So there I was, trying to watch a simple video about how Huns are Huns, even on Black Forest, where they have a reputation for being a weaker civilization. In a private browsing window where the only other video I had watched was the end of another Rage Forest game. And what did YouTube decide I wanted to watch, and recommend to me? This.
Yesterday I had this thought,
similarity of YouTube algorithm optimization to planned obsolescence or whatever, products made at low quality so they need to be replaced. A video that changes your life, no need to watch more videos: channel dies.
Like with the company that made rice cookers that were too good so they went out of business.
The episode from Person of Interest, and the dialogue, made me think about that line from Dark Lord of Derkholm (p76):
"It's no fun to have to think of yourself as a murderer. . . . A bit like being mad, except that you're sane, I've always thought. So what stopped you?" He was shocked to hear himself sounding truly regretful as he asked this question.
I'm not completely blameless. If someone says, "killing people is always wrong and murderers are bad", I point to the example of An Jung-geun (안중근) who killed Japanese politician Itou Hirobumi.
About this video, which I did not watch, naturally: people are told when they are young that killing people is wrong. The US is 69% Christian (notwithstanding a video that, naturally, I didn't watch, with the title "What's the Difference Between Christians & Protestants?"), with other religions being only 4%, so it's fair to say that basically everyone in the US has heard of the ten commandments. One of which is popularly translated as, "Thou shalt not kill."
It seems like there are lot of people who think that this commandment is a lie for children.
Along with the comments of that video, many of which praise people who killed others 'for a cause', I also found Assassination of Empress Myeongseong while looking for the name of the Korean person I mentioned above. "The defendants were acquitted of all charges, despite the court acknowledging that the defendants had conspired to commit murder." And the Ten Commandments article links in its lead to the Galician peasant uprising of 1846, in which "peasants killed about 1,000 nobles" but otherwise is so non-notable that I'm not even bothering to understand its relevance to religion. I think The Centurion's Empire by Sean McMullen had a good depiction of violence against nobles at a particular moment in history; a dramaticized account that, by describing the manner of death of fictional persons in more detail than we can know of any real person who died so long ago, makes those people more than a statistic.
Coincidentally, the "lie for children" article mentions Terry Pratchett. I never read The Science of Discworld because it wasn't available at my library. Another thing I thought of on this topic was the ending of Pratchett's novel, Night Watch.
But I don't want to say exactly why I thought of it, because of spoilers. Also, the start of the book was very unrealistic: flowers remind the main character what day it was, and he says that he always forgets every year, but the flowers would have been there the previous day as well. The audience doesn't experience that previous day. But it happened. (And I'm sure that there were many elements of the book that I didn't appreciate, because I never read Les Misérables.)
Wikipedia says about not killing that "Eliezer Segal observes that the Septuagint uses the term harag, and that Augustine of Hippo recognized that this did not extend to wars or capital punishment." I'm pretty sure that, with all the wars described in what's known in Christianity as the Old Testament, that whoever recorded this commandment did not think it was a ban on wars. But I do think that they did not mean, "it's bad to kill someone unless they're racist".
To summarize, a lot of people think that there are hidden rules for behavior, that even justify killing other people. What exactly these hidden rules are is not known, because they are hidden. And people justify attitudes that rely on these hidden rules, instead of thinking that this is insane and they should fix the problems that result in hidden rules for morality. (I already linked the scene from Gegon's Clash of the Ovski that used a relevant song, I won't link it again.)
Also, just as an example of a character who killed other people: the discussion at the end of A Dream Within a Dream, Ep06.
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