7 ms·

I bet you've been pretty privileged in grand scheme of things, university, regular jobs, maybe the lowest point has been backpacking etc... Parent have at least

I bet you've been pretty privileged in grand scheme of things, university, regular jobs, maybe the lowest point has been backpacking etc... Parent have at least one car, yawn yawn yawn.. No one is stealing from you, they are stealing from a supermarket. Privileged people always seem to think in black and white, theft is theft never an excuse blah blah, quite often making the cliche mistake of associating morality with legality.. I hope one day you don't need to learn this ain't always correlated..

hueving 10y ago
Discursive ad hominem, yawn. Discuss the implications of theft being okay if you are hungry, not the background of the person who suggested they disagree with that notion.
- RodericDay 10y ago
  > Discursive ad hominem, yawn. What kind of environment do you partake in discourse in that this kind of condescending contribution is acceptable? It sounds like you're taking your cues from the Comic Guy from The Simpsons. "Tu quoque? yawn".
  - homogeneous 10y ago
    The "yawn" is a bit flippant, but I don't see why it's condescending, he's absolutely correct. Your comic book guy reference seems to suggest that you think he's using big words to sound smart or something, but it seems like a pretty cogent response to a post that completely skips over the substance of the topic at hand and parades around unqualified assumptions about the poster as an argument.
  - hueving 10y ago
    It was a direct response to the "yawn, yawn, yawn" in the parent. If someone is going to behave like a asshole, they don't deserve much better as a response IMO. Life is too short.
ixtli 10y ago
I think the reason why people have a hard time understanding what you're saying is because unless you've experienced _systemic_ difficulty in your life it's very hard to differentiate it from _personal_ difficulty. Put in a less rigorous way, if you've never truly had to fight against a system that seems constructed to see you fail it would be hard to understand how this is different from, and much worse than, difficulty that stems from smaller, instantaneous issues that present roadblocks or troubles in your life.
- eropple 10y ago
  I would agree with this--it's interesting to me that a culture that generally views itself as rational has such blind spots when it comes to systemic failures. I would expect that working with systems full of unintended behaviors, non-continuous outputs that can result in sudden failures, etc. should make that obvious, but apparently it doesn't. (Personally, I have never experienced systemic difficulty in my life--but it's plainly obvious that it exists.) For the sake of my blood pressure I won't go into the similarly strange attempts to solve what systemic failures (almost always the ones that minorly inconvenience the privileged, isn't that strange?) folks of this mindset do deign to recognize, but...yeah.
  - ixtli 10y ago
    I appreciate your desire to assume stupidity before malice but I've come to see the continuation of oppressive systems as intentional :( People profit off of them and so I'm forced to conclude that they're purpetrated intentionally. I'm not trying to say that there's some movie-like evil villain out there cackling to himself but rather that there are many people making money as a direct or related result of the systemic suffering of others and that they turn a blind eye to the sometimes painfully obvious effects of their actions.
    - eropple 10y ago
      Sure, but those aren't the people who are caping up for them on Hacker News. (I mean, some may be, but in general I'm skeptical.)
protomyth 10y ago
I've not been privileged all my life. I have a dislike for fish because of some of things and situations we were in. It is never, ever ok to steal. Stealing from a supermarket is stealing from a person or people. Just because you cannot name who is affected doesn't mean it isn't people. It is black and white. The morality and legality are in alignment in this regard. This whole "shades of grey" leads to the blackness that destroys people and civilizations. The whole point of government social programs is to provide for survival. There are organizations that provide and places to go.
- vidarh 10y ago
  > It is black and white That you believe this makes it absolutely impossible for me to think you're not in a privileged position. > The whole point of government social programs is to provide for survival. There are organizations that provide and places to go. Great when you know where to go, and they work as they should. They are not perfect. And people are not perfect. Especially not when starving.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    > That you believe this makes it absolutely impossible for me to think you're not in a privileged position. Believe what you want, but I sure as hell didn't grow up in a privileged position. > Great when you know where to go, and they work as they should. They are not perfect. And people are not perfect. Especially not when starving. Churches will give food, its part of many faiths. Stealing is wrong, and brings misery to others. People will help others, but taking is never right because of the chain of pain you unleash in the world. Whose privileged when you can decide to take from others?
    - vidarh 10y ago
      > Believe what you want, but I sure as hell didn't grow up in a privileged position. I think the disconnect there is that we appear to have very different ideas of what is required to be privileged. Have you ever starved? (And going hungry is not starvation). > Churches will give food, its part of many faiths. Again, have you ever starved, and tried to think clearly enough to find someone willing to give you food? > People will help others, but taking is never right because of the chain of pain you unleash in the world. If the choices is theft of necessities or starvation, I would always consider theft morally acceptable, because the pain involved is magnitudes apart from the pain caused by petty theft.
jerf 10y ago
History has a lot to say on this topic. I don't think it supports the thesis that people should just be allowed to steal because Privilege. Society is much better off with some people helping the poor and law and order being maintained. It's rather a black-and-white view to think we must choose only one or the other. If you want to feel moral, go feed a poor person today. You'll feel much better. Don't assault the basic pillars of the civil society that is what has left you rich enough to be able to afford that without a second thought for a quick hit on the virtue pipe. (Preempting one of the lines of attack I can forsee coming here, the crime is also minor and the penalty should be minor correspondingly. I would happily support some sort of very compassionate enforcement; perhaps a sentence of a few days' service at a soup kitchen which will also feed him or something. But there is still an important difference between enforcing the law even in this minor way, and declaring that certain people lack Privilege and therefore, ironically, have the privilege of being above the law, which is the sort of caustic poison that can dissolve civil society entirely.)
- pyrale 10y ago
  > History has a lot to say on this topic. [...] Society is much better off with some people helping the poor and law and order being maintained. What history has to say is that, at many points, society has failed to provide help for the poor on a volunteer basis, and that said people have died of starvation and/or violated the law to avoid it. If you expect that the normal order of things is for people to voluntarily donate in order to avoid hunger problems, then you have to admit that law and order will be broken on occasions, because the nominal food-providing mechanism occasionally fails.
  - jerf 10y ago
    I'm going to come back to the concrete on this, though. Do we have any reason to believe Italy is in this situation, though? We're not really arguing a hypothetical here. I readily concede the analysis might get more difficult in Somalia or in a war-torn area, but this is Italy. Is there really no other option for this person other than theft? Because I find that hard to believe. Who cares about hypotheticals that don't apply to the current situation? Well, philosophers, sure, but it's a completely different question than what we're actually faced with here.
eveningcoffee 10y ago
In my youth I would have starved unless we did not have a bag of potatos from our friends who lived on the countryside for our help during the harvest. We did not have a car. Am I not privileged enough to have an opinion that theft, as such, should not be tolerated? I still think that we should collectively help people who are in risk of starvation.
dragonwriter 10y ago
Other than the fact that the parent post is all discursive ad hominem (as pointed out in another reply), its also extremely presumptive and grounded in rather false premises. Often, people that have been through hard times have the most black and white view of what is morally right in such times, and cling to them quite strongly as an important part of their identity, often one which helped psychologically in getting through hard times. Black and white thinking can, sure, be a result of privilege, but it can also be a product of its absence. Aside from being fallacious to attack a speaker for your presumption of what in their background might be the motivation for their ideas rather than addressing the ideas themselves, you'll also quite often be wrong on that presumption.
curious_fella1 10y ago
> No one is stealing from you, they are stealing from a supermarket Yes, well they're stealing from someone, aren't they? But of course, it's ok if someone steals from the heartless grocery store owner, isn't it? I feel as if you would have a different opinion if anybody was allowed to walk into your house without your permission and ransack your fridge (and anything else they felt that they "need"). The moral problem with theft isn't that it is illegal. The problem is that one person expended their own personal resources to create the good. The person has spent their own time, money, and/or intelligence to create some good that now has value. The thief, who has expended zero effort to create nothing, takes the fruit of the producer's labor for no work, on the basis of his "need". What kind of society does this produce, where you can take things from others solely on your basis of need? You seem to be making the cliche mistake of associating morality with need. I hope one day you don't need to learn this isn't always correlated...

hueving 10y ago

Discursive ad hominem, yawn. Discuss the implications of theft being okay if you are hungry, not the background of the person who suggested they disagree with that notion.

RodericDay 10y ago
> Discursive ad hominem, yawn. What kind of environment do you partake in discourse in that this kind of condescending contribution is acceptable? It sounds like you're taking your cues from the Comic Guy from The Simpsons. "Tu quoque? yawn".
- homogeneous 10y ago
  The "yawn" is a bit flippant, but I don't see why it's condescending, he's absolutely correct. Your comic book guy reference seems to suggest that you think he's using big words to sound smart or something, but it seems like a pretty cogent response to a post that completely skips over the substance of the topic at hand and parades around unqualified assumptions about the poster as an argument.
- hueving 10y ago
  It was a direct response to the "yawn, yawn, yawn" in the parent. If someone is going to behave like a asshole, they don't deserve much better as a response IMO. Life is too short.

ixtli 10y ago

I think the reason why people have a hard time understanding what you're saying is because unless you've experienced _systemic_ difficulty in your life it's very hard to differentiate it from _personal_ difficulty. Put in a less rigorous way, if you've never truly had to fight against a system that seems constructed to see you fail it would be hard to understand how this is different from, and much worse than, difficulty that stems from smaller, instantaneous issues that present roadblocks or troubles in your life.

eropple 10y ago
I would agree with this--it's interesting to me that a culture that generally views itself as rational has such blind spots when it comes to systemic failures. I would expect that working with systems full of unintended behaviors, non-continuous outputs that can result in sudden failures, etc. should make that obvious, but apparently it doesn't. (Personally, I have never experienced systemic difficulty in my life--but it's plainly obvious that it exists.) For the sake of my blood pressure I won't go into the similarly strange attempts to solve what systemic failures (almost always the ones that minorly inconvenience the privileged, isn't that strange?) folks of this mindset do deign to recognize, but...yeah.
- ixtli 10y ago
  I appreciate your desire to assume stupidity before malice but I've come to see the continuation of oppressive systems as intentional :( People profit off of them and so I'm forced to conclude that they're purpetrated intentionally. I'm not trying to say that there's some movie-like evil villain out there cackling to himself but rather that there are many people making money as a direct or related result of the systemic suffering of others and that they turn a blind eye to the sometimes painfully obvious effects of their actions.
  - eropple 10y ago
    Sure, but those aren't the people who are caping up for them on Hacker News. (I mean, some may be, but in general I'm skeptical.)

protomyth 10y ago

I've not been privileged all my life. I have a dislike for fish because of some of things and situations we were in. It is never, ever ok to steal. Stealing from a supermarket is stealing from a person or people. Just because you cannot name who is affected doesn't mean it isn't people. It is black and white. The morality and legality are in alignment in this regard. This whole "shades of grey" leads to the blackness that destroys people and civilizations. The whole point of government social programs is to provide for survival. There are organizations that provide and places to go.

vidarh 10y ago
> It is black and white That you believe this makes it absolutely impossible for me to think you're not in a privileged position. > The whole point of government social programs is to provide for survival. There are organizations that provide and places to go. Great when you know where to go, and they work as they should. They are not perfect. And people are not perfect. Especially not when starving.
- protomyth 10y ago
  > That you believe this makes it absolutely impossible for me to think you're not in a privileged position. Believe what you want, but I sure as hell didn't grow up in a privileged position. > Great when you know where to go, and they work as they should. They are not perfect. And people are not perfect. Especially not when starving. Churches will give food, its part of many faiths. Stealing is wrong, and brings misery to others. People will help others, but taking is never right because of the chain of pain you unleash in the world. Whose privileged when you can decide to take from others?
  - vidarh 10y ago
    > Believe what you want, but I sure as hell didn't grow up in a privileged position. I think the disconnect there is that we appear to have very different ideas of what is required to be privileged. Have you ever starved? (And going hungry is not starvation). > Churches will give food, its part of many faiths. Again, have you ever starved, and tried to think clearly enough to find someone willing to give you food? > People will help others, but taking is never right because of the chain of pain you unleash in the world. If the choices is theft of necessities or starvation, I would always consider theft morally acceptable, because the pain involved is magnitudes apart from the pain caused by petty theft.

jerf 10y ago

History has a lot to say on this topic. I don't think it supports the thesis that people should just be allowed to steal because Privilege. Society is much better off with some people helping the poor and law and order being maintained. It's rather a black-and-white view to think we must choose only one or the other. If you want to feel moral, go feed a poor person today. You'll feel much better. Don't assault the basic pillars of the civil society that is what has left you rich enough to be able to afford that without a second thought for a quick hit on the virtue pipe. (Preempting one of the lines of attack I can forsee coming here, the crime is also minor and the penalty should be minor correspondingly. I would happily support some sort of very compassionate enforcement; perhaps a sentence of a few days' service at a soup kitchen which will also feed him or something. But there is still an important difference between enforcing the law even in this minor way, and declaring that certain people lack Privilege and therefore, ironically, have the privilege of being above the law, which is the sort of caustic poison that can dissolve civil society entirely.)

pyrale 10y ago
> History has a lot to say on this topic. [...] Society is much better off with some people helping the poor and law and order being maintained. What history has to say is that, at many points, society has failed to provide help for the poor on a volunteer basis, and that said people have died of starvation and/or violated the law to avoid it. If you expect that the normal order of things is for people to voluntarily donate in order to avoid hunger problems, then you have to admit that law and order will be broken on occasions, because the nominal food-providing mechanism occasionally fails.
- jerf 10y ago
  I'm going to come back to the concrete on this, though. Do we have any reason to believe Italy is in this situation, though? We're not really arguing a hypothetical here. I readily concede the analysis might get more difficult in Somalia or in a war-torn area, but this is Italy. Is there really no other option for this person other than theft? Because I find that hard to believe. Who cares about hypotheticals that don't apply to the current situation? Well, philosophers, sure, but it's a completely different question than what we're actually faced with here.

eveningcoffee 10y ago

In my youth I would have starved unless we did not have a bag of potatos from our friends who lived on the countryside for our help during the harvest. We did not have a car. Am I not privileged enough to have an opinion that theft, as such, should not be tolerated? I still think that we should collectively help people who are in risk of starvation.

dragonwriter 10y ago

Other than the fact that the parent post is all discursive ad hominem (as pointed out in another reply), its also extremely presumptive and grounded in rather false premises. Often, people that have been through hard times have the most black and white view of what is morally right in such times, and cling to them quite strongly as an important part of their identity, often one which helped psychologically in getting through hard times. Black and white thinking can, sure, be a result of privilege, but it can also be a product of its absence. Aside from being fallacious to attack a speaker for your presumption of what in their background might be the motivation for their ideas rather than addressing the ideas themselves, you'll also quite often be wrong on that presumption.

curious_fella1 10y ago

> No one is stealing from you, they are stealing from a supermarket Yes, well they're stealing from someone, aren't they? But of course, it's ok if someone steals from the heartless grocery store owner, isn't it? I feel as if you would have a different opinion if anybody was allowed to walk into your house without your permission and ransack your fridge (and anything else they felt that they "need"). The moral problem with theft isn't that it is illegal. The problem is that one person expended their own personal resources to create the good. The person has spent their own time, money, and/or intelligence to create some good that now has value. The thief, who has expended zero effort to create nothing, takes the fruit of the producer's labor for no work, on the basis of his "need". What kind of society does this produce, where you can take things from others solely on your basis of need? You seem to be making the cliche mistake of associating morality with need. I hope one day you don't need to learn this isn't always correlated...