Anonymous asked: (re that last ask) id assume that the person was using deliberate hyperbole because of perceived blowback. not quite joking but more like exaggerating so as not to actually engage in discussion? ex: if i was talking w a friend who i felt prioritised the environment over what i believed were more important concerns, i might then say something like 'i hate nature. every day i dump a lil more oil in the HOPES that i kill a few more dolphins' (ie i dont really want to talk abt this w you; relax)
Oooh, interesting, so, basically, the intent is to communicate “we don’t share values and I am uncomfortable discussing this so I’m going to opt out by being a caricature of the side you’re arguing against”? Sort of like responding to people who say “you’re going to Hell” with “yes, eating the souls of orphaned children really did a number on my chances of salvation”.
It would make me really stressed to be on the receiving end of this (as compared to just “can we talk about something that isn’t politics and stressful?”) but I guess people sometimes respond to “let’s not talk about politics” with “this isn’t politics, it’s basic human decency!” or “you’re not supposed to be comfortable!” or other things that make it hard to just request a topic change when someone’s discussing something they think has moral importance.
*is guilty*
The specific instance I can recall is someone calling me a racist, where I was like: “Yes, I hate blacks and I detest Jews. In fact, I punch them any time I see them. On an unrelated note, you wouldn’t happen to have any idea why all the mirrors in my house are broken, would you?”
I like to sincerely appropriate the accusation. One of my favourite moments was when a Frustrating Hippie complained about how the CEO of Nestle is evil for suggesting that water should not be free and an unlimited human right, I argued back that the only problem in his proposal of “manage water as a business, sell for highest bidder, generate profit for Nestle” was the “Nestle” which should’ve been “an equal dividend for everyone who lives in the area” instead. He proceeded to accuse me of being an evil corporate capitalist (because apparently socializing natural resources only counts as Proper Left if it’s done in a catastrophically sub-optimal way which eschews the best known technology for allocating them) and asked me whether I wanted people to pay for the air they breathe, too.
I was immensely delighted at this because he was running straight into a trap of “Actually yes” without even realizing it. I just changed “aquifer” to “atmosphere” and “drought” to “global warning” and made the exact same argument as before. Yes, people would technically pay for the air they breathe, but in practice it would be a rounding error only even measurable with cryptocurrencies compared to the industrial users who had been exploiting the free human right to breathing air to the full extent of their ability to consume it (so many orders of magnitude higher than that of the poor people these kinds of hippies claim to care about that it isn’t even funny) and would now pay for it instead, consequently also solving extreme poverty and instituting a global UBI as a goddamn side effect, compensating the people worst harmed by global warming with the money of the people causing it etc. and yes technically people would pay for the air they breathe and this thing you thought was just an obviously evil and ridiculous strawman would be way better than what we have now and what do you have to say about that, huh?
I could hear his brain crashing from hundreds of km away. Troll was highly amused while Optimization feels the need to point out that to this day it hasn’t encountered a more theoretically elegant way of solving numerous global problems at once than Frustrating Hippie’s “evil strawman only baby-eating capitalist devils would support”.
4 months ago · 74 notes · source: theunitofcaring · .permalink
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