cross-posted, via Microblogs Community.
Stop trying to make simple things sound complex – either because you like hearing the sound of your own voice or because of whatever insecurities drive you. If I’m kicking a puppy in the street, it’s because I’m an asshole. You don’t need to know my motivations. You just need to know I’m an asshole. And stop me.
Yes, this is about Israel.
I used the example of the puppy getting kicked as I’m painfully aware that, at least for some people, the thought of a puppy in distress is unbearable whereas tens of thousands of murdered Brown kids is just another Wednesday. (You’d have a hard time getting a politician who regularly kicks puppies to death elected but folks who consider themselves otherwise decent have not, so far at least, had an issue with voting for people who fund and arm Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.)
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Dog bites you
You kick it off you
You’re now just an asshole in a vacuum
Actually braindead black-and-white morality take.
It’s kinda hard that a puppy can bite a grown man hard enough to deserve a kicking in the street you know… We’re not talking about a grown dog.
Same with bombing a school, I think it’s safe to say that if you bomb a school full of children, you’re kind of an asshole.
Sometimes I want to post a comment but I stop myself because the brigade will come and I’m to tired to give a fuck
I think this is a thing some people need to hear. Sometimes this is true. Sometimes what matters more is that right now a person is being an asshole and needs to be stopped.
However, psychology has shown that all behavior has a reason, and we do ourselves a disservice by not taking the time to learn what conditions lead to that behavior so we can remove them or spot the behavioral patterns earlier and prevent it from resulting in puppy kicking.
It is not just the morally supeiror option to whatever the fuck we do now (in the US anyway), it’s also the more pragmatic solution. It’s just also not what the person who’s puppy was just kicked wants to hear.
If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.
–Boswell: Life of Johnson
Oh good. Someone who consistently espouses the most unhinged perspectives putting forth an argument against nuance and careful consideration.
Out of curiosity, what nuance and careful consideration should we take when we see a state bombing and killing tens of thousands of civilians, included kids?
Or when another state bombs a school full of girls?
Are we also going to “carefully consider” the holocaust?
I think we can say there are actions that can be considered universally evil, and both bombing a school full of children and an ethnical cleanse are, to my careful consideration, evil.
I can stop one person from hurting an animal, maybe. If they’re not armed with a gun or knife. If they don’t decide to punch me instead of the dog. If they don’t lie to the cop and say I started the fight.
I cannot stop a billion dollar corporation or a shitty president. At least not in a way that won’t likely get myself killed as well, and even then we’ve seen they just replace the shitty head of the snake with another and just carry on, like UHC.
So this isn’t a great comparison, especially when it skips from blaming “I” to “we” while completely ignoring how difficult it is to form any sort of consensus, much less one where everyone involved has to accept a massive amount of risk.
So stop trying to make complex things sound simple. The posited morality is simple, the action is not.
This could just as easily be abused to try to remove nuance with e.g. petty crime, a problem that is best solved by understanding the reasons behind it.
“But Hitler was a vegetarian!”
Oh wait, we’re way past the Hitler mic drop.
Aral is one of the first people I followed on the fediverse and I have a love-hate relationship with him. On one hand, he works on fantastic projects and his opinions are based (see above). On the other hand, he is one of the most negative and hateful online personalities I’ve seen
Aral sucks. It doesn’t matter if you agree with 99% of the things he says, if you so much as even question that 1% that he says which doesn’t quite line up to you, he quote-replies you to insult you in front of his audience and then blocks you before you can defend yourself. If he doesn’t have a proper response to your question, he’ll reply with “Oh so you believe [XYZ terrible things], huh?” which you never said and just leave that post hanging so you can’t reply to it, to make it look like you’ve given up on the argument and that he “won” it. Immature, pseudo-intellectual Twitter-user behavior, IMO.
I don’t get why people still follow him. His opinions are far from unique; you can find his exact same opinions from plenty of other Fediverse users, ones who won’t fall back on gradeschool bullying if you have a different opinion.
He comes up a lot on my instance. The only times I remember seeing really negative stuff was in response to abhorrent events going unchallenged elsewhere. So I see it as a normal human reaction.
That said, I don’t see all his posts.
But the puppy is a TERRORIST dontyouknow?!
What? That doesn’t make any sense.
His actions obviously justified because its the reincarnation of Hitler.
