That arguments even worse, it takes it from "killing the kids solves a current problem" to "killing the kids may solve possible future problems", and if that's the standard, then it's never not justified killing kids, as you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues.
Say what you will about the CPC but at least they correctly realized that Pu-Yi didn't need to eat a bullet to head off any issues, and that was even after he collaborated with the Japanese.
That arguments even worse, it takes it from "killing the kids solves a current problem" to "killing the kids may solve possible future problems", and if that's the standard, then it's never not justified killing kids, as you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues.
That argument is completely absurd. Just because you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues doesn't mean it's likely.
I don't want to pull the "I'm a statistics professor card", but I'm literally a statistics professor so unless I see an integral over a sample space in the denominator I don't want to hear about likelihood, and especially not when someone's half-baked narrative of possible possibilities gets treated as meaningfully bearing on that likelihood.
Like are we just throwing that word around or is their some objective method that apparently everyone else knows about for now to compute these probabilities and arrive at these conclusions.
There's no way to objectively calculate the worth of an innocent person's life anyway, so you can't really put it into a formal equation. Sometimes you just have to make decisions based on incomplete information, I don't see what the problem is. It's not like I want to kill kids, but if I evaluated that there's a high enough chance that it could save a high enough number of lives, I'd pull the lever on that trolley problem 100%. What am I, a Kantian?
If seems to me that if we're willing to acknowledge that our subjective estimation of probabilities aren't necessarily any good at predicting actual outcomes we could not only save ourselves a ton of trouble handwringing over what level of perceived benefit justifies turning on the orphan mulcher, it would also go a long way to ensuring we don't accidentally make common cause with the people who do enjoy mulching orphans.
You can pretty easily draw a thoughline from the slapdash deployment of political violence to the elevation of ghouls like Beria to the head of the organs of state.
You've already decided you're ok with orphans getting mulched the moment you pick up a gun and call for revolution. Innocent people die in war, that's a fact of life. It may not be you who mulches the orphans, but you're the one setting of the chain of events that will cause them to get mulched. I feel like anybody who cares about this just has an extremely romantic view of war.
Revolutions don't happen on a regular basis, and a failed revolution can change the course of history and deny opportunities for centuries to come. And in the short term, it can mean the death of everyone you know and love, and countless others beyond anything you're capable of comprehending. You have to understand what you're getting into when you go down that path, and you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to win. You try to fight honorably, you pass up on a potential advatange, you can be assured that the enemy won't. There's no room for half measures, you either fully commit or you back down.
Obviously the kids of a deposed ruler represents far more of an issue than regular children in a country. I seriously don’t think non-revolutionaries far after the event have a leg to stand on to critique the actions of the Bolsheviks from some Ivory Tower of morality. What happened was during a revolution and they were the children and heirs to the position of the sunpreme enemy
Obviously the kids of a deposed ruler represents far more of an issue than regular children in a country.
Right it was some great great cousin of the Tsar that opened the Soviet Union up to the west leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and not some hereditary nobody.
I seriously don’t think non-revolutionaries far after the event have a leg to stand on to critique the actions of the Bolsheviks from some Ivory Tower of morality.
I mean, they fail even a basic "ends justify the means" test given that Russia is currently a hyper-capitalistic dystopia so yeah, I don't think my critique of the path they set down is in fact ill-posed.
Capital, in all it's algorithimic and anti-humanistic glory is the supreme enemy, not some guy wearing a funny hat in a bunch of medals . The french killed their funny hat guy and 10 years later they had an Italian in an even funnier hat running things, so this notion that we can just kill our way into socialism by executing certain lineages seems a bit daft.
Saying that I am promoting “killing our way to socialism” is patently dishonest. I am stating that the Bolsheviks took out an easy path to anti-revolutionary activity and stopped the flower of evil from flowering. I don’t wish to have a conversation if you are going to misrepresent what I said by claiming that I want to “kill our way to socialism”
You are willingly misrepresenting what I am saying. The path to socialism isn’t about killing but of course killing is generally necessary, the enforcement of authority of the proletariat must be carried out agaisnt the former oppressors. If you can’t understand that, I don’t know what to say
Fuck you. Killing children is never necessary. If you can't understand that, I don't know what else to say.
the enforcement of authority of the proletariat must be carried out agaisnt the former oppressors.
Children were never the oppressors you fucking ghoul! You remind me of the goddamned apologists for the US nuking Japan "anything done in the name of furthering the goals of my side, even deliberately to innocent people born in the wrong place at the wrong time, may seem icky but thems the way it is. I'm just being practical." Not only does the argument rest entirely on a possibility of what might happen, it's completely unjustified regardless.
I don't think it's fair to equate the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the injury and radiation poisoning and genetic defects of countless more to killing, what, 5 children? That's absurd. You're blowing this completely out of proportion.
You can argue it's wrong but I can't imagine getting upset over something like that. There's a simple matter of scale to consider.
And again, that's exactly what the fascist apologists for the dropping of nuclear bombs on innocent Japanese civilians say.
"I can't imagine getting upset over something like child murder." I almost put in one of the disgust emojis here but it felt like it was too light-hearted for the disgust I'm actually feeling right now for people I used to think of as comrades.
That arguments even worse, it takes it from "killing the kids solves a current problem" to "killing the kids may solve possible future problems", and if that's the standard, then it's never not justified killing kids, as you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues.
Say what you will about the CPC but at least they correctly realized that Pu-Yi didn't need to eat a bullet to head off any issues, and that was even after he collaborated with the Japanese.
the kids were an issue that could have been mitigated
the rest of them got what they fucking deserved
Badumptiss
Metaphysical pablum.
i have no fucking idea what any of that means
Calling the kids an issue is a pretty good pun.
lol, fair
my point was that they posed a problem
but that problem could have been mitigated without shooting them
That argument is completely absurd. Just because you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues doesn't mean it's likely.
I don't want to pull the "I'm a statistics professor card", but I'm literally a statistics professor so unless I see an integral over a sample space in the denominator I don't want to hear about likelihood, and especially not when someone's half-baked narrative of possible possibilities gets treated as meaningfully bearing on that likelihood.
Like are we just throwing that word around or is their some objective method that apparently everyone else knows about for now to compute these probabilities and arrive at these conclusions.
Yeah it's called guesstimating
There's no way to objectively calculate the worth of an innocent person's life anyway, so you can't really put it into a formal equation. Sometimes you just have to make decisions based on incomplete information, I don't see what the problem is. It's not like I want to kill kids, but if I evaluated that there's a high enough chance that it could save a high enough number of lives, I'd pull the lever on that trolley problem 100%. What am I, a Kantian?
If seems to me that if we're willing to acknowledge that our subjective estimation of probabilities aren't necessarily any good at predicting actual outcomes we could not only save ourselves a ton of trouble handwringing over what level of perceived benefit justifies turning on the orphan mulcher, it would also go a long way to ensuring we don't accidentally make common cause with the people who do enjoy mulching orphans.
You can pretty easily draw a thoughline from the slapdash deployment of political violence to the elevation of ghouls like Beria to the head of the organs of state.
You've already decided you're ok with orphans getting mulched the moment you pick up a gun and call for revolution. Innocent people die in war, that's a fact of life. It may not be you who mulches the orphans, but you're the one setting of the chain of events that will cause them to get mulched. I feel like anybody who cares about this just has an extremely romantic view of war.
Revolutions don't happen on a regular basis, and a failed revolution can change the course of history and deny opportunities for centuries to come. And in the short term, it can mean the death of everyone you know and love, and countless others beyond anything you're capable of comprehending. You have to understand what you're getting into when you go down that path, and you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to win. You try to fight honorably, you pass up on a potential advatange, you can be assured that the enemy won't. There's no room for half measures, you either fully commit or you back down.
I just wanted to say thank you for arguing against the celebration of the murder of children.
Obviously the kids of a deposed ruler represents far more of an issue than regular children in a country. I seriously don’t think non-revolutionaries far after the event have a leg to stand on to critique the actions of the Bolsheviks from some Ivory Tower of morality. What happened was during a revolution and they were the children and heirs to the position of the sunpreme enemy
Right it was some great great cousin of the Tsar that opened the Soviet Union up to the west leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and not some hereditary nobody.
I mean, they fail even a basic "ends justify the means" test given that Russia is currently a hyper-capitalistic dystopia so yeah, I don't think my critique of the path they set down is in fact ill-posed.
Capital, in all it's algorithimic and anti-humanistic glory is the supreme enemy, not some guy wearing a funny hat in a bunch of medals . The french killed their funny hat guy and 10 years later they had an Italian in an even funnier hat running things, so this notion that we can just kill our way into socialism by executing certain lineages seems a bit daft.
Saying that I am promoting “killing our way to socialism” is patently dishonest. I am stating that the Bolsheviks took out an easy path to anti-revolutionary activity and stopped the flower of evil from flowering. I don’t wish to have a conversation if you are going to misrepresent what I said by claiming that I want to “kill our way to socialism”
Well let's strip out the euphemistic cover to the following.
What specifically did that involve? A smidge of killing possibly?
You are willingly misrepresenting what I am saying. The path to socialism isn’t about killing but of course killing is generally necessary, the enforcement of authority of the proletariat must be carried out agaisnt the former oppressors. If you can’t understand that, I don’t know what to say
Fuck you. Killing children is never necessary. If you can't understand that, I don't know what else to say.
Children were never the oppressors you fucking ghoul! You remind me of the goddamned apologists for the US nuking Japan "anything done in the name of furthering the goals of my side, even deliberately to innocent people born in the wrong place at the wrong time, may seem icky but thems the way it is. I'm just being practical." Not only does the argument rest entirely on a possibility of what might happen, it's completely unjustified regardless.
I don't think it's fair to equate the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the injury and radiation poisoning and genetic defects of countless more to killing, what, 5 children? That's absurd. You're blowing this completely out of proportion.
You can argue it's wrong but I can't imagine getting upset over something like that. There's a simple matter of scale to consider.
And again, that's exactly what the fascist apologists for the dropping of nuclear bombs on innocent Japanese civilians say.
"I can't imagine getting upset over something like child murder." I almost put in one of the disgust emojis here but it felt like it was too light-hearted for the disgust I'm actually feeling right now for people I used to think of as comrades.
Like a 12 year old? I guess that's the part I don't understand.