Neutrality is not enlightenment. It is a position only accessible to those for whom the stakes are very low, who want to feel superior to those who have no choice but to care.
If you’re opposed to neutrality, I am curious about the following:
Catalonian and Basque separatism: Good or bad?
Which is better: The Danish state church or the Finnish state church?
What is the appropriate way for Liechtenstein to respond to accidental Swiss invasions?
Are the anti-censorship attitudes that I have been told are common in the Caribbean good or bad, given that if they exist, they almost certainly include support of playing music calling for extreme homophobic violence?
If “no”, what’s the appropriate action to take, if any?
(I think neutrality is okay, because it’s hard to be right about everything, so people shouldn’t be pressured to display more confidence than they have in their opinions.)
A Jewish Holocaust survivor named Yehuda Bauer once said “ Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.“
Let me get this straight: it’s better to do evil than to realize that rushing in without a clue (particularly to issues that one has no a priori reason to believe are important) is not the best idea?
@ilzolende, what’s your take on this?
Well, while it is bad to be a perpetrator, it is better than just being a bystander and letting it happen. If you’re a bystander, you don’t really get involved with it one way or another. For example in the Holocaust, if you were a bystander, you were no better than being an oppressor. Of course, there were still people who helped, such as the Denmark people. The way I think of it is, if you’re COMPLETELY NEUTRAL, you don’t talk about what’s going on, you’re not helping anyone. You’re not bringing any sort of attention to the problem by being a bystander. If you’re a perpetrator, I can see how you could bring attention to the issue. It’s just how our minds perceive the message.
…
“For example in the Holocaust, if you were a bystander, you were no better than being an oppressor.”
I am parsing “bystanders are not better than oppressors” as equivalent to “oppressors are not worse than bystanders”. (If you endorse the first statement but not the second statement, I’d sincerely appreciate your reasoning for doing so, because I can’t model it.)
I disagree with [my parsing of] this statement. I take the apparently bold and controversial stance that Nazi war criminals are morally worse than randomly selected German kindergarteners in the early 1940s who may have repeated propaganda slogans or what have you.
Actually murdering real people to “bring attention to [an] issue” is bad. If an issue already involves people dying, another death will probably not generate enough additional attention to be justified. Does “108 people died!” make something sound significantly more important to random people than “107 people died!”? Probably not. And if people aren’t dying, how on earth could killing someone to raise awareness or something possibly be justified? (If you’re talking about perpetrating non-murder harms, then substitute in “had their wallets stolen” or what have you, I still stand by this argument.)
For a second I thought OP was trying to convince me invade Iraq.
“Are you with us or against us?” rarely has a good answer. It’s often a scary question to be asked, too.
“Are you with us or against us?”
“I’m against everyone who ever asks that question.”
(via ilzolende)
2 months ago · 16,589 notes · source: araxoolie · .permalink
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