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I am not sure how do you bully someone into basic human decency. Isn't that a contradiction in terms?

happytiger 3y ago
The end justifies the means is a paraphrase of Niccolò Machiavelli. The idea that the “desired result” is so necessary and so important that any method, even a morally “bad one,” may be used to achieve it, seems very popular. People lap up what they perceive to be justice against the machine, but it’s the system creating the problem in the first place. That is to say the focus shouldn’t be on activist investors waging a war on change from the outside, but a popular defunding of companies that can’t responsibly deliver products from the demand side, and “the system” doesn’t want you to know that’s how to change it. So we get fantasies of caped justice with appended hedge fund quality wealth and an appetite for morality and change, which of course is wishing for the very people who maintain the system to become the change: unlikely. But then again it was the very same author who wrote: > A man who is used to acting in one way never changes; he must come to ruin when the times, in changing, no longer are in harmony with his ways.
- mock-possum 3y ago
  The doctrine of “no bad tactics, only bad targets.”
  - happytiger 3y ago
    Indeed. Exactly.
- bartvk 3y ago
  > a popular defunding of companies that can’t responsibly deliver products from the demand side, and “the system” doesn’t want you to know that’s how to change it It seems much more logical to start driving electric, IMHO.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > “the system” doesn’t want you to know that’s how to change it I think even your own quotation marks show that "the system" is a weak concept. You can't think of things as a "system" or "matrix" (if you're a right wing conspiracist) or "society" (if you're a left wing one) causing every ill.
  - happytiger 3y ago
    I think of it as a military industrial complex with global financial elite through very effective public / private partnerships that seems to move towards constant war while espousing the need for peace, claim to support sustainability while owning and promoting the interests of the most deeply exploitive efforts and companies, espouse the reduction of income inequality even while they work against the economic interests of the majority to enrich themselves, and generally do so fairly consistently at every turn. How do you see the world? Is that vision of the current system particularly political, because I would consider it fairly objectivist based on my observations. The dominant paradigm is a system no matter what political ideology you use to interpret it. There is objectivism in “the system” as a nomenclature that shouldn’t be confused by one country’s domestic political paralysis. The assumption of every ill is a rather presumptuous broadening of what is obviously a rhetorical analysis. And remember that rhetoric is always intended to persuade so no term I write can be written without touching on the prior feelings you have based on your own rhetorical training. But that doesn’t eliminate objective reality: we need to account for it in our conversations. It isn’t healthy for a society to ignore the existence of governing bodies and their influences, whether you call them a matrix, a system, framework, a baked potato or any other term.
deleted 3y ago
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ur-whale 3y ago
> Isn't that a contradiction in terms? "The beatings will continue until morale improves"
rkachowski 3y ago
do you have an obligation to tolerate the intolerant?
euroderf 3y ago
Well, you also have to consider the undesirability of unilateral disarmament.

The end justifies the means is a paraphrase of Niccolò Machiavelli. The idea that the “desired result” is so necessary and so important that any method, even a morally “bad one,” may be used to achieve it, seems very popular. People lap up what they perceive to be justice against the machine, but it’s the system creating the problem in the first place. That is to say the focus shouldn’t be on activist investors waging a war on change from the outside, but a popular defunding of companies that can’t responsibly deliver products from the demand side, and “the system” doesn’t want you to know that’s how to change it. So we get fantasies of caped justice with appended hedge fund quality wealth and an appetite for morality and change, which of course is wishing for the very people who maintain the system to become the change: unlikely. But then again it was the very same author who wrote: > A man who is used to acting in one way never changes; he must come to ruin when the times, in changing, no longer are in harmony with his ways.

mock-possum 3y ago
The doctrine of “no bad tactics, only bad targets.”
- happytiger 3y ago
  Indeed. Exactly.
bartvk 3y ago
> a popular defunding of companies that can’t responsibly deliver products from the demand side, and “the system” doesn’t want you to know that’s how to change it It seems much more logical to start driving electric, IMHO.
robertlagrant 3y ago
> “the system” doesn’t want you to know that’s how to change it I think even your own quotation marks show that "the system" is a weak concept. You can't think of things as a "system" or "matrix" (if you're a right wing conspiracist) or "society" (if you're a left wing one) causing every ill.
- happytiger 3y ago
  I think of it as a military industrial complex with global financial elite through very effective public / private partnerships that seems to move towards constant war while espousing the need for peace, claim to support sustainability while owning and promoting the interests of the most deeply exploitive efforts and companies, espouse the reduction of income inequality even while they work against the economic interests of the majority to enrich themselves, and generally do so fairly consistently at every turn. How do you see the world? Is that vision of the current system particularly political, because I would consider it fairly objectivist based on my observations. The dominant paradigm is a system no matter what political ideology you use to interpret it. There is objectivism in “the system” as a nomenclature that shouldn’t be confused by one country’s domestic political paralysis. The assumption of every ill is a rather presumptuous broadening of what is obviously a rhetorical analysis. And remember that rhetoric is always intended to persuade so no term I write can be written without touching on the prior feelings you have based on your own rhetorical training. But that doesn’t eliminate objective reality: we need to account for it in our conversations. It isn’t healthy for a society to ignore the existence of governing bodies and their influences, whether you call them a matrix, a system, framework, a baked potato or any other term.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ur-whale 3y ago

> Isn't that a contradiction in terms? "The beatings will continue until morale improves"

rkachowski 3y ago

do you have an obligation to tolerate the intolerant?

euroderf 3y ago

Well, you also have to consider the undesirability of unilateral disarmament.