It’s the trolley problem again. This time, you have 3 tracks and 2 switches. The trolley is headed towards 5 people, one switch sends it to 1 person, and the other switch would send it to 0 people, but it’s broken. Voting third party is pulling the broken switch, knowing the 5 people will die but you’ve shifted the responsibility from yourself to whoever was supposed to fix the switch.
Excellent analogy. If anyone still plays dumb after reading this, they probably are
I like your analogy. Let me expand.
This same situation happens every day. For years now, 1 person has died every day. Nobody pulls the broken lever, but if people started pulling it, it would start working. For the first couple days or weeks, 5 people would die each time, but eventually we would be able to get the train on a safe track.
The whole post is an example of a propaganda technique where you keep repeating one thing over and over until it becomes a default thing where people don’t even question the logic.
The ones capable of refuting it feel tired because of the sheer number of posts while the vulnerable ones get affected.
Today both sides “feel” that the use of this propaganda is fair game cuz the other side is already doing it.
Why do neoliberals bring up the trolley problem as if it is some settled debate among scholars that there is one clear possible answer?
I’m not a neoliberal, I’m a socialist. I’m just not an idiot who will give a fascist free rein just because his opponent has the same shitty foreign policy as every politician in the whole fucking country has. There is a difference between the status-quo level of bad and catastrophic.
Harris supporters on Lemmy have called for me to be put in a concentration camp.
*Harris supporters with violence fantasies: https://lemm.ee/post/45695948/15722267
Your fears of fascism are ignorant of the capacity that Democrats exhibit.
Edit: I think my point was too subtle. What I meant was that it seems like lefties will bicker and infight rather than focusing on the bigger enemy first, until that enemy manages to seize power and it’s too late. We’ll be “united” in that we’ll be executed together.
Sometimes, I wonder if a Trump victory would be the only way to get the various leftist factions to stop arguing and stand together, side by side, united in the fact that fascists don’t care what flavour of ideological opposition they’re executing.
Who gives a shit about whether the Trolley Problem is settled - it’s about your answer: Which option do you endorse?
Some people say this out of desperation about the french left : what if we had five years of Le Pen, wouldn’t that consolidate the left? Well, perhaps. Should we try something else first? Probably
As a center-leftist supporting third party candidates (Go Claudia de la Cruz!), no a Trump victory won’t unite the left, because a Trump victory won’t make me like the Democrats more than I do now. If the Democrats want my vote, they will have to start appealing to me as a voter (stop supporting Israels war, reduce military spending, etc)- but the Democrats don’t have these policies and a Trump victory won’t change that.
Tl;dr a Trump victory changes nothing for my stance as a third party supporter
The trolley problem isn’t “settled debate” for the same reasons that Kamala vs Trump isn’t “settled debate”.
The point of the trolley problem and why it’s analogous is that it’s coming up fast and you must choose to either pull that lever or not. Whichever choice you make, that’s the moral character you’ve chosen to exhibit.
What is the moral character of someone incapable of questioning the validity of orphan crushing trolleys?
