NOVA DRAGON

“You can tell people not to smoke but you’d be a hypocrite then. If a hypocrite is telling you not to do something they’re doing - that’s worthless.”

I couldn’t disagree with the “worthless” thing more, even if I tried.

Yes, I would be a hypocrite, but calling someone a “hypocrite” is merely a personal attack on their character. Someone’s character, ultimately, does not change the fact of the matter, which is that, in this case, smoking is harmful and you shouldn’t smoke if you want to be in good health. The person telling you this being a hypocrite has no bearing on that whatsoever—it’s intellectually fallacious to even suggest such a thing.

I know what you were trying to do, and I understand your sentiment. However, ultimately, personal consistency doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, right? If I smoke cigarettes, I can still tell people not to smoke, right? My smoking doesn’t undermine the science or the message. However, my concern is that this “KILL THE RICH” platitude has been so adopted by the online left that it’s making us look, as a whole, like psychopaths; and, considering that, it’s now beyond “individual consistency” and more in the territory of “stupid zeitgeist” that does more harm than good. Honestly, what I see right now is a bunch of LARPers that make the left look crazy, and I feel like, ultimately, that’s harmful. The fact that I get so many downvotes is just kinda a reinforcement of this impression, as well. It’s a sad time to be alive when widespread murder is the political chant, in any day/age… lest we become the monster, and all that. That’s all.

I respect life? sorry?

“killing half the billionaires and redistributing their wealth”

Are we on the same planet right now? How are you going to do that? And if you kill them, how are you to ensure their wealth is redistributed properly, not just funneled back into their corporate shell company or their equally immoral families? The measure you’re proposing here requires a total overhaul of the system that is more unrealistic than a measured overhaul into more overall socialist systems of general wealth redistribution. I get that billionaires do harm to the planet and I get that that makes you, me, angry. but what you’re proposing here is just straight up murder and it’s unrealistic; It’s even more unrealistic than, say, everybody voting for a socialist and the systems entirely overhauled except you are adding extra steps of just killing all the billionaires on top of it. What I’m ultimately concerned about is the left going online and just saying kill billionaires while sitting in front of their computers doing literally nothing, making all of us look like psychopaths thus hurting our cause due to clear and obvious LARPing.

but it’s obvious to me that I’m not going to change your mind. you can sit around and LARP on Lemmy all day, if you want, that’s fine. Ultimately, in an hour, I won’t care that we even had his conversation. I’m not going to change your mind, so this is going to be my last post regarding this subject, because I’m not going to change anybody’s mind on a far left leaning Lemmy community. I’m sorry I even posted my opinion.

vegan, actually.

OK why don’t you go kill some billionaires then, instead of just fantasizing about it on the internet? Good luck and godspeed.

Are you a literal slave? If you play with meaning, you can turn everyone into a slave and kill everyone. Is that what you want?

I also respectfully disagree. Tit for tat, taken to its logical conclusion, eradicates all life on the planet; if that’s your goal, fine, you can make that argument, but that’s ultimately a separate discussion. There were literal slaves and serfs around the time of the French Revolution—now you could make an argument that “wage slaves” or whatever exist in the first world, but that is pure abstraction when compared to the absolute widespread human suffering in France during the late 1700s. You would have to be entirely disconnected from reality to think that people, en masse, have it worse in first world countries than they did in France during the 1700s; that’s a “log off” moment, for sure. If you want to expand the scope to the world at large, then, yeah, there is some fucked up stuff going on, and people (millionaires, billionaires, &c. &c.) do hoard wealth, but murdering them is not the solution; that won’t even do anything to their accumulated wealth, as most of it is tied up in corporate assets; instead, harsh regulation needs to be enacted on the system that allows these people to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth. But instead, we have these very surface level takes that are just like “kill the billionaires”, which solves nothing and actually makes our side look insane, which hurts our cause—frankly, its stupid. Now, if you want to alter the claim to “the threat of violence is needed,” then I would be more inclined to agree; however, individually murdering certain billionaires is not productive; I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to match whatever vitriolic bullshit eye for an eye sentiment that these billionaires might have, and maybe that’s an idealistic take and naive, but it feels right.

This whole “kill the rich” thing is counterproductive and needs to stop. Advocating for murder has never been cool.

There’s truth in both your response and the post you’re replying to. The seller did take the time to list the relevant information right there on the sign, but he didn’t have to adopt this “OK idiot” attitude when the potential buyer started asking questions; because, while the buyer may be an idiot, there are a lot of idiots in the world, and we should err on the side of empathy instead of judgment. In this scenario, the seller is basically doing the “like I said…” thing that everyone p. much everyone unanimously hates. So, when the buyer asked his dumb questions, the seller should have simply answered them—after all, what is the buyer trying to do, ultimately? He’s trying to sell the product; he should not be trying to correct someone’s mental handicap (however minor or severe), because, if he made that his goal, he’d need the patience of a literal saint and all the time in the universe.

This comic would have been just as effective–and less insulting–had they not included the explanation at the top; the graphic gets the point across just fine.