Something that i find prettyd disgusting these days is how certain people put their political ideologies / viewpoints over human lives, for example, celebrating the russian invasion of ukraine because it is “a blow against US / NATO imperialism” completely ignoring all the warcrimes, the deaths, and the suffering generated by that war, the same happening with the palestinian genocide because “Israel is the only working democracy on the middle east”, acting like their ideoligies are going to bring back to life all the dead people somehow
People have this problem where they subscribe to Us versus Them thinking. They dehumanize certain groups of people and see them as something less than human, and therefore they don’t care if they are harmed. Militaries all over the globe do this to train their armies to kill without discrimination.
We see it in the USA all the time with the two party political system. I think if the extremist liberals and extremist conservatives had to share a room, it would turn into a blood bath before any common ground could be found. It’s disappointing and disturbing to me that people can’t seem to act in a civil manner. People get tunnel vision and lose sight of the fact that we all have to share this planet and we have to compromise on a lot of things. Seems like most people don’t want to compromise anymore, they want to destroy the opposing side instead and rule the world. That’s so delusional I can’t even…
The people who boil complex geopolitical events down to “haha western imperialism is finally getting challenged, lol shitlib get owned” are immature teenagers arguing in bad faith or on things they don’t understand. That would be what we call a “tankie”.
The same goes for those blindly supporting Israel because “omg hamas is terrorist” or whatever the hell they even justify it with anymore. A lot of those may just be quiet racists or fascists happy to see a dictator like Netanyahu have his way with Western support- obviously never thinking for a second that they themselves have an equal chance of being on the receiving end of such treatment, not the delivering end.
Both of these situations are absolutely horrible. But neither can really be boiled down to simple ideology over human lives as much as the lower-quality people love to do so. People want things to fit how they think so that they can feel good about their thoughts. Many things get shaped in that lens and it gets worse every day. And, unfortunately, the only real solution is just not to interact. Their minds can never be changed once they set up their world view to be self supporting.
Your views mirror mine closely. Ukraine’s war is awful, but it never needed to happen if Putin wasn’t such a trigger-happy, imperialistic dictator. His war is purely for territorial and ideological expansion of control at the expense of human life. Same goes for Palestine, while the operation was framed as being anti-terrorism at first, Netanyahu has gotten completely unhinged and fallen out of line in some crazy drive to control all of Gaza and eliminate Israel’s competition. However, I support Ukraine and do not support Israel, despite these being philosophically contradictory in the terms of “preserving human life over ideologies” since Ukraine is still killing people. The context makes the conscience.
Ukraine is killing people to preserve their people’s lives, it’s not contradictory.
I’m trans. Tell me more. 🤷♀️
If authoritarians get their way, you’ll have to hide in my attic until we are liberated.
I don’t know why people are okay with trans people dying as well. Some people were absolutely sick when Brianna Ghey was brutally murdered.
You should ask your fellow Christians, trans folks are not so popular with the church if you haven’t noticed.
Every Christian I have talked to about this subject is vehemently against killing transgender people. What does my belief in God have to do with my opinion on not killing trans people?
You don’t have to strictly be for killing them, you can just be against their existence, and someone else will take that to its logical conclusion.
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest”
I think it is true that Christians who are against violence against trans people should be far more vocal over it. But the general thing I hear isn’t really wanting to get rid of trans people, more of if they should be validated as their desired gender or not, or how children should be approached about the topic.
the existence of trans people is quite literally conditional on them being validated as their desired gender.
if you don’t validate them, then when they keep doing trans stuff (like transitioning), you will freak out and attempt to stop them. For example by sending them to conversion therapy. And it should be obvious to any basically humanist person why that’s a bad idea.
No, because there are no effective conversion therapies that work, and it can make the situation worse. It’s not a binary. You don’t have to choose between “oh yeah sure let’s change the signs on bathrooms! You can compete in women’s sports and be in women spaces, too! Oh and please go and tell these children all about your sex change!” and “send them all to conversion therapy at gunpoint”. I don’t know why you keep jumping to conclusions so quickly and freak out at me stating the fact that killing people is abhorrent. Because apparently I am not allowed to condemn the murder of a young girl because I, like 2.38 billion other people, think that Jesus of Nazareth from 2024 years ago made a convincing case for actually being God.
Speaking of the Russian invasion of Ukraine… A lot fewer people would have died if Ukraine had surrendered immediately. About 200,000 Russian soldiers’ lives would have been saved, and I find it rather unlikely that Putin’s repressive measures would have killed more Ukrainians than that. But somehow in this case I find myself putting my ideology over human lives.
Not all ideologies are the same, of course, but you should still consider whether you only see people you disagree with putting ideology over human lives because when you put your own ideology over human lives, it seems so obvious and natural that you don’t think about it.
Putin also could have … Not invaded ?? & the lives of those Russian soldiers would have been spared.
True but not relevant to the point being made.
It is perfectly relevant. Putin, and thus the rest of the Russian political machine that backed him up, chose to put ideology (his personal agenda of territorial expansion) over human lives (of both Ukrainian and Russian). Can one really fault Ukraine for making the decision to fight back when the decision was already made for them? From some philosophical point of view, one could then put the ‘blame’ on both- since both have chosen to put ideology above lives and extend the fighting. However, one forced the decision of the other. Blame cannot be equally assigned, when the blame didn’t even exist until the unilateral action of one party.
The concept of “ideology” is perhaps too narrow a definition for such a situation as Ukraine, however. Most people boil it down online to just “Western proxy war vs Russia”, but it is more than just politics, it is the threat of extinction of Ukraine’s independent self-determination, freedom of expression, and ethnic distinctiveness.
I think Timwi was getting at this part of ArbitraryValue’s comment:
Not all ideologies are the same, of course, but you should still consider whether you only see people you disagree with putting ideology over human lives because when you put your own ideology over human lives, it seems so obvious and natural that you don’t think about it.
Also worth emphasizing that they specifically say this preceding that:
But somehow in this case I find myself putting my ideology over human lives.
In other words, unless I’m mistaken, even supposing their thought might somehow hold true that Ukraine’s surrender would save lives, they maintain support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia as they’re putting their ideology over human lives. Nevertheless, they think it’s important to recognize that they are doing this, rather than think there is no ideology in play whatsoever in their position.
It’s not necessarily the best way to have approached this given the charged topic (particularly framing it as a certainty of far fewer lost lives), but I think that point is worth remembering. Introspection is especially important in serious matters, otherwise you lose sight of what you’re really fighting for.
