amorphos_ii wrote: ↑April 29th, 2024, 3:20 pm
What I find dangerous is that there has been software to blur out nude images for at least 15 years, yet it isn’t on children’s phones! The super duper AI tech cannot work out when people are being blackmailed?
Pattern-chaser wrote: ↑April 30th, 2024, 8:41 am
The American commitment to 'freedom of commerce' is there in the background, I think? Spam email could've been stopped years ago, but Americans insist that any and all businesses have the freedom — and the *right*! — to contact any potential customer, even if that customer has expressed a specific wish *not* to receive such communications. And porn is *Big* Business...? There is profit there, and profit over-rides any other priority.
Not that I disagree with your sentiment; I don't.
chewybrian wrote: ↑April 30th, 2024, 2:59 pm
As an American, this seems like an accurate description of the way most Americans think. We are taught that freedom only means "freedom to..." and never "freedom from...". We tend to be conceited and rather childish in protecting our rights to do things that we know are bad for us, to a ridiculous extreme. A middle ground seems more reasonable, and seems to be the case in much of Europe.
Yes, AmeriCapitalism is all-embracing and all-pervasive, in today's world. Outside this topic, on a more global stage, we might observe that AmeriCapitalism, and the unconstrained free-market continuous-growth economics that go with it, is responsible for climate change, global warming, mass extinctions, droughts, floods, and wildfires.
For AmeriCapitalism nurtures and promotes the acquisition, magnification, and retention of personal wealth. This requires profit, which in turn requires
consumption. And it is our uncontrolled, and apparently uncontrollable, consumption, ever-increasing, that leads to all of these undesirable ends, as well as all the others that I have not mentioned explicitly.
It is sad to observe that many or most meaningful discussions about the state of our world hinge on this one thing. It isn't all American, it has always been there, but it started to really bite, to be ecocidal, following the
Industrial Revolution. And we, the Vassal States of America, are equally responsible, even though we are controlled and constrained by the American Empire, of which we are a part.
But from a philosopher's POV, it is sad that this one issue touches upon almost every other meaningful or useful discussion we might have. It seemingly underlies any and every other matter we might try to consider.