Marcus G. Daniels wrote at 08/15/2013 06:00 PM:
I think there's a tendency to focus on the decisions of a person makes because they can be perceived as correctable. In contrast, if a pharmaceutical company puts out dangerous compounds and through a sustained and expensive campaign, when people start experiencing life threatening side effects, no one blames their CEO. It's just a fact of life. The `system' which is `good' did it. Meanwhile, Snowden or Cheney or Weiner are people we can all talk about, but I argue the criticism should be focused at those decisions of those at the top, and those decisions should be held to a higher standard.
OK. I can see that when talking about for-profits or even disorganized (or nefarious) non-profits. But with someone like Linus Pauling ... or, hell, Roger Penrose for that matter (witness the beating he took for advocating non-computational components in the doing of mathematics by mathematicians) ... I tend to think of an organization (even if it's a corporation) as being _more_ stable, more trustworthy, because there are checks and balances built in. When evaluating an individual, we tend to presume a dictatorship... Roger Penrose was the decider and he decided to advocate for non-computational consciousness ... or Linus Pauling was the decider and he decided to advocate for vitamin C. But if we examine something like the Washington Post, as owned by Bezos, it will be a more trustworthy organization than Bezos, as an individual, will be ... I think, anyway.
Well, I don't really trust. I just accept that I'm often powerless. To the extent I can identify bad arguments, I avoid or try to stop the kind of people that make them over and over. If there is no story a person can rationalize or falsify, it's all just guesswork anyway.
Yeah, I fall closer to that approach, myself. But most of the people I know don't do that. Most people seem almost incapable of skepticism. Or perhaps they just really really _want_ to trust someone or some group. Even if they call themselves "anarchists", they seem to be incapable of dissecting the opinions of other "trusted" "anarchists" in their group. I first ran into this problem when a group of people, perhaps 10-15 years younger than me, began identifying various places as "bro-" and people as "bros" ... e.g. "That's a bro-bar" or "She's such a bro." I tried to tease out their meaning and, in the end, it was similar to "hipster". One false move and you, too, could be instantly recategorized as "them" .... a bro or hipster. E.g. if you happen to like ultimate fighting, you might be a bro. Or maybe you wear funny hats, you might be a hipster. There are some mechanisms of trust at work, here. And they are fundamentally different from mine and from those used by my elders. I just can't nail them down. -- ⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella Every day I wake up we drink a lot of coffee and watch the CNN
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