Well, there's other sources for this, becauses it's actually true. I wonder what "armor" you think HN even has as inane tripe like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24426407 is glued to #1, while something that actually matters and pertains to the responsibilities of this crowd is, once again, penalized.
As a counterpoint here's something Franz Kafka wrote in a letter to Elli Hermann 1921, badly translated by me.
> Parents have an animalistic, senseless love for the children, which confuses themselves with the child all the time, the educator has respect, and this is much more valuable for education, even if there is no love present at all. I repeat: valuable for education, because even though I call parental love animalistic and senseless, that does not value it lowly, it is just as much a unknowable mystery as the artful, creative love of the educator, only in the context of education however it cannot be valued low enough.
Well, there's any kind of person anywhere, anyway.
I think it's not wrong to be pre-emptively wary of that (and prepare arguments for it), considering the way F.U.D. about "cookie banners" [1] got many people worked up against a supposedly useless and clueless law that (again, supposedly) "forces" sites to show such banners -- because their desire to track, which is the first link in this causal chain, is being ignored or assumed as given and benign.
[1] banners sites put up because they would prefer to track everyone on the first visit, rather than having an opt-in link somewhere in the footer for example.
So what you're saying is, when I post that Catalonia should be free and go on holiday in Spain, no spooks would follow me around, and no pressure would be put on German companies to fire me, and this isn't even remotely comparable.
On the other hand, people like Chomsky aren't being persecuted. Though all in all, I would also say they get ignored very efficiently, Chomsky still isn't exactly unknown either. Is there a Chinese author and speaker with decades of real harsh criticism of their government under their belt, who is living in China with their works being translated in all sorts of languages and also available in China?
> The rationale behind that statements leads to the attitude of not even attempting to be objective.
What is "the rationale behind that statement", other than intellectual honesty? The statement is true, not even attempting to be objective does not follow from it. Denying it to achieve something that isn't even gained by its denial is a refusal to be more objective, plain and simple.
> So while you are correct the statement on its own does not state that
.. I'm still at -1. Not because what I said is wrong, but because some would prefer it to be wrong or something.
> I believe that to be dangerous because it then allows you to engage in sophistry.
That also doesn't follow. I would even say that is sophistry. The statement is true, it doesn't become untrue because of things you claim would follow from it, even if you had shown how they follow from it, which you did not.
Nobody said you shouldn't try. But part of that is calling out those who talk of being "unbiased" or "objective" not as a shorthand, but as something they seen think is actually within their possession.
> It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.
-- C.S. Lewis
> We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
It's easy to explain -- just not to people whose salary whose salary depends on not understanding it, who keep shaking their heads as the predictable results of the boat they won't rock roll in.
> people want some understanding of what's happening, but they're not getting it from the media, they're not getting it from the intellectual classes, they're certainly not getting it from the government
[..]
> it's happening all over and I think you can trace a good deal of it to the effect of neo-liberalism. It had a goal remember: the goal of neo-liberalism was to transfer decisions away from the public to the hands of private power and to atomize the population.
> the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.
The majority of people is fine living their lives as to ensure to destruction of all organized human life on the planet, just when it comes to the climate. Thinking of history, all the darkest hours of it involve a majority thinking they're right automatically, by virtue of being the majority, and persecuting minorities, or doing all sorts of stuff that in hindsight is just evil, embarrassing and gross.
> Free thought requires free media. Free media requires free technology. We require ethical treatment when we go to read, to write, to listen and to watch. Those are the hallmarks of our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die. Because if we don’t, something else will die. Something so precious that many, many of our fathers and mothers gave their life for it. Something so precious, that we understood it to define what it meant to be human; it will die.
-- Eben Moglen
If people don't understand that it takes away from them, not from the importance of the issue.
We couldn't otherwise build, light and tear down walls with just our minds. Learning how to handle and accept emotions is possible with our minds and the help of each other, but in societies where the full range of emotions are mostly suppressed in public life, and many causes for negative emotions normalized, people often rely drugs and other "workarounds".
> The answer is simple, protection from them taking it by force.
No force can stand against an infinite amount of drones, to name just one thing. Those who own the means of production that no longer require workers will also own all means of warfare. Few people own more and more, faster and faster. This will not magically wrap around to the opposite.
You already acknowledged that 6 year old phones are obsolete.
And you also claimed claimed that "only someone who didn't work on Apple products" could possibly "buy into" [that's also a huge accusation, one you don't even bother to back up] the idea that Apple is a treadmill of increasingly crappy things. That is demonstrably wrong, yet also not worthy of you even acknowledging it.
> that’s a technical challenge not a financial decision
Proof for that? Nevermind, you just ignore your glaring errors, and demand more proof, as if you watched those videos fully, while dropping laughable claims like that casually.
There is nothing to "buy into", it's all in the open. There is something to be in denial about however, and you just offer an ad-hominem right out of the gate, plus the statement that phones failing when they cease to be "supported" is fine and normal; but somehow not planned, even predictable obsolescence.
It's a shift from owning things that either break or last, to a constant churn, enforced by software where the hardware can't be made bad enough. Apple is hardly alone in this, but Apple is in it, for sure.
She was arguably a bit careless in the moment that lead to them getting caught, and since pushing that stack of fliers wasn't really useful for their greater aims, that kinda proves your point as well. The idea of the White Rose not getting caught, so rather shortly before the end of the Nazi regime, and Sophie Scholl writing more letters, or even books, is fit to make me cry with homesickness. It's an unspeakable loss.
But otherwise, if you read the interrogation transcripts, I don't think she regretted anything. She knew what she was doing and why she did it, and she knew she did well. IMO her life ended so much better than that of people who just give in to pressure against their conscience. It's not like those are immortal, and then they have to spend the rest of their time with who they became, too. Some find a way back, most don't. As Shakespeare wrote, the coward dies a thousand deaths -- Sophie Scholl died but one, and it was rather majestic, if you squint just right.
I still wish she would never had a chance to prove her greatness in this particular manner and had survived instead, so don't take this as me negating your point.
> I just sometimes ask myself if people in previous centuries thought and lived as superficially as today. Or if, piece by piece, as times fade, their bad aspects retreat to the background and their goodness shines especially bright? At any rate I think that the individual, regardless of outcome, has to be vigilant, and especially when it is made hard for them. You also believe that this can never be levelled upwards, as desirable as that seems. When there is levelling, it always happens downwards. But here, too, there is a brilliant opportunity offered by fate to prove ourselves. Maybe one should not underestimate that, either.