Johann   tag: responsibility

Joseph Weizenbaum pointed out the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of this "logic" in an interview: it's like saying every year there's bound to be rapes happening in Berlin -- so why not just go out and rape someone?

If your only excuse is that someone else would do it, you are that other person.

Installing exactly the technology Hitler would have had wet dreams about under the pretense of ^(the) convenience ^{(of getting fleeced)} and security ^{(from unscheduled murder, not from large scale mass murder by authorities)} is something you can delude yourself about, but that doesn't absolve you from your responsibility in it.

War doesn't brutalize people, people brutalize people.

Sometimes that's called war, but it's not like war "is" and "does" stuff, no matter how often people who want to absolve themselves of their decisions may claim so.

Whenever and wherever freedom and enlightenment rear their head in the form of specific people and specific insights, they are systematically fought. By all sorts of specific people for all sorts of specific reasons -- but not by laws of nature, or the laws of progress or whatever it gets rationalized as. Whatever road we're currently going down, it's one of many possible ones. And every step along it is made of people, decisions, and responsibility.