PugJesus

PugJesus , 10 hours ago to World News in ‘I am not made for war’: the men fleeing Ukraine to evade conscription

: Also, I seriously doubt you never do anything out of self-interest and only spend your life altruistically, which is what you are essentially berating me for not doing.

Because... I say that... there should be SOME kind of moral limit to what you would do to prevent risk from someone close to you?

Because I say that, I'm demanding you live your life 100% altruistically?

Also, I would suggest that I do not have the moral right to sacrifice anyone’s life but my own, related to me or not.

And where does inaction fit into that paradigm?

PugJesus , 10 hours ago to World News in ‘I am not made for war’: the men fleeing Ukraine to evade conscription

You are getting dangerously close to violating civility rules.

For correctly pointing out that your argument is entirely without limits? Civility is when someone doesn't say something that makes you think about your deeply held positions, and the less you have to think, the more civil it is.

You do not get to tell me it is my duty to send my child to die in a war any more than you get to tell me that it’s my duty to sacrifice my child to appease the volcano god no matter what moral argument you are making.

Cute, that you equate stopping genocide with superstition. Funny enough, the very example you use, the historical 'sacrifice your child to the gods' ALSO goes against your claim of doing quite literally anything for your child being the irrepressible urge of billions of years of evolution that you can't help instead of a very modern phenomenon.

And you also do not get to call anyone here evil. You have been here long enough to know that.

Oh, I don't get to have opinions on morality, now? I'm sorry. Please forgive me for judging anyone as evil. I'll remember to say nice things about the Nazis next time too. After all, they were just preserving a future for their children. I mean, what if their children had the risk of going hungry and dying in the future? Isn't cleansing the land of foreigners to preserve plentiful estates for them worth removing that risk?

I’m sorry that you think I’m evil, but that does not give you the right to call me or anyone else evil.

So now I can't call anyone evil. Wow. I'll remember that the next time I'm discussing genocide.

PugJesus , 10 hours ago to World News in ‘I am not made for war’: the men fleeing Ukraine to evade conscription

I don’t remember making a moral argument. When did I do that? Can you please quote it?

If your argument isn't that saving your child under these circumstances is moral, what you're saying then, is that you recognize full well that what you're proposing, since it is seemingly entirely without limits, is unforgivably evil, but you're 100% okay with it anyway and have no interest in examining or questioning it.

PugJesus , 10 hours ago to World News in ‘I am not made for war’: the men fleeing Ukraine to evade conscription

The need to protect your offspring doesn’t just transcend species, it transcends kingdoms.

Cool, the need to reproduce also transcends kingdoms, but I wouldn't be making moral arguments for reproducing at any cost either.

I’m sorry, but trying to reason or shame me into abandoning my parental need to protect my offspring that goes back literally billions of years is not something you’re going to be able to do. There is a long, long history of parents begging their children not to go to war.

There's also a long, long history of parents shaming or even killing their own children for not going to war for a just cause. This idea of a child being worth committing any evil to save is very modern. You can claim that it's something that you could never fight, that it's some biological imperative that takes precedence over everything else, but history, and fuck, recent examples for that matter, very clearly points to that being nothing but an excuse.

PugJesus , 10 hours ago to Political Memes in bombastic side eye

Tens of thousands of men, women, and children are dying right now, and your guy is supporting it.

Thanks for affirming that you still don't understand the trolley problem.

And I am making a choice. I’m choosing third-party.

Keep giving out those thoughts and prayers to help the fascists. There's not much difference between you and them.

PugJesus , 10 hours ago to White People Twitter in Pls someone make this reality

We generally say 'Antiquity' and 'Late Antiquity' anymore.

PugJesus , 10 hours ago to World News in ‘I am not made for war’: the men fleeing Ukraine to evade conscription

Do you lack empathy for other parents and other children? Do you expect them to die to save you and your's, or will you just expect enough of them to die to stall for the duration of your lifetimes? How direct does your contribution to the deaths of others have to be? If your daughter was held hostage, would you go to the camps every day and pull the lever on the gas chambers, or would that be 'too much'?

My mother loves me, and I know she'd die to save my dumb ass. She'd kill a few people at the least too. But I also know she would be deeply ashamed of me if I was bound by common morality to assist in the prevention of a great evil, and chose instead to flee - not just spur of the moment, but continually, every day of my life, until either the evil was successful in its genocide or until other people paid the price on my behalf.

Could you look your daughter in the eyes, and tell her a hundred children raped to death were the price to not risk her life? Not even a guaranteed trade, just not to risk her life? What other risks to her life are unacceptable?

PugJesus , 10 hours ago to Political Memes in bombastic side eye

As a citizen, I am working on building support for third-party candidates who are outside of the Democrat-Republican Duopoly (which is really just a Monopoly).

Cool, you do realize that voting against fascism in this election doesn't disable you from doing that, right? You... you do realize that a fascist getting in power will make building that support harder, right?

... right...?

I don’t care if it’s realistic. It’s the only option I see.

This is the equivalent of 'thoughts and prayers'. May not be realistic, but boy does it make you feel like you're keeping your hands clean. I mean, ignore the hundreds of thousands of people who are going to die in various horrible ways because of your inaction, at least you didn't have to make a choice. That would truly be terrible.

PugJesus , 10 hours ago to Political Memes in bombastic side eye

Why is that my job?

Because you're a citizen. That's what being a citizen means. If you don't want to share in political power, I'm given to understand there's an wannabe autocrat who you're currently assisting who will gladly take the 'burden' of responsibility away from you. That way when you smile at all the minorities being herded into death camps, you can say "Don't worry! It wasn't my decision!" as you close the gate behind them.

Internet memes about the trolley problem actually fail to present it completely. After the ponderer decides that killing one person is better than killing five people, they are then asked if it’s okay to push a bystander off a bridge onto the train tracks if that would derail the train and prevent it killing five people.

To me, the ultimate lesson of the trolley problem is that morality is not a matter of trading fewer lives for more lives. That’s why I’m not listening to your “Biden probably means fewer deaths than Trump” argument. Voting for either of them violates my sense of morality.

Cool, so instead of seeing Palestinians die, you're going to see MORE Palestinians die AND Americans AND Ukrainians AND see a decline in freedom, equality, and living standards across the board. Fucking wonderful. "Let's make things worse, because that's what my morality says is best!"

You save literally no one, kill additional people, make the system worse, because... you don't want to make a decision.

That's fucking vile.

I’d rather work on dismantling the tracks, even if it might take a while.

Cool, how do you think that's going to work under an openly fascist regime?

PugJesus , 11 hours ago to World News in ‘I am not made for war’: the men fleeing Ukraine to evade conscription

How many other sons and daughters are worth your's? Ten? A hundred? A thousand? Does it matter if they're children, or legal adults? Does it matter if they die quickly, or held, raped for a month, and then tortured to death?

PugJesus , 11 hours ago to World News in ‘I am not made for war’: the men fleeing Ukraine to evade conscription

That only causes the sons and daughters of others to die

PugJesus , 11 hours ago to Political Memes in bombastic side eye

You’re trying to make this a false dichotomy. That’s a form of logical fallacy, and it’s manipulative.

You do realize that not all dichotomies are false dichotomies, right?

Here - why don't you outline a realistic plan that leads to neither Biden nor Trump being elected, and how you plan to achieve that. That way you can prove that "The two near-majority polling candidates, and the only two that will be on the ballot in every state, aren't the only practical options", and that you aren't just misusing terms out of an ignorance of what they mean.

It’s like those trolley problems about “do you throw the switch or not”? The thing I would do is try to fix the brakes. And if people on the track die, that is the fault of whoever tied them to the track, not me.

It's astounding that you manage to miss the entire point of a trolley problem.

PugJesus , 11 hours ago to White People Twitter in Pls someone make this reality

The Middle Ages were not "a time of ignorance, barbarism and superstition"; the Church did not place religious authority over personal experience and rational activity;

Like hell it didn't.

and the term "Dark Ages" is rejected by modern historians

Because it's a prejudicial term, not because the past isn't fucking shitty.

PugJesus , 12 hours ago to Political Memes in it's a big deal jack

No /s, I have definitely been assured of it many times by commenters on the Fediverse.

I'm just not in agreement.

PugJesus , 12 hours ago to Political Memes in bombastic side eye

Oh, I do think Trump is a fascist. (And Biden is supporting a fascist in Israel, so what’s the difference?)

What's the difference between a fascist who has openly stated an intention to shift to unlimited support for Israel to 'finish the job' and someone who has expressed limited (if insufficient) support for restraining Israel?

I wonder. Or maybe it's the difference between one openly stating an intention to end democracy here, in the US, while the other quite openly opposes the idea of ending democracy in the US?

I guess those are minor differences in the end. Who cares if fascism comes to America, right? It won't affect the people voting to let it in.

Trump says murderers and rapists will pour across the border. You say Trump will bring in death camps. Aren’t you sick of all the scaremongering?

Wow, I'm so glad that the prospect of the death of minorities at the hands of a regime you yourself admit is fascist is equivalent to baseless right-wing claims of "murderers and rapists" pouring across the border. Great.

And even if death camps are a possibility, you’re asking me to weigh the possibility of death camps against a very real genocide that is happening right now.

I'm really not. I'm asking you to weigh one thing, and one thing only - what difference your vote and advocacy will make in this election.

As much as it would thrill me to have the American electorate take a sudden and sharp turn left, erasing the past several decades of voting trends, in the next four months, it is exceedingly unlikely, especially considering polling on the current issues that dominate people's minds. Therefore, one must ask what the risks are for each realistic candidate's victory.

For a Biden victory, the risk is insufficient opposition to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and a lack of substantive resolutions to any of the problems facing the US at this point in time.

For a Trump victory, the risk is total US support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the abolition of what democracy the US does have, genocide in Ukraine, sterilization camps for immigrants (we had those during the Trump years, before you cry "Well that's just scaremongering", it was kind of a big deal to those few of us who pay attention to politics in this country), a self-proclaimed 'day-one dictator', and everything in the fucking Project 2025 outline coming to fruition.

Voting third party on the presidential level in this election is nothing more than an abstain. "I don't care which of those outcomes comes true."

Are those two victories equivalent in your eyes?