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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   31547 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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Sometimes I wonder if "banality of evil" is just a way to downplay regular evil. In other circumstances, if someone commits or aquiesques to evil deeds for the sake of personal success, that just gets called evil. If an armed robber murders a clerk, they don't get the privilege of having their evil called "banal" even if it was done seeking personal gain. Perhaps confronting the alternative, that some 90% of Germans simply were evil with no qualifiers during the height of Nazi rule, is too politically awkward?

There's a certain sick irony to an article in The Guardian discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the last few years in the UK with lockdowns. Then again, maybe banality is still the wrong word for it, given that at every turn they wanted the government to go even further, lockdown harder and for longer, and be even more aggressive towards dissenters.

I think the opposite. There’s a tendency to turn people who do evil things, or people who enable them in some cases into monsters. We dehumanize the situation. This grants us psychological distance from the event and the smug confidence that of course we would have joined the resistance, we aren’t monsters after all.

But this rarely if ever turns out to be the case. The people who ran the camps were generally normal people. They raised families, volunteered in the community, went to church, went to movies, and played sports. They lived, outside of the killing, absolutely normal lives. And they seemed to be able to either process the idea through nazi ideology or compartmentalize what they did for work from everything else in their lives.

Yes, this is exactly how I see it, with the kicker that 'they' is 'us'.

You know, every time I see your username, I involuntarily scan ahead to see where you make the turn. Sure, equate a few months of lockdownism to the Holocaust. Remember that time they gassed the antivaxxers?

@The_Nybbler has the right of it. Do you think a Holocaust film is trying to downplay the evil? Pointing out banality is a reminder not to assume something is good, or even okay, just because it is pedestrian. One must engage with the actual merits and flaws. In that sense, there’s no irony to the Guardian’s coverage. They will tell you with a straight face that lockdowns were good.

Well mapping people who went along with lockdowns to people who probably would have gone along with the holocaust seems like a reasonable thing to assume, even if they didn't gas anyone this time.

The gassing is kinda an important aspect. As a pro-lockdowner, if I thought the government would outright murder twelve million people (or, honestly, a lot less than that) in the name of a bad model of a disease, I would have had a very different reaction.

Yes and Germans were not voting for Hitler because they all thought he was going to kill all the Jews. Some were, sure I expect so. All? no. A majority? no way.

Curtail their rights, restrict them, punish them, remove them from spreading "poison" and "Jewish science", etc? yes sure. Encourage them to move to, or deport them, somehwhere else? yes.

All covid measure supporters were not supporting killing all dissidents.....

Some sure. All? no....

Curtail their rights, restrict them, punish them, remove them from spreading "covid" and "anti vax science misinformation", etc? yes sure. Encourage them to wear masks, be banned from healthcare, prosecuted for murder for going outside, prosecuted for murder for not agreeing with the government, going outside being a criminal offence when not sick, walking less than 2 metres from someone else to be a violent crime on par with stabbing them? yes.....

And so on.

I don't think the epistemic position is the same.

It's not that I, as a pro-lockdown person, abetted and ignored the possible genocide of Covid infectees, it's that I had a very strong positive expectation that there would not be a genocide or even a significant mass murder. (And, you know, I was right.) I don't think that can be said for people who supported the Nazi regime.

Well you wouldn't, and your words have as much weight as a nazi supporter saying they didn't expect Jews to be mass murdered and they haven't been yet so they're right (in 1937 or so).

You think we're epistemically in a 1937 position with regard to Covid camps?

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How so?

politically motivated mass curtailment of rights, propoganda campaigns led by the military information warfare units to discredit true information if it contradicts government current lines, information warfare on domestic populations to scapegoat dissidents as they're associated with political enemies, etc.

You think these are the core defining traits of the Holocaust? Not, say, the mass murder?

If Hitler had put Jews, invalids, gypsies and various dissidents in camps and then kept and fed them until the end of the war, we would be ... very confused, morally, for one, considering what other claims he made, but we'd probably have a different view on Nazis. Depending whether he'd used them for labor, we may even consider the camps "relatively humane" as far as camps go. Certainly they wouldn't be considered synonymous with absolute evil.

These are some things I think going along with is evidence that one has the mindset of someone who would also go along with the holocaust. Not all Germans were physically killing jews, gypsies, homosexuals, slavic prisoners, political prisoners, etc. Most, if not almost all, were just going along with the aforementioned government actions.

There are reasons why extermination camps existed, rather than just shooting them all where they found them across the country, that are not just related to logistics and efficiency. Maybe if they had done that people in Germany would have been les likely to go along with it, but we know they did go along with the sort of thing most people went along with during covid.

If non vaccinated, or positives covid tested individuals and families had been shipped off to camps (outside china), and had been killed would that really have been incongruent with the rhetoric and propoganda deployed? The holocaust and covid was a difference in degree, not of kind.

If non vaccinated, or positives covid tested individuals and families had been shipped off to camps (outside china), and had been killed would that really have been incongruent with the rhetoric and propoganda deployed?

I obviously cannot prove this, but my immediate reaction is "yes, of course, massively incongruent."

We'd need more samples. I was right this time, but obviously n=1.

I think even in China, you could predict fairly reliably if a given camp or campaign was going to engage in mass murder or not, ie. whether the Uighur rhetoric is like the Nazi rhetoric in ways that the Covid rhetoric is not. To be clear, I don't have an opinion on this; I haven't done any research on genocide in China, but I'd expect if there was genocide we should see commonalities in the rhetoric.

edit: Ie. say, nobody was calling Covid victims dangerous parasites.... Okay, I'm not willing to say that. Maybe it's just that the US CW is so hot that the rhetoric on the street was genuinely indistinguishable from Mein Kampf? If so, Scott may be apropos: "Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. ... Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them."

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You think these are the core defining traits of the Holocaust? Not, say, the mass murder?

For those who were aware of the camps but not personally aware of the murder--yes! Those would be the core defining political traits of the Holocaust for German citizens.

Considering how often I was personally accused of literally committing mass murder by being vocally opposed to lockdowns and government-mandated masking during COVID, I have to agree with @Azth here. "Certainly they wouldn't be considered synonymous with absolute evil" seems like a wildly optimistic take on "Nazi concentration camps without the actual executions." Indeed, it is now widely agreed in American jurisprudence that the Japanese internment camps were barely distinguishable from Nazi concentration camps, and they are often offered as an example of nearly-absolute evil, listed alongside slavery and Native American relocation programs as among the worst of U.S. history.

I understand that many people (maybe you?) are utilitarians who think that the reason to favor or disfavor certain things is to just check the consequences. But you don't actually get to check the practical consequences of the laws you pass, before you pass them. Rounding up the Jews in Nazi Germany was not sold to the German people as a campaign of mass murder. There was never a law that said "the penalty for being Jewish is death." The law was: we're gonna massively curtail your rights if you're an undesirable, we're gonna segregate you from the population, detain you, relocate and re-educate you for the greater good.

"But COVID was a good reason to pass such laws, and anti-semitism wasn't" is an argument that does make these things distinguishable in substance. But with regard to the relationship between state action and individual rights, the only difference between the Holocaust and COVID lockdowns was how things turned out in the end. And even then, based on the attenuated logic of the people who accused me of being a mass murderer, COVID lockdowns likely also resulted in unnecessary deaths (e.g. of loneliness), further blurring the lines.

This is why I am so strongly opposed to large, powerful governments. I do not think it is at all unfair to compare those who went along with lockdowns with those who went along with the Holocaust, because the consequences were not knowable in advance in both cases. For non-victims, the question was always and only: "how far will you go along with the government when you think its individual rights-constraining actions are intended for the greater good?" And the answer in both cases, distinguishable though they were, was, "apparently, pretty damn far."

EDIT: I guess I think I should add, for clarity, that while I do somewhat fault the German people circa 1935 for the horrors their government perpetrated, I would not strongly condemn the rank-and-file Germans for the Holocaust (the way I would strongly condemn, say, Hitler or Goebbels), any more than I strongly condemn rank-and-file Americans for putting me through COVID lockdowns. I do weakly condemn both groups! What I think makes this line of reasoning interesting, in part, is that I suspect a lot of people strongly condemn the anti-semitism of rank-and-file Germans as being, essentially, complicity with the Holocaust. For pro-lockdown Americans who feel that way about 20th century Germans, I can imagine being quite offended by the comparison. But I personally do not regard pro-lockdown Americans as "literally Hitler," I regard pro-lockdown Americans as "approximately as culpably and benightedly statist as mid-20th century Germans, who were also not literally-Hitler."

Indeed, it is now widely agreed in American jurisprudence that the Japanese internment camps were barely distinguishable from Nazi concentration camps

Okay, well, I don't believe that. In fact, I'd consider the US japanese internment camps much closer to a "serious mistake of governance" than an "act of immense evil" that I do the Holocaust. To put a number on it, I would maybe put them on the moral order of magnitude of 10-100 murders?

I would add to this that the consequences for both covid measures and the holocaust, in my opinion, show how both were wrong. One of those items is not controversial, while the other is, but it's the same attitude and fundamental pattern of behaviour that leads to both.

Covid measures seem to have been, largely, pointless and harmful. The holocaust utterly failed at eliminating jews, and utterly failed at all other possible goals, while also harming Germans and the German state. The harder this sort of wrong measure and behaviour (Obey and punish the dissident) are pushed the worse the outcome seems to be, in general.

If we had covid measures for the same amount of time as the nazis were in power then I would expect about 80% likelihood that extermination camps would have been used for the non compliant/infected/non vaccinated somewhere in the English speaking world. But that's just my opinion.

Remember that time they gassed the antivaxxers?

No. However, in the US, as a consequence of regime propaganda, a large proportion of the population eventually claimed to support the idea of putting unvaccinated people in concentration camps. Are these people evil? Banally evil?

The idea that nothing should ever be compared to the Holocaust contradicts the concept of "never again", because for it to never happen again, similar events must be stopped before they progress to being as bad as the holocaust.

Nobody said that nothing should ever be compared to the Holocaust. But comparing COVID lockdowns to the Holocaust is ridiculous and without any merit.

I infer that you think the Holocaust was significantly worse than the Covid lockdowns?

Of course it was. It's not even close.

How did you come to that conclusion?

A comparison has plenty of merit. They have both shared features and differences. That's what a comparison is.

Yes, we all know you think that lockdowns were an abject display of evil which was bad enough to justify your Holocaust comparisons. You're wrong.

You're wrong.

This is consensus building and just your opinion.

It's certainly just my opinion, and I never claimed otherwise. For the other part, that rule doesn't mean what you think it means. If I said "everyone thinks you're wrong" that would probably be consensus building. But just telling someone they're wrong is well within bounds of the rules, because it's an expression of my personal opinion.

Calling some sorts evil "banal" is not an attempt to downplay it. It's an attempt to remind people that not all evil comes in obvious forms, like your armed robber or Amon Goth (who would likely be considered a caricature if he weren't real). That e.g. the people duly recording the shipments of prisoners and Zyklon B and bodies burned, and then going out and having an office party, are evil as well. These people in other words.

I don't think that's the point of banality of evil as given in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Instead, I thought it was about the lack of clear evil intentions. This would also apply to an armed robber unthinkingly killing a clerk because they happened to be in the way of their actual goal of committing a robbery. Now, maybe because the goal is still a robbery they have an evil intent, so this isn't the best example. However, in most cases, unthinkingly committing evil acts because not doing so is an obstacle to your goals tends to get called evil without the banal qualifier.

Eichmann's actions were not ordinary or boring. He was not some random low-level bureaucrat unthinkingly crunching numbers or a labourer loading Zyklon B. His position was fairly high-up, including his involvement in the Wannsee Conference.

I don't think that's the point of banality of evil as given in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Instead, I thought it was about the lack of clear evil intentions.

From Eichmann in Jerusalem:

I also can well imagine that an authentic controversy might have arisen over the subtitle of the book; for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not lago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III "to prove a villain." Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.

Arendt's hypothesis was not about intent in the conventional sense, especially since Eichmann's behavior even during the trial pretty clearly demonstrated that he a) new what was happening and b) contributed knowing that his actions furthered those purposes. He went to extremes in the pursuit of his orders, and even squabbled with other sections of the Nazi power structure to play a larger role in killings at points. He wanted what was happening; he just didn't have a 'good' or even a bad reason for it, or recognized (or, more likely, cared about) the line from what he did to what was happening around the corner.

((Which makes it an awkward comparison for COVID stuff, beyond the vastly different scales. I don't think you're complaining solely about the desk jockeys intimately involved in vaccine passport design as separate from the police arresting 'trespassers' or people filling skate parks with sand.))

It's just that for Eichmann, it was a day job: he rode a desk and signed papers, talked with foreigners, and tipped his hat. What did it matter if the vast majority of them died months, weeks, or days later? He struggled at length against the accusation during the trial that he'd beaten a Jewish child to death with his own hands (and before the fall of Nazi Germany, ), described at length how he was shocked at a few carloads of carbon monoxide victims or even the simple description of the methodology... but he nodded and shrugged that he signed papers sending thousands and tens of thousands to camps he knew they would die in.

((This is part of the reason Ward Churchill's "Little Eichmann" comment raised so many hackles. Churchill spoke only in the sense that the victims of 9/11 profited from America's "global financial empire", rather than actually finding any connection to the actual military interventions he had blamed them for. Eichmann claimed to be a cog in the murder machine, Churchill turned the term to cover anyone who was in the same room. Of course, no one has since tried to cancel the man for dropping the hard-g in the same essay: who whom.))

The failure for Eichmann was not inability to achieve superhuman heroic ends, like Schindler or de Besange (or John Rabe, for a more awkward example). Nor was he the perfect sociopath who would accept any inhumanity when done against undesirables. He just seldom cared. There were a few times he was shocked into doing the right thing, when he barely noticed it and then returned to form a few weeks later. He "worked in transportation", rather than pulled the trigger on a gun or picked out 'workers' from 'undesirables', nor did he originate orders; he just did it knowing that every optimization or every indifferent decision sent men and women and children to death. In Arendt's theory, Eichmann had a zeal, but it was the zeal of a social or business climber. He'd slap a man for unprofessionalism, but get queasy at the sight of blood.

((I'll caveat that this is somewhat controversial: it's possible and maybe even likely that Eichmann was at least trying to play the fool by the time of his capture and trial, as some alleged recorded interviews from when he was in hiding in Argentina give a different aspect than a lot of his trial testimony, and suggest a more actively malicious role.))

That's not, notably, a good description for Hoss. Hoss did pull the triggers, sometimes literally in some early executions, and as commandant he ordered deaths, and ordered his men to experiment with more optimal methods of mass gassing. Even before WWII, Hoss lead a group of men to kill a school teacher. If Eichmann was the sort of villain whose unwillingness to get his hands dirty made him a little too pathetic to play center stage, Hoss very much wasn't. The 'best' you could say for the man was that he was not a monster every hour of every day of the week, and to some extent this is important to remember.

There are people who are close to the sort of 24-7-365 evil that seeks to prove themselves a villain, a la Beria (the 'buried his rape victims in his wife's rose garden' seems almost too on the nose, but I wouldn't be surprised, and it's pretty well-supported that he did take his work home with him). And there's a certain temptation to think of these sort of people like movie villains, who come with hissing red blisters or at least erudite snakes. But in reality, you get a lot of monsters that revel in inflicting the worst they can to innocents, and then wash their hands and plan a charming lakeside resort.

But I'd push back against suggesting any of them are less than monsters.

((This is part of the reason Ward Churchill's "Little Eichmann" comment raised so many hackles. Churchill spoke only in the sense that the victims of 9/11 profited from America's "global financial empire", rather than actually finding any connection to the actual military interventions he had blamed them for. Eichmann claimed to be a cog in the murder machine, Churchill turned the term to cover anyone who was in the same room. Of course, no one has since tried to cancel the man for dropping the hard-g in the same essay: who whom.))

Ward Churchill was eventually cancelled for falsely claiming to be a Native American. The question of "What are the who and whom which explain why was Ward Churchill treated differently from Elizabeth Warren?" is interesting and I don't know the answer.

Instead, I thought it was about the lack of clear evil intentions.

Slightly more complicatedly, it's about the way that things which would be wildly extraordinary in normal life (the uprooting and shifting of large populations, and the commitment of mass violence) and which would be shocking to bourgeois morality if committed on an interpersonal basis (shooting someone, or stealing their possessions while they scream) are normalized in the thoughts and discourse of policymakers by taking refuge in rhetorical generality and bureaucratic jargon, and then how everyone just gets on with normal things like office politics and lives completely boring lives even as the ultimate subject is the death and dispossession of millions. It's about how, notwithstanding all the hifalutin' things that the philosophers of liberalism wrote about citizens' exercise of reason and morality in public affairs, the quotidian swallows all of that even when it's the lives of millions on the line.

I think of banality of evil more in line with the Moloch idea. And I also find it useless. For instance I think that everybody involved in transitioning kids is taking part in great evil, of course they think they are doing good. In the end most people involved ranging from receptionist in gender clinic to actual surgeon who chops off healthy organs of kids will be fine. They are not doing anything illegal presumably. Another example - everybody knows what is happening in Xinjiang, China and it does not mean squat. Disney executives had no qualms filming Mulan next to it, literally thanking Xinjiang government for their tremendous help.

I most probably would not do shit about Jews were I living in those times. I don't do squat about kids being tortured in North Korea or literal slavery all over the world. So there is that - am I evil for just watching Netflix while all that is happening around me, possibly even contributing by paying slavers money for their products? If yes, then I don't care, it is not my business to solve these injustices.

For instance I think that everybody involved in transitioning kids is taking part in great evil

I would call it medical malpractice. Perhaps criminally negligent malpractice.

I think in the case of Xinjiang the banality of evil may be that so many will easily consume manufactured consent for war.

There are reeducation camps in Xinjiang, but there is no genocide and no sterilization campaign.

This is how the state is dealing with their Islamic extremism problem. Time will tell whether or not this works better than fighting a war against them, but so far I think there’s probably less evil afoot than in the collateral casualties of the GWoT.

Excellent, this is actually a perfect example of another counterargument. Who knows what is really going on in Auschwitz or Xinjiang or whatever. Only time will tell and in the meantime let me deal with my day-to-day problems.

The banality of evil refers to those who participate in some way in doing evil, rather than those who simply are aware of evil deeds but do nothing to stop them.

And further the reason it is linked to Nazi Germany is because such a large segment of the population, for one reason or another, eventually became supporters of the Nazi regime. Maybe not all enthusiastically so, but enough to be regarded as supporters of Nazi policy.

Opinion poll data from the immediate post-war years confirm the limited impact of Allied efforts. In October 1946, when the Nuremberg Trial ended, only 6 per cent of Germans were willing to admit that they thought it had been 'unfair', but four years later one in three took this view. That they felt this way should come as no surprise, since throughout the years 1945-49 a consistent majority of Germans believed that 'Nazism was a good idea, badly applied'. In November 1946, 37 per cent of Germans questioned in a survey of the American zone took the view that 'the extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was necessary for the security of Germans'.

Source

No, the reason it is linked to Nazi Germany is because the term originated in Hannah Arendt's book on the trial of Adolph Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

The review of the film in question is linking it to Nazi Germany as a whole, not Eichmann specifically.

Right. Because Eichmann was a high Nazi official, and Arent used him as an example of a more general phenomenon.

Yes, the general phenomenon that a large segment of the population in Nazi Germany came to support the regime for one reason or another. I'm not sure we really disagree?

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Sure, I probably participate by buying cheaper clothing from Xingjian cotton. I also work for international company, so I am sure that I am making products that help some really nasty people do some really nasty stuff with said product. I also like eating meat, which of course makes me a banally evil monster in eyes of many people. Take your pick of Moloch-like idea that I profit from or participate in and I am by definition banally evil person.

But that is not what Arendt meant by the term.

I think she did. People only put nazism on some pedestal of evil, so they think that Arendt had some incredible insight. In fact it is just another version of moral outrage porn. In above example I admitted that I am absolutely fine with eating meat, I have only smile for my butcher. Of course many people would say that I am evil, while I am just going about my day not thinking twice about it. There are people in US army devising WW3 plans for nuclear holocaust or who are one cog in the machine of identifying and striking targets for Predator drones including civilians. Then they go home, hug their children and do whatever.

Arend's insight is absolutely useless. For instance I think that doctors who transition children are absolute scum, I am sure that many of them are monsters and I think the same about every single person working in child transition clinic. Some conservatives think the same about about abortions. And now what, how should one act upon this knowledge of banally evil people doing their evil deeds while thinking about themselves as perfectly normal people? Absolutely nothing except maybe being more active in next elections and of course acting properly outraged when the society finally permits it.

  1. She absolutely did NOT mean it to refer to bystanders who did nothing, because she was not seeking to explain the behaviors of bystanders, but rather only the behavior of government officials who implemented the policy.

  2. They think that Arendt had some incredible insight because, in 1963, it was in fact a unique and controversial insight.

  3. It is the exact opposite of outrage porn; in fact, Arendt was criticized at the time for not being sufficiently outraged. Her entire thesis was that Eichmann was not "a monster" and was not even particularly anti-Semitic.

For instance I think that doctors who transition children are absolute scum,

If so, then they are not an example of the banality of evil. They are an example of regular old evil. The banality of evil would refer more to the insurance adjuster who approves the doctor's insurance claim.

And now what, how should one act upon this knowledge

Well, if you are an insurance adjuster, you quit your job.

She absolutely did NOT mean it to refer to bystanders who did nothing, because she was not seeking to explain the behaviors of bystanders, but rather only the behavior of government officials who implemented the policy.

Sure, nobody is talking about doing nothing, we are talking about people supporting 3rd Reich in one way or another. Which is how this thread started.

They think that Arendt had some incredible insight because, in 1963, it was in fact a unique and controversial insight.

I am with you on this. People fetishize Nazism as somehow unique and Arendt kind of ruined the party, I am not dissing her - I am dissing people who need her.

It is the exact opposite of outrage porn; in fact, Arendt was criticized at the time for not being sufficiently outraged. Her entire thesis was that Eichmann was not "a monster" and was not even particularly anti-Semitic.

Here I did not mean Arendt's particular schtick, but how it is used now: Ah, you are not particularly hardcore Nazi, you are just banally evil so I can still punch you. I meant this.

If so, then they are not an example of the banality of evil. They are an example of regular old evil.

Doctors are only one cog in the machine that goes from lawmakers, through Eichmann style beurocrats interpreting said laws, through insurance companies, hospital management, through psychiatrists, receptionists and so forth. The surgeon who is cutting the organs in fact has quite a good excuse doing what he does, he has mountain of exculpatory paperwork to freely do what he is gonna do. In fact if the doctor would refuse in some fit of consciousness, he or she would probably suffer severe career consequences. How is he evil in the old sense? He is law abiding citizen, respected even.

And this is where I differ. I regard my failure to remove Xi and similar figures from power to be a vague source of guilt, only dulled by the fact that it's not even remotely possible for me to do so. If there was a way for me to meaningfully contribute towards a cause with that goal in mind, it is likely I would do so, but what few possible avenues exist to doing that seem to have exceptionally dubious connections with that end goal. E.G Liberty in North Korea exists but their actions are so tangential to the actual goal in their title that I don't know how they intend to link the two. Free Joseon? How would I even help them? It's not like crowdfunding hits on Kim Jong Un is a thing.

only dulled by the fact that it's not even remotely possible for me to do so. If there was a way for me to meaningfully contribute towards a cause with that goal in mind, it is likely I would do so, but what few possible avenues exist to doing that seem to have exceptionally dubious connections with that end goal.

I find this idea interesting due to what I perceive as the vast intellectual and financial resources of the commentariat here. North Korea reportedly has a GDP of $16 billion and a population of 26 million. I think that the productive and intellectual capacities of a few hundred 150+ IQ millionaires is probably more than that of North Korea in the long run, as long as NK stays the way it is.

I'm not sure crowdfunding hits on Kim Jong Un would accomplish anything anyways--it's not like the government would totally collapse with him. The country also seems quite well-protected by China, though it seems they'd be amenable to a reunification if the US backed off from SK. Having looked into the situation very little, here's what I would do:

  1. Grease NK leaders' palms. Give them somewhere safe to go, or maybe even an honored position within reunified Korea. There should be an ironclad promise that they don't get punished should they cede the fight soon.

  2. Arm the populace. Starlink internet for all, and millions of cell phones dropped from space if necessary into the country. This would probably be enough, but if necessary, when they looked ready to riot, I'd send guns in too to make them an actual danger to the government.

Seems very doable to (as a coordinated, intelligent group) raise a few billion dollars, either through charity or capitalism, and then get this sort of thing started.

I'd be missing the financial resources to make any meaningful contribution.

Regardless overthrowing the north korean regime is a sort of inevitable end-point of effective altruism even with a strong anti-coup bias. You eradicate malaria, you cure world hunger, you're living in a megastructure in the outer solar system... And the slave-masses of the country-sized concentration camp that is North Korea continue to scratch the dirt for a meagre near-starvation diet.

What is the net gain in QALY from switching the population of North Korea to living under the known next best alternative of South Korea. How much does each QALY then cost? Is dropping automatic weapons on North Korea the new malaria nets?

I'd be missing the financial resources to make any meaningful contribution.

In this hypothetical you'd be hooked up with a great job by the Motte Cartel.

Regardless overthrowing the north korean regime is a sort of inevitable end-point of effective altruism even with a strong anti-coup bias. You eradicate malaria, you cure world hunger, you're living in a megastructure in the outer solar system... And the slave-masses of the country-sized concentration camp that is North Korea continue to scratch the dirt for a meagre near-starvation diet.

Agreed, but at a certain point this sort of decision becomes much more complicated than naive QALY work imo. There's a fundamental shift in ethics when you go from [doing what you can inside the system] to [working outside the system] to [designing the system yourself and breaking other systems]. Once you're not just buying bednets but also taking responsibility for determining a nation's future, the correct course of action becomes far harder to calculate. I certainly wouldn't trust an organization called "Effective Altruism" to wage war based on their ideals. Whatever super-organization creates Dyson Spheres would probably find it as morally justified to invade us for "backwards" beliefs as we find it justified to invade NK for humanitarian reasons.

There's a certain sick irony to an article in The Guardian discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the last few years in the UK with lockdowns.

This is a fairly pointless comment. 'How come a newspaper is discussing the notion of evil when they disagree with my policy preferences?'. You could find someone to make such a comment whoever was discussing the issue; 'there's a certain sick irony to an article in the Mail discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the fuel duty price escalator', or something. You may well regard lockdowns as evil but I don't see the connection between your disagreeing with their position on that front and the discussion of the root of 'evil' generally.

Reducing the false home imprisonment of the entire population to a mere disagreement over policy preferences is like calling the subject of the film a mere policy disagreement. Maybe you do think such actions are just policy disagreements, but if so the entire point of the banality of evil as a concept starts to fall apart. They're not evil, not even banally evil, perpetrators and those who aquiesqued to the holocaust just had a civil, rational difference of opinion that by chance happens to involve imprisoning and then killing lots of Jews, with as much moral weight as preferring rye bread to bagels.

I think only in China were lockdowns severe enough to qualify as “home imprisonment”, as far I know in Western countries you were allowed to leave your house to go buy groceries, walk your dog, exercise (albeit sometimes in a reduced area), etc.

Lockdowns were a case of curtailing personal liberties in an emergency, which does not have the same quasi-universal moral consensus as committing genocide. What makes you be against them in particular? Are you against all government intervention that reduce freedom in the name of safety (making you a libertarian), does it violate some moral principle in particular, or do you think the response was mistaken/ineffective in the case of Covid-19? Are you against /all/ travel restrictions, or would you be fine with some level of social measures (see: closing down non-essential businesses, allowing limited scale gatherings, vs. China-level restrictions)?

You may have a different opinion on the matter, but most people will trade some level of freedom for safety. The motivation for lockdowns was slowing down the spread of the pandemic and potentially saving millions of lives; would you be against them even if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they worked?

I think only in China were lockdowns severe enough to qualify as “home imprisonment”, as far I know in Western countries you were allowed to leave your house to go buy groceries, walk your dog, exercise (albeit sometimes in a reduced area), etc.

Home imprisonment often comes with reasons you are allowed to leave your home. Even prisoners placed in prisons get home leave from prisons, for instance, and nobody would deny that they're not imprisoned. The reason the definition of imprisonment needs to be so broad is because otherwise it allows situations where pseudo-imprisonments can't be challenged by their victims.

To put it another way, I know a relative who was sectioned (is it called that in the US) for two weeks and then recovered and was released. During their sectioning, they actually had more liberties than they did under lockdowns, as they were permitted to go anywhere for two hours a day for any reason, every day. Not to mention access to legal protections if there was reason to believe that the sectioning was done fraudulently.

Lockdowns were a case of curtailing personal liberties in an emergency, which does not have the same quasi-universal moral consensus as committing genocide.

Nazi Germany justified genocide on the grounds of curtailing personal liberties in an emergency. (Edit: This is not the actual reason but it's the steelman they could make. Nazi Germany didn't recognise personal liberties as a thing at all. Similarly, lockdownist regimes don't actually believe they're "curtailing personal liberties in an emergency" because they don't recognise personal liberties as a thing either. You don't see relevant leaders regretfully apologising for their crimes against human rights just before they go on to commit them, they just go unacknowledged or denied. Further, those who criticize lockdowns for being breaches of human rights do not get the response that they are a regretful breach of human rights but something something utilitarian priorities. Rather, they get called far-right extremists or conspiracy theorists, suggesting lockdownist leaders at least publicly deny that any loss of personal liberties happened at all)

Prior to 2020 there was a quasi-universal moral consensus against false imprisonment. That's why it's in the universal declaration of human rights. It's why there's objections to concentration camps. Or at least there were, until places like Australia started opening them up. Countries have been condemned, sanctioned, isolated etc for far, far less than what many places did in 2020.

Lockdowns do not reduce freedom in the name of safety because they both don't increase safety from covid and also massively increase danger from the government. I am against false imprisonment in particular. The response was empirically ineffective given that countries that declined to do lockdowns saw no ill effect from doing so. I am against all covid-related travel restrictions because governments clearly cannot be trusted with an inch lest they take a mile.

would you be against them even if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they worked?

Does this hypothetical serve a purpose? It's like asking if you'd be against the holocaust if Nazi ideology was proven to work. A world in which Nazi ideology was correct does not resemble our own in any way. For a start, there's no hypothetical way for a lockdown to pass a cost-benefit analysis because the maximum benefit is so small compared to the minimum cost. Even if our lockdowns as actually carried out worked and prevented, say... 0.6% of the population dying, the amount of time people were placed under lockdown itself undoes that through QALY losses.

leaders regretfully apologising for their crimes against human rights just before they go on to commit them, they just go unacknowledged or denied

Certainly not 'apologise for their crimes' because obviously an apology for a 'crime' would imply they are wrong anyway, but politicians absolutely constantly stressed that these decisions were not being taken lightly and were only demanded by truly extraordinary circumstances.

Perhaps the most important thing though is that they subjected themselves to the same measures (partygate etc. notwithstanding) - how many high-ranking Nazis subjected themselves to the concentration camps?

they subjected themselves to the same measures (partygate etc. notwithstanding)

Pointing out that politicians obeyed lockdowns, except of course when they didn't, is the equivalent of damning with faint praise. "Disproving with faint proof"?

Partygate was mostly bad because Boris lied to the House not because the infringements were all that bad. He got the fine in the end for a very mild offence indeed, one that I suspect most people were guilty of at some point during the pandemic. It's still unacceptable, but it hardly undermines the point that, in general, they too were subject to the rules.

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Listing all the cases of high-profile politicians ignoring or carving out conveniently politician-shaped holes in restrictions would take a very, very long time. Via wealth, influence, the nature of their job etc, politicians could evade the worst effects of lockdowns. Taken at it's broadest, plenty of high-ranking Nazis did in fact subject themselves to the concentration camp. They just subjected themselves to it in a very different way than prisoners experienced.

Further, from information that has come out about decision-making over time, we know that many decisions were taken very lightly and for very frivolous reasons. For instance, it's a matter of public record at this point that the reason the UK government mandated face masks in secondary schools in England is because Nicola Sturgeon did it. This is not the behaviour of someone who is deeply concerned about violating personal liberties but believes via some utilitarian calculation that doing so is the least bad option.

the reason the UK government mandated face masks in secondary schools in England is because Nicola Sturgeon did it

That was pretty small fry all things considered, and not really a major imposition - after all, in the case of schools in particular they are a governmental institution, so imposing requirements there hardly seems like a grievous blow to personal liberty.

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The whole point that is was done indifferently and for no reasonable personal gain is what makes it banal. The guy that put jews on the list to take their property for themselves is not banally evil. The guy on a salary that makes sure the diesel engines for suffocation run smoothly for his paycheck is.

Diesel mechanics don't work for free, and working for the death camps often brought a large wage premium. If we assume that the same dynamics apply to blue collar labor in Germany, 1942 in some important ways, then a large wage premium is pretty significant personal gain.

As I understand it, indifference and lack of gain were not central to Arendt's concept of the banality of evil. As noted here

Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.

I'll caveat that the use of "intent" there is White's usage, and common among Arendt's critics and follows, rather than her own term of art. By contrast, Arendt's phrasing is more prosaic in what she felt would have been a better summary for the man:

"You admitted that the crime committed against the Jewish people during the war was the greatest crime in recorded history, and you admitted your role in it. But you said you had never acted from base motives, that you had never had any inclination to kill anybody, that you had never hated Jews, and still that you could not have acted otherwise and that you did not feel guilty. We find this difficult, though not altogether impossible, to believe; there is some, though not very much, evidence against you in this matter of motivation and conscience that could be proved beyond reasonable doubt. You also said that your role in the Final Solution was an accident and that almost anybody could have taken your place, so that potentially almost all Germans are equally guilty... What you meant to say was that where all, or most all, are guilty, nobody is.

This is an indeed quite common conclusion, but one we are not willing to grant you. And if you don't understand our objection, we would recommend to your attention the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, two neighboring cities in the Bible, which were destroyed by fire from Heaven because all the people in them had become equally guilty. This, incidentally, has nothing to do with the newfangled notion of `collective guilt,' according to which people supposedly are guilty of, or feel guilty about, things done in their name but not by them - things in which they did not participate and from which they did not profit. In other words, guilt and innocence before the law are of an objective nature, and even if eighty million Germans had done as you did, this would not have been an excuse for you.

Luckily, we don't have to go that far. You yourself claimed not the actuality but only the potentiality of equal guilt on the part of all who lived in a state whose main political purpose had become the commission of unheard-of crimes. And no matter through what accidents of exterior or interior circumstances you were pushed onto the road of becoming a criminal, there is an abyss between the actuality of what you did and the potentiality of what others might have done. We are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of your inner life and of your motives or with the criminal potentialities of those around you. You told your story in terms of a hard-luck story, and, knowing the circumstances, we are, up to a point, willing to grant you that under more favorable circumstances it is highly unlikely that you would ever have come before us or before any other criminal court. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and Support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations - as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world - we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

On the contrary, the guy on the paycheck is doing it for personal gain. The alternative is to not run the diesel engines and not get the paycheck.

Not to mention the banality of Rotherham.

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