You would have been a real riot in the concentration camps.
Smapti: “Hey, everybody… okay, so you’re starving and emaciated and you get no medical care and you work all hours of the day with hardly any clothing on in terrible weather, and at this point you barely even look like a person anymore, but listen! You’re alive. Isn’t that great? Ce-le-brate good times, come on!”
Everyone else: “Are we done yet?”
Smapti would’ve willingly become a kapo.
Is there a name for the people who reported their neighbors in Nazi Germany?
Nazis.
Bumping due to Smapti spreading his insanity into a death penalty thread: Well, looks like Texas executed an innocent man - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board
Just as a reminder, Smapti is on record, by his own posts, as believing it is wrong to help free slaves at little/no risk to himself, he believes MLK Jr.'s civil disobedience was wrong, he believes that the only fucking morally correct actions for a slave in the pre-1860s US was to obey their master, and he believes that Harriet Tubman’s actions to help free slaves were morally wrong.
IMO there’s no point in engaging with Smapti on these issues, since his sense of morality and the law is fundamentally broken. I recommend treating his opinions on the subject as you would the ramblings of a crazy person on the street.
A few months old, but this is a great analysis of Smapti’s particular flavor of insanity.
I try to be fair with posters. The only time Smapti stuck out in my mind in a negative way was in discussing Edward Snowden, but there are arguments to make against what Snowden did. Some of the posts cited here, however, are reminiscent of the kind of things Steophan might type - I don’t judge Steophan in total, only having a negative view of his apparent embrace of police power, which I find disturbing.
Let me fix that last sentence for you, if you don’t mind:
I recommend treating his opinions on the subject as you would the ramblings of any other crazy person.
Or, you know: *A coward, a fascist and an idiot. *
Smapti is now spreading his crazy into an organ donation thread: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=881869
For those tempted to engage him (and that includes me, for a few posts, until I remembered), I recommend keeping in mind the following:
Just as a reminder, Smapti is on record, by his own posts, as believing it is wrong to help free slaves at little/no risk to himself, he believes MLK Jr.'s civil disobedience was wrong, he believes that the only fucking morally correct actions for a slave in the pre-1860s US was to obey their master, and he believes that Harriet Tubman’s actions to help free slaves were morally wrong.
IMO there’s no point in engaging with Smapti on these issues, since his sense of morality and the law is fundamentally broken. I recommend treating his opinions on the subject as you would the ramblings of a crazy person on the street.
Someone was recently (and justly) taken to task for feigning concern for another poster’s mental health. That said, I think Smapti really, truly believes that vivisectionists are lurking, waiting for a chance to kill him for his organs.
I’m not saying this to make fun of him.
He needs to be reassured that this was not a documentary.
I’m not surprised he’s against organ donations. The operation getting him a working brain was clearly a failure.
So, slaves and those that would free them should be obedient to the state, but if something has the potential to impact him personally, well that’s clearly government over reach.
I am not “against organ donation”. I am against policies that would make people organ donors by default, or punish people for not being donors (which several people have proposed in the thread at question), because the precedent they establish is the beginning of a slippery slope which leads to forced euthanasia for the purpose of organ harvesting.
I am not stating that I would actively disobey any given law about organ donation. I’m saying that I believe such a law would be wrong, just as I believe that slavery is wrong. Saying that a law should be obeyed is not a judgment as to whether the law is a good one.
Given that opt-out results in significantly higher participation rates, and thus much higher availability of donor organs, it would reduce or eliminate the organ shortfall - and thus reduce or eliminate any reason for “forced euthanasia for organ harvesting”.
Also, those places rumored or reported to have engaged in “organ farming” most explicitly do not offer the concept of “opt-out”, not in fact any opting of any kind.
If there is such a slippery slope, it doesn’t start with opt-out. It probably starts with a totalitarian regime not questioned or resisted by its citizens. It sorta starts with you.
Did you flunk civics? Quick, folks; list all the ways in the United States of America to get a bad law revoked. It’s a short list, Smapti. One of them is doozie, too.
Passing new legislation, judicial review, or Constitutional amendment.
In the case of slavery, the antebellum Congress was unable to prevent its spread and the Supreme Court found it was permissible under the Constitution at the time, which is why the postbellum Congress passed the 13th Amendment to do away with it.
Ah, so you do know about judicial review. Let’s just stipulate you know how a law gets in front of the courts for that to happen. (Well, technically, it’s a case that comes before the court, but that’s not much of a distinction here.) So, in short, you’re just a fucking idiot.
One who feels that their rights are abridged by the law files suit against the authority which they feel is denying them the exercise of their right. In some cases, this involves attempting to perform an act which is illegal under the law in question for the specific purpose of it being prevented by the authority, for the purpose of demonstrating the alleged denial of rights.
This is not an unacceptable act of disobedience, because the intent is not to openly defy the law, but to demonstrate that an act is unlawful for the purpose of arguing that it ought not be so.