Let's be clear. It is not the actual smartphones that do this; machines are designed and programmed by humans. Companies can choose to use technology to manipulate our emotions and trigger our reflexes, and many do choose just that, often for financial gain.
“what it does” describes the actions taken - cancer wards work to treat cancer (which is their purpose). Outcomes of what they do isn’t relevant to the point.
The purpose of most social media companies is to manipulate people for financial and political gain which is what they do.
I think that "manipulate people for financial and political gain" is an outcome of what social media companies actually do - I was under the belief that in a general sense, they want to maximise the time people spend on their apps so that they can sell this attention to advertisers, independent of whether or not a given ad buyer wants to manipulate people.
> they want to maximise the time people spend on their apps so that they can sell this attention to advertisers
This is where they manipulate in my mind. They maximize that time by exploiting human psychology, manipulating people into scrolling their feeds endlessly eh?
But note that this is deeply unethical and amounts to denying people the right to self-defense, and by extension, denying people the right to freedom.
The only thing that happens when guns are denied is the rise of corrupt and totalitarian politicians, and that the common man is either oppressed by them or by criminal gangs. Enter guns, and the common man can defend himself against both, which is a blessing.
Thankfully it is now possible to print your own guns and build one easily, so this will become less of an issue in the future, when everyone, if they want, can carry concealed guns.
I live in a country with an aggressive gun lobby, and a ludicrously corrupt government that wants to create a fascist ethnostate. The gun nuts are largely on the side of the fascist ethnostate. I don’t think guns are the perfect defenders of freedom you think they are.
I like this response to poke a hole in the parent comment, but it is worth noting that smartphones and guns are different in a pretty massive way:
Smartphones can be useful and valuable in many ways separate from the ways they can be used harmfully. Guns exist only for physical violence (or to threaten physical violence).
This is a fairly recent transition in gun use - it's not that long ago that their primary use was in feeding people (both through hunting, and through keeping predators away from livestock/crops)
> In most times and places, I'd guess the military had many more guns than civilians
My understanding is that the mobilisation for the Civil War is the only time in US history that military stockpiles of firearms have outnumbered civilian gun ownership (although possibly also at the height of WWII).
Though large standing militaries (versus recruiting large numbers of civilians into militias) is a fairly recent phenomenon, so the calculation is often not as cut and dried as one might expect.
1. Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.
In the case of the shooting examples the idea is to destroy the clay pots or damage the target. Baseball isn't quite on that level. I'm not sure what a gun can be aimed at without intent to damage it.
2. Intense force or great power, as in natural phenomena.
A gunshot definitely feels like an intense force. You could argue it for a strike from a baseball bat but it's quite relative and of course you can strike gently much more easily than you can shoot gently.
> In the case of the shooting examples the idea is to destroy the clay pots or damage the target. Baseball isn't quite on that level. I'm not sure what a gun can be aimed at without intent to damage it.
The point of clay target shooting isn't to destroy something, it's to build a skill and test yourself against an impartial system. That's what Duck Hunt captures and what made it popular. It's why shooting is a sport in the olympics.
Plenty of social reasons too, beyond hunting and self-defense, it can serve comradery and grounding. Some folks practice archery. Some folks fish. Some folks practice martial arts which they hope never to have to use in anger, but which they find calming, centering, and empowering.
> Plenty of social reasons too, beyond hunting and self-defense, it can serve comradery and grounding. Some folks practice archery. Some folks fish. Some folks practice martial arts which they hope never to have to use in anger, but which they find calming, centering, and empowering.
I'm not debating that. I have no moral issue with shooting a clay duck, I just see using explosives to shoot anything as an act of violence. I would say the same about fishing and archery. There seems to be some confusion here about the moral aspect of this, I'm not saying it's anti-social or anything like that, only that the use of guns is inherently violent.
All tools have potential use for violence. Hammers are as good at smashing heads as building houses. Even nuclear weapons have been used for constructive purposes. No tool is inherently good or evil, safe or violent. Those are properties of verbs. Everything is in the application and choices of the user.
Blaming a tool does seem like a convenient way to avoid personal responsibility.
Again I'm not making a moral argument here. I'm not talking about good and evil. I'm talking about violence and non-violence. A gun being used for "a good purpose" doesn't make it less violent.
So to you a flare gun is violent? It's a gun. Takes 12ga cartridges / shells. It can certainly be used to kill someone, but is designed and intended for saving lives. Is a knife violent? How about a letter opener? What about rope? Does it become violent only when certain knots are tied in it? How does this violent / non-violent object dichotomy work for you?
Violence, to me, is a verb someone can do to someone else, very specifically, with just about any object since the discovery of the rock and pointy stick.
> Violence, to me, is a verb someone can do to someone else, very specifically
That's fine, I already shared several dictionary definitions which differ from what it is "to you." To answer your questions above I would refer you again to those definitions.
You seem to be making some sort of qualitative argument about weapons (bullets, arrows... fishing rods?) vs non-weapons (baseballs), but I'm not seeing what makes archery categorically different from, say, playing darts, or shot-put (in all cases, a sport involving rapidly accelerating a projectile towards a goal of some kind)
No, not about weapons, about effects. Fishing is violent because it harms fish, not because a fishing rod is categorised as a weapon. I don't think archery is categorically different than darts. Shot-put is somewhat different in that nothing need be damaged in performing it but you're right that the launching of the projectile could be seen as violent. The former two meet both definitions of violence whereas the latter meets only one. The thing with a gun is that any use of them involves violence of multiple kinds.
