Saw this in hexbear memes yesterday. To me it reads as a satire of the holier than thou attitudes I see around here. But it also had no downvotes and nobody was challenging it, so I wonder if it reads differently to you, and how if so.
I tried asking the OP but I was told not to expect discussion in the memes community
I thought the point of this was that the meme normally has the other track(s) connected to the middle track, so the fact that they’re disconnected means the lever doesn’t do anything and the system is designed to give a false sense of choice to cover up its murderous intent.
That's how I read it. The tracks have to be connected.
If you are standing with the leaver, the trolley can't change tracks, no matter how much you pull it.
If you're standing at the leaverless track, you don't even have the illusion of control over the situation.
The only moral choice in this image is to get on the moving trolley and try to stop it yourself.
Which is always an option in each one of these trolley images.
Ultimately, the "Trolley Problem" is stupid as a rhetorical device because life isn't binary.
And still, choosing an empty track doesn't do anything neither other than letting the person on the bottom feel better about themselves. If the guy on the top is a play on the liberal 'choose the lesser evil' sentiment, what is the bottom guy about?
If all 3 tracks are an option, the bottom track not doing anything is the point because the alternative is murder. But I’m saying that in this meme there really is no option other than the middle track because the other 2 aren’t attached.
None of the tracks do anything. It's satire, that's the whole point. It's a critique of electorialism.
I think, the bottom left text is said first and the top right is a response to it, this makes the meaning of the meme clearer
Yes. I saved the meme way before I posted it. I will put the original later
Hexbear doesn't have down votes btw. We believe that if you have something to say, come say it and challenge or be challenged and discuss rather than passively down vote it and move on.
Also people had set up bots to downvote things in trans comms, which... Why would anyone do that
No, it's not satirical
It's a genuine condemnation of the attitude that "If some people have to die to maintain my life of way, then so be it"
Most of us here aren't very keen on that particular way of thinking
See, I thought it was because whoever drew it wasn't particularly aware of how trolley tracks work
It's valuing spiritual cleanliness (intellectual opposition to genocide) as much, if not more than material effects of real world actions. Or in the case of this meme, acting as if choosing an unrelated empty track is morally superior to pulling a lever that controls nothing.
I don't intend to change anyone's minds, I just thought the meme was too on the nose to be genuine
It depends on your perspective. From our perspective, we're powerless people who are on the extreme fringes of politics, completely alienated from actually holding power. We are totally opposed to genocide and horrified at the people who are willing to cut a deal and do 1% less genocide.
If you look at it from the perspective of someone who thinks 1% less genocide is an acceptable value proposition, the communists are the unreasonable ones. The meme looks like it's parodying them, because they don't see why 1% less genocide is actually a great deal.
But the truth is, even the people who wanted 1% less genocide didn't have power either.
If the lever controls nothing, by which you probably mean elections in which case I totally agree, then doesn't that also mean that the material effects of pulling it don't exist?
This isn't a democracy and capitalists will still do what capital needs after the election. If that is genocide, then genocide it is. Real change cannot happen from within capitalist institutions, it happens by workers organizing.
Even if elections did matter, what exactly have the Democrats done to prove that they aren't willing to do just as much as their counterparts? The "debates" were literally a contest of who is more willing to spend more on the war machine, instead of things like public health and housing, things that the working class really need and care about.
I thought its message was "not picking a side isn't morally superior to picking a side even if picking a side doesn't change the outcome, people will die either way and the guy holding the lever is a literal nazi", which in my opinion extends to "so if picking a side has a chance to make it better it is immoral to not try".
I'm not here to convince anyone of that, I was just confused why someone from here would make a meme seemingly mocking the usual hexbear position but it seems this was edited from a liberal meme
It makes sense to me as-is. Liberals were gleeful about sacrificing minority groups for power. They committed genocide and didn't get power for it. If they instead killed no one and lost, at least they aren't fucking demons.
I don't know if it was supposed to be tongue in cheek, the only issue I take with it is that it's missing a Hamas operative firing an RPG at everyone in the image
Blue track should zig zag over the red as other groups get sacrificed to Democrats ineffectiveness and ambivalence.
vague or confusing memes end up getting upvoted on here all the time. there's usually several different interpretations.
In this case though, I think its pretty clear that neither of these people depicted have any power to decide which track the trolley goes down, they're... physically disconnected. It reads to me as making fun of electoralism in general. Liberals fit just as easily into the "I will achieve greatness (slightly better conditions at home) by allowing the death of others (genocide abroad)" role as conservatives do, if not more.
What it lacks is depicting an alternative that actually works to stop the trolley, but it still makes the point that electoralism is fuckin pointless
edit: I see the OP popped into the thread further down. It makes more sense if understood as a leftist response to the unedited version where the lever actually does anything.
I mean... The SS were all volunteers. The wehrmacht soldiers who committed atrocities were too. Nobody was forced to murder jews in nazi germany. There was no punishment for not doing the warcrimes, you just didn't get promoted. The clean wehrmacht is a myth made after the war to whitewash the army in western germany to free more soldier to prepare for an eventual war with the USSR.
I don't know what the meme is trying to say, but if it's trying to argue agains "holier than thou attitudes" it's doing a terrible job at it. Funnily enough it is doing a pretty good job at showcasing why you're a fool for calling it a holier than thou attitude lol.I’m glad you asked. I saw 0 comments and assumed I was juuust too autistic to get this one.
