I don’t understand the point. We are all free to disobey and have to deal with the consequences. It can’t be otherwise. Nobody can pass as an automaton.
But at the same time, obedience, discipline and chain-of-command are ingrained in military culture (do correct me if I'm wrong, my main sources are movies and propaganda). But also trust, trust that e.g. your commanding officer knows what they're doing, considered the risks, and takes responsibility. They too in turn make decisions based on what they know / are told; if there's civilians in a target but intelligence doesn't say so, are you or your chain of command guilty of a war crime?
Not sure if you read Generation Kill or watched the miniseries, but that is one of the main points. In there, there were two platoon commanders, Lieutenant Fick and Captain America(The book never reveals its name, and I think the series does, but I don't recall at this moment). While Lieutenant Fick was a competent officer that tried to kept the welfare of his troops, he often butted heads with its direct superiors since the order given to him could endanger the lives of his subordinates while not accomplishing nothing of value. In contrast Captain America, was an incompetent officer who gave reckless orders, was ignored by his troops and could have been possibly be charged with war crimes. At the end of the series, when the journalist is interviewing the battalion commander about why Captain America was never disciplined for his actions, the battalion commander answers that the same leeway that he gave to Lieutenant Fick was given to Captain America. In other words if he were to punish Captain America, he should also be punishing Lieutenant Fick. In retrospective is understandable, but when you read or watch it, you wonder why no action is being taken to discipline Captain America and why no one listens to Lieutenant Fick
Having spent a bit of time working with the British army, I'd say there's a lot of pushback, either overt or covert. They even by doctrine have someone nominated in group decisions as the person who will play devil's advocate, to try and reduce groupthink, as groupthink is bad and they know it.
If you did not know civilians were present, it is very unlikely you will be charged under the UCMJ. Here is an article from Human Rights Watch about the lack of consequences https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/01/25/lost-innocents.
With regards to movies, remember prior to the modern era many soldiers and seaman were forced to serve against their will. Discipline was brutal. In the British American War of 1812, one of the reasons for war was the forced impressment of American sailors into the British Navy. British Admiral Horatio Nelson acknowledged the critical role of impressment in maintaining the British Navy’s manpower. In 1803, he reported that over 42,000 sailors had deserted since 1793, highlighting the challenges of crew retention. He stated, “Without a press, I have no idea how our Fleet can be manned.”
https://www.nps.gov/articles/impressment.htm
It was Prussia’s Moltke the Elder who recognized the complexity of modern war and the need for officers to think independently. “Subordinates would have to use initiative and independent judgment for the forces to be effective in battle. Campaign and battle plans should encourage and take advantage of the decentralization that would be necessary in any case. In this new concept, commanders of distant detachments were required to exercise initiative in their decision-making and Moltke emphasized the benefits of developing officers who could do this within the limits of the senior commander's intent.”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_von_Moltke_the_Elder
With all that said, it all comes down to personal conscience. Of deciding what is right and wrong.
No, they should have placed the cash in a box and sent it via USPS Registered Mail.
Then it requires the feds themselves to interfere to open the package. Plus, Registered Mail has a full chain of custody as the item becomes a fully accountable item within the mail stream that is signed for at every single touch along the way.
You better have your $5 wrench available to get access though. It's not like they can just take the briefcase or duffel bag full of crypto away from you.
If you actually read the article, they weren't doing anything illegal... that's why IJ is giving them legal representation. The government would have a harder time seizing stablecoins because they couldn't say "well a K9 indicated there was drug residue on the bills" or whatever.
This is a qualitatively different kind of abstraction. All other abstractions still require the programmer to express the solution in a formal language, while LLMs are allowing the user to express the solution in natural language. It's no longer programming, but much more like talking to a programmer as a manager.
Buddhism claims that our feeling of separation (and thus the multiplicity of subjective experiences) is an illusion. But I never really understood why.
My hunch is that this is related to the question of why we are experiencing this particular moment in time and not another one in the past or in the future, is related. If you believe in the many words interpretation of quantum mechanics, one can also say why I’m experiencing this particular branch.
> Buddhism claims that our feeling of separation (and thus the multiplicity of subjective experiences) is an illusion. But I never really understood why.
They've made a good book to help people get the concept. It's called "the gateless gate" and it's a series of seemingly non-sensical stories, that you're supposed to think about and try to see the meaning behind it.
For an intro. I think the old stories have too many anachronisms for modern readers. There are too many meanings in the phrasing that the readers of the time would already know.
Do you know of any modern translations that frame the story in actual modern references?
I think it would make a bad introduction to buddhist philosophy in any way, it's meant as a more "advanced" text imo. Starting with a plain english intro (like Alan Watts, The Way of Zen) or simpler texts (the Dhammapada) should be easier.
VS Ramachandran has an interesting talk about mirror neurons, which is a subset of motor neurons. They activate when you perceive anybody else doing something as opposed to only activating during your actions. This is fundamentally a built-in empathy/group learning mechanism, but it also has some other interesting implications too.
For example, when somebody touches someones hand in your view, your mirror neurons activate just like you yourself have been touched. Then your nerve endings in your hand send a signal to cancel the effect, but sometimes you still get a tingling from the neural confusion depending on the strength of the signal (e.g. watching someone getting kicked in the balls or russian daredevils walking on top of highrises). But, if there is no nerve endings there, there is nothing to cancel the signal, so you do experience another persons feeling of being touched as your own. Therefore, the only thing that separates our consciousness is literally our skin and our nerve endings on it.
I sometimes wonder if we are all basically the same conscious, threading through all of the "antennae" of life one after another. But I find this idea painful because it is tantamount to an immense cosmic loneliness.
Yes, although The Egg ultimately presumes separation of consciousness at some "higher level" given that there is a dialogue between such consciousnesses. My greater sense of loneliness comes from a sense that the very premise of a separation of consciousness exists as a deliberate goal of our universe, which was made by a "God" who is actually all of us, as a means to keep myself/ourself company and to introduce love. Sort of like we are all branches of the same tree. But people talk about having epiphanies about this as if it is a good thing that we are all the same, leading to a connectedness. But it also leads to loneliness.
Loneliness is a human instinct based on our evolutionary history as social primates though - if you travel up the antennae enough that there's no 'others' there's also no evolutionary pressures to make that loneliness a source of danger.
But what I find cool is that the lonely social ape can also look up the antenna and find all the security it could want - where I think some religions err is that when this happens, if you keep identifying with the insecure social ape rather than the many-antannaed-deiform it can interfere with the smooth communication between the two.
I feel this resonates with mindfulness lifestyle: give your full attention to the present moment and the quality of your activity (and product) will show.
