Tree
4mo ago
It costs me 350 euros per year to insure other people’s cars, but only 35 euros per year to insure their houses and everything else. So the likelihood of me destroying their house is multiple orders of magnitude lower.
But strictly speaking, yes, any accidental destruction should only be compensated at used discount prices. If you have a working class friend and you let him borrow your luxury watch and he loses it you can’t expect him to repay you full price. But again, insuring this is cheap so I’m not going to die on that hill and claim classist oppression on the basis of 35 euros.
Tree
4mo ago
I understand that I am on the hook for anything other than $10,000 worth of damage to other people's stuff, and act accordingly.
Even that little insurance shouldn’t be necessary. If I crash into your brand new Porsche, me or my insurance should only have to repay you the price of a used kia – else you owning expensive shit is an externality I have to pay for.
Tree
4mo ago
Morally good:
Roman Emperors who did us all a favour by being assassinated: Caligula, Commodus, Elagabalus.
Quick executions where everybody went “About time!”: robespierre, beria.
Achieving goals:
Making Serbia great again: Alexander I of serbia, Franz Ferdinand.
Left-wing rabblerousing impeded: Jean Jaures, the Gracchi.
Japanese military rule through assassination in the 1930s.
Tree
4mo ago
Practically speaking, you can’t adequately calculate the consequences of the assassination, so it defaults to “him or you” and you’re morally justified to kill him (he is the aggressor because a dictator issues implicit death threats). Perhaps Tito not being assassinated and keeping yugoslavia going longer than it should have, precipitated the genocidal killings of the breakup .
On principle, on hypotheticals, I agree that you shouldn’t kill him (and even die by his hand if necessary) if you have divine knowledge of incoming nuclear war or genocide. But that’s a huge if.
Tree
4mo ago
On a personal level, a dictator taking power is like a guy challenging you to the most significant bar fight of your life, a duel to the death really. You don’t have to fight him, but then you become his bitch for the foreseeable future. If a dictator should claim to rule over me without my consent he will have to do without my peaceful cooperation.
Ultimately our power as citizens is backed by the threat of this ehm… counter-revolutionary violence. It’s what keeps the fringes in line and our countries relatively coup-free.
When Tito uses force against me, coerces me, puts me in prison, kills me, that’s just him being a dictator, all according to plan. But when I use force, I’m supposed to have perfect foresight of any resulting chaos before I lift a finger… I’m sorry, but that’s too passive, copenhagen ethics. On self-defense grounds alone I have a right to assassinate him (before any utilitarian arguments about discouraging coups or genocides).
Tree
4mo ago
I’m an optimist myself, but he had written a book where he announced the war and the massacres to come, he had tried to putsch, his goons were murdering politicians, etc. It was hard to miss that he was literally hitler. A rule where we kill all politicians who do all that would have an acceptably low false positive rate imo.
And later, after 1933, surely assassination is permissible and recommended in all cases. A free man has the right to murder even a benign dictator. Without the vote, it’s really the only way left to express disappointment and provide valuable feedback.
Tree
4mo ago
I’m surprised at the strength of the backlash tbh. I expected biden‘s condemnation of political violence to be less categorical than it was. As a centrist with a strong interest in maintaining the democratic peace & order , who doesn’t think Trump is that bad, it’s easy for me to say that the old geezer should live. But I confess I don’t understand the anti-assassination case for opponents of the status quo who have spent years denouncing him as an authoritarian threat.
We all agree Hitler should have been killed, right? That’s the most popular hypothetical ever. Although some (e.g., Lothar Fritze) have objected to dead waitresses and complained of insufficient self-sacrifice in the few attempts on his life.
Therefore, I must conclude that they don’t believe Trump is Hitler after all, and instances of anti-trump and anti-red tribe hysteria only came from extremes or were meant to energize the base, while the leadership remains sane and committed to the american project. Reports of the death of democracy have been greatly exaggerated.
It exposes the culture war these last years as a giant attack ad, clickbait, crude emotional manipulation for dull partisans, irrelevant and rightly ignored by people who matter.
Yeah, it’s very hard for family members to accept dementia in their loved ones. Plus the voter deserves some of the blame for electing them.
Bottom line, the democrats and Biden have done the right thing here, they have de-clownified the world a little. It’s a low bar, but one I am not sure republicans could clear, if Trump was as decrepit.
More options
Context Copy link