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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

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INTPenis

That's right, just keep your head down, smile and nod, do your job and nothing will ever go wrong. /s

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A more charitable view would be to act like a zebra in a herd of zebra rather than a zebra in a herd of horses.

Charitable, but also privileged. Many people only have the option of looking like a cow in a cattle yard.

I don't think that's the interpretation, but make your computer systems disconnected from what you do.

If relevant adversaries don't know which computer to burn the exploit on, then they won't burn it on the right one.

You /s but this is actually valid advice for someone who just wants to get by in life and is content.

Downvoted, but so much evil is caused by people due to their distorted yet sincerely believed moral virtues. Not due to an absence of morality but because of it. Whatever you have in your mind as the image of quintessential evil is probably caused by those people's sincerely held moral system, a moral system they believed in as strongly as you do yours. So people who just live their lives and do not grasp on external change are fine by me.

are you saying that you've downvoted me, or just pointing out that I've been downvoted? If the former, why?

Unless you believe in the extinction of bad people the burden of restoring normality is for everyone else. Those who are not part of the solution are not part of the problem, they are the problem. You cant have the problem without them and you cant have them without having the problems.

Do the bombs dropping in war zones avoid apolitical people? If not, when is the appropriate time to get sufficiently political to avoid having a bomb dropped on one's head?

Very few individuals can influence whether or not bombs drop. The best way to avoid having bombs dropped on your head is moving to a place where fewer bombs are dropped.

But many people together, although none of them individually influencial enough, certainly can influence where bombs get dropped.

When you start successfully reaching many people you can be sure that security agencies will start watching you.

In areas where bombs are dropped there is generally a large majority in favor of stopping that, but they have little influence.

"Keeping your head down" means not doing anything that would cause a government (especially your own) to want to disappear you.

If you vocally oppose your tyrannical government, you won't avoid a bomb on your head. In the best case you'll get a bullet through your head. Worst case, you spend a lifetime in a prison.

True enough. I'm content as long as I don't hear the news anywhere. Recently had my dad over and he can't go 5 minutes without the news on in the background. Really hard to be content then.

>someone who just wants to get by in life and is content

"It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does."

That's stupid. It's not all an illusion. The scale definitely matters. If you are buying stocks you can make a profit as a little guy that if the big guys tried to do it they would quickly become the "market maker" and the strategy would not scale up. It's the same with criminal activity or insurgency--small mosquitoes are ignored while the major threats get swatted hard.

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