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I wasn't suggesting that you were unqualified to have an opinion. We are all sitting on the sidelines of each others lives. I am no more a part of your life,
by gregd 11y ago
I wasn't suggesting that you were unqualified to have an opinion.
We are all sitting on the sidelines of each others lives. I am no more a part of your life, than you are of mine. But what I was suggesting is that it’s easy for us to sit in judgment of the choices he articulated, as well as the outcomes of those choices, and say that he, “can’t make good choices”.
It doesn’t matter what you think your background was in comparison to his. You’re still projecting your reality and the outcomes of your reality, onto another complete stranger and coming to negative conclusions about his life. I call this judgment. Each of our lives is nuanced enough to affect outcomes even given very similar circumstances or “choices” as you call them.
Because Siegel’s outcomes ended in him defaulting on his student loans and articulating that, doesn’t mean he can’t make good choices.
- notacoward 11y agoConflating circumstances and choices is absurd. Siegel's default wasn't the inevitable result of circumstances. It was a choice. Whatever the outcome, he can't deny agency. He can't say it was all somebody else's fault, and that he only did what he had to do. He had to do one of several things, and he chose one. Millions of people, none of them in identical circumstances but statistically close enough, made different choices and had those choices work out fine, without the life of self-loathing Siegel predicted for himself if he had chosen differently. That prediction was convenient, but ill-founded in fact.