We’re talking capability.
By unlocking the gate, you **enhance **their capability to escape.
Yes. If I enable slaves to escape, and they are subsequently recaptured and tortured or killed or whatever other gruesome punishments you can imagine being rendered unto a runaway slave and/or his/her family, then it is my fault. And I don’t want that on my conscience.
Thus making myself responsible for what happens to them if they escape.
By that bizarre logic, if you leave them in captivity instead, and they subsequently go through continued decades of grueling labor, hardship, whippings, servitude and abuse that is typical for slavery, then it is your fault. Do you want that on your conscience?
Geez, there were dozens of posts between these two, and you still forgot the United Way update…
In that case I have taken no action that makes me responsible for their fate.
If I take it upon myself to enable the slaves to escape, then I am responsible for their escape, not them.
I am the gunman; the slaves are the gun.
No, you made a choice that resulted in a worse outcome. It’s pretty reasonable to suppose that the slaves themselves will know better whether they’re better off escaping or not – by not opening the gate, you’re choosing the scenario in which that is not an option.
Inaction can be a choice.
Nope. You’ve already committed yourself to the position that the decider (the guy issuing the orders for genocide) is responsible but the enabler (the guy pulling the gas chamber switch) is not. You’ve squirmed and weaseled around the obvious obscenity of this position, but you haven’t repudiated it (until just now, with the above statement – in a way that leaves you stained by all the obscenity but stripped of whatever virtue there may be in standing behind it).
Damn I hope so.
What are we beating this guy up about I would like to know.
Inaction doesn’t let you off the hook.
Say you see a passenger smuggling an explosive device aboard an airplane (a plane which you yourself will not be boarding), but choose not to report or say anything to the authorities about it.
If that plane was subsequently blown up with loss of all life aboard, could you really live with peace of mind afterwards, shrugging, “I have taken no action that makes me responsible for their fate?”
Er, how so? As Smapti has explained, no injustices are going on in Russia.
Yes.
Another indication of how you are a very bad neighbor, and a detriment and possibly even a danger to the society in which you live.
Then you are, by pretty much every standard, a terrible piece of shit. But that’s not news to anybody in this thread.
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping, Smapti. Why is that?
This is not quite right.
I don’t post very much on the SDMB, but I spend a great deal of time on this site. It’s rare that a day passes without me reading what is being discussed here on the dope. That said, I did not take note of Smapti for many years; I don’t know if that is because he did not post much during the early years of his membership here, or if his opinions changed, or maybe I just missed it. Regardless, in the last few years I have noted Smapti’s posts, first with shock, then with disbelief, and finally with horror.
Think of all the people that have advanced the cause of human rights through history: Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, William Blackstone, George Mason, etc… All these people fought for civil rights, justice, equality, and the rule of law. These people, and others like them, are why we have equality and justice in this country. They, and others like them, are why we abolished slavery. They are why we don’t stone or decapitate people for heresy or apostasy. They are why we don’t execute our political leaders when they fall out of favor. They are the pillars of our civilization.
The opposite of these people are not the monsters in history like Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot. Nor are they the more common sociopaths like Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, or Ted Bundy. No, it is people like Smapti that are the antithesis of these pillars of our civilization. They are a much more pervasive and banal evil. Even as they claim to abhor things like slavery and murder and rape, they are the tools of the monsters that try to tear down our civilization.
If Smapti lived in the antebellum south, it would not matter that he disapproved of slavery, he would stand by and watch as an entire race of people were enslaved and treated as chattel. He would watch as families were ripped apart, as children were sent to die in fields far from their parents, as women were raped by their owners, and as men were beaten to death when they were too weak or sick to work. Not only would he watch, but we would defend the system if someone rebelled against it. He would decry it as a great wrong out of one side of his mouth while dutifully turning in a child born into slavery that had escaped even if it meant the child’s death.
If Smapti lived in Nazi Germany, he would stand by and watch on Kristallnacht as 30,000 Jews were rounded up and sent to Concentration camps to die even if he knew this would be their fate. If the SS could not find where a Jewish family was hiding on that night, Smapti would give them directions regardless of his feelings as they are the representatives of the state and the state is always right.
It is people like Smapti that made up the community members at Jamestown; if he were there he would have mixed the Koolaide and cyanide and given it to the children there as their divine leader, Jim Jones, demanded. People like Smapti, as members of the FLDS church, obediently delivered up their wives and daughters for rape by Warren Jeffs and the other church elders. It was people like Smapti that plunged their knives into Sharon Tate’s eight and a half month pregnant body killing her and her unborn child at the orders of their leader, Charles Manson.
People like Smapti have renounced their humanity and abdicated all personal responsibility for justice in the world. Morality is not relevant when discussing them as the have relinquished any judgement of good or evil. It does not matter what they believe or feel. It does not matter what they have been taught. It only matters that they will unquestionably do and support what their superiors tell them. Good is what their government and leaders tell them and evil is anything that opposes it.
Luckily, Smapti is irrelevant as a US citizen; the US (for all of its many, many faults) is mostly a force for human rights and good in the world. If, instead, Smapti lived in a different country or time, he would have been a tool used to rape, murder, and commit genocide. People like Smapti are the worst of us.
I don’t disagree with the rest of your post, but fuck that. The Great Person theory of history is bullshit, and worse : it is an actively harmful view of history. History is not changed by one Great Dude doing one Great Thing, rather Great Dudes are picked as exemplars of popular movements and evolving trends. Because it makes for a simpler object lesson - a better “lie to children” as Pterry Pratchett would say.
The reality is a lot messier than that. Hitler did not cause the Holocaust. A hundred million people did, each in their small but significant and necessary way, over multiple decades. Abraham Lincoln did not free the slaves, and Isaac Newton did not figure out gravity. They were all standing on the shoulders, not of giants, but of a great anonymous mass, propping them up, shaping them, crowbarring them into their molds.
The point is : we all have a stake and a responsibility for how History unfolds, even if it doesn’t look that way from our individual, narrow perspective. And it is, of course, in that context that **Smapti **can go swallow a cactus. We each do our part, we all have to.
He will carry water for any devil asks him to.
… you just keep telling yourself that, Virginia 
Nice hijack Kobal2.
I actually completely agree with you about the flow of history; the forces that created the holocaust, the great leap forward and its mass starvation, or the genocide of Americans by the colonials is all bigger than one or even a handful of people. You are 100% correct.
But this thread is about Smapti and what a complete piece of shit he is. I tried to do that by contrasting him with people in history that were not pieces of shit and maybe I did engage in a bit of hyperbole. But the point, I think, stands.