hanshan

>So which do you prefer? Foreign manipulation of public will, or democracy?

That's a false dichotomy which implies you missed my point. There is no such thing as sovereign democracy in a globalized world with omnipresence and instantaneous communication.

One could indict every major world power for foreign election interference. Laws are meaningless if no one follows them.

>The Internet allows foreign adversaries to attack America in new and unexpected ways,”

>“Together with our law enforcement partners, the Department of Justice is resolute in its commitment to locate, identify and seek to bring to justice anyone who interferes with American elections.

Sounds like Don Quixote is fighting the internet now. Unless you just shut it down how is it possible to not have world wide "interference" on the world wide web? Perhaps we need to think about how the instantaneous global communications network is obsolescing the concept of the nation state which was formed as a result of the printing press.

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

>Free and fair elections are hard-fought and contentious, and there will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide, and conquer us.

That sounds like a fitting description of mass media/news corporations everywhere.

>Money gives you time.

Being alive gives you time.

>If you aren't being paid to do the journalism then you are getting paid to do something else

Yeah, you're getting paid to do whatever it is you're a subject matter expert in.

Reporting on it in important situations is simply a public service which people do all the time with blogs and such.

Implying people only want to do things if they're paid money is silly.

If everyone can watch everyone with equal transparency, that would seem to imply a distributed system with information symmetry, which is antithetical to centralized authority. If there was a central authority/super admin in such a system, how would you keep them from covertly creating information asymmetry?

Their best for you, or for advertisers?

Care to elaborate on your concerns? We're obviously speaking theoretically here at a high level of abstraction

>The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.

-John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it came, where it went (1975)

>we could watch the people that watch us.

If this were possible, there would be no authority

>This is literally Google donating money to charity.

I specifically said "product" donations.

>Even so, many would agree that Facebook and Google are charitable for giving their products away for free

And they would be ignorant of the value of their information, attention spans, and technology in general. Many such people would also agree that "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about"

That's a lot like saying FB and GOOG are charitable because they give their products away for "free". How much money/data are those product donations extracting from the people they donated to?

>The negatives are less tangible: giving up your personal data (this is complicated by the fact that the data didn't exist until you used their services), targeted advertising, I'm not sure what else there is.

You forgot about the elephant in the room: the imminent danger of cyberwarfare.

The reason the Holocaust was so efficient at mass murder was because of "giving up your personal data".

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

These tech companies have aggregated the most detailed demographical and psychological profiles in history on billions of people.

Let's not pretend they're impervious to hackers.

The "weapons of mass destruction" of the future will be algorithms loaded with the dual-use munitions we call "big data".

Time is more important than money, and expertise does not depend on the funding of a newspaper or media company

So, a subject matter expert with a cellphone video?

Where the problem arises is the degree to which one is affected by these emotions. Too much anxiety can lead to paranoia, schizophrenia and anti-social behavior, too little can lead to life threatening situations. Too much aggression can lead to irrational mass murder, too little can lead to slavery.

In case you didn't realize, my comment and the parent's comment are satirical.

"The internet would not exist without advertising"

>Emotions are part of the biological machinery that keeps meat-machines alive and active in the world.

Not all emotions are valuable, some are indeed quite harmful and anti social.

Which brings us back full circle to the original point of this comment chain: that western society is extremely emotional about the subject of death relative to other societies. This tendendency leads to unecessary suffering and the prolonging of life at all costs.

The US has come very far from its founding mantra; "Give me liberty, or give me death!" has seemingly been reversed to "anything but death"

No you didn't, you spoke of "responsibility", and being around to "take care of them", which implies an unfulfilled or unending paternalism

>no evidence that total biological death would entail anything but

You seem very certain of your hypothesis. Is there anything that science has had a harder time defining, quantifying, or understanding than the nature of consciousness as it relates to reality? With that in mind it would seem more in keeping with the spirit of science to remain agnostic ("I don't know"), rather than atheistic ("I know")

>Those who raise questions about the God hypothesis and the soul hypothesis are by no means all atheists. An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.

-Carl Sagan

Yes, I understand why atheists are so fearful of death, but also see the illogical and impractical nature of it.

>death for atheists is the loss of everything

Atheist logic should lead to the realization that from an individual standpoint, there is no possibility for the experience of this feared loss, at all. Immediately before the moment of death, you still have it all. Immediately at the moment of death, you have no conscious ability to experience the loss. Therefore the fear is not logical, it's irrational because your "total loss" is something you can never experience.

>When the brain is damaged or undergoes chemical changes, we know that consciousness seems to disappear. There is no strong evidence to think this is different upon the death of any organism.

People often have dreams under such circumstances, and there are many who have died and been resusitated that report having wild experiences inbetween.

>we fear our eternal end WHILE we are alive

Again, you're mythologizing/hypothesizing here with your use of the word "eternal".

But yes, when confronted with immediate life threatening situations, all animals including humans have a natural fight or flight instinct. However, not all humans (and seemingly no animals) have such existential dread like you do of a future of eternal nonexistence. Your fear is a result of your materialist reductionist mythology.

The simple fact of this discussion is: no one knows what death is truly like, so we can only extrapolate, hypothesize, and mythologize.

>If you thought you'd never wake up again, how comfortably would you go to sleep?

If we have no choice but to go to sleep, why would we want to spend those last moments feeling terribly uncomfortable?

If we face the facts that death is a part of life, and that we all must die, what's the practical value in fretting over that fact? (Aside from being wise not to do stupid things that lead to a stupid death)

Is the goal of parents raising children not to prepare them to be adults that can take care of themselves? That's the problem with "helicopter parents", they hold on so selfishly to their role as a parent that they stunt their children's growth and atrophy their capacity for autonomy.

There comes a point in all our lives where we become so old that we become burdensome. If the old never died, there wouldn't be room or resources for new life and ideas to be born and grow. In that sense, it is honorable to meet death, because you are making room for new life.

It seems your logic has been overriden by your fear.

If, as you hypothesize, one loses "conscious experience forever" when they die, how could they consciously experience "endless oblivion"?

How is fearing nonexistence different from a child fearing nonexistent monsters under their bed?

>Western culture simply understands the reality of the situation.

What is the "reality of the situation" in regards to death that they are so privy to?

It's pretty well documented how terrified western culture is of death relative to others. The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell is an excellent book which goes into insightful detail on this subject.