Predators 2010 Quotes

Today the most serious computer predators are funded by rich criminal syndicates and even nation-states, and their goals are far more ambitious. Cyberattacks were launched at digital networks in Estonia by ethnic Russian protesters in 2007 and in Georgia before Russia attacked that country in 2008; and someone, probably Israel or the United States (or both), successfully loosed a worm called Stuxnet in 2010 to sabotage computer-controlled uranium centrifuges inside Iran’s secretive nuclear program.

Over the last few years, Greg Smith’s former company earned huge profits, first from the expansion of the American mortgage bubble and the European bubble of sovereign debt, and then again from the – almost simultaneous – bursting of these bubbles on either side of the Atlantic. Subsequently, Goldman Sachs proceeded to secure influence over some of the key political positions in the Italian, Greek and Spanish governments, in order to predate further on these countries after having driven them to the brink of disaster. The role of Goldman Sachs as one of the principal architects of the crisis in Greece was particularly remarkable. As was revealed in 2010, not only they had helped the Greek government to conceal the true state of the country’s finances, but at the same time they had also bet against Greece’s sovereign debt, hoping for its default. As a consequence, in a matter of weeks millions of Greek people saw their livelihoods utterly disintegrate, while the country sank into a state of widespread humanitarian emergency, as industries closed, hospitals ran out of medicine, and the suicide rate sky-rocketed.

It is worth noting that we are strongly biased to not appreciate the true horror of predation, since most victims of predation are non-human animals, and most of us do not feel remotely the same when seeing a non-human animal get eaten alive compared to when we see the same fate befall a human, even if the suffering is the same, or indeed greater, in the non-human case. Thus, to appreciate the true horror of predation, it may be necessary to see a human get eaten alive by predators, and then try to generalize the resulting feelings of horror to the non-human victims of predation (and it should be noted that human deaths due to predation are not, in fact, a rarity; for example, tigers alone are estimated to have killed more than 373,000 people between 1800 and 2009, Nyhus et al., 2010, pp. 132-135).

human beings are prone to violence when the costs of aggression are nil, and are much more peaceful when violence does not pay off. However, he (2010, chapter 4) adds that the combination of rational calculation based on self-interest and ‘strong reciprocity’ results in social trust that allows the company of strangers for individual human beings.