Such as being forced into doing something. Be fucking self-consistent, you stupid fuck.
What earthly distinction are you trying to make here? It’s not the worst thing you’ve said in the past day, but i think it’s the weirdest.
There’s a difference between deciding which choice is the most morally positive, and deciding you don’t have the guts to take it.
~Max
The implication is that they go through the justice system, as opposed to me being the one to personally reduce the individual to slavery. It’s a distinction of process rather than consequence (although possibly it could lead to a different result).
~Max
The only difference I can see is the one where the racist coward lies to himself about it after the fact because he doesn’t have enough empathy to feel guilty afterwards.
We’ve already established in this thread that you’re somewhat lacking in the empathy department, especially when it comes to Black people, so this is hardly news.
Or should I say your persona pretends not to have that empathy, since I don’t believe word one that comes out of your troll mouth.
Right. That’s a rather bizarre distinction to make. If “meat is murder”, I’m not actually guilty of murdering a cow because a slaughterhouse did that for me.
I could never be persuaded with that kind of argument. I may encourage “murdering” of cows by buying meat. But I don’t actually murder the cows myself. Maybe it could work if I ordered the cow whole from the ranch, in the same way that the person ordering a hit job is responsible for the murder.
Same thing when I buy clothes, food, or electronics without checking the manufacturing chain for child labor, substandard wages, environmental pollution, etc.
~Max
Look, I’ll make this perfectly clear. Max’s rigid adherence to following oppressive laws isn’t about his devotion to the law, it’s about his devotion to oppression. How many different ways does he need to say he’s absolutely fine with it? He’s trying to pass off a mindless adherence to unjust laws as a virtue because he has no other concept of virtue.
Are you saying that if you don’t know about these things then they don’t matter?
He just made it worse than that. He said he’s willing to consider what the consequences of his supposed neutral action that puts it in the hands of a law officer are for himself, but not anyone else.
EDIT - clarified my previously slightly innacurate post.
Let’s say you have a friend who grew up racist but is really trying to improve and is making good progress. You’ve promised to punch him or something for every time he slips up (I imagine that’s the kind of person you are). They slip up, in an email or social media post or something. Before you can respond his wife gets in a car accident or some other circumstance that makes it wildly inappropriate to go punch him / confront his racism. So you put that off for now. Confronting racism seems to be, for you, a moral imperative. Not confronting racism makes you a racist according to your own standards. Does that make you a racist coward?
~Max
No, just that it doesn’t carry the same weight as it would if I was the one treating animals inhumanely, employing children in sweatshops, paying substandard wages, polluting the environment, etc.
~Max
I think you’re saying “out of sight, out of mind”, but that’s ridiculous. You can and should make choices that help stop all of those things.
I bet you do, asshole, I bet you do.
No, that’s not quite what I’m saying.
In post #605 I said I would follow the law unless the law requires me to do something so contrary to my conscience that I couldn’t live with myself if I followed it. As examples I gave turning a child out in inclement weather, and shooting an innocent. As a counterexample I gave telling immigration officials, should they ask, about Cuban refugees of communist oppression who are sheltering in my house.
Now, it may very well be that they face some sort of death penalty if extradited back to Cuba. And I said I was against shooting innocents. But my act of turning them in to immigration officials doesn’t carry the same moral weight as shooting them outright, which should be obvious, but apparently needs stating.
In the same line of thought, buying meat isn’t unconscionable like personally torturing a cow would (might?) be; if for some reason I was legally required to buy meat, I would have no compunctions about that law being so unconscionable as to overcome my duty to follow it.
~Max
Nobody is talking about the Vermonter buying a cotton shirt, it’s about returning a human being to slavery. You’re now walking the escaped cow back to being tortured.
I always imagined, “The Straight Dope, fighting ignorance MrDibble, punching racists since 1973.”
~Max
I wasn’t going to respond anymore, but fuck it (I’m not saying butt fuck it, though if that’s your thing do it as long as it’s consensual).
Max, a normal person doesn’t see a difference. This “moral weight” you measure differently is not something that empathic people have. You are either trolling, or have sociopathic tendencies. It doesn’t really matter either way, you are shitty regardless.
The distinction you’re drawing here would be like saying that dumping a kitten onto a busy freeway doesn’t bother you as much, because you’re not the person actually running the cat over with your vehicle. Your actions directly led to the incident in either case. A normal person would be horrified doing any of it.
No, I’m not. Finding a runaway slave in your barn and turning him over to the local justice of the peace is not, in and of itself, reducing him to slavery. I’m not treating him any different than a white man who trespassed on my property, or for that sake, a cow that jumped my fence.
~Max
Whatever you think I’m saying doesn’t hold up, or I’m contradicting myself somehow, because morally speaking I think dumping a kitten onto a busy freeway would be about the same as running it over with my own vehicle.
~Max