I play Skyrim. In that rpg video game you can be an assassin. After you kill Grelod the Kind, a child abuser, one of the children she tortured says:
“Kill one person, and you can solve so many problems. I wonder at the possibilities.” - Runa Fair-Shield.
When does assassination become an acceptable political strategy? I can see how bumping off many crazy men (and right now I can only name male dictators but I guess women could be just as bad) would make the world safer - well, safer if we assume it would not trigger a backlash and WW3.
Maybe we could assassinate Kim and North Korea would rejoice not set off nukes? Maybe we could assassinate MbS and the Saudis would just shrug and appoint a new Crown Prince with a less murderous tendancy towards journalists and dissidents? But could we assassinate Putin, Trump, Xi, or Modi and not release hell?
If I had a red button to press and it would remove Putin, Trump, Musk, Thiel, Hamas, Netanyahu, or other bad guys, should I press the button? What do you think?
Note: this is a thought experiment - outside Skyrim, I never killed anyone, never worked as an assassin for hire, and have no desire to change that fact. I just want to read your thoughts on this topic - I think we’ve all wondered if there is a shortcut back to normality in face of current events but are we fooling ourselves?
If I had a red button to press and it would remove Putin, Trump, Musk, Thiel, Hamas, Netanyahu, or other bad guys, should I press the button? What do you think?
You mean take the current unstable genocidal dictators who are deeply connected with the current political climate and have definite limitations and restraints placed upon them, and replace them with all the associates, wormtongues and ideological puritans that surround these authoritarians and are there simply for the reason to seize any level of control and power that they can?
To say nothing of the lesser-recognized dictators-in-waiting who surround these nations and will look for any opportunity to strike a rival when they’re down.
You may help things, or you may make everything far, far worse. The devil you know and all that. We get hung up on the idea that single individuals control outcomes, when really those people are just the face of a movement or agendas spanning across thousands of people.
Use your red button on the wealthy elite of the world who retain vast surpluses of hoarded (stolen) wealth from billions of people, you would do a lot more good, particularly if that wealth is just lost forever. Better it burn than be used to control populations.
I think when Julius Ceasar was assassinated it turned the republic into an empire, IIRC. Might need more people to go to avoid some shit like emperor Vance.
Trump certainly has plenty of fat men around him. I just thought it was a coincidence rather than a strategy but maybe he has some well-read people in his security team? Nah, on reflection, I think it’s just a coincidence.
Interesting… Thanks for that info. I am a Brit, I wonder what plans our secret services have prepared for different scenarios (Russia, China, North Korea … and now USA). Looks like world is going back to Macchiavelli (if we ever really left).
That reminds me of a news story from a few years back: a series of bank robberies in Germany, Holland, Denmark - all the same modus operandi and all done by white-haired robbers. Interpol (international police force) said they thought it was elderly members of 1970s terrorist organisations like Bader-Meinhoff gang stealing money because they had no retirement pensions as they destroyed their state records when young/had no savings accounts/criminal records etc and had to find some way to pay for elder care. It just paints an hilarious picture in my mind: Zimmer-frame Zapatas!
The big problem is the state which has such extreme power.
The big part that makes those states work is default compliance, which allows that state to commit violence using everyone who complies (which is everyone by default). Individuals being non-compliant directly translates to power being syphoned away from the state. This is why morality and ethics education are so Important, as the state cannot do anything immoral if individuals refuse to do immoral actions. The second most important thing is transparency, since states utilize opacueness as a means to obfuscate the morality of actions. This is one reason why dense hierarchies are utilized in governments - to obfuscate actions and provide personal deniability to members of the state infrastructure.
Creating bigger problems. Exactly why I ponder if assassination does any good or just recoils on you. But I think that its usefulness is contingent on who kills whom.
I guess that is why there are so few assassinations of elite figures - it threatens the stability that protects the elite so the elite do not assassinate each other.
However, assassinating non-elite people - terrorists and revolutionaries is routine. The elites (governments of nation states, their sub-contractors) have even mechanised assassination by using remote-controlled drone attacks. This stabalises their control.
So, if elites assassinate those that threaten them, it typically works in their favour. But if non-elites do it to elites, does it empower them or not? If it causes chaos and instability amongst the elite, and the chaos spreads to wider society, and does harm to bystanders or even brings about war, is this a price worth paying, or even a good and necessary outcome?
Honestly, I am still struggling with these questions. Part of me thinks ‘sauce for goose, sauce for gander’ and the tyrants deserve to die by their own methods turned back on them. Another part of me knows war is terrible, especially for ‘ordinary people’ and for the environment, and should be avoided. But there is such a thing as ‘a just war’ and armed struggle can be morally good or even our duty.
Putin and Xi…I’m pretty sure that, if they were topped, there’s enough institutional Authoritarianism that either there would be a “clean” and immediate change to someone with the next highest authority…or it would fall into civil war with just as much speed, rounds of assassinations back and forth until the power vacuum is filled by someone able to pull everyone left to heel…or the whole government falls apart…
I know too little about Russia to know who is a contender to replace Putin or if when he goes the system that created him will go too. I am trying to educate myself on that.
As for China, I know a bit more but I am no expert. Given my limited insight, I am surprised that Xi is still in power. I expected the Communist Party to have ‘neutralised’ him, not necessarily bumped him off but to have taken away his power and reduced him to a figurehead, especially after he mishandled the pandemic and has struggled to fix China’s economic woes. He is basically a thug. If all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail. But you cannot beat a pandemic with a hammer nor fix inflation or unemployment or pollution with one. You must have as many tools as possible - Chinese perfected the toolkit of government over thousands of years. Sophisticated people in Chinese government must think Xi is an ignorant lout. I suspect they keep him in place because its better for the people who really run China to have a useful idiot as a puppet than to go through the uncertainties of replacing him - more or less how they handled the Kim regime in North Korea until lately. Putin and Kim collaborating on Ukraine must have really angered China which is probably why Chinese are considering sending ‘peace-keeping’ troops to Ukraine. Xi is a pig in a drawing room and the real government is just working around him.
It is hard to tell how much of the reportage about Xi is ‘smoke and mirrors’. I recently saw a viral report on Reddit and in The Guardian newspaper (probably going around all the news outlets) about Chinese military exercises and some special navy vessels (biggest of their kind! etc) they had which were supposed to provide support for amphibian landings of tanks etc. Every report spins this as ‘China war games is preparation for invading Taiwan - shock!’. I am very sceptical. Xi is apparently the driving force behind sabre-rattling rhetoric against Taiwan and building up PRC military might (his new bigger hammer), but I reckon most of Chinese government are not interested in a war with anyone least of all Taiwan - I think they expect to recover Taiwan eventually, by peaceful means, and are happy if it takes a century cos that long timescale is how Chinese think. So, given this split between Xi and the rest, I have the sense this whole media story is just a performance - whether it is to fool the world about China’s military aggressiveness (advertising Xi’s policy) or is some part of Chinese administration doing this to fool Xi he’s still in charge (covert anti-Xi policy), I cannot tell. I just don’t have enough facts to judge what these military manouvres tell us about Chinese government or, on the bigger scale, what real difference it would make if Xi was not around.
We (in UK) get 24/7 coverage of Trump’s idiocies but not real information on other political leaders. I am European and I could not name five European political leaders, let alone predict the outcome if one were assassinated. As for politics in rest of globe, I am just clueless for the most part but I do try to educate myself. I have to create my own news feeds because the MSM is worthless.
In America it’s not too late. We have a clear succession strategy. It sucks…I think you’d have to pick people off till you got to Rubio to get back to something closer to normal. He’s #4. If you don’t stop there…it gets a lot worse before it gets any better.
China, Russia, and especially Best Korea are so deeply entrenched, I don’t think succession would go as cleanly.
Honestly though…Rubio is such a spineless twit, if Trump, Vance, Johnson, and Grassley all got picked off, he’d probably shift so hard to the left he’d make Bernie Sanders look like Ronald Reagan.
The Chinese would certainly just appoint a new president, no problem. Xi might be in charge, but the Chinese communist party isn’t some vestigial organ. Russia, however… Putin’s been exclusively in charge for long enough and with no immediately clear successor that I’m almost certain that his death is going to result in a power struggle and civil war.
Imo, if you want a picture of what the end of the Putinato looks like, I would say that the end of Mexico’s Porferiato would probably be a fairly accurate representation.
I mean, plenty tried to kill Hitler. He was just really good at not getting assassinated. Frequent last-minute changes to planned public appearances helped a lot
The crusades existed many a day ago, Yahweh’s heavenly army battled once before.
A fight must be unanimous however it must be on creeds agreed.
It will be seering light, blinding, and in it - elusidating every facet of darkness among you. Only the wrathful will survive and for what? You must agree in your values to be truly mighty.
See no creed, no color, and no gender. Witness inherent value in existing sentient. We only live when we enact our will.
What is your will? Will you act? Or forever react.
There is an army ripe for the picking. I am trying.
I’m reminded the example of the people’s will and the assassination of Alexander II. One person doesn’t change a system. On the other hand taking out all the billionaire donors that craft a system, well that might be something else. They could just buy a new leader.
Assassination would just make Trump into a MAGA martyr. They would be riled up and energized.
Yes, then the next question is, whom would they rally behind after Trump? We can see a chain of command for the line of presidency, but without Trump, there’d be a power vacuum at the top of his cult. Either it gets filled with an acceptable substitute, or the obligate-followers in his fandom won’t know where to direct their energy.
I wouldn’t be surprised if such a power vacuum created drama. Would Musk still be pulling so many strings in the government if Vance were president? Would he find a way to usurp even more unconstitutional government power, like how he controls DOGE? Would Vance tolerate Musk’s intrusions at all?
Or would his loyalist followers rally behind someone completely different, like a media personality? They’re looking for charisma in a leader, after all, and neither Vance nor Musk have that the way Trump (or someone professionally on TV) does. It’s possible some right-wing boner rises up through the crowd. Then, since Trumpsters naturally orient themselves toward the biggest dick around, he (Trump’s successor would almost certainly be a “he”) would get all their attention.
I have to wonder. P2025 has hit the ground running. Wouldn’t they have a contingency in place for just such an occasion? I’d bet they already have someone up their sleeves for the eventuality of him passing on his own. There is definitely someone up their sleeves for if we have another election. I do think there would be a vacuum. I think it would be short lived. We all suspect the gop is falling in line due to blackmail material. Their relief of the blackmailer being dead would be short lived when they realize he didn’t actually hold the cards. They’d all fall in line behind whoever the back room tells them to.
Biggest problem is that all of these people that you and me consider assholes do have a huge support. It’s not like a dictator can be a dictator without any support.
I agree with you but I got side-tracked because of the way my childish mind thinks and started chuckling to myself as I imagined an enormous ‘dictator’s support’. The Trump Truss (patent pending). I am visualising something Steampunk style with polished brass, gears and levers, and puffs of steam - a bit like the walking house in Howl’s Moving Castle but bolted around the Tangerine nethers. Cheered me up!
I think we have to explore moral questions. I think it immoral to just refuse to think. It is wrong to simply assert ‘killing people is wrong’ instead of arguing a case. Games, imaginary scenarios, give us laboratories in which to test out our ideas without hurting anyone.
Like you, I am very reluctant to harm any sentient being. But is it always wrong? Example of a thought experiment: you are passenger on an airplane, a terrorist hijacks the plane, says he is going to fly it into a hospital and kill thousands of people. You just came out of the rest room and are behind him, he has not realised you are there, you could jump him but he has a gun, you might have to wrestle for the gun, and he, or you, or a bystander might get killed. What do you do? If you must never kill, then you must not take the risk of killing him, or yourself, or a bystander while you wrestle so you just have to let him fly the plane into the hospital and kill thousands. Or you might argue it is morally better to act, risk killing someone rather than do nothing, and as a result thousands die.
For thousands of years (probably far longer) humans have asked themselves ‘what if…?’ questions. We did this with stories around the camp fire, with theatre, with novels, with radio, movies, t.v., cartoons, comic books. Now we do it with video games. Speculating and questioning and debating is how we develop moral views. This is how humans do human. This is the way we got to having courts of law to argue cases, democratic institutions to argue over what is best government. Asking a question is not immoral. Refusing to ask questions is - those who do not think for themselves, often have their thinking done for them by others, and that is at best infantalising, a refusal to do adult, and at worst a form of willing slavery. That’s my view.
Sure, the Japanese invaded my ancestral homeland, done the horrible massacre in Nanjing, but “killing people is wrong” so I guess my ancestors shouldn’t have fought back and let them slaughter my people?
Next time I see you I’ll punch you. If you do anything, I mean anything other than turn your other cheek and let me keep punching you until I’m satisfied, you are a hypocrite and should be ashamed. Now turn around, I’m not done punching you.
You’re right. My ancestors are evil, and they shouldn’ve just kneel to the japanese imperialists and accepted their place as inferior to the japanese people. /s
I play Skyrim. In that rpg video game you can be an assassin. After you kill Grelod the Kind, a child abuser, one of the children she tortured says:
“Kill one person, and you can solve so many problems. I wonder at the possibilities.” - Runa Fair-Shield.
When does assassination become an acceptable political strategy? I can see how bumping off many crazy men (and right now I can only name male dictators but I guess women could be just as bad) would make the world safer - well, safer if we assume it would not trigger a backlash and WW3.
Maybe we could assassinate Kim and North Korea would rejoice not set off nukes? Maybe we could assassinate MbS and the Saudis would just shrug and appoint a new Crown Prince with a less murderous tendancy towards journalists and dissidents? But could we assassinate Putin, Trump, Xi, or Modi and not release hell?
If I had a red button to press and it would remove Putin, Trump, Musk, Thiel, Hamas, Netanyahu, or other bad guys, should I press the button? What do you think?
Note: this is a thought experiment - outside Skyrim, I never killed anyone, never worked as an assassin for hire, and have no desire to change that fact. I just want to read your thoughts on this topic - I think we’ve all wondered if there is a shortcut back to normality in face of current events but are we fooling ourselves?
Whatever gets everybody the closest to no violence, including systemic, is best.
You mean take the current unstable genocidal dictators who are deeply connected with the current political climate and have definite limitations and restraints placed upon them, and replace them with all the associates, wormtongues and ideological puritans that surround these authoritarians and are there simply for the reason to seize any level of control and power that they can?
To say nothing of the lesser-recognized dictators-in-waiting who surround these nations and will look for any opportunity to strike a rival when they’re down.
You may help things, or you may make everything far, far worse. The devil you know and all that. We get hung up on the idea that single individuals control outcomes, when really those people are just the face of a movement or agendas spanning across thousands of people.
Use your red button on the wealthy elite of the world who retain vast surpluses of hoarded (stolen) wealth from billions of people, you would do a lot more good, particularly if that wealth is just lost forever. Better it burn than be used to control populations.
I think when Julius Ceasar was assassinated it turned the republic into an empire, IIRC. Might need more people to go to avoid some shit like emperor Vance.
Sigh… I dunno anymore man. What insane times.
Beware the Ides of March, huh?
If I recall, Shakespeare’s Caesar says to Antony:
*Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.*
Trump certainly has plenty of fat men around him. I just thought it was a coincidence rather than a strategy but maybe he has some well-read people in his security team? Nah, on reflection, I think it’s just a coincidence.
According to the Supreme Court, it was a presidential option back while Biden was still in office.
Interesting… Thanks for that info. I am a Brit, I wonder what plans our secret services have prepared for different scenarios (Russia, China, North Korea … and now USA). Looks like world is going back to Macchiavelli (if we ever really left).
I kind of wonder where the jfk shooter is, if he is doing all right? If he is thinking about going back to active duty…
That reminds me of a news story from a few years back: a series of bank robberies in Germany, Holland, Denmark - all the same modus operandi and all done by white-haired robbers. Interpol (international police force) said they thought it was elderly members of 1970s terrorist organisations like Bader-Meinhoff gang stealing money because they had no retirement pensions as they destroyed their state records when young/had no savings accounts/criminal records etc and had to find some way to pay for elder care. It just paints an hilarious picture in my mind: Zimmer-frame Zapatas!
The big problem is the state which has such extreme power.
The big part that makes those states work is default compliance, which allows that state to commit violence using everyone who complies (which is everyone by default). Individuals being non-compliant directly translates to power being syphoned away from the state. This is why morality and ethics education are so Important, as the state cannot do anything immoral if individuals refuse to do immoral actions. The second most important thing is transparency, since states utilize opacueness as a means to obfuscate the morality of actions. This is one reason why dense hierarchies are utilized in governments - to obfuscate actions and provide personal deniability to members of the state infrastructure.
The whole of human history is solving a problem which then creates bigger, more complicated problems to solve.
See also: The assassination of Franz Ferdinand
Creating bigger problems. Exactly why I ponder if assassination does any good or just recoils on you. But I think that its usefulness is contingent on who kills whom.
I guess that is why there are so few assassinations of elite figures - it threatens the stability that protects the elite so the elite do not assassinate each other.
However, assassinating non-elite people - terrorists and revolutionaries is routine. The elites (governments of nation states, their sub-contractors) have even mechanised assassination by using remote-controlled drone attacks. This stabalises their control.
So, if elites assassinate those that threaten them, it typically works in their favour. But if non-elites do it to elites, does it empower them or not? If it causes chaos and instability amongst the elite, and the chaos spreads to wider society, and does harm to bystanders or even brings about war, is this a price worth paying, or even a good and necessary outcome?
Honestly, I am still struggling with these questions. Part of me thinks ‘sauce for goose, sauce for gander’ and the tyrants deserve to die by their own methods turned back on them. Another part of me knows war is terrible, especially for ‘ordinary people’ and for the environment, and should be avoided. But there is such a thing as ‘a just war’ and armed struggle can be morally good or even our duty.
So, I go back and forth.
Putin and Xi…I’m pretty sure that, if they were topped, there’s enough institutional Authoritarianism that either there would be a “clean” and immediate change to someone with the next highest authority…or it would fall into civil war with just as much speed, rounds of assassinations back and forth until the power vacuum is filled by someone able to pull everyone left to heel…or the whole government falls apart…
I know too little about Russia to know who is a contender to replace Putin or if when he goes the system that created him will go too. I am trying to educate myself on that.
As for China, I know a bit more but I am no expert. Given my limited insight, I am surprised that Xi is still in power. I expected the Communist Party to have ‘neutralised’ him, not necessarily bumped him off but to have taken away his power and reduced him to a figurehead, especially after he mishandled the pandemic and has struggled to fix China’s economic woes. He is basically a thug. If all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail. But you cannot beat a pandemic with a hammer nor fix inflation or unemployment or pollution with one. You must have as many tools as possible - Chinese perfected the toolkit of government over thousands of years. Sophisticated people in Chinese government must think Xi is an ignorant lout. I suspect they keep him in place because its better for the people who really run China to have a useful idiot as a puppet than to go through the uncertainties of replacing him - more or less how they handled the Kim regime in North Korea until lately. Putin and Kim collaborating on Ukraine must have really angered China which is probably why Chinese are considering sending ‘peace-keeping’ troops to Ukraine. Xi is a pig in a drawing room and the real government is just working around him.
It is hard to tell how much of the reportage about Xi is ‘smoke and mirrors’. I recently saw a viral report on Reddit and in The Guardian newspaper (probably going around all the news outlets) about Chinese military exercises and some special navy vessels (biggest of their kind! etc) they had which were supposed to provide support for amphibian landings of tanks etc. Every report spins this as ‘China war games is preparation for invading Taiwan - shock!’. I am very sceptical. Xi is apparently the driving force behind sabre-rattling rhetoric against Taiwan and building up PRC military might (his new bigger hammer), but I reckon most of Chinese government are not interested in a war with anyone least of all Taiwan - I think they expect to recover Taiwan eventually, by peaceful means, and are happy if it takes a century cos that long timescale is how Chinese think. So, given this split between Xi and the rest, I have the sense this whole media story is just a performance - whether it is to fool the world about China’s military aggressiveness (advertising Xi’s policy) or is some part of Chinese administration doing this to fool Xi he’s still in charge (covert anti-Xi policy), I cannot tell. I just don’t have enough facts to judge what these military manouvres tell us about Chinese government or, on the bigger scale, what real difference it would make if Xi was not around.
We (in UK) get 24/7 coverage of Trump’s idiocies but not real information on other political leaders. I am European and I could not name five European political leaders, let alone predict the outcome if one were assassinated. As for politics in rest of globe, I am just clueless for the most part but I do try to educate myself. I have to create my own news feeds because the MSM is worthless.
You’d have power vacuums.
In America it’s not too late. We have a clear succession strategy. It sucks…I think you’d have to pick people off till you got to Rubio to get back to something closer to normal. He’s #4. If you don’t stop there…it gets a lot worse before it gets any better.
China, Russia, and especially Best Korea are so deeply entrenched, I don’t think succession would go as cleanly.
Best Korea?!!
Old meme that North Korea is Best Korea.
Honestly though…Rubio is such a spineless twit, if Trump, Vance, Johnson, and Grassley all got picked off, he’d probably shift so hard to the left he’d make Bernie Sanders look like Ronald Reagan.
The Chinese would certainly just appoint a new president, no problem. Xi might be in charge, but the Chinese communist party isn’t some vestigial organ. Russia, however… Putin’s been exclusively in charge for long enough and with no immediately clear successor that I’m almost certain that his death is going to result in a power struggle and civil war.
Yeah, I can see what you mean. Still, weirder things have happened.
Imo, if you want a picture of what the end of the Putinato looks like, I would say that the end of Mexico’s Porferiato would probably be a fairly accurate representation.
Good people don’t become assassins, something bad people don’t have problems with.
It’s never Hitler, Putin, Stalin or Trump who get assassinated. Always JFK, Martin Luther King, Bobby, …
I mean, plenty tried to kill Hitler. He was just really good at not getting assassinated. Frequent last-minute changes to planned public appearances helped a lot
We need monsters who fights on the side of the light.
The crusades existed many a day ago, Yahweh’s heavenly army battled once before.
A fight must be unanimous however it must be on creeds agreed.
It will be seering light, blinding, and in it - elusidating every facet of darkness among you. Only the wrathful will survive and for what? You must agree in your values to be truly mighty.
See no creed, no color, and no gender. Witness inherent value in existing sentient. We only live when we enact our will.
What is your will? Will you act? Or forever react.
There is an army ripe for the picking. I am trying.
You fight for freedom from tyranny and the defense of the weak. From the beginning of time to the end of time.
Why did you utter something so dear to me? What made you say this. May I know?
The question was where does the will come from.
same problem as cops then
One person? Probably not a lot. 1,000 people? Well that’s different.
You can absolutely make a massive difference with just one person. People really underestimate how much importance one leader is…
You do have to worry about the election after any assassination though lol.
I’m reminded the example of the people’s will and the assassination of Alexander II. One person doesn’t change a system. On the other hand taking out all the billionaire donors that craft a system, well that might be something else. They could just buy a new leader.
Assassination would just make Trump into a MAGA martyr. They would be riled up and energized.
You would end up with MTG as Vance’s VP or something equally horrid.
I’d rather he die from a heart attack or a lightning strike on the golf course.
Yes, then the next question is, whom would they rally behind after Trump? We can see a chain of command for the line of presidency, but without Trump, there’d be a power vacuum at the top of his cult. Either it gets filled with an acceptable substitute, or the obligate-followers in his fandom won’t know where to direct their energy.
I wouldn’t be surprised if such a power vacuum created drama. Would Musk still be pulling so many strings in the government if Vance were president? Would he find a way to usurp even more unconstitutional government power, like how he controls DOGE? Would Vance tolerate Musk’s intrusions at all?
Or would his loyalist followers rally behind someone completely different, like a media personality? They’re looking for charisma in a leader, after all, and neither Vance nor Musk have that the way Trump (or someone professionally on TV) does. It’s possible some right-wing boner rises up through the crowd. Then, since Trumpsters naturally orient themselves toward the biggest dick around, he (Trump’s successor would almost certainly be a “he”) would get all their attention.
I have to wonder. P2025 has hit the ground running. Wouldn’t they have a contingency in place for just such an occasion? I’d bet they already have someone up their sleeves for the eventuality of him passing on his own. There is definitely someone up their sleeves for if we have another election. I do think there would be a vacuum. I think it would be short lived. We all suspect the gop is falling in line due to blackmail material. Their relief of the blackmailer being dead would be short lived when they realize he didn’t actually hold the cards. They’d all fall in line behind whoever the back room tells them to.
Biggest problem is that all of these people that you and me consider assholes do have a huge support. It’s not like a dictator can be a dictator without any support.
I agree with you but I got side-tracked because of the way my childish mind thinks and started chuckling to myself as I imagined an enormous ‘dictator’s support’. The Trump Truss (patent pending). I am visualising something Steampunk style with polished brass, gears and levers, and puffs of steam - a bit like the walking house in Howl’s Moving Castle but bolted around the Tangerine nethers. Cheered me up!
Wtf is this comment bro? Killing people is wrong. Trying to use videogames as your excuse is disgusting.
I think we have to explore moral questions. I think it immoral to just refuse to think. It is wrong to simply assert ‘killing people is wrong’ instead of arguing a case. Games, imaginary scenarios, give us laboratories in which to test out our ideas without hurting anyone.
Like you, I am very reluctant to harm any sentient being. But is it always wrong? Example of a thought experiment: you are passenger on an airplane, a terrorist hijacks the plane, says he is going to fly it into a hospital and kill thousands of people. You just came out of the rest room and are behind him, he has not realised you are there, you could jump him but he has a gun, you might have to wrestle for the gun, and he, or you, or a bystander might get killed. What do you do? If you must never kill, then you must not take the risk of killing him, or yourself, or a bystander while you wrestle so you just have to let him fly the plane into the hospital and kill thousands. Or you might argue it is morally better to act, risk killing someone rather than do nothing, and as a result thousands die.
For thousands of years (probably far longer) humans have asked themselves ‘what if…?’ questions. We did this with stories around the camp fire, with theatre, with novels, with radio, movies, t.v., cartoons, comic books. Now we do it with video games. Speculating and questioning and debating is how we develop moral views. This is how humans do human. This is the way we got to having courts of law to argue cases, democratic institutions to argue over what is best government. Asking a question is not immoral. Refusing to ask questions is - those who do not think for themselves, often have their thinking done for them by others, and that is at best infantalising, a refusal to do adult, and at worst a form of willing slavery. That’s my view.
Yes, it is. So when there is someone going out to kill a large number of people, what should we do about it?
Yes, Jan 6 murders were very wrong. Tesla vandals are morally superior, I agree wholeheartedly.
TIL the allies of WW2 are evil.
Sure, the Japanese invaded my ancestral homeland, done the horrible massacre in Nanjing, but “killing people is wrong” so I guess my ancestors shouldn’t have fought back and let them slaughter my people?
🤣
So you hate them so much you became like them? Flawless logic bro.
Next time I see you I’ll punch you. If you do anything, I mean anything other than turn your other cheek and let me keep punching you until I’m satisfied, you are a hypocrite and should be ashamed. Now turn around, I’m not done punching you.
Lmao the guy in favor of assassinations is now threatening me with violence. Checks out, thank you for proving my point. Did you vote for Trump too?
You’re right. My ancestors are evil, and they shouldn’ve just kneel to the japanese imperialists and accepted their place as inferior to the japanese people. /s