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Comment by martin-t | Hacker News Reader

But that _have_ learned. They are systematically making violence a taboo the way sex was in the past.

If all people think violence is wrong and immoral instead of just against the rules they have written ("laws"), then they can keep writing rules that suit them even more and more without any pressure against it.

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Except almost every blockbuster movie, rap song and mainstream video game romanticizes and heroizes violence.

Yes but try to apply the same rules to real life and people will laugh at you.

How many times do you see the hero having to choose between killing the villain and leaving him to the legal system (not justice system) to give him a lesser punishment?

This whole story was started by the fact that countless people have begun to revere Luigi Mangione as a Robin Hood-like folk hero. Whatever taboo put in place against violence seems to have failed in this case.

Yep, if you boil the frog too fast, it will notice.

When people say "staring daggers", do you think they are actually trying to stab someone?

Resorting to violence over other non-violent means to resolve disputes is often a symptom of weak institutional capacity, and one could argue that this instance of violence is such a symptom.

It's a tug of war between institutional capacity (people's inability to act) and injustice (people's willingness to act even if they will face negative consequences).

I have a theory for a long time that "democracy" as a concept is pushed so strongly in the West not because it really favors people nor for its effectiveness but because it nulls political assassinations and delegitimates them. Thus it is an extremely good system for the rulers.

A system with fewer assassinations is a better system, if all else is equal. Unfortunately, all else is not equal.

Democracy should be an alternative to violence: Instead of murdering the next Hitler, you can just vote him out. Unfortunately, this only applies as long as it works. American democracy has not worked for a very long time.

Not just vote him out, that solves all his future murders. Depending on when he was votes out, he still needs to be punished for all his past murders.

Any society that stigmatizes violence is soon overtaken by one that doesn't.

The west is in terminal decline and will be replaced by a cult from the middle east. This is the third time this has happened.

The only annoying thing is that I'll need to learn Arabic. English was bad enough.

> taboo the way sex was

Was it? the puritanical views in some western social groups is hardly how the whole world saw sex, even in those western societies sex was seen differently as long as it was within the same class.

>"even in those western societies sex was seen differently as long as it was within the same class."

Same with violence! Not too much institutional change made for gang violence between 13-21 year olds in Chicago - as long as they're in the same class.

Do you think assassinating arch-dukes was being sold as virtuous back then either? Especially by the churches which were the moral arbiters of the time?

Plenty of people were still in favor, clearly.

The difference is in the past most discourse was by mouth - impossible to censor and eavesdropping was costly because you needed a person to do it.

These days more and more discourse is online

- heavily censored by platform rules which are much more strict than laws, partially because it makes the moderator's job easier to err on the side of caution, partially because it teaches people to self censor which then extends into real life

- censorship can be automated and even invisible (shadowbanning, fake degradation of QoL, ...)

- eavesdropping is also automated and omnipresent

The real danger of AI or LLMs these days is not they machines will want to kill us but that powerful people will use them to mass-profile everyone and stop any dissent from spreading.

Do you think China will have a revolution and restore democracy? How? How will people organize?

And every currently democratic state will be the same - democracy only needs to fail once and it will be almost impossible to restore.

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EDIT: Even word of mouth is in danger, sufficiently powerful organizations are or will be able to access microphones near you. Or cameras for lip reading. Again, en-masse, automated by AI.

By the Serbian orthodox Church?

https://images.app.goo.gl/dqHBEnQvy2hc6RHD8

This is them blessing the troops to go kill the Austrians a month later.

It was a blessing for a defensive war. Serbians didn't "go" anywhere to attack Austrians. It was the other way around. But I guess you already know that. Why did you choose to write "to go kill" when they didn't go anywhere?

Sure, after the declaration of war by the state. The Church (depending on which definition you use) sponsored plenty of Crusades too. None of these actions are ‘rebel against the machine’.

Though that does sometimes happen, usually leading to/in the middle of a civil war.

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