Full title: “Shut the fk up!” Democrat storms out of event as voters voice criticism of anti-trans bill. “You can’t fking talk to me that way!” Rep. Eugene Vindman said before walking out without taking more questions.
Full title: “Shut the fk up!” Democrat storms out of event as voters voice criticism of anti-trans bill. “You can’t fking talk to me that way!” Rep. Eugene Vindman said before walking out without taking more questions.
Dang, this reminds me of what I was saying two years ago:
I’m just saying, if you’re willing to accept excuses like, “Palestine isn’t on the ballot this year” then you’ll readily accept excuses like “trans rights aren’t on the ballot” and so on, until there’s no one left to stand up for you.
Reject trolley problem thinking.
I’m autistic, and as far as I understand it, there seem to be two groups of people able to pass the trolley problem: psychopaths/sociopaths, and autistic people.
I’m going to tell you something. I don’t think this is trolley problem thinking, although superficially it looks that way. I think this is the opposite of trolley problem thinking.
Trolley problem thinking is having zero qualms about doing the thing which causes the most difficulty even when you personally would have to feel responsible for extremely negative consequences, in order to have the best possible outcome for the highest number of people.
The Trolley Problem isn’t an illustration about the difficulty between choosing the deaths of a small number of people versus choosing the deaths of a large number of people. It’s a demonstration that a person has the ability to live with themself knowing that their actions had the best possible consequences in a no-win scenario.
This person’s behavior isn’t an illustration of that. Ironically, the phrase “throw them under the bus” is appropriate here, because Eugene Vindman isn’t doing this for the purpose of winning, but instead because he lacks the ethics to feel that he is causing harm. He’s not doing it because he’s calculated that this will cause the best possible outcome, because if he had the ethics required for that kind of thinking, he would understand that the next step once transgender people are thrown under the bus is to be asked to throw another group under the bus. It’s weird how well this metaphor and the other metaphor illustrate how this is actually leads to more people being run over.
The trolley problem is a philosophical thought experiment designed to examine differences in schools of moral philosophy and of people’s moral intuitions. It’s not necessarily about demonstrating that you have to live with the consequences of the choice.
The problem with it comes when people assume that the act utilitarian answer is objectively correct, and that it is broadly applicable to real world problems even when there are huge differences. At that point the trolley problem stops serving as a tool to explore moral philosophy and becomes a rhetorical tool to justify and feel better about throwing people under the bus.
Another thought experiment designed to critique this perspective is as follows: while travelling through the woods, you come across a group of armed men holding prisoner a group of people who were protesting their regime. The leader of the armed men says that if you take a gun and kill one of them yourself, he’ll let the rest go, but otherwise, he’ll kill all of them. From the perspective of act utilitarianism, or trolley problem thinking, taking the offer is morally obligatory.
The problem with that is that you can be manipulated into causing harm by a malevolent actor. All they have to do is threaten some greater harm, and you become their tool, which can increase their power and their ability to threaten larger harm. “You must go out and kill one person, or I will command another of my agents to go out and kill three.” This essentially precludes standing up to any powerful entity in any meaningful way.
Refusing to kill one of the hostages, or pull the lever to run over Palestinians, leaves open the possibility of forming a united front to defeat the people forcing us into such situations in the first place. Keeping one’s own hands clean is not simply a matter of “moral purity,” but rather, an intentional strategy of avoiding actions taken against a particular group.
We can imagine a trolley problem where on the switched track is a foreign diplomat who, if killed, will cause an alliance between two countries to fail, leaving them both vulnerable to a third, and making it essential to save them. This is the hidden cost of pulling the lever to sacrifice Palestinians. But it goes beyond their specific value as allies, it also tells other allies that they can be sacrificed in the same way. In this case, it is better to accept a future where an external force commits a greater immediate harm than to commit a smaller immediate harm ourselves but which jeopardizes alliances and solidarity.
No, those are separate problems, not the trolley problem.
Yes, they are separate problems that highlight problems with trying to apply the logic of pulling the lever more broadly to other circumstances.
Philosophically it is a test for how far and long people will participate in unjust systems.
It’s about the point people start questioning the system of charging someone with this choice, or the system that has people being lashed to trolley tracks as a point of principle.
What a weird take to try and justify the way morons didn’t vote to keep their own country functioning. Instead, they helped to directly destabilize the entire planetary governance system but somehow still think it was justified action.
Other countries are not the scope of the US vote. Especially now more than ever.
Conflating internal problems with external ones is just missing the point. Can’t have it both ways. Either the US dictates world policy and you accept that with that will come chaos to other nations, possibly without their consent. Or the US stays completely out of world policy, and you accept that with that will come chaos to other nations, possibly without their consent.
It isn’t a trolley problem. Both sets of tracks are piled with bodies.
You can’t have feelings and turn them into a non-vote that determines your own country’s downfall because of what happens in another country in either of those two scenarios, because destroying your own country helps nobody, and in fact has already led to the death of hundreds of thousands (mostly children) across the planet and many more will follow.
Now, your own country is in jeopardy, and with that comes jeopardy to all the people in your nation and many other nations. Not just trans rights. Everyone’s rights. Everyone’s lives.
RIP: critical thinking.
This is the weird take. The decision to arm and support Israel is not “world policy,” it is US foreign policy. Calling on a change of US foreign policy to avoid causing harm and to stay out of other countries affairs is not “dictating world policy” it is the complete opposite of that. I would be perfectly fine with the US staying out of world policy, although you’ve also set up a false dichotomy here, it is possible to have a foreign policy that’s somewhere in between “complete isolation” and “arming and funding genocide.”
To say “other countries are not the scope of the US vote” is utterly bizarre. Obviously US voters can, should, and do consider US foreign policy when casting votes. It’s also relevant to domestic policy because so much of our tax money is being wasted on the military rather than being used to address actual problems.
Everyone’s rights would be in jeopardy either way. The only question is whether we allow the ruling class to divide us and turn against each other, like crabs in a bucket trying to screw each other over for our own advantage, or whether we attempt to forge a united front. If we betray each other, our defeat is completely inevitable, and all we’re doing is buying our in-group a little time. To stay united means a willingness to pass on some fleeting offer of short-term security for some of us, but in exchange we have an actual fighting chance in the long term.
You think I’m not thinking critically only because you aren’t aware of the factors that I’m basing my analysis on. The immediate, direct outcome is not the only thing that matters. What we are now seeing, only a few years later, is the beginning of a massive shift towards more progressive, more antizionist politics.
The conventional wisdom was always that if you run centrists who are essentially Republicans but like 10% less bad, then you’ll pick up the centrists and the left with fall in line behind the lesser evil, and so there is no reason to ever run progressives from the perspective of winning elections. If everyone followed your logic, then that’s where we would still be. But Harris’s loss is just one more point of data, together with the wave of progressives like Mamdani, that proves that theory false.
However, if you think I’m being unreasonable, I don’t mind. A “reasonable” person (by your standards) would fall in line behind whatever garbage candidate was placed in front of them. To win in an electorate with enough “unreasonable” people means that you have to start caving to their demands.
Fixing the idiocy is great. Trying to justify abstaining from voting, which has directly led to killing so many humans, even just USAID alone led to 700,000+ deaths, mostly children, all over one president (which alone is dumb as anything, a president isn’t a king, they are just a figurehead that does stuff and takes blame) doing a policy decision based on historic engagement spanning almost a century is basically one-dimensional moronic.
Justify your mistake all you want. The hard line is protecting as many people as possible and then targeting the rot when you’re able to. You don’t just let the rot live and hope you can somehow fix it afterwards with hopes and prayers.
Those that thought they had power by not voting killed so many people with their concept of having power, without thinking of the bigger picture. The ripple effect is huge. Power grids, data centers, transportation, air travel, medicine, elder care, medical, insurance, vaccinations, communications, emergency preparedness, welfare in disaster zones (in the US), water, massive job layoffs, food safety, access to food, health and safety, inter-government agreements. Pick a dart and throw it, you can’t even trust lettuce anymore. All because some idiots didn’t care about their own lives and thought that using their vote in their country for some other far away land might make a difference even though it never would because they were hoping their decision for a leader in one country somehow would have any active effect in a corrupt nation on the other side of the planet that was always dead-set on genocide regardless of who the US puppet is. Instead, they were just unknowing pawns.
It did make a difference. It destroyed everything. Kudos. RIP critical thinking times a thousand.
My thoughts exactly. I suppose the difference is that I consider supporting genocide to be rot as well. I believe “hopes and prayers” was the strategy proposed for convincing the Democrats to change their position after demonstrating to them that they could win without doing so and therefore had every incentive to keep doing what they did to win.
I didn’t kill anyone. Trump, and Trump voters did. It’s truly bizarre how intent y’all are about not assigning responsibility to the people who are actually responsible for the harm.
I understand it’s appealing to switch the relationship of who’s in charge between the US and Israel for the sake of preserving a fantasy of the US being “the good guys,” but it is nothing more than a fantasy. The US holds every card, it is a larger, wealthier, far more influential nation, it is the most powerful nation on earth, it has military spending higher than the next nine countries combined, and when there was a similar situation before, Ronald Reagan whipped Israel in line with a single phone call.
Israel is the US’s forward base in the Middle East, it’s unsinkable aircraft carrier, and its actions are in accordance to the US’s wishes, because they would not be remotely possible without US aid. The tail is not wagging the dog. Israel is a proxy of the US and not the other way around.
What was there worth preserving? A police state conducting pointless war and genocide? Now we still have that, just as we did before, just as we would have no matter who won the election. If only it had destroyed everything!
Again, I’ll repeat what I just said. You think I’m not engaging in critical thinking only because you’re not aware of the factors I’m looking at, but, if you’re not going to agree with me, then I would prefer you see my as “unreasonable,” because it puts me in a stronger negotiating position with your side.
Liberals view government in terms of disinterested parties coming together to try to work out the most rational policy together. This is completely delusional and always has been. Politics is inherently about self-interested parties fighting for themselves and their own material interests, and those of their allies.
Harris and her ilk spat on our faction and made it completely clear that she had zero interest in giving us anything we wanted. They wouldn’t even allow the purely symbolic move of allowing a Palestinian speaker at the convention. On virtually every issue, it was the same. “Fuck you, vote for me.” This is not how politics works, at all, and to allow such an approach to win would be to demonstrate to everyone that the left is completely powerless and that there is no reason to ever give us anything.
It’s not my fault that the DNC decided to force a candidate down our throats who acted completely unreasonably and absolutely refused to negotiate. After that, my hand was forced. Even if I wanted to compromise, they’re not even at the table.
It’s also worth remembering that the Democrats have literally funded far-right candidates because they know that people will fall in line behind “lesser-evil” candidates that way without having to offer anything we actually want. There is no chance of ever getting out of this mess so long as we allow them to manufacture problems like that and flinch into supporting them anyway. Fighting this war requires thicker skin.
I swear, y’all are like, “Because of that damn Churchill fighting back, now I have to deal with my city getting bombed. This is all his fault! Why don’t we just let the Nazis kill all the Jews and take over Poland so we can all go back to brunch? We can’t control what Germany does anyway.” Only worse, because in that example the UK wasn’t actively arming and supporting Germany like the US is doing with Israel.