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Bitcoiner, Nuclear Engineer, Truth Maximalist, God not Religion, Earth not ESG Organizer of @npub1ynn5qnnc95qaqjejrtyazfdgutlxvme3djywe6s9wg76k68s37sqsl2qfd

Hey, guys, new block height ATH! 🥳

When they say:

"it's only used by criminals and for money laundering"

What they mean is:

"when it's used by criminals and for money laundering, we can't get our cut"

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/these-are-biggest-corporate-fines-2024

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Remember remember, to the moon in November. 🔥

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Kids have no school today, but I still have to work 😐

Has Dave shared what he thinks about Bitcoin? There are a lot of libertarians who are monero Maxi's literally because of silk road AFAIK.

Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

gm

In fiction, the point of view from how we see the story can often color how we perceive the ethics of characters. And of course, that lesson can apply in real life as well.

If you ask most people if Neo and Trinity in the Matrix are heroes or anti-heroes, for example, they’ll probably say heroes. There is nothing particularly dark or edgy about them other than kind of a general “cool” factor. They’re pretty chill and well-meaning people in their downtime, we care about their relationship, they help their friends, they have rather pure motivations, etc.

But in the Matrix, agents can teleport themselves into any unplugged person. Which means that when Neo or Trinity attack a place, they pretty much have to slaughter everyone. Leaving survivors means that agents can teleport in. Innocent guards and stuff just get wiped out by the dozens. The stakes of humanity being enslaved by the machines are so high, that the characters don’t even really debate the ethics of this; they just accept it.

Like literally the opening scene is Trinity killing police, and the audience is like “wow cool” instead of “so, is that the antagonist?” The famous lobby scene consists of Neo and Trinity wiping out tons of guards that are just doing their job of guarding a skyscraper. In the sequel, Trinity sends a motorcycle bomb into a power station, and then murders the remaining guards as they attack her. We all basically like Trinity, and yet there are platoons of widows and orphans out there from all the guards she killed. There aren’t really even any scenes of her reflecting on that, like finding it emotionally difficult in any way to do those things or feeling in any way haunted by it.

If the Matrix story was shown from like, a detective’s point of view, these characters are terrorists and would either seem like outright villains (if you don’t know their motivation) or anti-heroes if you do (ends justify the means; mass-murder is okay and not even worth feeling bad about if it saves billions).

So, how the movie *frames* things for us makes a big difference. We closely follow Neo and Trinity so much that we’re like, “of course they’re the heroes”. The same thing happens in real life with political commentators and things like that; a cultural narrative can frame something as wholly good or wholly bad when often it’s actually kind of complex.

Therefore, it’s a useful practice whether in analyzing fiction or real life, to always ask how you could invert the framing for something.

Great point. I always thought they were kind of tapping into the "it's all just a video game" kind of vibe, but you are so right because even in the matrix universe this is just an abstraction because if you die in the matrix you die IRL.

There is definitely also a hot war kind of mentality as well and as you point out, everyone who is still plugged in is essentially an agent. They also only kill indiscriminately when there is a greater threat of agents.

I think as I've gotten older and also as I've gotten closer to God, I now find myself questioning the morality of any war movie including WWII movies like saving private Ryan, which also came out in a similar time period. But that was not my mental frame at the time.

GM ☕

The last couple of weeks I've been getting up early and getting some work done before everyone else wakes up. But I keep the lights off in my office and have been enjoying the crackle of a local beeswax woodwick candle that my daughter got me 🙂

Never been able to attend a beefsteak, after listening to this episode, I vow to change that. Hope to meet you IRL at a meetup or beefsteak sometime 🍻

https://fountain.fm/episode/P5uprou4Ajg62FLUI6j6

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