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Products designed to fail, a documentary
Renegade:
Effecting change for the better: Macropathy vs. The Swarm
-IainB (November 03, 2011, 06:31 AM)
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Linked from that article:
Lawfully Good vs. Lawfully Evil
Excellent read. Very articulate.
And yes, he's making a Dungeons & Dragons alignment system comparison. (Which is pretty accurate.) For those of us geeks out there that grew up killing kobolds and the like. :)
Ehtyar:
I must say I am a member of the naive club here.
Most of my troubles had been with clothing - fabric that just doesn't hold up, pairs of pants typically last me months, not years. For quite some time I've been considering things before I buy them in relation to how long I expect them to last. I now purchase pants and shoes from stores that sell to tradesman, I purchase business laptops for personal use (my lenovo laptops are without a doubt the longest lasting and most indestructible pieces of technology I own), I build my own desktops from parts from vendors who have a history of avoiding bad capacitor suppliers and so on. Without being consciously aware of it, I've spent the past few years of my life gradually moving from mainstream purchasing behaviours to ones I expect to result in the best possible longevity of what i buy.
The Lightbulb Conspiracy has made me very concious of this process now. I'm at a point now where I'm happy with almost all the products I purchase, longevity-wise.
That said, watching that video made me absolutely livid, and I'm astounded that the ongoing degradation of quality has not been more noticeable to the general populace. Products from certain companies with bad reputations always struck me as obviously of low quality in one aspect or another, but intentionally designing them to fail brings corporations down to a whole new low. My first thought was "how is this legal?!?!", but you quickly come to realise that those who would be in a position to protect consumers from this type of behavour are most likely getting more than their fare share of the money getting thrown at bad products. Disgusting.
Ehtyar.
IainB:
Lawfully Good vs. Lawfully Evil[/url]
Excellent read. Very articulate.
-Renegade (November 06, 2011, 06:43 PM)
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In the start of that article, it says:
In contrast, activists don’t care whether something is lawful, they care whether it’s good and just.
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If that, by implication, is true of all activists, then you could say that it holds true for (say):
* Roman Catholicism: RC leaders of yore, who, before the Reformation, were a deadly, and acted ostensibly in the name of God and for our own salvation. I have not seen a historical estimate of how many people have had to die at the hands of this Religion of Peace, over its 2,000 year-old history, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were not of the order of 100+ millions.
* Islamism: Islamist activists of today, who are eternally obliged by Allah in the Koran to ensure that Islamism is the dominant religion and legal system, and that it is enforced (typically under threat of barbaric punishment or pain of death) in any society/culture where they find themselves. I saw an estimate of 140+ million people who have had to die at the hands of this Religion of Peace, over its 1,400 year-old history.
* Stalinism: the Russians are a bit secretive about this, but historical estimates seem to vary between 20 to 50 million deaths of mostly Russian citizens.
All these deadly "-isms" started small. The most recent were, I gather, Facism and Nazism. I suspect that "communism"/"globalism" - i.e., global state governance - may be the Next Big Thing to tyrannize and kill us for our own good.
But supposing I don't want to forego the freedom to live my life peacefully and in my own way as I might reasonably choose?
The thing that scares me is the people - whether government bureaucrats, religio-political activists, or politicians - who not only believe that what they are working towards and agitating for is "good and just", but also know with absolute certainty that it is best for us, and so are determined to ram it down our throats, into our statutes and (often) into our wallets. And if you don't like/accept what they espouse, then you are labelled in a deprecatory or pejorative manner and marginalised or killed:
* Don't believe our [insert religio-political ideology here] dogma? Are you with us or against us?
* Don't believe in an imaginary concept of God? Then you are an atheist.
* Don't believe in our ideology of Christianity? Then you are a heretic, (they were generally killed) and nowadays also a lost soul.
* Don't believe in our ideology of Islamism? Then you are an infidel (who Allah says must be killed if they commit blasphemy or do not submit) and nowadays also an Islamophobe.
* Don't believe in our ideology of Communism? Then you are a Capitalist pig and also an enemy of the State
* Don't believe in our ideology of socialist-collectivism? Then you are a member of the extreme Right Wing.
* Don't believe in our ideology of Capitalism? Then you are a Communist and also a member of the extreme Left Wing.
* Don't believe in our theory of AGW? Then you are a sceptic or a climate denier.
After it becomes Politically Incorrect and then made a crime enforceable in Law, anyone who objects, ridicules or denounces the X-ism will be punished. For example, the UN is apparently currently being urged by the Muslim member countries to make it illegal to "Defame a religion" or some such nonsense.
Sometimes, this activism takes over wholesale, and then it may become a matter for national standards to be imposed, so that the citizens of your own and/or neighbouring countries - who cannot see things the right way - are to be variously excommunicated, imprisoned, tortured, killed, or [insert atrocity here].
Some people might say, "Of course, this is exaggerated nonsense. How could it possibly be true?"
Some of possibly the worst historical examples:
(Source: (Possibly) The Twenty (or so) Worst Things People Have Done to Each Other:
No thanks. Keep your well-meaning "good and just" activists well away from me, mate.
[/list]
Renegade:
No thanks. Keep your well-meaning "good and just" activists well away from me, mate.
-IainB (November 06, 2011, 09:55 PM)
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You're only debating what is good or what is evil.
That "changes" in different places and times. Well, not really, but people think it does...
Aristotle -- People only do what they think is good. Anything else is simply people being misinformed/uneducated. (Paraphrasing)
Kant -- Categorical Imperative. (Duty, veil of ignorance, etc. etc.)
Slap those 2 together, and you've got a solid recipe for "good" and "evil". Kant might be pretty radical, but it's damn hard to argue against him.
So at the end of the day, in that line of thought, people only really need to education to solve more problems than you can shake a stick at.
IainB:
You're only debating what is good or what is evil.
...
Aristotle -- People only do what they think is good. Anything else is simply people being misinformed/uneducated. (Paraphrasing)
Kant -- Categorical Imperative. (Duty, veil of ignorance, etc. etc.)
Slap those 2 together, and you've got a solid recipe for "good" and "evil". Kant might be pretty radical, but it's damn hard to argue against him.
So at the end of the day, in that line of thought, people only really need to education to solve more problems than you can shake a stick at.
-Renegade (November 06, 2011, 10:26 PM)
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Well, I didn't intend to debate good/evil.
I was intending to provide a serious note of warning about do-gooders and activists who believed that they were operating on "good and just" principles, and who know what is best for you, me and the rest of humanity - whether we like it or not.
For example, Warmists insist that there is a risk of global catastrophe from an as yet unproven theory of AGW. I was watching some video footage the other week on YouTube where some Greenies/Warmists had challenged this guy (Lord Monckton) who didn't see that there was any rational justification for accepting the theory of AGW, and said so in rational terms.
But reason had apparently disappeared, because pretty soon the Warmists started to ad hominem the guy. Resorting to the use of logical fallacies - such as ad hominem, for example - is usually a sure sign that someone is desperate, having no rational basis for supporting their argument.
Eventually, one of them referred to Monckton's approach or something as being akin to the Nazis, whereupon Monckton - whose wife I think was a child of Jews who had survived the Nazi concentration camps - politely pointed out a few truths. He said that, in using the term "Nazi" for this as a form of labelling only served to ameliorate the perceived heinousness of the Nazi's crimes against humanity (OWTTE), and did nothing to substantiate any rational argument.
If people can be ignorant like this, then the educational system would seem to have already failed to teach them to take responsibility for thinking critically for themselves. They are arguably as likely to have read and understood what Aristotle or Kant had spoken/written of as a flea would be likely to comprehend its place in the universe. If you looked into such peoples' eyes you would probably see all the lights on, but that nobody's home.
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