Time and Space @badwolf-timeandspace - Tumblr Blog

Starting to think all the backlash to the idea of the trolley problem is just people trying to hide the fact that, deep down, they know they would be too scared to pull the lever.

astra-the-dragon

I suppose one of the advantages I've gained from having been in the military is that I went from a suspicion I would have the conviction to make those kinds of calls, an absolute certainty that I do have it. I've held lives in my hands, but thankfully I rose to my training and my convictions. I chose the best of the options I had available to me at the time.

There is nothing shameful about being too afraid of making the decision, in my view. But yeah, it's cowardice to project your anxiety by claiming the philosophical quandary itself is meaningless.

zaprowsdower27

No reason to wonder. A ton of people openly bragged about how morally pure they were for not pulling the lever in 2024. They just hate it when you contextualize it like that and insist they were taking a third option to sound less terrible when their actions are 1:1 compared to the thought experiment.

nitpickspot

If anything, the reason I reject it is because I consider the thought experiment ITSELF to be cowardly.

All human lives are worth the same amount, and any LOSS of human life is as large a tragedy as any other amount of lost human life. You aren't doing a GOOD thing by condemning one person to die to save four more, you're not even doing a BETTER thing. It might be the more valuable thing in a coldly utilitarian point of view, but from my moral stance death is death. You don't get to compare and contrast your way out of that.

dappercat123

You’d be too scared to pull the lever huh?

darkladynyara

People hate the trolley problem because it is inherent to the problem that choosing not to act is an active choice. That's why they reject the problem itself rather than making an argument for choosing to not pull the lever. They aren't afraid to pull the lever- they're afraid to admit that their priority is keeping their own hands clean.

today-tastes-like-honey

I don't think you guys understand the trolley problem very well. I don't really see how it would be applicable to the 2024 election, for example. For starters, the key element of the trolley problem is that you can either let five people die by doing nothing, or sacrifice one person that would have been fine otherwise. This was not at all the situation of the 2024 election - the closest thing within the framing of the trolley problem would be "five people will die if you do nothing, but you can save four of them by pulling the lever". It is of course correct that the lever should be pulled in this scenario, and it is devastating that it was not because people complained that there was no option to save all five.

But the trolley problem is not just the one scenario of 6 people tied 1v5 on two train tracks. It contains a large number of variations of, for example, who these people are, what they have done with their lives, and so on - most importantly, it includes variations of the background scenario. Many people choose to pull the lever and sacrifice one person for the sake of saving five. So how does this change if you are not talking about train tracks? What if you are, instead, in a hospital? Here are five patients in need of organ transplants to live, as well as one healthy person. The doctors will kill the healthy person and save the five patients with their organs, if you tell them to. What's the matter, then? "Choosing not to act is an active choice", isn't it? It's still five lives for the cost of one, isn't it? If you say that killing this healthy person is the correct choice, would you advocate for this politically? For choosing healthy people by lot to kill them in order to get their organs?

You can expand it further - I don't know whether the original thought experiment does this, but the way I learned it does: If we're fine killing one person to save five, are we fine enslaving one person to benefit five? And so on. None of which works in the context of the bloody 2024 election because, as I said, there was no option where you would stop the killing of the people the trolley was going to hit by sacrificing uninvolved people that would otherwise have lived. There was only an option to have the trolley only run over some of the people tied to its original track.

myfootyrthroat

The million estimated deaths due to USAID cuts would like a word.

today-tastes-like-honey

I'm not American. I didn't throw anyone on any fucking tracks.

I didn't say the choice Americans made in 2024 was the correct or justifiable one. I did, in fact, call it "devastating". I don't know how you missed that. Here, I'll highlight it for you:

it's just not a situation comparable to the trolley problem. There were no two tracks. That's an integral part of the problem, that you either kill 5 people or 1 other person. There were no two tracks of separate people. It was "Palestinians" or "Palestinians plus a lot of other people". That's a scenario incompatible with the problem.

Most of the post was an explanation of why this is not how the trolley problem works and your comment proves pretty clearly that you either didn't bother to read or lack the necessary reading comprehension.

I really did my best to phrase my previous comment in short sentences so even people with low reading comprehension would be able to follow the line of reasoning, so I hope you were just too arrogant and full of yourself to bother reading it, because otherwise that really says something even sadder about you.

I'm being a lot more polite right now than you really deserve given the heinous shit you accuse me of in your tags.

myfootyrthroat

"It's not compatible with the trolley problem because it's comparing a huge negative outcome with a smaller negative outcome."

Do you also think it's not compatible with the trolley problem because it doesn't involve an actual train?

smegorl

"The trolley problem is a binary choice between letting a few people die or letting more people die, unlike the last US presidential election where pir only choices were thousands of people dying or millions of people dying. Really they're incomperable!!!

-🤡

badwolf-timeandspace

Also equating the trolley problem to this scenario: “So how does this change if you are not talking about train tracks? What if you are, instead, in a hospital? Here are five patients in need of organ transplants to live, as well as one healthy person. The doctors will kill the healthy person and save the five patients with their organs, if you tell them to. What's the matter, then? "Choosing not to act is an active choice", isn't it? It's still five lives for the cost of one, isn't it? If you say that killing this healthy person is the correct choice, would you advocate for this politically? For choosing healthy people by lot to kill them in order to get their organs?”

Makes me wonder if they even understand the trolley problem. Because in the trolley problem scenario the 1 person is also already tied to the tracks, just like the other 5. They are all in potential danger, and you can’t stop the danger (/the train) nor pull the people off the tracks. The only thing you can influence is the position of the lever, leave it as it is and 5 people die, pull it and 1 person dies.

In case of the “organ donor”, it’s a person that isn’t in danger, they aren’t even near the tracks. Killing them to take their organs would be like hunting down a person and tying them to the tracks to be run over by the train.

Anyway, the organ transplant scenario is not one where the trolley problems applies. The train has already ran over these 5 people (they literally have organ failure). Just shut the fuck up and call a doctor.

sonyaheaneyauthor

Russia’s Empire Is Starting to Fall—the “Good Russians” Know It

As someone who lives in Kyiv under almost nightly missile and drone attacks, let me tell you something.

Published 16 July, 2026.

By Kira Rudik

The more Ukrainian missiles hit Russian oil refineries, the more articles by "new" and "good" Russians we will see. That is the first sign the empire is beginning to fall. The "good Russians" will recycle the same old arguments. In Ukraine, we have heard them so many times they make me sick: “Russia is too big to fail,” “Russians cannot be humiliated—otherwise there will be nuclear escalation,” “The Russian army is incredibly strong,” “Russia has a democratic future,” etc.

None of these claims withstands scrutiny. The truth is that Russia is the last surviving European empire. It outlived the tectonic changes that reshaped Europe after the Second World War. Then it was a totalitarian state controlling the 15 republics of the Soviet Union. Today it remains a centralised empire ruling over 21 national republics within the Russian Federation.

It is a top-down, KGB-FSB state that survives by exporting natural resources while investing billions in propaganda designed to convince the world that it is an indispensable global power.

In reality, before the full-scale invasion, Russia's economy was roughly the size of Italy's or Canada's. Yet we never heard either of those countries claim to be one of the defining poles of a new multipolar world.

Black smoke rises from the area of the Russian oil producer Gazprom Neft's Moscow oil refinery on the south-eastern outskirts of Moscow on 18 June, 2026.

Russia is not too big to fail. Its territory is enormous, but territory alone does not make a superpower. The Soviet Union was even larger—and it collapsed.

The idea that Russia, and especially Vladimir Putin, must never be humiliated, became one of the defining narratives of 2022. I remember it vividly. As the world was discovering the atrocities of Bucha, it felt surreal that so many influential voices were still concerned about protecting the dignity of the dictator who had authorised murder, torture, rape, and countless other war crimes.

Back then, "Putin's red lines" dictated Western policy. Many governments refused to provide Ukraine with essential weapons because they feared escalation or believed Putin might resort to nuclear weapons.

That conversation sounds very different in 2026. Ukraine has demonstrated that the Russian army is not invincible, that Russia cannot adequately defend its own borders, and that its military power has clear limits. The Kursk operation, Operation Spiderweb, and the destruction of Russian warships across the Black and Azov seas proved exactly that.

As someone who lives in Kyiv under almost nightly missile and drone attacks, let me tell you something.

There has never been a diplomatic formula built on fear of Putin that protected Ukrainian civilians. The only thing that has worked is reducing Russia's ability to wage war.

And despite years of warnings about "retaliation," Russia's retaliation looks exactly like its regular attacks. It bombs civilians regardless.

Perhaps the biggest illusion many people in the West still cling to is the belief that Russia can become a democracy, return to the international community, and resume business as usual.

The "good Russians" want you to believe this too. There are two fundamental problems with that narrative.

First, Russia has never been a democracy—not for a single day in its history. Ironically, many of the same people who insist that 148 million Russians cannot simply disappear also expect those same 148 million people to embrace democratic values overnight.

We in Ukraine believed this ourselves in 2022. We thought that if ordinary Russians simply learned the truth about the war, they would rise against Putin. Considerable resources were devoted to breaking through the Kremlin's information blockade.

Reality proved otherwise. The majority of Russians support the war. Many genuinely believe they are fighting NATO and the West to defend their way of life. Good luck convincing them otherwise.

The second problem with the fantasy of restoring relations with Russia under the slogan "trade is better than war" is even simpler.

Russia already had all of that. It belonged to the G8. It traded freely with the democratic world. It created enormous wealth for its oligarchs while distributing just enough prosperity to much of its population. It expanded its influence across Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East while building partnerships with authoritarian regimes.

Now ask yourself a simple question. Can Russia realistically expect to achieve greater economic prosperity than it enjoyed in 2012 or 2013?

It already reached that point. And it willingly sacrificed it for one overriding objective: preserving the empire.

Russia is likely to collapse for many of the same reasons the Soviet Union collapsed—falling energy revenues, the growing political weight of war veterans, and the desire of Russian elites to regain access to the wealth and assets now frozen under Western sanctions.

The story of a sinking empire is never new. As the ship begins to sink, different players suddenly present themselves as reasonable, democratic, pro-Western, and pro-peace. They promise they can build the "good Russia" Europe has always hoped for.

What almost every one of these self-appointed Russian leaders desperately wants to distract you from is a far simpler conclusion.

The destruction and decolonisation of the Russian empire would be one of the best things that could happen to Europe—and the only lasting strategic outcome worthy of the immense price this war has already demanded.

dduane

Wow, but this sums up the situation exquisitely

bavovniatko

Westerners: war in Ukraine? Shouldn't it have ended? We want ruzzia back to participate in Olympics.

Ukraine today (11.07.26)

justacynicalromantic

My colleague (the one that works in shift with me and is supposed to relieve me) lives very near to where Russian missiles struck Kyiv tonight. Thank God she and her family are alright, but all her windows are gone. She needs to go to the police to document the damages and do something about the wreckage. Its a scary sleepless night for her and an extra shift for me.

And this is such a normal occurrence for anyone living in Ukraine that I feel somehow embarrassed even writing about it. But I just wanted to write it, to say that the war is still going on and touches our lives in many small and big, significant and mundane ways every day, even if Ukrainians do not write about it as much anymore - it's because we acclimated to it.

chutzpahchesed

Thomas said that October 7 marked a turning point, not immediately because of what she saw in the media, but because of what she did not see

The Nova Music Festival Exhibition, which recently opened in London, convinced a pro-Palestinian student to change her view of the October 7

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/27/received-death-threats-abandoning-pro-palestine-movement/

It wasn’t long after Hamas carried out its attack on Israel in Oct 7, 2023, that Taryn Thomas found herself swept up in the chorus of pro-Palestine activists mobilising against the Jewish state.

Even before Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza following the Oct 7 massacre,“I was scrolling through social media, and I only saw support for Palestine,” she recalls. “People I know, whether it was activists or people I look up to, were already posting their thoughts.”

Then aged 19 and studying biomedical science at the elite Stanford University in northern California, Thomas, an African American, was first introduced to the anti-Israel movement at Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, where Palestinian flags were flown by some activists. “I never really understood why, but we were told that in order for us to be free, Palestine has to be free,” she says.

She subsequently helped lead large protests against Israel and, within two weeks of Oct 7 2023, had joined an encampment of activists on campus protesting against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Like many others, she donned a keffiyeh, the headscarf worn to demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians. “I really loved it because of the sense of belonging and the sense of purpose,” she says of the encampment. “It was like an instant community.”

Besides fellow students, Thomas was encouraged by “faculty members like history professors” who “validated the movement”. “It seemed like everyone was a lot more educated than me and very certain and sure of themselves that this is a genocide,” says Thomas, who is now 21. “The only safe position was the more radical one in the encampment.”

‘I was confused by what our mission was’

Thomas grew up in Riverside County, one of the few Republican counties in the otherwise “very liberal California”. That, together with racist abuse at school, influenced her political outlook. “I thought going further to the Left would be the solution to the extremism I was seeing from the Right,” she says.

Huge demonstrations took place at universities across the US in the months that followed Oct 7, with protesters confronting the educational institutions with their demands – including to divest from Israel and cut ties with counterpart Israeli institutions.

While the movement was largely peaceful, some demonstrations turned violent and led to clashes with police. “One of our protests got out of hand, and that kind of made me take a step back,” says Thomas.

This was in June 2024, when several militant students broke into the office of Stanford’s president, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. “They spray-painted disgusting things, such as ‘Pigs taste best when dead’, ‘Death to America’, ‘Death to Israel’, and ‘Kill cops’,” Thomas recalls.

“I was confused by what our mission was. At what point did the pro-Palestine movement turn into this anti-Israel, anti-America movement? We completely lost sight of the victims we were claiming to be supporting and fighting for.”

Yet those behind the vandalism “doubled down”, she says, and justified their actions, “even though Jewish students said they felt unsafe”. She explains: “They felt like they couldn’t go to their classes, they were getting harassed and doxxed [having personal information published online] and things like that. Essentially, we completely lost our minds.”

A drastic change of heart

Then, in October 2024, Thomas was one of many students who received an open invitation to the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in Los Angeles. Recently opened in London, the exhibition aims to recreate the festival site where 413 people were murdered by Hamas, and many more were injured or taken hostage.

Nova exhibition

The recently opened Nova exhibition in London commemorates the 413 young people murdered by Hamas at the festival Credit: Jeff Gilbert

“Initially, I laughed, thinking, ‘What’s this propaganda?’” Something piqued her interest, however, so she decided to go. “I’d heard about the festival and was curious, but I’d only really heard the reasoning, ‘Well, why would you have a festival next to a contested border? Essentially, they were asking for it.’

“I was hoping it was going to reaffirm my position, that I would find Zionist lies and whatever. I went with a very closed mind.” Three hours later, Thomas emerged feeling “so lost”.

“I experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance – what I was seeing versus what I’d been told. It was like I arrived a year too late to a funeral. I had so many questions, but I really had no one I could talk to about this. All of my friends were from the encampment. I’d never met an Israeli or talked to them about their experiences – I was fluent in the state’s sins, but I was illiterate in its people.”

Seeing pictures and footage of the young festival-goers hit home for Thomas. “They were kids my age, just dancing, and then fleeing for their lives the next moment. I could see myself in them. I could have been sending a last ‘I love you’ message to my mum. I felt so much empathy and sadness.”

One element in particular changed everything – an audio clip of a jubilant Hamas fighter phoning his father to let him know he’d killed 10 Jews. “My heart sank because these [were meant to be] our martyrs. [This was] the resistance we were claiming we wanted. When we called for any means necessary, I didn’t realise that’s what it meant.”

Months later, Thomas was invited on a trip to Israel organised by a group combatting anti-Semitism on campus. “I knew if I was going to continue to speak on this, I needed to see it for myself,” she says.

During the 10-day trip last March, she met with Israelis, Ethiopian Jews, Palestinians, Druze and Bedouin. “I was shocked at how much diversity I saw – I didn’t even know Israel had black people,” she said.

On the fourth day, the group had to take cover during a missile attack. “Our guide told us to get on the ground, and I put my hands over my neck and prayed. “I thought about the irony of how I’d called for the divestment of the very system I was praying for,” she says. “It [the missile] didn’t care about my politics or what I posted or any of that. I was a target, a body on the ground, and I felt utterly useless.”

Fortunately the missile was intercepted and the trip continued, but the experience left Thomas shaken. She says it made her realise “how cushy and comfortable a life” she had in America, and that she’d not realised the “real consequences” of what she’d been calling for.

‘It felt like being stoned publicly’

Back home, she posted a picture of her trip online – a decision that cost her dearly. “My best friend of three years asked, ‘Is this in Israel?’ I said, ‘Yeah, do you want to talk about it?’ She immediately blocked me. I hadn’t even expressed anything. I literally said I went. Period.”

Her post opened the floodgates. “I lost every single friend”, while her classmates “posted really disgusting things”, including labelling her a “genocidal apologist”. Thomas says she was doxxed, and received death threats and racist abuse – and that her family was also targeted. “It was like a crusade and felt like being stoned publicly.”

She now takes a dim view of the encampment atmosphere. “It completely insulates you in this echo chamber and indoctrinates you. If you had any questions, you’d lose your social belonging – the last thing you wanted to be called was a Zionist.”

She adds that the protesters’ “attention turned into this hatred” and there were constant calls for the “normalisation of violence”. Some activists, for example, celebrated the assassinations of Charlie Kirk, the Right-wing political activist, and Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, she says.

The mental toll had become so heavy on Thomas that she stepped away from her studies late last year. What helped get her through this tough period is the new friendships she has formed, including some with Jewish students.

“They knew I came from the encampments and they engaged with me, intellectually argued with me, disagreed with me, but we still broke bread on Shabbat,” she says. “I learned from my [now] best friend that she was doxxed because of people within our movement. I know I have to repair some of those damages.”

‘Open your heart and put down those megaphones’

Thomas says her family are not politically engaged in the issue of Israel and Gaza and she has faced questions from her mother about her involvement. “She was just like, ‘Why are you doing this? It isn’t your burden to shoulder.’ She just wants her family to be safe and protected.”

But Thomas hopes that by sharing her story it will encourage others to experience the Nova exhibition. “I hope the people who are protesting will come – I just want them to go inside,” she says. “None of this is political. Just look and learn the stories – you don’t have to agree. Come in with an open heart and an open mind and put down those megaphones.”

As for Thomas, she hopes to return to university in September, but in the meantime, she is determined to do what she can to increase cross-community understanding. “A lot of us on the pro-Palestine side were recruited through empathy, so I think we can be reached through it too. Because of this unique perspective I have of what changed my heart, I think I can hopefully change other people’s.

“I’m not Jewish. I’m an African American woman. But a lot of our struggles are parallel,” she says. “We’re seeing an increase in anti-Semitism, we’re seeing an increase in extremism and political violence. There’s just no way that I can now sit back, kick my feet up and call it a day.”

#the pro-palestine movement is literally a cult #and a hate cult at that #good for her for getting out

folklorespring

Militarisation and indoctrination of Ukrainian children in Russia and Russian-occupied territories 

#russia is a terrorist state

extasiswings

This guy should be blacklisted from politics.

extasiswings

mariacallous

featherweightwing

You know when it comes to Graham Platner I’m glad that a lot of women on the left are finally waking up to how blatantly misogynistic a lot of leftist men truly are. They’re seeing the way these men are talking about Platner’s accuser: calling her a liar, calling her a “Zionist plant”, saying that she was asking for it, and a lot of women are rightfully horrified and fed up.

But I also think a lot of these women need to ask themselves a simple question: why were you ok with them doing this to Israeli women? When Hasan Piker said that he “didn’t care” if women were raped on Oct 7th, when they called Israeli women who came forward about their assaults liars, when they mocked the suffering of the hostages and said that Hamas “treated them well”, when they said they deserved it, when they joked that they were “too ugly to be raped”, where was your outrage over that behavior then? Why were you silent when it was Israeli women, and why did you think it would stop there?

What starts with Jews never ends with Jews.

maryfitzroy

stephenroot

These people are such fucking losers omg

ralfmaximus

Meta faces damages almost equivalent to its roughly $1.5 trillion market value.

Thirty-three states have banded together to sue Meta, alleging that the company was exploiting its young users on Instagram and Facebook for profit, including by collecting data from children without parental consent. Four of those states—California, New Jersey, Colorado and Kentucky—also claim that the company misled consumers about the addictive design features on the platforms, thereby causing mental health problems in children who got hooked from an early age. The damages requested by those four states add up to a whopping $1.4 trillion, Meta said in a recent court filing, a figure that would allegedly go even higher with the other penalties the attorneys general seek to add. The number is high by many standards but especially when compared to the company’s market capitalization, which is just above $1.5 trillion.

GOOD. Fucking nuke them from orbit, then piss on the survivors.

chutzpahchesed

A massive banner reading "Destroy Israel" was unfurled at the San Fermín festival opening ceremony in Pamplona, Spain, on Monday. The banner

A massive banner reading “Destroy Israel” was unfurled at the San Fermín festival opening ceremony in Pamplona, Spain, on Monday.

The banner featured a crossed-out Israeli flag beside the slogan and the initials “EHKS,” referring to Euskal Herriko Kontseilu Sozialista, a Basque socialist organization.

Crowd members hoisted it above their heads in Plaza Consistorial before the chupinazo, the ceremonial rocket launch that opens the week-long festival, known worldwide for the “Running of the Bulls.”

fleysh

I just think that if you’re a Spaniard attending Pamplona and protesting anything not explicitly pertaining to animal cruelty at the festival during which you and yours gather to watch and participate in the torture of thousands of bulls then you should probably pack your shit up and shut the fuck up. And if I might be so bold as to suggest reckoning first with your countries past and present antisemitism before making any such calls to violence against half of the global Jewish population.

#antisemitism

sprinkledsalt

There's so much anger and cultural anxiety around women thinking that committing rape is a permanent character disqualification that they don't ever have to forgive

chutzpahchesed

TIL (((the Jews))) invented the Ancient Greeks. Chanukah is so confusing now 🤪

also can there be a single solitary new movie released these days that isn’t accompanied by the most deranged Judenhass conspiracies?

in conclusion:

bilgisticallykosher

Why is it all (gesture)?

Decades of propaganda. Turning politics into fandom, turning fandom into politics. Purity culture, having impossible standards for being "good" black and white thinking.

Not enough Jews, not enough learning about Jew hatred, thinking it started and ended with the Holocaust, and then taking Jew and Romani hatred out of the curriculum anyway. Not learning the little things, the phrases that built up to it all.

It sucks.

Have the fattest picture I've ever taken of one of my cats (with a siddur!)

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Time and Space