with a bulldozer and destroy your house, is that violence?

How about if I flood your entire state/region permanently, both destroying your living, as well as that of your friends and families, as well as forcing you to relocate to a region you have nothing in common with?

Someone throwing a punch in your face is violence. Is that more acceptable to counter with violence than the previous scenario? I haven't met a single person who genuinely believes that.

"violence" can express itself in many ways.

> Pretty much. If you have to resort to terrorism, then your goal is probably indefensible.

Terrorism is a meaningless tern used to appeal to emotion. One's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. Nearly every colonizer was overthrown by such a group. In many places, slavery was overturned by such groups.

Peaceful actions also harm people. Any transition to clean energy harms at least some people (for example executives and share holders of oil companies). The more important question is if the benefit outweighs the harm, and if the harm stays below some threshold of "unjustifiable harm".

I don't see how infrastructure is somehow special in this.

This is true for change in general.

To that end, the obvious answer to the person in that opening ceremony is "if people had further picture of the impact" [1].

Justice is in the eye of the beholder. The way they can make people sympathize with their intents of sabotage is by providing a justification, and enabling people to provide themselves one of their own. Otherwise, people will work with what they have, and what they have is mostly just their moral standards.

Evidently, the thread starter's moral standards do not condone this. Mine don't either. The way one can change this is by providing more information that would enable us to change our minds. This isn't really what's happening so far (although neither sides are communicating in a way that would make an open ended discussion of this super viable).

[1] and have that picture be such that it supports their conclusion. Note how this doesn't mean that picture must be:

- truthful

- balanced

- reasonable

And provided all parties are aware of this, they'll be more critical and suspecting of the other. For good reasons, I'd say.

That's quite naive consequentialism.

It is a bit reductionist, but so is "don't harm infrastructure". Infrastructure can be harmful, just like anything else.

And in the end most criticisms about consequentialism are either about how to retroactively declare something moral or immoral (which is irrelevant for deciding the best path now without future knowledge) or are qualms with one particular way of weighing harm vs benefit. I'm perfectly fine with considering third order effects in the calculation, and an action that saves a life but errodes society is not necessarily "good" since the ultimate harm may outweigh the benefit. In fact it's this very kind of reasoning about higher-order-effects that would lead you to the conclusion that sabotage could be justified in some cases

> sabotaging fossil fuel infrastrusture protects it.

Oh, is it that simple, really? Or does it come with a lot of unintended consequences, fueling conflict and paving the way for a more suppressive government?

It’s very simple to take an absolutist moralistic stance like this if the people hit by those consequences are thousands of miles away.

You've probably realized, but this can be said the exact same way for both sides of the equation (see: location of worst victims of global warming).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com