alt Hacker NewsI'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. Are you implying that secularism is the cause of counterfeit goods on Amazon? Or am I reading you wrong?
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I agree with some of their sentiment but disagree that it is secularism specifically.
If anything, my observation has been that social media provides better avenues for exploitation by bad actors and, for lack of a better term, people unwilling to do 'self work'.
It used to be a lot harder to 'grift'; historically, a community would eventually suss out bad actors which leads to shunning/etc.
But, when your 'community' is an entire country or a large area of the planet, the signal/noise ratio changes along with the behavior of the bad actors.
As an example not directly related to Amazon, I've worked with more than one person who would be a decent programmer if they worked on their job skills as much as they worked on their job hopping skills; online job posting (at least for a while) made it way easier for someone to just hop from job to job collecting a paycheck before the 'well now they should be onboarded and productive' red line is crossed and they are found out.
I've seen it with more than one person that is happy to screw over multiple 'friends' because they just use the internet to find the right groups to make new friends [0].
I've seen it with acquaintances where they just keep burning through 'matches' on dating sites without any introspection as to their own toxic behavior[1].
And sure, in all these cases people bad actors can still get 'outed'. However the bad actors are also happy to be dishonest in their own messaging, which again messes with the SNR. They'll just try to drag you through the mud and drain your endurance fighting their lies if you try to speak up, and unless you've really got time to burn... everyone stays quiet.
And, well, society is worse as a result.
[0] - They'll even pick up new interests in the process, once they've sufficiently burned themselves in a given community.
[1] - My favorite example was two narcissists that -both- were looking to replace the other before they broke up with each other...
Secularism, changes in 'christianity' in the US. I'm not some christian nationalist but I do believe changes in values allowed Amazon to do this. Maybe I'm wrong and people will end up going against this in the long term. The 'christian' view of this behaviour didn't come from a vacuum. My biggest worry is the passivity/docile nature of people nowadays can't bring such change.