The banality of Big Tech’s evil

I was referred to the article by Cory Doctorow entitled Ayyyyyy Eyeeeee - The lie that raced around the world before the truth got its boots on by a Tumblr post.

It pertains to one particular lie propagated by those who shill machine learning under the brand of AI, one called ‘criti-hype’ i.e. criticism that incorporates a self-serving commercial boast. To use the article’s example case:

But there’s another aspect to Hamilton’s fantasy about the blood-lusting, operator-killing drone: this may be a dangerous weapon, but it is also a powerful one.

A drone that has the “smarts” to “realize” that its primary objective of killing enemies is being foiled by a human operator in a specific air-traffic control tower is a very smart drone. File the rough edges off that bad boy and send it into battle and it’ll figure out angles that human operators might miss, or lack the situational awareness to derive. Put that algorithm in charge of space-based nukes and tell the world that even if your country bombs America into radioactive rubble, the drones will figure out who’s responsible and nuke ’em ’till they glow! Yee-haw, I’m the Louis Pasteur of Mutually Assured Destruction!

The genius of this tactic is described thusly:

By focusing on Facebook’s own claims about behavior modification, these critics shifted attention away from Facebook’s real source of power: evading labor and tax law, using predatory pricing and killer acquisitions to neutralize competitors, showering lawmakers in dark money to forestall the passage and/or enforcement of privacy law, defrauding advertisers and publishers, illegally colluding with Google to rig ad markets, and using legal threats to silence critics.

These are very boring sins, the same tactics that every monopolist has used since time immemorial. Framing Facebook as merely the latest clutch of mediocre sociopaths to bribe the authorities to look the other way while it broke ordinary laws suggests a pretty ordinary solution: enforce those laws, round up the miscreants, break up the company.

However, if Facebook is run by evil sorcerers, then we need to create entirely novel anti-sorcery measures, the likes of which society has never seen. That’ll take a while, during which time, Facebook can go on committing the same crimes as Rockefeller and Carnegie, but faster, with computers.

And best of all, Facebook can take “evil sorcerer” to the bank. There are plenty of advertisers, publishers, candidates for high office, and other sweaty, desperate types who would love to have an evil sorcerer on their team, and they’ll pay for it.

…

So long as Congress is focused on preventing our robot overlords from emerging, they won’t be forcing these companies to halt discriminatory hiring and rampant spying.

Best of all, the people who get rich off this stuff get to claim to be evil sorcerers, rather than boring old crooks.

The article pointed me to a book authored by Doctorow, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, the entirety of which is available here.

The book is an in depth examination of the phenomenon of Surveillance Capitalism, one aspect of which is talked about in the article. Here is a non-exhaustive summary of the book.

Doctorow starts by exploring why we have a rise of conspiracy theories, anti-intellectualism and misinformation.

What if the trauma of living through real conspiracies all around us — conspiracies among wealthy people, their lobbyists, and lawmakers to bury inconvenient facts and evidence of wrongdoing (these conspiracies are commonly known as “corruption”) — is making people vulnerable to conspiracy theories?

Like in the article, he points out that Big Tech does not have mind control beams, and persuasion itself is not so powerful, as monopolism is.

influence campaigns that seek to displace existing, correct beliefs with false ones have an effect that is small and temporary while monopolistic dominance over informational systems has massive, enduring effects. Controlling the results to the world’s search queries means controlling access both to arguments and their rebuttals and, thus, control over much of the world’s beliefs. If our concern is how corporations are foreclosing on our ability to make up our own minds and determine our own futures, the impact of dominance far exceeds the impact of manipulation and should be central to our analysis and any remedies we seek.

Doctorow debunks the idea that collecting and hoarding data is in itself a source of power – rather it is a Ponzi scheme, an application of the greater fool theory: 

Pick-up artists assume they fail to entice women because they are bad at being pick-up artists, not because pick-up artistry is bullshit. Pick-up artists are bad at selling themselves to women, but they’re much better at selling themselves to men who pay to learn the secrets of pick-up artistry.

…

Even if you never figure out how to profit from the data, someone else will eventually offer to buy it from you to give it a try.

The real danger of such data hoards is from identity theft and related crimes. And of course, government surveillance.

any hard limits on surveillance capitalism would hamstring the state’s own surveillance capability. 

Again he points out how Big Tech’s so-called mind control or even influence is based on tenuous stuff.

For example, the reliance on the “Big Five” personality traits as a primary means of influencing people even though the “Big Five” theory is unsupported by any large-scale, peer-reviewed studies and is mostly the realm of marketing hucksters and pop psych.

The antidote, he says, is in the poison itself. Facebook started by allowing people to import data from other social media and uploading contacts, i.e. it started by exploiting interoperability of technology. And it can be ended the same way.

Today, incumbency is seen as an unassailable advantage. Facebook is where all of your friends are, so no one can start a Facebook competitor. But adversarial compatibility reverses the competitive advantage: If you were allowed to compete with Facebook by providing a tool that imported all your users’ waiting Facebook messages into an environment that competed on lines that Facebook couldn’t cross, like eliminating surveillance and ads, then Facebook would be at a huge disadvantage. 

The biggest danger of all, is corruption, leading to an epistemological crisis.

This concentration of both wealth and industries means that our political outcomes are increasingly beholden to the parochial interests of the people and companies with all the money.

…

In a world as complex as this one, we have to defer to authorities, and we keep them honest by making those authorities accountable to us and binding them with rules to prevent conflicts of interest. We can’t possibly acquire the expertise to adjudicate conflicting claims about the best way to make the world safe and prosperous, but we can determine whether the adjudication process itself is trustworthy.

…

You’re left with a kind of inchoate constellation of rules of thumb about which experts you trust to fact-check controversial claims and then to explain how all those respectable doctors with their peer-reviewed research on opioid safety were an aberration and then how you know that the doctors writing about vaccine safety are not an aberration.

…

No one can say for certain why this has happened, but the two dominant camps are idealism (the belief that the people who argue for these conspiracies have gotten better at explaining them, maybe with the help of machine-learning tools) or materialism (the ideas have become more attractive because of material conditions in the world).

I’m a materialist. I’ve been exposed to the arguments of conspiracy theorists all my life, and I have not experienced any qualitative leap in the quality of those arguments.

The major difference is in the world, not the arguments. In a time where actual conspiracies are commonplace, conspiracy theories acquire a ring of plausibility.

We have always had disagreements about what’s true, but today, we have a disagreement over how we know whether something is true. This is an epistemological crisis, not a crisis over belief. It’s a crisis over the credibility of our truth-seeking exercises, from scientific journals (in an era where the biggest journal publishers have been caught producing pay-to-play journals for junk science) to regulations (in an era where regulators are routinely cycling in and out of business) to education (in an era where universities are dependent on corporate donations to keep their lights on).

Throughout the book Doctorow notes that both Big Tech and its critics agree that tech, its powers and associated troubles are somehow unique. Tech exceptionalism, basically. Doctorow refutes their belief. But he does believe in one exceptional power of tech: coordination.

The hard problem of our species is coordination. Everything from climate change to social change to running a business to making a family work can be viewed as a collective action problem.

…

The upshot of this is that our best hope of solving the big coordination problems — climate change, inequality, etc. — is with free, fair, and open tech. Our best hope of keeping tech free, fair, and open is to exercise caution in how we regulate tech and to attend closely to the ways in which interventions to solve one problem might create problems in other domains.

Doctorow notes that just as anti-whalers and anti-pollution activists were united under the term ‘ecology’ and the mandate of protecting it, activists working against Big Tech have to unite under the umbrella of trustbusting (enacting and enforcing anti-trust legislation and policy).

But there is a catch: governments worldwide prefer that Big Tech clean up their own messes, by policing their users. So if you want a temporary fix of reducing the level of online abuse and crime, while working towards breaking up Big Tech in the long run, that won’t work.

That’s because any move to break up Big Tech and cut it down to size will have to cope with the hard limit of not making these companies so small that they can no longer afford to perform these duties — and it’s expensive to invest in those automated filters and outsource content moderation. It’s already going to be hard to unwind these deeply concentrated, chimeric behemoths that have been welded together in the pursuit of monopoly profits. Doing so while simultaneously finding some way to fill the regulatory void that will be left behind if these self-policing rulers were forced to suddenly abdicate will be much, much harder.

The ultimate solution:

As cyber lawyer Lawrence Lessig wrote in his 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, our lives are regulated by four forces: law (what’s legal), code (what’s technologically possible), norms (what’s socially acceptable), and markets (what’s profitable).

…

Getting people to care about monopolies will take technological interventions that help them to see what a world free from Big Tech might look like. Imagine if someone could make a beloved (but unauthorized) third-party Facebook or Twitter client that dampens the anxiety-producing algorithmic drumbeat and still lets you talk to your friends without being spied upon — something that made social media more sociable and less toxic. Now imagine that it gets shut down in a brutal legal battle. It’s always easier to convince people that something must be done to save a thing they love than it is to excite them about something that doesn’t even exist yet.

Arrival - the gaviṣṭi fiasco

Yesterday I watched the critically acclaimed English movie Arrival (2016) for the first time, and the first thing that stuck with me was the use of the word गविष्टि (gaviṣṭi).

***spoilers ahead***

In the film, the protagonist, a professor of linguistics, is approached by the US government to attempt to translate alien communication. She tells the Col. who approaches her that she needs to see said aliens and talk to them face to face in order to translate. The Col. refuses, with the implication that he would seek another expert. Our protagonist asks him to judge the proficiency of their other candidate by asking them

the Sanskrit word for 'war' and its translation

The word the candidate came up with was गविष्टि. This is in itself strange because Sanskrit has many common words for war, all of which have also been inherited by multiple Indian languages and are in currency in the 21st century.

What is stranger is the literal translation offered for this word. The other candidate translated it as 'argument', and our protagonist translated it as 'desire for more cows', and the movie implies that the latter is more accurate.

They're both wrong. It is an easy error to make, because it is a compound word made out of the word गव, which indeed means cow, and ईष्टि which does mean desire. But this error is all the more egregious because linguistics is one of the foundations of the movie and the story it was based on.

In reality, the word गव, meaning cow, is often put in compound words for emphasis, both in Sanskrit and its nibling languages such as Bengali. I have here four examples to demonstrate my point.

1. गविष्टि (gaviṣṭi): A desire as ardent as the desire for cows. Ultimate desire, basically. Extended meaning: the conflict fuelled by said desire, or the desire for such conflict. In practice, the kind of conflict referred to by this word is restricted to individual battles, not a whole war

2. गवेषणा (gaveṣaṇā): Synonymous with above, including the extended meaning about conflict. However when used in neuter/feminine gender it has the additional meaning of: the quest/research undertaken to acquire the object of said desire. This last meaning is now the dominant meaning of the word, especially in the extant Indian languages where it is used to describe scientific and philosophical research.

3. গোহারা (gohārā): A loss as bad as the loss of cows, i.e. an utter and humiliating defeat. I grew up hearing this applied to the Indian Men’s cricket team’s losses, especially against their Pakistani counterparts

4. গোরুখোঁজা (gorukhonja): A search as desperate as the search for a missing cow.

Evidently, cows were and continue to be important!

I don’t know how they got Gaviṣṭi to mean ‘argument’. Yes, the word ‘गो’ also means ‘word’ in addition to 'cow', but that has no relation to how it got to acquire the meaning of a ‘conflict’.

Anyways, as a fun exercise, here are the actual words for war in Sanskrit and their meanings, in order of popularity of usage:

1. युद्ध (yuddha) - in the masculine gender: the conquered party; in the feminine gender: the action of gaining victory over, or launching attack on; in the neutral gender: the battle or war that is fought

2. संग्राम (sangrama) - the coming together or assembly of a tribe/village/troops thereof, to beat the shit out of other tribes/villages. The resulting battle/war.

3. रण (raṇa) - in the masculine gender: joy, pleasure (related to रम्), making noise (onomatopoeia); in the neuter gender: fight, struggle, war - presumably in the sense of 'an encounter that makes a lot of noise'

4. समर (samara) - the act of joining together to hurt others, war.

It is significant, I think, that two out of these words focus on the fundamentally cooperative nature of war - about how war is a collective effort - it is not one person’s struggle against anything.

Coming back to the film, another egregious error it commits is in its handling of Linguistic relativity. But that's a subject for another post.

Women in the Vedas

I came across this answer about the status of women in Vedic society. It is very detailed, and the author is a subject matter expert on Vedic texts.

However I was intrigued by a singular claim being made in it - that Vedic Society was not patriarchal. So I requested citations for the answer, which the author graciously provided in a comment.

This is my further response to the answer.

Text of original answer	Citations in comment	My observations
Here, we should be speaking of the status of women in society, as reflected in the sūktas of Rigveda in the early Vedic period.  First, the society was presumably patrilineal (tracing lineage through male descendant) one, though not patriarchy.		In your citations you frequently quote the Rigveda, the Atharvaveda and even the Arthaśāstra together, even though their provenance is several centuries, even millennia apart. It sounds as if the culture they describe is contiguous and unchanging across those impossibly vast stretches of time. Is such comparison valid? And then there is the small matter of caste. Whom do these texts represent? Only the Brahmins and their customs? Or Vedic society at large? Do you have evidence? Because unless you prove that the Vedic samhitas are somehow representative of the entire society of that time, you don’t get to make statements about society at large.
Even then, we have some sages identifying themselves with matronymic instead of patronymic, like Dīrghatamas who is known best as Māmateya, or Suhastya as Ghauṣeya. Both mother and father are equally cherished.	Dīrghatamas refers to himself as Māmateya - RV 1.147.3, 1.152.6, 1.158.6. Gautama refers to Dīrghatamas as Māmateya in RV 4.4.13. The sage of RV 10.41 is Suhastya Ghauṣeya, the son of Ghoṣā, as per Rigveda Anukramaṇī. Ghoṣā is his mother, who is the sage of RV 10.39 and 10.40	I fail to understand how usage of matronymics translates to “Both mother and father are equally cherished”.  The correct conclusion would instead be: mother’s name was considered a valid basis for identification of individuals. Which is very cool, but in and of itself has no bearing on whether a society is patrilinear or patriarchal.
This is quite the opposite of absolute patriarchies where “G”od is imagined as father and creating a series of patriarchs in myths who act kings and propagate the mankind. To compare, in many patriarchal Indo European societies, Sky-dad was given more prominence as opposed to the Earth-mother, whereas Rigveda never does this, and whenever possible, addresses both together, in the compound form Dyāvāpṛthivī.	There is no sūkta in Rigveda dedicated to Dyaus Pitar alone, it is always invoking both - the Dyāvāpṛthivī. This is a fact.	Women are represented among deities. Divinity is considered plural, and necessarily bigendered. Impressive. Also less relevant than you think: My answer to "Why is goddess worship important for the world?" TL;DR version: "the Hindu patriarchal impulse to subordinate women is rooted in the acknowledgment that women are powerful... the task for Hindu feminists, at an ideological level, is to rescue shakti from its patriarchal prison" Source: Is Shakti Empowering for Women? Reflections on Feminism and the Hindu Goddess
This also reflects in the idea of daṃpatī (the Mister-Mistress couple) as rulers of home, rather than male.	Dampatī is almost always a dual compound present in Rigveda, that occurs in the sense of “ruling couple of house”.	Co-rulers of the home. Okay. Who has the final say in case of disputes?
	However, as I said in the answer, this is slightly different from other IE cultures where cognate of dam(s)pati is used for “the lord” of the house, and a cognate of “dams-patnī” is used to address a mistress. (Cf. déms pótis)	So does the word damspatni exist in Vedic Sanskrit? What does it mean? Is it also used in the sense of “ruling couple of the house”?
	Aśvins in RV 2.39.2 are compared to married couple taking part in religious rites, Agni is said to be anointed as Mitra (/companion) when he sets together the dampatī of one mind, etc.	So one of the Aśvins just sits around doing nothing but giving consent, and the other one does most of the job? Also the married couple is likewise being compared to a pair of twins. (Analogies are commutative, you know.) What does that mean? What were the “twin stereotypes” in the Vedic age?
Women often had a different world of their own, engrossed in arts - singing, dancing.		Gender roles. Start of the slippery slope towards patriarchy
They also are supposed to handle the ceremonies by custom. (And the adventurous yajña toiling is a male effort with a lesser but very necessary physical participation of females)		This reminds me of a statement in ISKCON’s Heart of Hinduism. Take a look: “the wife’s roles were centred on the home and she was not burdened with contributing towards the family income.” In both the statements, work traditionally associated with men is framed as toil or burden that women are being spared from. What is conspicuously absent from these statements is that the kind of work being described here enable men to have a huge advantage in power. Surely you can’t deny that, can you?
Rigveda also shows women did work like grinding and selling flours to earn their money, as Śiśu Āṅgirasa would suggest in RV 9.112.3.		So women could earn money. Could they keep it?
They also usually looked after household, ruled the husband’s home and protected the livestock.	Ref. RV 10.85.	Again with the home. I’m beginning to worry.
Women are also composer sages of Vedic verses, something we would never have expected in a Bronze age society, with verses being handled down through a primarily male lineage.	Even if we remove the female sages who identify themselves/are identified with legendary females, like those of Vāc Āṃbhṛṇī, the Apālā sūkta, Ghoṣā sūktas, sūkta of Śacī Paulomī are all indeed of female composers. In my knowledge, I don’t know of similar women in Zoroastrian, Greek, Norse or Roman cultures.	Allow me to point you to the Völva of the Norse peoples. Unlike the female sages here, whose existence is not corroborated by sources outside their self-identification, the Völva and their counterparts in other Germanic cultures were real women, who held actual power in society, whose presence was attested by a culture foreign to them (Romans, in this case), and whose gravesites have been found by archaeologists. It seems to me that Vedic culture is the one which has to prove itself.
And they have a high position in the society, as a complement to the masculine part of nature.	In Atharvaveda’s words (which are even used today without knowing meaning in Brahmanic marriages) the husband-wife are compared to Ṛk-sāman, Cakravākā pair, Dyāvāpṛthivī. A complementary vision.	As a complement? Why as a complement? Are not people valuable on their own? Are the men of the Vedic period also solely cherished as being a complement to the feminine part of nature? Like I said you have very low standards for what constitutes a high position in society.
The yajña requires wife of the sacrificer, without which it cannot be done. We might even have an allusion to ruling ladies, as Śyāvāśva’s patron’s wife, or Śacī Paulomī and her daughter.	A well-known fact. Every śrauta and gṛhya ritual needs one to have the consent and presence of his wife, even in classical Brahmanism. Even in the daily aupāsana ritual we perform, the husband asks the wife for consent, and the wife has to respond “please do”, so that the offering is done. This is, unfortunately getting replaced by a “temple-worship” that is heavily male-oriented and gives no role to women. The importance of wife is substantiated in many Rigvedic themes, esp. in the Mudgalānī episode, she recovering her husband through mounting the chariot of yajña (RV 10.102) and driving it to success.	What happens if wife says “Don’t?” Are you trying to argue that the wife is the mistress of the chariot and the man is the charioteer – that the woman is actually in control? Or that she even has control? That was a reference to the Kathopanishad, as I’m sure you’d have noticed. Well unless you’re trying to argue the above, all this tells me is that women’s so-called participation in yajña is mere lip service.
Most often, women appear in Rigveda as lovely, beautiful wives, sometimes as bold, choosing lovers, but one time as “heart-breaker” in the case of Urvaśī who breaks up with Purūravas leaving the latter in sadness.		Relevance?
Women also come as queens, as sages, as protectors of livestock, as speakers in assemblies, as divinities, as mothers, as nurses, as yajamānapatnīs, patrons, as charioteers, singers, dancers and so much more. Overall, the role of women was far better than the classical times.		Not impressed by women as queens – Women in Ancient Egypt Do women also appear as sacrificers/priestesses, yajamanas (as opposed to wives of one), ministers/administrators/clerks/officials (as opposed to queens), carpenters, potters, and warriors? Are they seen holding up half the sky, not in mythology, not in theory, but in everyday life?
Regarding marriages, all the three are recognized - monogamy, polygamy, polyandry. However, both polygamy and polyandry are confined to divinities (Soma mating with waters, or Maruts with Rodasī) in early Rigveda. In later Rigveda, we find a tilt towards acceptance of polygamy as a norm, but monogamy is still the ideal.		So what?
The marriage hymn for example, talks only of a couple as a religiously united one.	The marriage hymn is RV 10.85, celebrating marriage of Sūryā with Soma. In the elaboration of this sūkta in Atharvaveda (which is the foundation of Brahmanic marriages) the pair is compared to cakravāka pair (a kind of geese, known to be very faithful to each other till their death in the culture) along with other complementary one-one pairs. (Ṛk-sāman, Dyāvāpṛthivī)	Again, relevance? What does this have to say for the status of a wife? That she had job security?
This existed even in classical Brahmanism, and thus monogamy was always supported. You could have only one religiously recognized partner in Brahmanism - as a wife, if she with her husband has established the Agnihotra fire, then he cannot marry anyone else. Kings however might not have had a restriction.	Brahmanism was made with monogamy as the ideal, so a person who has married and has established the tretāgni with his wife becomes connected to his wife (whatever he offers is as per her consent and she becomes a part of his own deeds). In most of the dharmaśāstras, mentioning this instance, remarriage for a man is prohibited (unless his wife dies). (Āpastamba 2.5.11.12 for instance)	So monogamy = lack of patriarchy? How?
Mating against will of a woman (even if married or in a relationship) is highly discouraged,	In the verses, it is always “a passionate husband with his eager wife”. (uśatī) The institution of marriage itself exists for this. This is also the position of Brahmanism that bases itself on Vedas. As we might see in Āpastamba 2.1.1.18, which suggests one shall mate only when his wife decides. In Arthaśāstra, Kauṭilya warns several times, “A man shall never have intercourse with a woman against her will”. (Arthaśāstra 4.12)	Marital rape recognised as a crime! Wait, no, it isn’t. Enthusiastic consent is recognised as being ideal. True. But is rape even recognised as a crime? What are the punishments for such an act?
as Urvaśī’s taunting of Purūravas might show. The woman could break-up such a relationship.	In RV 10.95, Urvaśī explains her position that she is walking away from the relationship, by saying that Purūravas used to mate with her who “wasn’t interested in it” (RV 10.95.5, note the term “avyatyai”, “for avyatī”) That a woman could break a marriage where she perceived danger from her husband was true even at the time of Arthaśāstra and even in classical times.	Wait, wait. So Urvaśī is a marital rape survivor? Wasn’t she a “heartbreaker” a few paragraphs back? Which is it? I’m confused. And why is her dumping of a rapist considered “taunting”?
Unwed girls getting pregnant was however, not viewed positively in the society. A girl could love someone and marry her choice in public. But unwed and still being pregnant? Women didn’t want that. Women usually shunned these kids after giving birth in secret. However, Vedic sages stand with such shunned kids and their mothers to an extent, that a regularly praised deed of Indra is that he rescues the shunned son of unwed girl and uplifts him. He also takes birth himself as a shunned son of his mother, but still fights for the honour of his mother.	“Unwed girls getting pregnant was however, not viewed positively in the society.“ “that a regularly praised deed of Indra is that he rescues the shunned son of unwed girl and uplifts him. “ Recalled in RV 4.31.16, and also in 2.13.12, 2.15.7, 1.112.8. “He also takes birth himself as a shunned son of his mother, but still fights for the honour of his mother.” Cf. RV 4.17.	Classic symptom of patriarchy. Pours water all over your matronymic argument. Apparently a mother’s identity is not valid on its own.
However, we don’t see any place where there is thrashing of women or policing of women, though we have quite an interesting request to the bride to not hit her husband and be kind!	Wife is called “apatighnyā”, (not smiting husband) “śivā” (kind) and prayed to be bliss to the biped and quadruped. (RV 10.85.43, 10.85.44) This is even today “recited” to the wife faithfully as is the custom, when she enters the household, although people have no idea of what is in the verse.	This only tells me that violence by women was considered as being especially bad. As opposed to violence by men which was so normalised that it was not even mentioned.
At least some men who tasted failed relationships did exist in Rigvedic period too, and they were afraid of women. :) This is probably enjoyed by Urvaśī as she cold-heartedly dismisses off Purūravas’s request (you would understand her perspective if you see how much Purūravas was obsessed with his manliness and his charm to attract girls before) with a cold remark calling him fool, that long-lasting friendship for him is not possible with women, because women have hearts of hyenas.		Enjoyed by Urvaśī? Cold-hearted? Are these words appropriate to someone who dumped their unfaithful and rapist boyfriend?
(hyenas symbolize self- security, self-sufficience, parenting)	This is the case in Rigveda, especially when Indra himself is shown as a hyena with his thousand cubs in his mouth in RV 10.73.3.	Nice to know.
It is interesting to see that Rigveda has no instance of force afflicted upon women except for Indra’s exception when he fights Uṣas. Conjugal rights were conferred upon women, as we see even in the earliest dharmasūtras of BCEs. It is this right that Lopāmudra evokes to make her ascetically inclined husband realize the worth of a wife in the completion of human existence. This is also the matter related to Mudgalānī, who through being the charioteer of her husband’s sacrifice, revives him. Indra, Soma and even Brahmā sage become women in Rigveda. Whatever the males think of females in that period, all the females in Rigveda are bold and outspoken - they are quite direct, precise.		By conjugal rights I hope you don’t mean the right of either party to demand sex at will. Because that’s just a license to commit marital rape. The fact that women hold such license is not an indicator that the system is not patriarchal. “realize the worth of a wife in the completion of human existence” Not only classical patriarchy, but an example of how patriarchy harms men. “Whatever the males think of females in that period” So it’s not evident is it? Just from the Rigveda. Glad you acknowledge it. How then, did do you make the sweeping statement before? That the society was presumably patrilineal (tracing lineage through male descendant) one, though not patriarchy.
It is not surprising that the vivāha sūkta, the marriage hymn (Rigveda 10.85) that has withstood the test of time, is from a woman’s perspective.	The impression it has on us. Even following the tradition, the sage is also “Sūryā Sāvitrī”. You are free to disagree.	I don’t need your permission to disagree. But thanks. And I do disagree.
Finally, it is interesting to see how in Rigveda and Atharvaveda, the sage specifically consoles the young widow who lies herself beside her husband, and commands her to “return to the world of life, be the mistress of the progeny and legacy left by her husband”.	RV 10.18.8, elaborated in Atharvaveda. Quite opposite to the picture of an “obedient” daughter-in-law, the Rigvedic bride is asked to become the “supreme queen” over her husband’s household (saṃrājñī bhava …, RV 10.85.46). At least Śacī Paulomī’s self-praise sūkta in Rigveda gives a vision of a woman who took pride in her power and success.	Why? Why is a household being treated as a dominion, as opposed to a domicile? Homes and households are supposed to be places free of power struggles, where people live in peace and comfort. They are supposed to be the ultimate neutral ground. What does it say about the society when it treats the home as a battleground?
This is to be specifically contrasted with post-classical India where Satī became a known practice.	Based on whatever I have said as in Vedas and agreeing orthodox Brahmanic scriptures, I have presented my conclusion. I believe it would be an appeal to Presentism to not see the obvious fact that women as envisioned in the Vedas are quite different from what the idea of an oppressive patriarchy demands. Or what became in later India.	Holding human beings accountable to standards of basic decency (the strong not trampling the weak, people having equal rights and opportunities irrespective of their gender, caste or other station in life) should not have to be an “ism”. And it sure as hell is not a fallacy. In fact a refusal to do so either means you don’t think historical people are fully human (Bigotry of low expectations) or that you condone their actions. And while you do know a lot about the texts you have quoted, you don’t know a lot about what patriarchy means. Patriarchy is a system in which society is organised to benefit the handful of men in power, the male gender as a whole, and people of other genders and classes who uphold the system, in that order. It is not defined by oppression, it is defined by power, just as a dictatorship remains a dictatorship no matter how benevolent it might be. I could not find any conclusive evidence in your citations that women wielded any power in the economic, social, legal and religious spheres. The home was their sole domain, it seems, and power in this sphere was also shared, as it should be. Your citations and the corresponding conclusions you draw from them raise a lot of questions, and in many cases actually prove the opposite of your central claim – that Vedic society was not patriarchal.  That it was better than later societies in – wait, which way again? Matronymics – countered by stigma against unwed pregnancy. Marital rape discouraged (only discouraged, mind you) – countered by conjugal rights (whatever they might be). So perhaps you should revise your claims, or at least reconsider them.

Anatomy of a Murder

Humans kill each other all the time. This is not a special or unique attribute. Many kinds of animals kill their own.

But humans also hate killing each other. In this again, we are not unique. Many kinds of animals will not kill their own, and mourn deeply if they accidentally do.

In some societies everybody had a license to kill. In others it was a privilege and responsibility vested only with the state and its limbs – the nobility, the army, the judiciary and sometimes, the clergy. Anybody who did not belong to one of these institutions and still dared to strike upon their neighbour became a murderer.

But in separating murder as a crime from the killing of humans in battle, sacrifice or punishment, we encounter a third impulse which is perhaps unique to humans – the need to emotionally and rationally justify the killing of our own.

This impulse may simply be an expression of our general need for rationalising things. Or it may stem from the cognitive dissonance that occurs when we try to reconcile our innate bloodlust with our innate empathy.

Regardless, as a result of this impulse, the plain act of killing a fellow human being does not determine the morality of a person. Whether it be stories or real life, killers of any kind and creed can be found acceptable, and even heroic.

This phenomenon may or may not extend to transhuman/humanoid characters, be they victim or perpetrator.

A stunning number of classical heroes and deities are renowned and prolific killers of demons, ogres, giants and other sentient non-human humanoid beings. Modern heroes likewise kill zombies and aliens and suchlike with impunity.

The same courtesy is sometimes extended to vampires or the occasional alien who are treated sympathetically despite their human bodycount.

But what does all this mean?

I think it means that we humans are discerning creatures, and we do not consider all similar actions equivalent. That a human life has been lost is not the only point. The motive, the process and the circumstances all matter to us.

Detractors of this point of view claim that such thinking results from, and results in bigotry. That in judging one death to be a tragedy, and another to be a necessity, we effectively claim that some lives are worthier than others.

They are not wrong.

The same kind of utilitarian view is also taken in labelling killers as honourable heroes or despicable murderers.

Inevitably the question arises, ‘Who decides which life is worthier than another?’ The answer to this and other variants of Juvenal’s satirical question is simply, ‘whomever is in power’.

As I've written in my answer to Why should a God resort to violence and war?

The question of justification of a war is raised by four kinds of people:

• The current or prospective belligerents of the war, who are looking for a reason to enter, continue or exit the war. Non-combat intervention, such as through sanctions and embargoes and other forms of influence, also counts as belligerence here. Their criteria for 'justness' is mainly a matter of cost-benefit analysis. 
• The participating public, i.e. the civilian population of the belligerent countries/communities who show their indirect support to the war through funding, etc. Their criteria for 'justness' is basically ideology (patriotism is an ideology). 
• The so-called innocent bystanders, who are affected by the crossfire/aftermath despite not being active belligerents or passive participants. Their criteria for 'justness' is a sort of commonly expected corollary to the Golden rule viz. "we've hurt no one, therefore we should not be hurt by anyone". 
• The analysts who view the war either from a safe distance or in hindsight, analysts like you and me. We can judge a war by any number of criteria - morality, practicality, divine sanction, etc. etc.

Replace ‘war’ with ‘killing’ and you’ve got your answer.

Nevertheless, current opinion dictates that people and fictional characters who kill others for whatever reason should at least show some hesitation or remorse for their actions in order to remain sympathetic to the audience.

I’m not sure where I stand with that.

I am not in any way or form, a pacifist. I do sincerely believe that killing someone is sometimes the only solution, and I applaud the people who take on this difficult job, so that the rest of us can keep our hands and conscience clean. But even so killing people is never the first solution, and that the license to kill, like other forms of power, should only be entrusted with those who truly understand the value of life.

If at all my protagonist is required to kill, I don’t want them to be hesitant or remorseful, but to be careful and introspective, much like Captain Yoo Shi-jin of DOTS.