CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]

lol, punny on two levels, I like it ;)

Centrists wouldn’t like me, I’ve been told I’m “not boring” so there goes any hope of a centrist grifter career

I normally don’t like AI stuff but this guy uses AI tools to make fun videos and you might like his Democratic Penguin’s Republic series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ8qGOe2K0o

Sorry, guess I’m scabbing on you all because nobody pays me, I just do it for the love of the game.

I did, long ago, dream of exiting the rat race so I could fulfill my dream of being a left-wing demagogue getting paid to spit fire in the faces of the powerful. Alas, I had no idea how to get started, then I read something by Nathan J. Robinson, the most prolific socdem essayist ever, where he said all his work gets him about $15K in profit a year, and I concluded that my dream would not come to pass. Man is at least 10x more prolific than I could be, writes less confrontational and therefore more accessible and publishable stuff, and is the editor and owner of a magazine. All for not enough to live on in any big city? Shit, the problem is that the left is the side of the people who don’t have money. Only way to make a good living doing politics is to work for the right wing which I obviously couldn’t so because while I may be a spineless cuttlefish, I still have a hard aragonite core that cannot bend and betray my principles.

Cute cute cute cute cute!

*people can construct, not you specifically. But maybe you, I don’t know.

Are you going to read or think about the comment or are we done here?

You can construct a trolley problem to justify anything you want. It’s about the constraints that the person who posed the question chose. You don’t really get to choose in a trolley problem. The constraints choose for you. In the real world, our options are not so constrained and the outcomes are not so clear. As such it is useless for actually figuring out what to do.

The trolley problem is a useful basic philosophical experiment to get people to think about things and reflect on constraints, assumptions, and values. And often the best response is in fact “fuck these constraints and assumptions!”

So the trolley problem is not bullshit, but it is very very often misapplied in a bullshit or bad faith way, for example last year in the US I saw a lot of liberals uncritically and unironically appeal to “the trolley problem” to rationalize voting for the party that was committing a live-streamed Holocaust. They were using it to absolve themselves of the responsibility to think about and own their moral judgements, and that is the sort of misuse that a lot of people balk at.