On 5/26/19 9:16 PM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
On Monday, 27 May 2019 at 00:56:50 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
in defense against the benign. So congrats those pretending to be
anti-Nazi while utilizing that to build the NEXT new fundamentalist
regime.
I have to admit that I do use gmail, but I wonder if it is healthy that
NSA have access to basically all letters exchanged by millions or
billions of people across the globe…
But then… gmail is so convenient…
Convenience and a lack of principles is our weakness as a society. And
we are all guilty at one level or another.
I run my own mail server, but I'll admit that has more to do with my own
unique approach to spam prevention, and my dislike of webmail
interfaces, than it does anything else. (And I do have gmail as a backup
in case of server failure.)
No argument here, I'm just as guilty of the occasional sacrifice of
principles for convenience as any other normally-headstrong b****rd (I
didn't used to be...but then my 20's ended, and most of my 30's, and
wouldn't you know...I ran out of my double-dose of teenage angst ;) Just
wanna get by now, like any stereotypical late-30-something... ;) )
It's extremely difficult in modern society to stick to principles that
matter. It really does put you at a notable disadvantage, which, I
imagine, is why most people never even give it a second thought to begin
with.
At least in the US, I've become convinced this is (at least in large
part) a fundamental, inseparable, consequence of the legal guidelines
ruling corporate entities (namely, the fact that profit is, by law,
*required* to be a corporation's top priority).
I suspect our closest hope may lie with something like this:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation> Although,
even that only seems a mere "step in the right direction", rather than a
solution...(Under it, ethical/societal matters to be weighed must be
spelled out during incorporation, otherwise they're still not legally
permitted to be considered in decision-making, and there's apparently no
requirement for even having any such clauses at all). But anything
*better* than that (or even full-50-state-deployment as-is) is unlikely
to ever happen in the US: Anything that doesn't directly facilitate
"money is power, might makes right" just gets labeled "communist" or
"socialist" and rejected outright by the nationalist rednecks we've been
overrun by ever since 9/11. (Go figure, they attack us...and we respond
by throwing away any credibility we ever had. Figures, coming from the
same fine folks who brought the world such hits as "Puritanism", "Witch
Trials" and "Shorten a War by Nuking Civilians - But Still Claim The
Moral High-Ground")
