Sorry, I don’t believe I’m responsible if a guy drives to a bar, gets drunk, and then crashes the car, even if I gave him my keys. I didn’t drive him to the bar, I didn’t buy him any drinks, and I didn’t force him to drive after he got drunk.
…knowing he was going to drunk drive, is the pertinent point.
It’s no different than if a guy says “Oooh, I’m so mad, if I had a gun I’d just kill someone”…and then you give him a gun. *Of course *you’re responsible.
You’ll not that mostly, the law agrees that you’d be liable if you knowingly let someone else drive your car drunk.
Great, well in the case of the poll of this thread, I don’t KNOW that anyone is going to kill anybody. So I guess I’m in the clear. Thanks for making my point for me!
.Are you claiming to be unaware of the existence of sociopaths, hate groups or any other similar groups? Of course any reasonable person would know (sorry, “KNOW” :rolleyes:) that if the law passes, there would be people who definitely would kill.
I love when people think they won an argument and while they’re patting themselves on the back, their shoulder gets dislocated.
To be clear, I wasn’t assuming an alt-reality US for this question; I assumed that people’s responses would reflect a view of society shaped by their respective political environments. And yes, since America is in the political weeds right now and most posters here are American, I expected to see mistrust and suspicion on display. Now that a lot of people have answered, it would be interesting to know all their countries of origin and whether/how their responses were shaped by their experience of being from there. So far, only the South African poster has made that known.
But I’m still curious whether the yes voters would reconsider if, rather than their whole country, they imagined a smaller group of people they had more in common with. Would they trust a smaller, more homogeneous electorate to not vote for something crazy?
Anyway, apart from whether you trust your countrymen, the other dimension of the question was strictly the morality of voting one way or another, and it’s no surprise that people have very different ways of calculating it. That part seems to have devolved into a back-and-forth about who’s responsible for what, and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere productive.
In the referendum, nobody would know how you voted until all the votes were counted. Of course, you wouldn’t see a real-time update of the tally either, so the thread’s poll wouldn’t really be a good simulation anyway.
I presume that you also don’t know that water is wet - if it’s inconvenient to know that.
Why do people tell you to vote, if voting has no effect? If voting has an effect, if me voting has an effect, then (brace for it) my vote has an effect. And if my vote has en effect, I’m responsible for that effect, as a result of that whole “words have meanings and that’s what the word ‘responsible’ means” thing.
I mean, honestly, suppose this thing passes. Who else is responsible for it passing than the people who voted for it? The people who didn’t vote for it? The people who abstained? Space monkeys? Sorry, no, that’s idiotic. The people who caused it to happen are the people who caused it to happen. It’s pretty damn axiomatic.
Now, as to the Obama thing. I voted for Obama, and I’m responsible in some small way for everything he did while in office. If his term in office was an unmitigated disaster, then an as honest person I have to accept my part in voting for that. Of course it would insane to assess the his presidency by focusing on only the bad effects of it, and nobody here would be so completely unhinged as to focus only on the people he killed and ignore everything else. I mean, that would just be stupid. Nobody would do that.
So let’s look at the full spectrum of results of this referendum passing.
- It’s now legal to kill a subset of humanity that it wasn’t legal to kill before.
- No other effects.
Yep. You vote for this thing, you’re voting to legalize murder. There’s really no other way to look at it. Well, I suppose you could lie like crazy about it to yourself and everyone around you, but that’s not going to impress anybody who hasn’t got a vested interest in helping you dodge responsibility.
I’m an american. (As my posted location indicates.)
I’m also anti-gun. I perceive the logic supporting wide and easy availability of guns to be approximately equivalent to the arguments supporting a yes vote here - personal safety is perceived as being increased, and damn the consequences, they’re not my problem.
I don’t expect anyone to accept responsibility for their actions - seriously, who accepts responsibility for their actions? I didn’t even write this post; space monkeys did. However it would be nice if it was acknowledged that voting yes is not going to be universally agreed as a noble and heroic action that will be praised by yes and no voters alike, voters who’ve already been murdered included.
Again with the “impress anybody.” kind of hung up on that, aren’t you?
I don’t know how you sleep at night with the crushing responsibility you feel over all the innocent victims of US drone bombings. It must wrack you with guilt 24 hours a day.
Well, I’m not going to murder everyone I meet, so yeah, it bears mentioning how this referendum will effect interpersonal relations between people in the community. Whether or not it passes it will create a list where people can look up who the cowardly assholes who want to allow murders are. If the referendum passes I would definitely expect to see society fragmenting as the people yes voters are trying to get killed decide it’s not to their benefit to associate with people who want them dead. Even if it doesn’t pass the assholes will probably find themselves losing friends and job opportunities - if somebody holds a gun to your head but doesn’t get to fire it you still don’t end up liking them. If it does pass, then a portion of the ‘no’ voters will doubtlessly look upon the newly-lawless society and decide that if they don’t get protection nether should anybody else, and take it upon themselves to demonstrate on at least a few people that voting ‘yes’ wasn’t the protection they thought it was.
Honestly, more than anything else this demonstrates the importance of secret ballots. Yes voters are doing something reprehensible for their own benefit, and the stability of society pretty much demands that people voting reprehensibly be allowed to resume the cover of decency in their daily life, at least until they reveal themselves on twitter.
Nope, because I’m not stupid. The reasoning was clearly explained for all to see who have reading comprehension.
You seem to be taking this mighty personally, and are now simply calling those who disagree with you assholes and cowards. We clearly are not going to agree on this, so have a good day.
Hmm? I was talking about how the people who Yes voters are slating for death are likely to perceive said yes-voters. And I didn’t think it was even slightly controversial that the yes-voters under discussion are casting their votes explicitly for the purposes of self preservation, while explicitly throwing no-voters in front of the bus full of murder as part of their approach to self-preservation.
The scenario is actually very explicit in putting people between a rock and a hard place. It’s “choose to either risk yourself being killed, or to explicitly support the killing of other people for your own safety.” That’s the scenario presented. The “yes” vote is explicitly a vote from a position of fear.
Pretty much the only yes-voters who are not acting in a cowardly fashion are those who are supporting the proposition because they just want the freedom to murder people.