Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]

Ngl, the fact that the US lied about masks and had such a clusterfuck response while China listened to the science was a major step in me becoming China-pilled.

Moral rules are not things to be blindly followed, but rather are useful guidelines to avoid screwing things up. They are “the manual,” they are “standard operating procedure,” they are there for a reason and you can deviate from them, sure, but you’d better have a damn good reason, or you can expect it to blow up in your face.

Virtually everyone seems to have this all twisted up. On the one hand, you have people who always try to follow SOP, even if there’s good reason to deviate from it. On the other hand, you have people who see that there are situations where SOP doesn’t apply, so they just ignore it altogether. Both of these approaches are foolish and lead to making mistakes.

The trolley problem is a thought experiment specifically designed to be an exception to the otherwise reasonable SOP of “Don’t kill innocents.” But you don’t make a rule from the exception. You don’t go around treating, “The ends justify the means,” or “It doesn’t matter how many people I have to sacrifice in persuit of the greater good,” as your new SOP, just because you saw a thought experiment where the old SOP doesn’t apply.

The whole reason moral guidelines are necessary is because the mind if fallible and prone to making mistakes. Our emotions, or our desire to fit a particular identity, may get in the way of good decision making. For example, the use of torture post-9/11 was driven by hatred, a desire for revenge and domination, and a desire to embody the image of the Jack Bauer antihero, willing to do whatever it takes to keep people safe. I’ve read reports of NSA torturers walking out of torture sessions while visibly erect. It was driven by, well, evil. This “ends justifies the means” mental framework makes it all to easy for hate or other emotions to hijack reason. Of course, in reality, this torture never produced any useful information, and in at least one case caused a previously cooperative informant to clam up.

Likewise, if a problem can be pushed out of sight and out of mind, it can easily be ignored or rationalized away. This is the case with liberals and the Palestinian genocide. When something is far away, when it affects people who I don’t know, then psychologically it becomes much easier to write off anything that happens - even moreso if you are operating on the framework of, “Any cost to achieve my aims.” But these situations are where moral guidelines are more important than ever. It is fundamentally unacceptable to act on willful ignorance of the suffering caused by one’s actions, to say, “This makes me feel guilty so I just won’t look at it or think about it.” This is another way in which one’s mind can compromise their reason and better judgement.

That’s also what’s at play, at least imo, when people continue to eat meat despite knowing about the cruelty involved in that industry. When we see someone beat a dog, we are horrified, we are outraged, we are moved to act to stop it - because our empathy extends to the pain the dog feels. But cows and pigs can feel pain just as a dog can, which means that rationally, we should be equally horrified at the conditions those animals are kept in. But those practices are always kept out of sight and out of mind, and the mind has powerful forces, like the force of habit, that are capable of compromising reason and good judgement.

When people try to convince me of things (especially things like torture or genocide) based on them being “the lesser evil,” to say it goes against SOP is an understatement. It’s like asking me to dance a waltz on the raised forks of a forklift. Now, maybe some set of circumstances exists in which standing on the raised forks of a forklift makes sense, like maybe it’s the only way to escape a fire. But I’m never going to accept that this is just a normal or generally acceptable way of doing things.

The rules are there for a reason and you shouldn’t deviate from them without a very good reason and the majority of the time that people think they have a good reason they are wrong.

I gotta push back against the criticism that several of my comrades in here are expressing. Y’all are talking about the US collaborating with Nazis after the war, and you’re not wrong about that, but that was the US government, while this meme is about a soldier. The soldiers on the ground fought for all sorts of reasons, they might have opposed the Nazis for all sorts of ideological reasons, or they might have just been doing it out of loyalty, or any of the other reasons soldiers fight. But there were people on the ground fighting the Nazis under a US flag who were committed antifascists and even communists. As for the others, whatever their reasons, when the call came to save the world from fascism, they answered, and were willing to sacrifice life and limb to do it. That’s pretty heroic if you ask me. And they weren’t the ones who made the decision to let Nazis into NATO and stuff afterwards.

I understand the defensiveness against attempts to glorify the US while villifying the USSR and downplay their (more substantial) sacrifice and contribution to the war. But there’s nothing in this meme that’s doing that, and there were Americans who contributed to the war effort. Is it necessary to kneejerk react to a meme celebrating someone who fought the Nazis by talking about the government that ruled over them? People aren’t defined by their nation or their government.

Let’s not forget the proud tradition of people like Woody Guthrie, who explicitly tied the war effort to a broader idea of antifascism, nor of the people on the front lines who he inspired.

Israel has no right to exist.

What’s your plan when your preferred party nominates someone above your maximum age?

The vibes on RedNote aren’t so bad.

NATO is seeking to take control of decision-making powers on future aid packages — normally led by the US — in an effort to limit the impact of a potential second Donald Trump presidency on the ongoing conflict.

This is wild. It’s bad enough that the US president has the power to start wars wherever he wants with no congressional approval. But now they’re trying to make it so that the only people with the authority to withdraw from a conflict are unelected NATO officials accountable to no one.

Dronies will support this, because they love endless war across the globe and want to remove any potential for popular support to achieve peace.

I don’t think you understand how this works. You cited Wikipedia asking me to accept it as a source. That means that you accept it as a source, and I may or may not accept it as a source. Given that Wikipedia says that your claims of genocide are disputed, you have to accept that. I don’t have to accept Wikipedia as authoritative, because I never claimed it was, I’m just saying that if you accept it, then you have to accept that all your claims are disputed. That’s just how citing sources works.

Or I could… not base my views on history entirely off of Wikipedia articles?

The Irish Famine was a genocide, because it was intentional. I should’ve clarified I mean that famines can be genocides, but are not inherently genocidal.

I’ll note that your own source says in the introduction:

While scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made, whether the Holodomor constitutes a genocide remains in dispute

Likewise, the article on the Kazakh famine:

Some historians describe the famine as legally recognizable as a genocide perpetrated by the Soviet state, under the definition outlined by the United Nations; however, some argue otherwise.

And

The de-Cossackization is sometimes described as a genocide of the Cossacks, although this view is disputed, with some historians asserting that this label is an exaggeration.

The last one I didn’t see any mention of genocide though it might be buried deeper in the article, it’s pretty long.

Famines are not genocides lol. Though I suppose you could make the case that the embargo on the USSR caused a lot of excess deaths. Famines were extremely common before the USSR took power because it was a pre-industrial society, the USSR ended that. Also, the USSR is a completely different government from the Russian Federation.

Of course you do, that’s my point.

Great argument.

They do, but the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.

Of course they’re not, and I don’t consider them as such. They are, however, the enemy of my enemy. Ideally, once the US is dealt with, Putin can get the wall next.

They have a long history of erasing East European cultures (i.e. Russification), and genocide. So I do not trust them when it comes to Eastern European affairs, and neither do native people from those countries

The US has a much worse historical record with genociding native people, so maybe Russia should support some landback movements in the US. Afaik they never did anything to the Native Americans.

I’m not sure what genocide you’re referring to in any case. But I’m sure you can dig up some skeletons in the closets of any two historical neighbors if you go far enough back. What’s funny about your argument is that you seem to be suggesting that people thousands of miles away are better suited to govern a region, since they likely don’t have a similar record.

(I wonder how they got there).

Are we just going to ignore the part where the USSR expanded Ukraine’s borders to include the disputed regions?

I disagree that the previous government was a puppet government.

My political aims go against the interests of the US, so generally groups that are aligned with my aims oppose and are opposed by the US. I don’t believe in judging every conflict as a disinterested third party with no consideration of past events or present conditions. The US has a long history of installing far-right governments, has an atrocious record of human rights, and violates sovereignty left and right, and that is relevant to who I support.

I do believe in giving critical support to just about anyone who’s willing to disrupt the unipolar world order in which the US has license to act as a rogue state. I want everyone involved in starting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to face a war crimes tribunal and be shot or hanged, and I support things that bring us closer to that goal. You, on the other hand, want to keep blindly trusting those same people to tell us who our enemies are. The only way to put any check on the US’s rampant militarism and aggression is through a multipolar world order.

I support both the Vietnamese fighting against the South Vietnam puppet government and the Ukranians in the DPR fighting against the current Ukrainian puppet government, yes (though my support for the latter is more critical since they’re not communists)

The Vietnam War? You mean the one where a rebel faction backed by Russia rose up against a smaller, recently established pro-Western government, and the US came to the defense of that government, because if they lost the enemy would surely keep expanding more and more across the entire region, and all the peace advocates were dismissed as supporting appeasement? That Vietnam war?

Yes, we take a similar position on that as we do to this, do you?

Adding “jailing pacifists for speaking out” to the things dronies openly support, along with forcing others to fight when they’re not willing to, poisoning civilians with generations of birth defects, and giving cluster bombs to Nazis.

The moral high ground, ladies and gents

Ukrainians are dying too, including ones drafted against their will. Maybe you should fight in their place before asking them to die on your behalf.

The war was already going on before Russia sent troops in.

It’s not supporting Russia to be critical of one-sided narratives or to call for peace for the sake of minimizing loss of life.