On violence

What Hacker News says

1. slibhbJan 2022
   The article is good but I think it makes a simple category error. There is quite a lot of theorizing concerning the justification of extra-legal violence. Riots, though, are characterized by their aimlessnessness. When rioters do discriminate in who they attack and what they destroy we don't call them rioters and we are generally more open to the idea that their actions may be justified.

   On Violence (Hannah Arendt), which is cited in the article, is a good discussion. In '67 there was an interesting public discussion with Arendt, Chomsky, and others titled "The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?" We tend to think that we're living in tense times but the 60s and 70s were more tense with more politial violence.

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2. adamseaJun 2020
   Why even posit that to begin with, when we have plenty of science - psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, etc - that are intensely interested in human behavior?

   We have actual data and reasonably useful models to draw on.

   What you describe is the setting for a Young Adult fantasy series. Which is fine, and interesting for a while, but not a good way to think about how we would like our society to function.

   Go read Hannah Arendt's "On Violence", if you haven't. Or "Eichmann in Jerusalem."

   It's the banality of evil that's the really unsettling thing.

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3. PavlovsCatOct 2019
   I agree, it's not like we need computers to make it worse.. but they sure can help. Humans can be pretty callous as is, and we are awesome at rationalizations where we can't muster the required callousness; but in the long run, even the worst bureaucrat in the history of the world will be a fountain of compassion and insight compared to the worst computer algorithm, of that I have no doubt.

   > These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man—of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy, to which today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy, or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody. Indeed, if we identify tyranny as the government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done. It is this state of affairs which is among the most potent causes for the current world-wide rebellious unrest.

   -- Hannah Arendt, "On Violence" (1970)

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