Just because that’s the most helpful course now in our completely broken democracy doesn’t mean that’s how it should be.
And ultimately that was my point. It’s temporarily helpful, but we will not win with this weapon. We can do minor amounts of damage with it, but conservatives can use it to devastating effect. Deliberately keeping it open as an option is only going to bite us hard later.
So we’re all just ok with the mostly conservative, white men that own these companies being our unelected moral compass then. Not much of a solution…
Fair, but that shut down should come from the government, not by having Internet infrastructure arbitrarily apply their executives personal morals to the situation.
Oh yeah, totally agree with that take. My ability to execute is separate from the moral good or bad of the situation.
Through that lens, then I’d consider most of these scenarios a moral good. I’m not really someone who holds with ‘all life is sacred’ or ‘everyone can be redeemed’, at least in scenarios where they have actively sought to kill others. For whatever reason, some humans are just bad people and need to be eliminated for the safety of others.
If they were easily neutralized, I’d prefer going through a proper justice system, but if not, then that’s merely a consequence of their own actions that they were taken down.
As the other commenter said, I’m not really sure these people were ‘good’ before. Maybe Sunday school ‘good’ as in they were good at faking things.
But sure, if you want to call it that, then I’ll just say that yes, some humans effectively have a negative gene that only activates if they get wealthy. A predisposition to rich asshole-ness.
I do not believe this is a universal trait or even a majority trait however. And, while these people aren’t good, they aren’t the sort of evil that’s implied when you’re talking about billionaires.
Aunt Becky going full Karen just cause she got a million dollars in a will is far different than healthcare CEOs knowingly implementing policies to auto deny coverage for kids with cancer just so they can earn another billion that they don’t actually need, care about or even use.
No matter how much of a bitch Becky became, she’s unlikely to suddenly be cool with the murder of children just because of some money in her bank account. It’s not that kind of evil corruptive force. Those traits had to be there from the beginning.
I mean I feel like the first two are obvious. Imminent harm happening immediately in front of us are pretty well trod moral grounds.
The third is probably just justice? 99% of the time that’s going to be handled via a war or international court or a trial of the previous government.
Things obviously get fuzzier the more defused your ‘personal harm’ is and I’m truly not sure where my line would be, especially as the more abstract it is the more the consequences influence my answer.
At some point I’m simply not willing to take the moral choice to kill someone doing something bad simply because of the personal impacts it would have on my life. Going to trial, possibly jail over it, mental trauma from having carried out the action etc.
And that’s only for scenarios where there’s rock solid evidence, which mostly wouldn’t be the case. If I had spotty evidence then I’m less willing to take risks on any sort of action.
People have gotten way too comfortable with censoring speech. I understand the fight against intolerance and propaganda and how hopeless that fight can feel, but we’ve sometimes taken things too far and that’s only going to hurt us in the end. The left is not going to be the one that will take these compromises to the limit. We will be the most hurt by every bit of erosion we allowed to happen.
Specifically, I’m referring to efforts to get right wing platforms taken down not by being banned by a Facebook or Twitter or something, but by attacking the infrastructure on which a right wing website it run (such as attempts to get Truth social shut down by going after AWS, ISPs and other basic Internet infrastructure). It’s a similar approach as is sometimes done when they target payment processors and trying to shame them into banning these platforms from processing payments.
These types of attacks on speech should never be allowed no matter if it’s the left or the right. We can ban people from our private business or gathering place, but we shouldn’t be able to stop them from creating their own. And no, basic Internet infrastructure shouldn’t get to play the ‘private business’ card. They are effectively the roads, utilities and other generic infrastructure of the digital age.
Those attacks are no different from the right’s constant attacks on abortion clinics by attempting to subject them to needless and pointless regulations meant for full hospitals. Or as if we’d allowed a water company to start selectively shutting off water to places they don’t like.
We need more protections for the neutrality of infrastructure (both physical and digital) and keep the fights firmly restricted to end user platforms. Lest we find that someday our enemies have taken these tactics and beat us with them with far greater ruthlessness than we’d ever use.
Money is basically the ring from Lord of the rings.
I’ll still stick with my (perhaps naive) belief that people still have this backwards. Wealth is not magically corruptive like the ring was. Rather only people who are already problematic will end up with the sorts of wealth that it takes to be labeled as one of those rich assholes. They aren’t assholes cause they’re rich, they’re rich because they were assholes.
The system (and human society in general) rewards the worst of us with wealth. However, if you short circuit this process and give a good person wealth, you’ll find that a) they don’t magically become an asshole and b) they probably don’t stay rich for very long. Typically because they’ve given most of it away as they don’t need it and don’t define themselves by having it.
What did the people do? Allow it to freaking happen,
I feel like I have a lot less standing to comment on stuff like this as an American currently watching my country just stand around and let the fascists take over.
And as far as I can tell we’re not the only country barely fighting back against authoritarianism either.
Agree it’s pointless what we’re doing, but I’m certainly not going to throw stones at people being unable or unwilling to risk life and limb for liberty.
I feel like ‘done nothing to you’ is too vague here.
If someone is currently attempting to murder my child is that ‘nothing to me’ or is emotional harm considered?
If someone is attacking a stranger in front of me is that ‘nothing to me’ or is the trauma of seeing another human attacked considered ‘doing something to me’
If someone is systematically committing genocide of a people not related to me in anyway (and it’s fully provable) is that ‘nothing to me’ or is it an affront to human decency and therefore count as harm to myself as a fellow human.
Basically there’s a million ways to justify someone has harmed you.
I’m not against age verification as a concept. But I don’t think the current solutions will actually protect children. They are simply a further attack on privacy. We will have less privacy and our kids will still be just as unsafe as before.
And I give it less than 6 months before this data is used for something other than protecting kids. It’s absolutely just going to be used to target LGBT content or something.
The reason isn’t really silly, I get it, but the punishment was.
In high school I spent a lot of time reading. Basically every lunch, every study hall period, etc. I read a fairly significant chunk of the library.
Problem was that I also tended to read during boring lectures in class, which pissed off a couple of my teachers and resulted in not great grades.
But all of their punishments were designed to punish people who hated to read. So my math teacher finally snaps and sends me to in school suspension… where I sit in a room and the monitor on duty is absolutely delighted that I sat there the entire day to read and even lets me go early for such good behavior.
I was later kicked out of honors courses and put into a remedial study hall situation. Again with a monitor who was supposed to make sure people were actually studying. Only way to get out of this was … a library pass. Where I could freely read whatever I wanted. Never did spend much time in study hall.
It’d be nice if my HOA banned Ring cameras instead of solar