In a number of threads now, Rand Rover has interrupted a stream of commiseration, pity, compassion, whining, or complaining (take your pick as to the characterization that applies) with a very black-and-white, confident appraisal of the problem being faced.
So far as I’ve been able to observe, his comments are seldom models of compassion or empathy.
In this latest example, a thread about a family evicted from a rental property after the owner lost in in forclosure, he observes:
Now, while it’s true that this comment, and this line of thinking, makes him an asshole, there’s more to it. Thus this Pit thread.
Rand Rover, ol’ chum, it seems to me that if we take this logic you’ve outlined and run with it, there’s really no sense in commiserating over any unfortunate turn of events. Lost your leg when a drunk driver hit you head on? Hey, you knew the risks of driving, and you voluntarily chose to assume them. You could have purchased a Hummvee and gotten extra steel plating installed; perfectly legal, but you chose not to. Wife died of a heart attack? Statistically, it’s a virtual certainty that one spouse will outlive another. You should have known the forseeable risk in getting married was that your wife would die.
Now, I’m not blind to the basic idea you’re pushing, here, which is that when a person suffers injury as a result of their own bad judgment, we tend to leaven our sympathy a bit. If you lost a leg because YOU got drunk and drove head-on into someone, for example, it’s perhaps understandable that the outpouring of sympathy itsn’t as copious as it might be for the first traffic accident scenario.
But however defensible that idea might be in the abstract, you’ve elevated it to an indefensible extreme here. The woman in the rental story was not a victim of particularly poor judgment. She entered into a contract, which the landlord breached – every contract requires good faith, and the landlord owed her a fiduciary duty which he failed to exercise. She acted reasonably, and was hit by a very unfortunate event. This calls for sympathy, and your critique of her is unreasonable.
Nor is this the only example.
I’m all for calling out the people that have indeed been victims of their own stupidity, malfeasance, or negligence. Even then, I don’t agree that they deserve nothing but scorn, but I’m willing to allow that some scorn may be in order. You have abandoned (if you ever held) that idea, and have evidently decided that any misfortune is the fault of the victim. This is wrong because it’s logically flawed, and because it’s cruel.
I realize that you care naught for one of those reasons, but perhaps the other will make an impact.