alanwatts

>it is unconscionable that we support the literal mass murder and ill-treatment of billions of animals each year when there are alternatives that require no suffering and no death.

There are ways to put down animals which require no suffering.

And no, there are no alternatives to death. Plants are living things too. Why is it okay to murder a plant but not an animal?

*Psychology and psychiatry I meant to say

>Generally there is no harm in theorizing, but I consider psychology and psychotherapy to be too important to allow ourselves to consider untested information.

Psychology and psychotherapy are almost wholly theoretical, subjective, soft sciences, rather than objectively testable hard sciences like physics and biology.

>psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests".[1][2]

-Allen Frances

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances

>Also there's no such thing as a negative emotion. Everything we feel is a necessary (or at least programmed) reaction to our experience.

Have you ever met someone with emotional issues, i.e. anger management issues? There are indeed many people with habitual "programmed" emotional responses which are detrimental to their well being and are extremely difficult to manage.

You might like to read the works of the evolutionary pyschologist and athropologist Dr. Paul Eckman. He posits that emotions are valuable life saving forces that help us act quickly in critical situations without having to think. However, our emotional habits have also evolved over many thousands of years, and so many of the emotional responses which may have saved our life as a paleolithic hunter gatherers may no longer be relevant and can have the opposite effect in a civilized society.

>Activists would do quite a lot more good by demanding better from their own government.

Easier said than done.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/10/mexican-activi...

>This actually is democracy working as designed - people being free to bullshit one another

They aren't free to bullshit one another. Facebook, Google, and co. regularly censor their users.

Ah, my mistake. I misread it as "many more people..."

Fair enough. Though my concern is not for myself, but rather for any potential great leader who could be silently neutralized/blackmailed/extorted by mass surveillance techniques.

Whether the culprits' organizational classification is public or private is of negligible importance.

>Mass surveillance isn't the same as targeted.

Mass surveillance is the first step in the discovery process, targeted surveillance is the second step after a target has been flagged by the dragnet.

>the fact that many people are more worried about marketers than the NSA?

How do you know this is a fact, was a global survey done?

>I am more concerned about A than B" is not a claim that B does not exist, nor is it a claim that "I" am unconcerned about B.

Indeed, however the phrase "100% tinfoil hat mode" does imply being unconcerned about B, and that anyone who is is a lunatic.

Dr. King was monitored by the NSA for "thought crimes". Is that "100% tinfoil hat mode"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.#NSA_mon...

When suing in a case like this, punitive damages would be paid out of the governments budget, rather than the personal assets of those personally responsible, correct?

Which is circular logic. To sue an entity which you fund is to indrectly sue yourself.

The terms "foreign" and "domestic" are meaningless in the context of the world wide web.

Neglecting to save millions of lives in order to make some extra money is okay, but killing a dog is not?

It's not perfect if your endpoints are compromised.

>You'd just make everyone's job easier.

How is that a bad thing?

1,300,000 people die each year in car wrecks and another 20,000,000 - 50,000,000 more are injured and/or disabled.

Google's motto is "Don't be evil" after all. Is valuing short term profits over millions of lives not "evil"?

>Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.

-Larry Page

>sounded like there was a huge cop-out at the centrw of everything that people were trying to ignore.

Yes, like that of the post which I was directing my response towards:

>As a lifelong believer in science...

Science is fundamentally hypothetical, not something to be sure of.

Believe: to accept (something) as true; feel sure the truth of.

"Believing in science" or "believing in creationism" are both opposed to your statement (which I agree with), because they do not leave room for doubt:

>we don't know yet, and we don't know if we ever will

>I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive;

-Harriet Tubman

"Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle, and we’ll explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing"

"We are still looking at the computer as if it were a means of doing what we were already doing."

-Marshall McLuhan

The income itself is what stabilizes the population, this phenomenon is known as the demographic-economic paradox.

The real false assumption here is that increased standard of living leads to overpopulation. The data indicates the opposite is true.

Reproduction is a survival mechanism. Threaten an organisms survival, and that mechanism is triggered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

>There are two states in nature. You either grow or you shrink.

There is also homeostasis. Perpetual growth is cancer.

>On one side, it's economically unsound

Actually, it is more economically unsound to maintain poverty in the midst of plenty (i.e, in the US there lies ~6 empty homes for every homeless person), if you consider the external effects. Poverty inevitably leads to violence, drug abuse, disease, overpopulation, war, and other erratic behaviors.

How much more do we spend on bureaucracy in vain attempts to mitigate these resulting effects? Prevention is far more cost effective than maintenance in this case.

>No. It's more effective to lobby your local member of parliament/congress to pass laws restricting what media organisations can or cannot do.

No. Facebook has far more lobbying power ($) than any of us. There is a reason why you see the FB logo in the background of the presidential debates.

Boycotting their service directly negates that power.

Perhaps this phenomenon is a result of the religious imperialism which first reigned over the New World.

Nudity was highly sacrilegious for los conquistadores de las americas, but the violence they used was not.

>Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

-Marshall McLuhan

The Vietnam War was the only one which was so honestly broadcast to the American public. Since then, the media has realized that real violence is not good for ratings, or the war effort.

Perhaps it is because the fundamental nature of "finance" as a social conception is inherently centralized.

So any purposefully decentralized/distributed system used for financial (centralized) purposes becomes corrupted by default.

It's an ad hominem attack, an attempt to distract from the actual issue at hand. I.e., focusing on Chelsea Manning's sexual preferences, or on Snowden being a "narcissist".

>To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.

-Lao Tzu

The family unit has been anything but since the industrial age.

For ~99% of human history, families lived, learned, and worked closely together.

As of late, the opposite is now true. How can parents provide adequate love and bonding to their children when they both spend the majority of their time separated from each other with strangers at school/work?