Not today Justin
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izzy's playlists!
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will byers stan first human second
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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Product Placement
shark vs the universe
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Love Begins
#extradirty
if i look back, i am lost
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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@the-library-alcove
New policy: No more arguing with Christianists, especially the ones who think that missionizing is a good thing. Autoblock on sight.
EDIT: Addendum: Antisemitic atheists too.
Less a DNI, and more just an exasperated sigh at this point, yes, I vet new followers for my own safety and I will automatically block missionaries, Christian apologists, antisemitic atheists, antizionists, Nazis (WTAF are you following me in the first place?), and TERFs.
hi all, noticed yet another leftist YouTuber veering hard down the anti-Israel pipeline, thought I would bring this to people's attention:
blatantly spreading the Greater Israel conspiracy as fact, and calling Israel itself "quite antisemitic"
I started watching him after deconverting from the Christianity I was raised in, his calm and thoughtful demeanour helped me avoid falling into the angry atheist stereotypes. while obviously critical of religion, he's always been very well educated and understanding, so seeing him repeat antizionist/antisemitic talking points without a second thought has been very disheartening :/
I guess I shouldn't have expected any different from someone whose entire channel is built around criticising organised religion, but he's a self described pluralist who emphasises engaging in accurate and reputable research. not holding himself to the same standard when it comes to research on Zionism it seems
"The UN said Israel is committing a genocide!" -links to statement by one UN official-
"Actually the UN has said no such thing." "Well I'm SORRY for not GOING INTO DEPTH on the UN's stance but I don't need them to say it's a genocide to know it is because I can SEE IT WITH MY OWN EYES -"
Just. Either you were repeating the statements of one person because you honestly thought it was the official position of the UN, in which case you're stupid, or more likely you fucking LIED and the little slide you just did isn't going to fool anyone.
...also it seems to me that Israel can EITHER be a theocracy - because the only way that can make anything even vaguely resembling sense is if you think Judaism is solely a religion - OR an ethnostate, which requires acknowledging Judaism as an ethnicity. Claiming both in one post just makes you look stupid.
There's a reason we call ourselves "Schrodinger's Jews"--where we exist in a bimodal wave-function that collapses into whatever is needed for the argument at the moment. That particular person's argument was just a great example of that.
hot take (or maybe this has been said tons of times before and i just haven't seen it idk): the assholes who are calling palestinians "animals" and cheering on/actively participating in their genocide are "zionists" the same way TERFs are "feminists".
(disclaimer: this viewpoint comes from online research, i am not jewish, israeli, or palestinian. i absolutely welcome debate in reblogs because i have VERY little authority on this topic)
Yes
Emphasis on this
Girl, you're gonna make me blush!
it’s really interesting how the guys that fight against paying child support the hardest are the ones that could afford to do it. these dudes will quit their well paying salaried job with benefits just to avoid their pay getting docked and potentially going to reimburse the mother of their child for buying their kid new shoes. they’ll leave their child without health insurance and work under the table jobs because they really hate their child and former S/O that much.
men who have been conditioned to believe that having kids and caring for them is somehow emasculating
they swear it is a man’s role to provide and protect but they’re going out of their way to deprive and endanger
They believe that their role is to provide and protect the ones they choose to; it's not a responsibility (though they'll frame it like it is to sound better), but a power that they hold over others. Child support is emasculating because they see it as being forced to provide for someone who isn't "theirs" any more. They don't see it as supporting a child that they have ongoing responsibility for because they believe that they should have the right to withdraw that responsibility at any time, that unconditional responsibility for a child is the woman's role. They see it as being financially cucked.
#these men like the power that being a provider gives#they like the idea that you are dependent on them and that they could take it away from you at any moment#but mandatory child support doesn't really give you that choice or any power over the child/ex#you can't leverage it the same way to get what you want
My friend's coworker has a boyfriend who literally does not have a bank account and keeps his money in CASHAPP to avoid child support.
He used to make good money. He quit his job to avoid child support.
The coworker is pregnant.
When I worked in branch banking, there was more than one man who would come in and ask to have his checking account closed and a new one opened bc of "fraudulent ACH charges." I knew it was actually his child support each time but was told I couldn't refuse the customer request.
Until...
One of them eventually had a giant note placed on his profile by legal saying we were not able to close any of his accounts or open new ones without clearance from legal, bc he kept cycling through account after account every time the state found the new one and submitted the garnishment paperwork.
IIRC he eventually got banned from the branch bc he threatened me & others when we told him no.
franz kafka’s writings are often analyzed in a trans lens the person who wrote that was almost definitely a trans person who related. people who call kafka a trans woman are almost entirely trans women. there is also a huge subset of literature shitposter girls who use kafka and the metamorphosis specifically to talk about their experiences with womanhood. so while i agree that the trope you are talking about is antisemitic i don’t think that applies here. he’s not being called a woman in a disparaging way.
It. Literally. Doesn't. Matter.
Spoiler alert: trans people can be antisemitic!
Franz Kafka was a real person who died not too long ago, and just because a trans person relates to his writings doesn't mean they can claim he's trans. It's not the same as relating to a fictional character. You can't 'headcanon' an actual person. I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman. He was an actual person, not a fictional character you can project on. An treating Franz Kafka like a fictional character you can project any label onto and separate him from his actual life is dehumanization and *also* antisemitic.
It's no different than queer people co-opting Anne Frank's memory and erasing her story to just herald her as a "bi icon" when she never had the chance to live long enough to label herself. Queer gentiles need to stop dehumanizing Jewish people and turning them into blank slates they can project onto.
Kafka's Metamorphosis and writings about his depression are from the viewpoint of a disabled Jewish man who was watching as antisemitism was slowly escalating around him and Jews were becoming insects in the minds of society. And "he's not being called a woman in a disparaging way" is the dumbest excuse ever- antisemitism is antisemitism. I've seen trans people infantilize Jewish men, calling them "different breed of man" or "scrunkly" and then insist they meant it positively. Intent doesn't matter. Calling a Jewish man, who never ever indicated having any gender identity otherwise, a woman, or implying he's somehow not a full man, is antisemitic.
I hope I'm not derailing here (please tell me if I am and I'll delete this), but I'd like to especially call attention to this line (which I love, btw):
I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman.
At some point relatively recently, people seem to have come to the conclusion that you can't empathize with a character (or real fucking person, in this case, and I cannot stress how gross that is) unless you're just like them. "Oh, I, a nonbinary person can identify with this cishet man? He must actually be nonbinary!" "Oh, I, an autistic person, can identify with this Ambiguously Quirky™ person? She must actually be autistic!"
Being able to relate to a person--real or fictional--who isn't just like you is a good thing. It's good that you see yourself in the writings of a cisgender man! Maybe it will teach you that cis people aren't the enemy. It's good that an autistic character resonates with NT people! Maybe they'll gain new insight into their autistic friends and family!
It's called empathy, and it's so important to understand that you are going to see your experiences reflected in people who are unlike you. Those connections are important. Deciding that Kafka must be a trans woman because you're a trans woman is missing the entire fucking point. It means that you do, in fact, have some things in common with a cisgender man, and conversely, it means that cisgender men have things in common with you. To flatten them out so they're just like you is missing out on so much of what they have to say.
People are beautiful and rich and layered and the fact that we can connect with other people and share experiences despite how different we are? That's the whole fucking point. That's what makes life worth living.
OP, I'm sorry I only spoke on being transgender and autistic. Those are the only two points that I could speak on from experience. Talking about real people like they're fictional pisses me off, and I sort of... got off on a thing.
I'm not OP, but one thing that's frightening about this from a Jewish perspective (especially in the context of discussing someone who was alive in the interwar period) is the recurring idea that Jews only matter as lenses for other people's stories. That we can be empathized with, but only if our narratives can be twisted to someone else's.
Because we've seen that before. We see it very often because it's a fundamental premise of some incredibly antisemitic forms of Christianity, and when it turns out that we're real people with real opinions and real beliefs and real feelings who don't just exist to validate someone else's perception of who and how we could be, people don't just abandon their pretense at allyship, they get violent.
It's also a common failing in how the Holocaust is taught. People like to present this lens of "it was random violence that came out of nowhere and could've happened to anyone. It could've happened to you! Imagine if you'd been one of the victims! That would've been a tragedy wouldn't it?" And the thing is, that's bullshit. If you were just a random German citizen at the time? You would've been one of the perpetrators. And it was a tragedy in and of itself; it doesn't become a tragedy by imaging a scenario in which people who were perfectly safe would've actually been potentially in danger (never killed, of course, because Holocaust education is also commonly sanitized, which is a different rant).
Edited to take out a rant that was in drafts and got added to this by mistake, but. Well, the Tl;dr, since that's been reblogged
Well. I'm a cis woman. GNC, perhaps, but cis. And I get misgendered (and degendered) a lot because of how people read Jewish features. And... when friends insist that any discomfort I have with feminine stuff is because I'm an egg... I get that they're trying to be helpful for a journey of self-discovery. But I've done that introspection. I check in with myself periodically just in case. And "oh, you're really nonbinary/a trans man because you're [insert list of stereotypically Jewish features//personality traits commonly ascribed to Jews [whether or not I have them]" -it hurts. Because not only are they minimizing my actual identity and my self-knowledge, and deciding that they're the experts on my life, rather than me, they're doing it in a way that's constantly used to hurt me.
another thing! Jewish men are (pretty often) seen as feminine/unmasculine and like they could never be 'true men'. In a lot of media they're the awkward nerds, the virgins, the weirdos. Point is this is not just misgendering anybody (which would be awful enough), this is misgendering a group that's known to be seen as less masculine than a white man for example
*this is a bit of derailing but it reminds me of how black men face the opposite issue of being seen as hyper masculine & in turn hyper violent. None of us can win in this racist ass society my g-d
I agree with all this but I don't think anyone ever said kafka was a trans woman, more that they interpreted Gregor samsa as one.
Nope. I have personally seen people call Franz Kafka a trans woman and refer to him in feminine terms.
Okay well that's just weird. I didn't think anyone would actually come to that consensus since it's just not true??
Antisemitism is a hell of a drug
@historysweeth3art Trigger warning: antisemitism via the feminization of a Jewish cis male.
And these are just what I got by using the tumblr search feature. Imagine if I used something that worked.
I don't want to take away from @terulakimban's excellent point centering actual empathy. That is a BIG trend I see when taking about anything Jewish in popular culture (I cannot tell you how many times as a theater person I've heard "Fiddler on the Roof is a story about all of us, tradition vs modernization" NO! IT IS ABOUT A JEWISH COMMUNITY IN VERY ANTISEMITIC RUSSIA AT A TIME WHEN POGROMS WE'RE SO COMMON PLACE 250,000-300,000 JEWS FLED OR WE'RE KICKED OUT over the course of 40 years. The tradition aspect is uniquely Jewish - how do we maintain our identity when we keep getting scattered and settled elsewhere? It lasted this long but HOW do we keep doing it? Can it continue?)
But in the Kafka conversation there is an element I think so many non-Jews just straight up refuse to understand. That is the fact that Jews have our own culture.
The societal gender ideals non-Jews in the West grow up with ... Aren't really in Jewish communities the same way. (Though cultural osmosis means we've picked up a lot along the way).
ALL our masculine role models, the ones we're told to admire, are shepherds. That's important bc shepherds lead the heard from behind, not in front. It speaks to a different leadership mindset. Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Solomon, etc. we're soft spoken, humble, slow to action, intellectually inclined. Even when they have tempers or are warriors, those aspects are critiqued or minimized. (It's why when Jews depict King David, he's playing his harp or herding sheep. When non-Jews depict him, he's fighting Goliath.)
Compared to the very Roman/Western ideal of masculine power might-makes-right, Jewish masculinity is inherently softer.
That's not to say we DON'T value male strength. But it's just one factor and mostly understood that physical prowess has a time and place. It's not the ultimate standard for our masculinity.
Especially when you consider femininity in Jewish communities. Our matriarchs were all outspoken, all defied their husbands/men at key moments without punishment (some were even rewarded by God.) Some were prophets, judges and leaders (Miriam, Judith, Devorah, Hannah) in their own rights. Jewish women certainly do not fit the mold of a Roman/Western quiet, docile, submissive woman.
And don't forget, while there very much is misogyny in Jewish communities, our traditions often challenge it. Men are expected to praise their wives every Friday night in front of the family (Eshet Chail), men are halacically responsible for their wives' physical pleasure, Rabbis have denounced marital rape as a sin far longer than it's been illegal in MOST modern nations and women are excempt from time based religious obligations as they are considered closer to God (though that comes with it own problems).
In short, religious or not, Kafka would have grown up with that different understanding of gender norms and what it means to perform gender. He would have understood gender completely different to how a modern non-Jew in the West would.
To erase his Jewishness from the conversation - to ignore the cultural difference between how you see gender and how he likely would have - is a pretty severe historical distortion. And makes this weird history AU even more problematic.
Its exactly why historians always say "there's evidence of this type of attraction/relationship/behavior but we cannot assign an identity to a dead person who would not have had our cultural understanding." We need to bring that back.
Engineering teams around the world have been attempting to develop new methods of seawater desalination.
Scientists in China have developed a more efficient form of solar desalination that uses 47.4% less energy than alternatives. After the first year of testing, the scientists believe that at scale it would be able to desalinate water more cheaply than producing bottled water.
The goal is now to scale the technology for use in coastal areas and islands experiencing water insecurity.
The defense secretary’s idea of administering testosterone therapy to members of the US Armed Forces reveals little understanding of the com
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has made no secret of his desire for a manlier military.
He consistently argues that the US Armed Forces lowered their combat standards in order to include women. He’s staged various photo ops in which he exercises and pumps iron with service members. In his speeches, Hegseth says that the Trump administration is restoring a “warrior ethos” to its legions of “war fighters.”
Now he has a rather dubious plan to guarantee that the troops are as macho as possible: testosterone screenings and, in cases where an individual’s testosterone is judged to be deficient, voluntary hormone therapy.
to anyone in the areas impacted by the wildfire smoke, my #1 biggest piece of advice as someone whos been dealing with wildfire smoke in the NW united states for years, is build yourself a Corsi-Rosenthal Cube
they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!
i think it took us maybe a half hour to put ours together, if that, and we replace the filters every 3 months. it's really made a HUGE difference, both when the air quality is bad, but also with our allergies
Saw these easy to read instructions on Twitter. Stay safe 💚
where i am, a box fan and the filters run about $20 each, so if $100 is too much of a stretch at the moment, get the fan and one filter. tape the filter to the intake side of the fan, all the way around. this is also good if your space is small and a 20" cube won't fit.
I think a lot of foreign relations discussions would be made vastly more productive if we all just switched to calling it “subsidized military vendor lock-in” instead of calling it “military aid”
Like. Yes, it’s also an exchange of value, sure, absolutely. It’s even an extremely worthwhile exchange of value if you’re a country like Ukraine. But so is lots of vendor lock-in?? Using Amazon cloud services is a good business decision because they are a good deal, and a bad business decision because they make it difficult for you to ever switch away from AWS. Both sides of that are true and real!
“How does sending this country free weapons do anything other than give them free weapons?” is a wild thing to have to keep explaining to people over and over again in a world where most people already understand that Google search is free because Google is trying to be an unassailable tech monopoly. The nuance here isn’t difficult to understand, and for most people it isn’t even a new concept, but for some reason as soon as you call it “military aid” everyone forgets that they’ve ever heard of such a thing and you have to start fresh and explain how it all works as though it’s Baby’s First Antitrust. There are real and substantive discussions to be had on the other side of “what even is the actual value proposition here”, and I’m getting kind of sick of always needing to start from zero for basically no reason
just in from tiktok: pictures of babies in diapers on the side of a diaper box is pedophilia
I don't know if stupid pearl clutchers know this, but the largest cohort of people who need diapers/nappies, has traditionally been babies, and it is a long established norm to put images of the target customer demographic on the packaging.
If people can't detach their sexualisation of continence aids from the children (and adults) that need them, that's their problem and actually they are the one who needs to stop projecting their sexualisation of children on diaper packaging as something the rest of us need to care about.
Ahhh, takes me back to when I was on the lj crochet community 2+ decades ago and there was a meltdown because someone posted a photo of their four year old wearing a beanie with cat ears and said "You can't see it, but he is naked because 'cats don't wear clothes'" and a whole section of the comm melted down and accused her of wanting pedos to find the photos.
I cannot stress enough: all you could see was this child's head and shoulders.
As the wank continued, someone else posted a photo of a baby in a diaper holding a crocheted pillow, and guess what happened.
Everything old is new again.
saw this really horrible comment today about how “Jewish women love to lie about rape,” and yesterday I saw what’s basically the inverse, “Jewish men love sexual assault, the majority of them are predators and rapists” along with the “61% of Israeli men” disinformation, and none of this is new - both are actually very, very old, both Jewish women being portrayed as liars and “harlots,” and Jewish men being portrayed as innately predatory - but it’s so disturbing seeing the way it’s gaining traction, and knowing that quite a bit of it in these awful posts is stemming from denial of the atrocities of 10/7 and of what was inflicted on the hostages (and those crimes were perpetrated against Israeli victims regardless of gender).
I was looking something up the other day and got a result from the 1930s subreddit, and there was a comment that had been removed by the moderators, but to which someone had replied (and that was still up) telling them they were an antisemite for saying that Jews are the cause of all the abuses in Hollywood and that they’d never generalize like that about any other group of people. this doesn’t mean there haven’t been abusive Jewish men, especially in positions of power, there certainly have been, and we know who they are, and the Jewish community as a whole overwhelmingly condemns them, but their individual behavior is used to smear and demonize world Jewry in a particular way. it’s scary seeing the stereotypes and suspicions and vitriolic attitudes continue to grow.
I’m not really going anywhere useful with this, but it occurred to me how often we mention that Jews are only 0.2% of the world population, and how few people ever really know or even interact with Jewish people. sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be more useful to point out that the majority, 99.8% of the world is non-Jewish. of course it’s easy to believe such terrible things and to scapegoat such a small group, and of course it’s almost impossible to combat it or to remove it from centuries’ worth of ingrained culture.
they can't have it both ways. If the majority of Jewish men are rapists, then Jewish women are probably being raped; if Jewish women are lying about being raped, then most Jewish men are probably not out there raping them.
What dumbfuckery.
Don't be silly, everybody knows we have no interiority or culture of our and only exist in interactions with nonjews where we maliciously manipulate them for no coherent reason
to understand how the libel works there are two necessary points: 1. antisemitism is self-sustaining even when its positions are entirely contradictory. this is why we see a lot of arguments that negate themselves, yet still get repeated and used as scapegoating/conspiracies and reiterated as true. logic is not a factor, it's whatever can twist and shapeshift to hate Jews. 2. the lust libel is based upon the belief that Jews intentionally target, manipulate, harm, and attack non-Jews. it's understood that it's non-Jews who are going to be victims of the Jews' wicked scheming. thus, Jewish women would be seen as lying about guiltless non-Jewish men, and Jewish men would be seen as preying upon virtuous non-Jewish women. it doesn't matter if this doesn't make sense. The Jew™️ in these scenarios is not human, but a malevolent entity, a threat against non-Jewish life and happiness and peace.
See also how Jews are simultaneously both Capitalists and Communists
"Whether someone understands it or not, these are the consequences of the political views they're espousing" is a pretty important analysis tool for online movements because quite honestly, over half of everyone engaging in politics online have no foundations for the stuff they're saying and are just saying whatever makes them feel like a member of an in-group.
If your in-group is "the left" you're very much not immune to this. In fact, trying to do left-wing politics without even trying to build a foundational political understanding is a great way to end up as a neo-nazi with a tumblr accent rather than an effective left-wing advocate.
People scrutinizing influencers for their views should also hold them to account for their facts.
This article spurred an attempt to double down in defense of Piker by framing Einstein's initial support for binationalism as meaning he opposed zionism and I want to take the opportunity to note that binationalism was zionism, it was the zionist position across streams up until the late 30's (when partition became an option)
I note this to point out that the reason anti-zionists have to elide this fact is because their position depends for its legitimacy on framing the zionists as the side that sought to claim sovereignty exclusive of arab rights by force and the anti-zionists as the side advocating a shared state when of course in reality it was anti-zionists engaging in violent struggle to deny jews rights and zionists seeking accommodation
Large number of complaints about the modern world resolve down to "I want everything in one bag and I don't want the bag to be heavy"
I want the newest, coolest, shiniest phone they advertise on Instagram and it should cost $30 and be tiny and also huge and have every feature I could possibly want without thinking about it
I want my websites to allow me unlimited uploading of all data in high definition with zero lag or buffering, have every single person on earth available, with an easy way to see only the stuff I like and not anything I don't, for free with zero ads, with clear, straightforward moderation that gets rid of every Nazi and has zero false positives that also lets me tell random strangers and the people running the site to kill themselves, and I should be able to find it without doing any independent searching on my own because I'm too lazy to look for it
I want my girlfriend to have huge tits and a small waist and a fat ass and thin thighs and have clear skin and be a virgin and great at sex, likes all the stuff I like but not in the annoying way other people do, looks like she spends 3 hours a day on makeup and hair but takes up zero time in my bathroom, goes down on me but doesn't ask me to eat her out, has zero kinks except for mine, doesn't demand anything of me and is attracted to me for me, modestly hides her body from the public but also makes other people jealous when I'm with her, isn't crazy jealous but doesn't have any other guy friends, wants three ways only with other girls, and also she approaches me in public so I don't have to do anything to meet or woo her.
I'd do one about video games or food but the last few years have shown that people will talk endlessly about wanting shorter games with worse graphics made by people who work less hours for more pay, or wanting to pay $1 more for a hamburger if the worker gets paid more, and then immediately revolt when the cost of their bleeding edge console or burrito taxi goes up with inflation.
It never fails to gobsmack me the things some of y'all believe Jews believe. I remember someone confidently saying that Jews believe they all go to the Christian version of Heaven, regardless of whether they were good people or not, because they're "chosen" and in Heaven they get a segregated all-Jews section. Like, y'all are just making shit up at this point. And you could just, idk, ask Jews, but even when a Jewish person tells you "um that's not what we believe" you think they're lying.
the chosen thing is just straight projection because that is more or less what a lot of Christians believe about themselves
growing up my Christian family taught me that the main difference between Christians and Jews is that Jews believed they’re “saved by works” (aka, Jews believed it does matter whether you were a good person or not) which made them “legalistic” while Christians believed they’re “saved by faith” (aka, what you do matters less than what you believe / who you know) which allowed for “grace and love”.
Christians just straight up look down on Jews for believing what you do in this life matters
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.
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.
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.
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.
You’d be too scared to pull the lever huh?
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.
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.
The million estimated deaths due to USAID cuts would like a word.
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.
"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?
"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!!!
-🤡
