Comment by zugi
21 days ago
Most people want to judge others and rationalize their own behavior, while piling on to whatever views happen to be popular at the time.
What's worse, working for Big Tobacco, or working for Big Tech, or working for the DEA and spending your days forcefully "civil forfeituring" innocent people's money without charges? The former are at least taking money from people who voluntarily surrender it in exchange for some service, with fairly good knowledge of what they're getting themselves into. While the latter are basically highway robbers. Yet society has chosen to popularize the first one as immoral, and is now working on villifying the second, with only scant mention of the third.
I'm sure I'm guilty of selective outrage myself. If we're going to quote religious references, how about Christ admonishing those who point out the spec in their neighbor's eye, while ignoring the log in their own.
More focus on one's own morality, and less on judging others, just might make the world a slightly better place.
Highly highly disagree. It seems to me the opposite!
People (incl. here) want to rationalise their behaviour by giving excuses — such as the very popular "but X is even worse and people don't complain about it" that you yourself are doing — for the fact that they work on in-ethical stuff, because the honest answer is simply "this pays cartloads of money, fuck you got mine", which is unpalatable to their own self-perception.
Sure, yet you're exemplifying the "judge others" stuff by calling what others do unethical, and judging without evidence that they only do it because of the money, and not because their moral world-view differs from yours.
I guess we're all guilty.
It's at least plausible that someone at the DEA genuinely wants to make a nicer, safer world for themselves and their neighbors. Yes, the agency does the terrible things you mention, but it also gets some horrific stuff off the streets. (Think fentanyl and meth, not weed. I couldn't care less about that.)
No one working for Big Tobacco thinks they're making the world better unless they're an idiot.
True, and I'm sure many, even most, folks working for Big Tech want to make the world a better place.
We likely disagree about the merits of the DEA's War To Destroy the Lives of American Meth Users. That's a topic for another post perhaps, but the point is people have wildly different moral frameworks.
I'm sure there are people working for Big Tobacco who think they're making the world better by helping people enjoy themselves. Heck, some people who work in online gambling, or sports betting, or run state lotteries, or make ice cream, might even believe that!
Some people who preach an ascetic and parsimonious way of life and judge the choices of others probably also think they are making the world a better place, one all-work-and-no-play comment at a time ;)
> Yes, the agency does the terrible things you mention, but it also gets some horrific stuff off the streets. (Think fentanyl and meth, not weed. I couldn't care less about that.)
Do they, though? Some of it, sure, but enough to make a positive impact? Probably not. Indeed, efforts to get drug X off the street often lead to a proliferation of more dangerous drug Y. There's plenty of reason to believe the DEA is only making things worse and causing more deaths.
Phrased differently prohibition is an act of pure insanity from an economic point of view. Every dollar spent on enforcement is a dollar spent subsidizing the value of drugs. All the while thinking that this will somehow "defeat" drugs.
It also brings up another truism: if you are fighting inanimate objects or god forbid abstract concepts you are going to lose just like a drunk boxing with a lamppost.