It's a new type of internet slacktivist. "In a hypothetical situation where a murderer busts into my house like the Kool-Aid man, I dream of action scenes in my head of how I would fight him off. That's my emotional labor. That's my contribution to family life. My wife can do all the other trivial things."
I hear your point for sure, though I would counter that the purpose of all philosophical thought experiments is to posit an extreme case that tests whether you would adhere to a deontological principle even in an instance with extreme consequences. I think such thought experiments are useful to help us think about how far we would take our principles. Ethics officers in hospitals get presented with some pretty crazy situations too and have to be practiced in thinking about these types of things and deciding where to draw lines.
This might make sense if someone asked as part of a conversation, but most of these guys just seem to want to put it out there unprompted to show how bad ass they are. It's why the "would you suck 1000 dicks" is a pretty good retort, because it's philosophically very close and if it's so important to you then the answer really should still be yes, but it takes away the weird John Wick role-playing you're trying to do (at least for heterosexual men).
Yeah, I agree with you that going around unprompted asserting that you are completely untroubled by the dilemma is laughable, and the guys doing this are laughable. It's pretty stupid and meant to position them opposite the people saying they would sacrifice their child to save 1,000 random people and who act appalled that anyone would choose to save their child. In reality it's a dilemma for a reason, and anyone completely untroubled by the trade-off would be a messed-up person.
Those "I would kill 1,000 people to save my family" dudes annoy me. It's a way to sound like a trad tough guy to #RETVRN morons on social media, but it's not something that is ever going to actually happen in your real life. The very definition of cheap talk.
The reality is, you have no idea whether, or how much, you would kill to save your family and neither does anyone else who lives in a peaceful, developed country because any situation in which you may need to do that is so alien to you. Change some fucking diapers and get back to me.
Yeah exactly, all it does is show off that these guys are having fantasies about killing people to prove their masculinity, which is... weird. It's just like those "come and take it" guys who are like "oh I WISH someone would come and try to take my guns" or "I DARE someone to trespass on my property". Like my dude, you shouldn't be fantasizing and getting excited about the possibility of getting to shoot someone.
I mean, the government did just talk about taking away a bunch of people's guns based on demographic characteristics. These people are unlikely to be directly affected by that kind of targeting, but everyone is at risk if the government starts to decide that it should control who is allowed to defend themselves.
No I agree, it's bad for the government to threaten to take people's guns, I'm just saying the way these guys talk about it really suggests they're itching for a chance to shoot someone. Like preferably you would hope it wouldn't have to come to that, but a lot of these guys seem to want that to happen.
It's really got the same energy as grown men who sincerely talk about how they would totally start a fight with someone who was rude to them or disrespected them in some way and would win easily.
It's like a more attenuated version of the guy who doesn't do laundry or wash dishes but gets his SO a big gift every once in a while. "I may be a lump, but I could show how dedicated I am in a single moment."
But at least the first guy actually provides something beyond a hypothetical of how far you would go to save his family.
TO COMPLETION. That’s the rub, so to speak. Some women go gaga over going down. Some women are “that feels nice”. And some are “ain’t happening, Fuck me”, no matter how good you (I) are (am) at it.
One of the things I have observed as a bisexual is that women are just more varied than men are. Different women want wildly different types of stimulation, and what one woman loves, the next might hate. Men aren't all exactly the same, but the range is much narrower.
Dude, who are these parents with mini Gordon Ramseys for kids. Like do kids even know the difference between fresh and reheated ? When I was a kid I would just scarf down whatever my mom gave me to eat when I got home from playing. And then I would study for an hour before falling asleep. Sometimes at my desk. The only tyranny I committed was almost never doing my homework!
My first thought wasn't that they would be able to tell the difference, but that reheating food instead of giving them fresh food could somehow be dangerous.
I don’t get this reheated food is dangerously nonsense. Eskimos have been freezing food for centuries, the rest of us now have this tech thanks to science and it’s already the vaccine (meaning it’s strongly opposed without scientific basis) of food tech?!
A paradox of being so wealthy and living so comfortablly that we can not only afford fresh food and meal delivery (multiple times a week even) is people considering day old food that has been preserved well to be poison.
Sometimes I really wish people would understand what true poverty is because it seems our definition of it is "has to bring their own lunch from home".
I feel like there's a huge element of modern superstition around a lot of this stuff. Some people believe very deeply that reheating food 2 days later will kill them, so they don't even consider it and the people who just do it regularly because it's actually harmless are disgusting to them and the wrath of the angry germ gods is surely going to rain down on them soon.
It is nonsense. I have no idea what's going on with moms these days, but they are some of the most neurotic people I've ever seen. I don't mean that as an insult but Jesus Christ, calm down! You'd think they'd be happy to learn that they don't actually have to care as much and things are actually not as dangerous as they think. A similar thing I've seen lately is this trend of not wanting to tell your kids about Santa/the Easter Bunny/the Tooth Fairy etc, because "I don't want to lie to my kids, what if they don't trust me anymore??" Like calm the hell down. Kids aren't allowed to have fun anymore because mom's neurosis tells her that disaster is lurking around every corner. I blame attachment parenting for scaring a bunch of moms into believing one mistake could make their kids hate them forever. I swear, they need to sit down and breathe, relax, it will all be okay.
I mean I think it's natural and normal as a parent to want your kids to like/love you, I mean no one wants their kids to hate them. I think the narcissistic thing is more that mom groups seem to constantly be competing with each other for who can be the "best" mom? That's more narcissistic than anything else, like stop treating your child like an object and being a parent for show, and actually parent. As for everything else, I can't explain the "I don't want to lie to them!" thing about Santa, but for the other things, I think it's also a reaction to how Gen X/Millennials were raised, and trying not to be that, as well as the narrative around "attachment parenting" which is trying *really hard* to avoid the baby feeling neglected or unloved and developing insecure attachment, which is a noble goal, but these moms are stressing out about it way too much and losing their minds over the worry that any one thing they can do (and they won't know what it is, so they have to constantly be on alert) can be the thing that secretly destroys their relationship with their child and that's just not true (unless it's like, some major thing, but a lot of these moms are worried that taking .25 seconds too long to respond to their kid is what will make them secretly feel unloved or rejected). Attachment is much more about consistency over time, not one incident. I kind of feel bad for them but at the same time, take a Xanax, Jesus.
I do think it’s narcissistic to always think about yourself in relation to a baby. It’s like a friend who’s constantly going “what does he think of me what does he think of me what does he think of me”. Yes it’s insecure but it’s also so fucking self obsessed lol like stop.
I don’t know where the O’Keefe Group stands, but if you go far enough right they do hate Trump again! Usually over not being antisemitic and/or racist enough.
"I would kill a thousand people for my child" guys never think about the obvious question -- does your child want a mass murderer for a dad? The answer is no.
Knowing the Trump administration, they're going insist on the urls that contain "DoD" be switched to "DoW" and given how competent they have been so far, I'm sure we don't have to worry about any security incidents related to switching the urls.
I'm sure that tons of people who don't have kids would gladly and very nobly sacrifice their children for the 1,000+ people who just died in a landslide in Sudan. Just as gladly as they'd pay 90% taxes on a much higher income they don't earn.
EDIT: It's the person who would sacrifice their child in such a cause that you have to worry about. I recently read again about how when Mao learned that his own son had died on the front in the Korean War in the early 1950s, his first remark was "How can there be no deaths in war?" Sign of a psychopath (though he'd shown many other signs before this).
I’m not a utilitarian, and so I *do* think there’s a pretty significant moral difference between not killing your kid to save 1000 strangers and killing 1000 strangers to save your kid.
And the Romans, for what it’s worth, would have seriously admired Mao’s attitude (and Stalin’s, in refusing to exchange his captured son for a German general) as patriotic—as putting country over mere personal attachments. It isn’t just a modern liberal thing.
I think some Roman schools of thought would have admired Mao's behavior and others would not have. They prized the concept of the citizen-soldier in the times of the Republic, especially earlier, but in my decent survey of Roman history they did not expect or ask anyone to sacrifice their immediate family members over unknown others. There's a reason that almost no society has compelled people to testify against direct relatives like spouses or children: they know people cannot be expected to do it and mostly won't. The sense of the citizen-soldier sacrificing for his country was greatly weakened as a leading Roman concept as land and capital increasingly accrued to large landowners in the late Republic (2nd century BC).
Separate point about the Romans: the Romans completely annihilated their enemies in most cases. They faced constant raiding on their frontiers both in expansionary phases and more peaceful phases, and they did not tolerate this at all: they razed those civilizations to the ground and took over everything with zero compunction. They did not risk their children or families out of some sense of obligation for the lives of others. You kill Roman civilians, your civilization will be fully taken over and the threat will be completely eliminated to the greatest extent their military could muster.
The real answer is that most people wouldn't do this, but you can still recognise that this is just a fundamentally selfish stance and not something that makes us noble or great. In theory, it's the right thing to do, it just would be weird if you did it and felt fine about it.
Yes, agree, similar reasoning to what I wrote on your other reply. I would be deeply troubled for the rest of my life by the trade-off, but I'm also clear that I, like nearly all other people, would indeed make the choice to sacrifice the 1,000 strangers to save my child. I read about the death of a thousand people in a landslide or earthquake every week and I feel very briefly sad for those people but it does not move my emotional mood even for the day. Given that losing my child would mostly ruin the rest of my life, I think it's just honest to own which decision you would make, even though the consequence is appalling.
Great point. In fact, the 1000+ deaths wouldn't even have to be in Sudan. They could be in whatever town you live in and the same principle would hold.
Presumably they changed it for a reason, no? Glorifying war is strange, but given this is Trump, Mr Bone Spurs, it's pure Projection. Also, Congress has to officially change the name, I saw somewhere they had to admit it's not an official name change. So it's a fun nickname instead, while spending money to change all the various signs.
I do think it's better in that it's less euphemistic, but they didn't change it to be more straightfoward. They did it because they fetishize war and violence.
It's because the Trump Admin is a boys club filled with 12 year olds who think "Secretary of War" sounds cool and badass and "Secretary of Defense" sounds lame and beta.
I didn’t say they changed it to be more straightforward. A lot of people are under the impression that the Trump administration created the term Secretary of War, and I wanted to point out that they didn’t.
I don't think many people think Trump invented it. In his own comments he said it used to be called that and he wanted to bring it back. It having been called that before doesn't really soften it that much though because the issue is that it's just a directionally unpleasant way to want things to move. If they never changed the name, calling it that now wouldn't signify anything, but when they changed it to reflect a modern belief that starting wars was bad and that counties should only have militaries for defensive purposes, from that point, attempts to change it back are a bit of a red flag.
I am fine with the Secretary of War title, though I did chuckle when I read about it. That's what it was always called though, and I think it's a less euphemistic title. Not coded good or bad for me.
I have some sympathy for the "are leftovers okay?" mom. The kid is 7 months old. She's lucky if the baby is sleeping through the night at that point, which is not the best for one's common sense. She's probably been on breast milk mode for most of the previous 7 months, and that stuff goes bad so fast. Usually you start solids at 6 months and there's tons of precautions around doing that (cut everything tiny! Only single ingredients to start!). Basically, this is a stupid question that she will probably recognize is stupid in a year, and I feel like all parents of infants have moments like this.
Pete Hegeseth sounds way more like secretary of gender war or secretary of war considering his sheer incompetence while obsessing with ideas like “women should not vote”
There is a woman in the UK, Bonnie Blue, who had sex with 1,000 men in day. Her exploit now seems more commendable in that no one died.
She’s the secret FBI agent and she saved us all.
People who say “I would kill 1000 randos or 1 million apes to save my family” are so silly. When would you ever find yourself in that situation?
Also, it’s embarrassing to jack yourself off about your own (entirely imagined btw) bravery in public. Cultivate humility.
I would eat 50,000 plates of dim sum to save one human
It's a new type of internet slacktivist. "In a hypothetical situation where a murderer busts into my house like the Kool-Aid man, I dream of action scenes in my head of how I would fight him off. That's my emotional labor. That's my contribution to family life. My wife can do all the other trivial things."
If the Kool-Aid Man breaks into my house, I'll just drink him. Problem solved.
So you would, in fact, drink the Kool-Aid
I hear your point for sure, though I would counter that the purpose of all philosophical thought experiments is to posit an extreme case that tests whether you would adhere to a deontological principle even in an instance with extreme consequences. I think such thought experiments are useful to help us think about how far we would take our principles. Ethics officers in hospitals get presented with some pretty crazy situations too and have to be practiced in thinking about these types of things and deciding where to draw lines.
This might make sense if someone asked as part of a conversation, but most of these guys just seem to want to put it out there unprompted to show how bad ass they are. It's why the "would you suck 1000 dicks" is a pretty good retort, because it's philosophically very close and if it's so important to you then the answer really should still be yes, but it takes away the weird John Wick role-playing you're trying to do (at least for heterosexual men).
Yeah, I agree with you that going around unprompted asserting that you are completely untroubled by the dilemma is laughable, and the guys doing this are laughable. It's pretty stupid and meant to position them opposite the people saying they would sacrifice their child to save 1,000 random people and who act appalled that anyone would choose to save their child. In reality it's a dilemma for a reason, and anyone completely untroubled by the trade-off would be a messed-up person.
Those "I would kill 1,000 people to save my family" dudes annoy me. It's a way to sound like a trad tough guy to #RETVRN morons on social media, but it's not something that is ever going to actually happen in your real life. The very definition of cheap talk.
The reality is, you have no idea whether, or how much, you would kill to save your family and neither does anyone else who lives in a peaceful, developed country because any situation in which you may need to do that is so alien to you. Change some fucking diapers and get back to me.
Yeah exactly, all it does is show off that these guys are having fantasies about killing people to prove their masculinity, which is... weird. It's just like those "come and take it" guys who are like "oh I WISH someone would come and try to take my guns" or "I DARE someone to trespass on my property". Like my dude, you shouldn't be fantasizing and getting excited about the possibility of getting to shoot someone.
I mean, the government did just talk about taking away a bunch of people's guns based on demographic characteristics. These people are unlikely to be directly affected by that kind of targeting, but everyone is at risk if the government starts to decide that it should control who is allowed to defend themselves.
No I agree, it's bad for the government to threaten to take people's guns, I'm just saying the way these guys talk about it really suggests they're itching for a chance to shoot someone. Like preferably you would hope it wouldn't have to come to that, but a lot of these guys seem to want that to happen.
It's really got the same energy as grown men who sincerely talk about how they would totally start a fight with someone who was rude to them or disrespected them in some way and would win easily.
It's like a more attenuated version of the guy who doesn't do laundry or wash dishes but gets his SO a big gift every once in a while. "I may be a lump, but I could show how dedicated I am in a single moment."
But at least the first guy actually provides something beyond a hypothetical of how far you would go to save his family.
TO COMPLETION. That’s the rub, so to speak. Some women go gaga over going down. Some women are “that feels nice”. And some are “ain’t happening, Fuck me”, no matter how good you (I) are (am) at it.
One of the things I have observed as a bisexual is that women are just more varied than men are. Different women want wildly different types of stimulation, and what one woman loves, the next might hate. Men aren't all exactly the same, but the range is much narrower.
Dude, who are these parents with mini Gordon Ramseys for kids. Like do kids even know the difference between fresh and reheated ? When I was a kid I would just scarf down whatever my mom gave me to eat when I got home from playing. And then I would study for an hour before falling asleep. Sometimes at my desk. The only tyranny I committed was almost never doing my homework!
My first thought wasn't that they would be able to tell the difference, but that reheating food instead of giving them fresh food could somehow be dangerous.
I don’t get this reheated food is dangerously nonsense. Eskimos have been freezing food for centuries, the rest of us now have this tech thanks to science and it’s already the vaccine (meaning it’s strongly opposed without scientific basis) of food tech?!
A paradox of being so wealthy and living so comfortablly that we can not only afford fresh food and meal delivery (multiple times a week even) is people considering day old food that has been preserved well to be poison.
Sometimes I really wish people would understand what true poverty is because it seems our definition of it is "has to bring their own lunch from home".
I feel like there's a huge element of modern superstition around a lot of this stuff. Some people believe very deeply that reheating food 2 days later will kill them, so they don't even consider it and the people who just do it regularly because it's actually harmless are disgusting to them and the wrath of the angry germ gods is surely going to rain down on them soon.
It is nonsense. I have no idea what's going on with moms these days, but they are some of the most neurotic people I've ever seen. I don't mean that as an insult but Jesus Christ, calm down! You'd think they'd be happy to learn that they don't actually have to care as much and things are actually not as dangerous as they think. A similar thing I've seen lately is this trend of not wanting to tell your kids about Santa/the Easter Bunny/the Tooth Fairy etc, because "I don't want to lie to my kids, what if they don't trust me anymore??" Like calm the hell down. Kids aren't allowed to have fun anymore because mom's neurosis tells her that disaster is lurking around every corner. I blame attachment parenting for scaring a bunch of moms into believing one mistake could make their kids hate them forever. I swear, they need to sit down and breathe, relax, it will all be okay.
Obsessing about whether your children will hate you - is kind of narcissistic too imo
I mean I think it's natural and normal as a parent to want your kids to like/love you, I mean no one wants their kids to hate them. I think the narcissistic thing is more that mom groups seem to constantly be competing with each other for who can be the "best" mom? That's more narcissistic than anything else, like stop treating your child like an object and being a parent for show, and actually parent. As for everything else, I can't explain the "I don't want to lie to them!" thing about Santa, but for the other things, I think it's also a reaction to how Gen X/Millennials were raised, and trying not to be that, as well as the narrative around "attachment parenting" which is trying *really hard* to avoid the baby feeling neglected or unloved and developing insecure attachment, which is a noble goal, but these moms are stressing out about it way too much and losing their minds over the worry that any one thing they can do (and they won't know what it is, so they have to constantly be on alert) can be the thing that secretly destroys their relationship with their child and that's just not true (unless it's like, some major thing, but a lot of these moms are worried that taking .25 seconds too long to respond to their kid is what will make them secretly feel unloved or rejected). Attachment is much more about consistency over time, not one incident. I kind of feel bad for them but at the same time, take a Xanax, Jesus.
I do think it’s narcissistic to always think about yourself in relation to a baby. It’s like a friend who’s constantly going “what does he think of me what does he think of me what does he think of me”. Yes it’s insecure but it’s also so fucking self obsessed lol like stop.
I think the point is that it is, in fact, nonsense.
Secretary of Walking Bigly and Carrying a Small Stick
I don’t know where the O’Keefe Group stands, but if you go far enough right they do hate Trump again! Usually over not being antisemitic and/or racist enough.
"I would kill a thousand people for my child" guys never think about the obvious question -- does your child want a mass murderer for a dad? The answer is no.
Knowing the Trump administration, they're going insist on the urls that contain "DoD" be switched to "DoW" and given how competent they have been so far, I'm sure we don't have to worry about any security incidents related to switching the urls.
I'm sure that tons of people who don't have kids would gladly and very nobly sacrifice their children for the 1,000+ people who just died in a landslide in Sudan. Just as gladly as they'd pay 90% taxes on a much higher income they don't earn.
EDIT: It's the person who would sacrifice their child in such a cause that you have to worry about. I recently read again about how when Mao learned that his own son had died on the front in the Korean War in the early 1950s, his first remark was "How can there be no deaths in war?" Sign of a psychopath (though he'd shown many other signs before this).
I’m not a utilitarian, and so I *do* think there’s a pretty significant moral difference between not killing your kid to save 1000 strangers and killing 1000 strangers to save your kid.
And the Romans, for what it’s worth, would have seriously admired Mao’s attitude (and Stalin’s, in refusing to exchange his captured son for a German general) as patriotic—as putting country over mere personal attachments. It isn’t just a modern liberal thing.
I think some Roman schools of thought would have admired Mao's behavior and others would not have. They prized the concept of the citizen-soldier in the times of the Republic, especially earlier, but in my decent survey of Roman history they did not expect or ask anyone to sacrifice their immediate family members over unknown others. There's a reason that almost no society has compelled people to testify against direct relatives like spouses or children: they know people cannot be expected to do it and mostly won't. The sense of the citizen-soldier sacrificing for his country was greatly weakened as a leading Roman concept as land and capital increasingly accrued to large landowners in the late Republic (2nd century BC).
Separate point about the Romans: the Romans completely annihilated their enemies in most cases. They faced constant raiding on their frontiers both in expansionary phases and more peaceful phases, and they did not tolerate this at all: they razed those civilizations to the ground and took over everything with zero compunction. They did not risk their children or families out of some sense of obligation for the lives of others. You kill Roman civilians, your civilization will be fully taken over and the threat will be completely eliminated to the greatest extent their military could muster.
The real answer is that most people wouldn't do this, but you can still recognise that this is just a fundamentally selfish stance and not something that makes us noble or great. In theory, it's the right thing to do, it just would be weird if you did it and felt fine about it.
Yes, agree, similar reasoning to what I wrote on your other reply. I would be deeply troubled for the rest of my life by the trade-off, but I'm also clear that I, like nearly all other people, would indeed make the choice to sacrifice the 1,000 strangers to save my child. I read about the death of a thousand people in a landslide or earthquake every week and I feel very briefly sad for those people but it does not move my emotional mood even for the day. Given that losing my child would mostly ruin the rest of my life, I think it's just honest to own which decision you would make, even though the consequence is appalling.
Great point. In fact, the 1000+ deaths wouldn't even have to be in Sudan. They could be in whatever town you live in and the same principle would hold.
“Secretary of War” was what the position was called from 1789 to 1947, so while it’s a noteworthy change, it’s not unprecedented.
Presumably they changed it for a reason, no? Glorifying war is strange, but given this is Trump, Mr Bone Spurs, it's pure Projection. Also, Congress has to officially change the name, I saw somewhere they had to admit it's not an official name change. So it's a fun nickname instead, while spending money to change all the various signs.
Plus, the first change was by the people who won WWII.
“Presumably they changed it for a reason, no?”
That would be the “noteworthy” part of “noteworthy but not unprecedented.”
I do think it's better in that it's less euphemistic, but they didn't change it to be more straightfoward. They did it because they fetishize war and violence.
It's because the Trump Admin is a boys club filled with 12 year olds who think "Secretary of War" sounds cool and badass and "Secretary of Defense" sounds lame and beta.
I didn’t say they changed it to be more straightforward. A lot of people are under the impression that the Trump administration created the term Secretary of War, and I wanted to point out that they didn’t.
I don't really understand how this is interesting or relevant.
Username checks out, then. 🙂
I don't think many people think Trump invented it. In his own comments he said it used to be called that and he wanted to bring it back. It having been called that before doesn't really soften it that much though because the issue is that it's just a directionally unpleasant way to want things to move. If they never changed the name, calling it that now wouldn't signify anything, but when they changed it to reflect a modern belief that starting wars was bad and that counties should only have militaries for defensive purposes, from that point, attempts to change it back are a bit of a red flag.
As long as we’re going back, let’s remove “In God We Trust” and “Under God”
I am fine with the Secretary of War title, though I did chuckle when I read about it. That's what it was always called though, and I think it's a less euphemistic title. Not coded good or bad for me.
I have some sympathy for the "are leftovers okay?" mom. The kid is 7 months old. She's lucky if the baby is sleeping through the night at that point, which is not the best for one's common sense. She's probably been on breast milk mode for most of the previous 7 months, and that stuff goes bad so fast. Usually you start solids at 6 months and there's tons of precautions around doing that (cut everything tiny! Only single ingredients to start!). Basically, this is a stupid question that she will probably recognize is stupid in a year, and I feel like all parents of infants have moments like this.
The "I'd obliterate a small country just to save my own child" guy is about to be recruited by the IDF...
CHH being an Evangelion fan wasn’t on my bingo card
Okay this is Substack I need everyone to answer the only important question: how many shrimp would you kill to save one family member?
Thank you for that!
Pete Hegeseth sounds way more like secretary of gender war or secretary of war considering his sheer incompetence while obsessing with ideas like “women should not vote”