3mo ago

How the tables have turned!

Stolen from reddit

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"Congratulations to George Floyd on being 5 years sober today."
Like... Really?
What the fuck is wrong with this broad? That's abhorrent.
Not to mention the 30,000 sickos who liked this of course...
- It's actually, sadly, quite easy. In her mind there are no shades of grey, no systems, no circumstances. There are people who are Good People and people who are Bad People, and which people are which is self-evident and not as related to their actions as you might think. It's just a case of identity. They're Good when they do bad things, and Bad People are bad even when occasionally doing good.
  And so celebrating the death of a Bad Person is honorable, obviously, and celebrating the death of a Good Person is sickening and deplorable. Clearly.
  And if I agreed that this was the way the world was, I'd probably agree with her. Unfortunately for me, that seems fucking nuts.
  
  Oh yea the "Good Person" who literally died the moment he was using outright lies to denigrate trans people and minorities - whom he felt should be eradicated, just as Hitler did.
  
  That's all part of it. Those people all fit under "bad people", and it's up to "good people" to protect society from them.
  It makes more "sense" if you think of Jack Bauer as being a guide to morality.
  
  Right exactly! Like the sibling comment says, in their minds Trans people are Bad. You can tell because "they're sick". (I don't believe this, I'm mimicking this mindset). Minorities are Bad. You can tell because they don't have money, they do different stuff than I do, which is Good stuff, and they do crimes and are bad parents or whatever. Doesn't matter what.
  So anyway, this Knight of Justice, Paragon of Good, was out there saying the Good People are being passed over in favour of the Bad People, which is obviously unacceptable. And that the problems with society aren't caused by Good People, they're caused by Bad People. And then right in the middle of his speech, a Bad Person shoots and kills him! How do we know they were a Bad Person without knowing who they are? It's self-evident because no Good Person would kill another Good Person.
  This is like if Superman died, and then the credits rolled! That's not the way this is meant to go! This is an afront to nature! This is a tragedy. To them.
  
  I mean this dynamic is not only found on the right. Many Lemmings seem to be caught up in the same mode of thinking.
  I hope we can all agree that people suffering and dying, in isolation, is bad. Obviously the implications of a death can vary widely and that’s where things get complicated. But the basic moral principle should be widely shared.
  
  I think the current moral question society is wrestling with is along those lines. Something to the effect of, how removed from the outcome of a decision does one need to be in order to absolve themselves of responsibility for that outcome? Essentially, why is it OK for a CEO or a President to cause thousands of deaths by signing a piece of paper but not OK for that same person to go out and shoot those thousand people one at a time? The outcome is the same there's just more obfuscation along the way in the first case. The greed motivation seems to be the difference. The CEO isn't usually killing people because he wants them dead, he's doing it because he views them as acceptable casualties in his quest to make money.
  Charlie Kirk is a great example of that phenomenon as well. He may not have directly shot anybody but he undoubtedly influenced people towards doing exactly that. To what degree should he bear the blame for their actions? He certainly didn't do it in complete ignorance of the possibility that people could die but does the separation from the actual crime make his actions morally acceptable? Does it make any difference if his motivations were money and power as opposed to bigotry and hatred?
  
  To me, diffuse harm is very obviously just as bad, but it is more difficult to quantify and fix. Furthermore, these types of harms are not comparable to a mass shooter where the danger is ended by killing or capturing them. The harms are produced by systems. Does killing Charlie Kirk end the harms he committed or will the billionaires propping him up simply replace him with another identical mouthpiece?
  Individual assassinations don’t usually solve systemic problems.
  
  True! It's not unique to the right, but I do think it shows up there a lot. It's a very Objective view of the world (there is a Right and Wrong, outside of culture), and there's more objectivity on the right, and more subjectivity on the left. Not universally, but more.
  I think the way this manifests on the left is actually pretty different, perhaps even the opposite, to the way it shows up on at least the current right.
  The current right has Good People who can do no Bad, no matter how much wrong they do. So they can get away with a lot, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, and their base will support them anyway because they're still a Good Person.
  Whereas on the left we're maybe a bit quick to dismiss someone outright, or lose the forest for the trees, because we think of ourselves as the side of Morality. So there can be a person who does a lot of good, and seems like a Good Person, and then one thing can come out about them, maybe not even a substantiated thing. Maybe something they did 25 years ago, that they would never do today, and in an instant everyone has flipped on them. You see, people are either Good People or Bad People, and if you've done a Bad thing, you must not have been a Good Person afterall! You were a Bad Person in disguise! Thank goodness we caught you and ousted you, so we can continue to be the side of only Good People.
  Shouldn't we be the side of spectrums? Of forgiveness? Of growth, and healing, and learning, and rehabilitation? Grace and second chances?
  I mean, don't get fooled over and over by the same grifter, but there could at least be some room to say oops, sorry, and then do better going forwards.
  
  Great points, I think you’re spot on with the differences.
  
  Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
  
  Splitting isn't BPD specific, but it is heavily associated with all cluster B disorders.
  
  SAW loomer syndrome.
  
  But why? Is it intelligence related or genetic or learned? Can it be cured? Does punching them help or make it worse?
  
  Considering studies have shown that conservatives have, on average, smaller parts of the brain that are related to things like empathy and higher rates of aggressive personality disorders and the like, I'd say all of the above. Bigotry is learned, not natural, but people are also emotion based and don't like to be proven wrong, so facts and logic don't really convince many people. It's why so many conservatives only change their opinions when it happens to them, and why so many who do have it happen to them continue to do the thing that hurts them.
  
  So you think there is no cure besides letting it happen to themselves?
  Maybe Trump is a good thing then because so far it seems he doesn't mind to betray his own supporters.
  
  It's always a very case by case kind of situation, but I'd say don't expect them to change their opinions. Even the ones who aren't in it because they were already bigots.
  Trump runs a cult, and after a certain point of commitment to a cult, it becomes basically impossible to get someone out because of the sunk cost fallacy of making it their entire personality and having to admit what they did in service to the cult was wrong.
  
  Are there truly so many of them in the US or are they just super active in the (social) media? I live in Germany and we unfortunately have quite a lot of right wingers too but it's seems to be less of them and they seem way less stubborn with their position. A bit more open minded.
  Also the whole spectrum is shifted in Germany. Your Democratic party would be seen as very conservative and almost right leaning in Germany (except for Bernie maybe, he would be leaning slightly to the left). Your Republican party would be an extreme right party.
  
  It's difficult to say, but they're definitely overrepresented both online and in the news. They're definitely a minority, the Republican party knows this and it's why they fight so hard to maintain control, but other context in the country makes it hard to say how much of a minority they are. Conservatives generally make up the areas of the country with the lowest population density, with cities running very much in the opposite direction. And a big part of Republican policy is convincing voters to vote against their own interests. I've seen stats that say that 60% of the population is more left-leaning than the government at any time. But we also have very low voter turnout here due to things like disenfranchisement and gerrymandering. Without that and things like the Electoral College, Republicans would never hold enough seats to hold any real power ever again. Trump actually got noticeably less votes in 2024 than he did in 2016 - it's just that the Dems got way less votes and the Electoral College that allowed him to win.
  As for the political spectrum here, I'd argue that the spectrum in Germany (and the rest of Europe) is normal, while the spectrum here is so shifted to the right that it's unhealthy. And it's gotten way worse just in my lifetime. Trump's party called the Republican party of the 90s communists for their policies. Back then, the two parties largely disagreed on the details of policy, though there has always been the bigoted side of the Republicans. It wasn't until the country elected a black man to office that things really went off the deep end. The Democrats every year say that they have to court some mythical moderate Republican to vote for them or else they won't win, so they shift to the right and disenfranchise the left. But that's not how Republicans operate, especially anymore. They no longer care about policy but about hurting Democrats, so they'd never vote for them anyway.
  It's also important to note that Bernie isn't even really a Democrat, he just runs with them because they're the closest to being a leftwing party. The Democrats don't want him, he's too leftist for them.
  
  Thank you, quite interesting. Makes it a little easier to understand the situation.
  
  Systemic defunding of education, and the denigration of critical thinking as a concept.
- What the fuck is wrong with this broad?
  Not enough time in the day to unpack that, friend
- It's worse and worse the more you think about it...
  George Floyd was murdered by the police, a group that's supposed to protect and serve the public. George himself contributed money to their salaries (as we all do), and they killed him in cold blood as he begged for his life.
  We don't know why Charlie was shot, but the biggotry and hatred he permeated far and wide into this country is his legacy. Imagine leaving this sort of quote (below) behind. What a legacy to leave...
  "I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage."
  Charlie Kirk (Oct. 12, 2022)
  He then died in the middle of a "debate" where he was incinuating that all trans people are violent and disturbed.
  
  “In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
  Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials

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