this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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US Authoritarianism
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You're acting like that was her personal decision and not an order she had to follow rather than her personal view
Could she have resigned instead?
Sure. And just like when people did it in the trump admin, the people you disagree with would just appoint someone who agrees with them.
"Some other people are even more Evil" isn't the great excuse for evildoing that you seem to think it is.
How did it work when people resigned under trump?
Did it make his admin better?
Or did trump replace them with worse people and do worse shit?
This ain't a hypothetical, we literally just saw how it plays out...
Your reusing of the exact same argument with different wording doesn't magically make it a better argument - an honest person judges others on the quality of their actions, and such moral judgment is wholly independent of their tribe.
The "what about those people of that other tribe" is not an argument about the quality of the actions of this person because there is no chain of causality linking them - she is not doing it because the past actions of those others forced her to act like this now. Pulling such unrelated events up is morally dishonest and means you're a Tribalist first and foremost, hence you are also unethical and immoral as you put tribe-membership above Ethics and Moral when judging such actions.
There is no such thing as being Honest, Ethical or Moral if a person's Tribe changes your judgement of their actions: the supporting of Genocide by a member of the Democratic Party is not made any less or any more deserving of condemnation by their membership of the Democratic party or by there being members of the Republican party who did or would do the same or worse - the actions speak for themselves, PERIOD.
Yours is the kind of excusing of Evil that makes Zionists go around mass murdering Palestinian children or supporting those who do: they do the Evil they do with such gusto and intensity that it amounts to Genocide and then claim it's only because of what Hamas did before: i.e. the greater evil done by "my side" they justify with the evil done by "the other side" even though causally the latter does not cause the former - there really is no need to kill tends of thousands of children to get at Hamas.
No matter what their tribe, any person commiting such actions whilst saying such things as this lady deserves exactly the same opprobrium, and that includes this lady. Her tribe and those other people's tribe is irrelevant for anybody who is an Ethical, Moral and Honest person.
It's fine man.
You want meaningless actions that dont do anything except good people losing power.
I want people in power to do everything they can with that power to stop a genocide.
We just disagree.
I pity you for living in a system were you don't have a real choice and to salve your conscience have to finding excuses to justify some evildoing over other evildoing so that you can feel that the incredibly narrow and highly managed "choice" you have is a real choice rather than meaningless theatre.
I would hope that if I myself was in that situation, my reaction wouldn't be to rush out in defense of the evildoing of the "side" I chose when the nature of their actions is pointed out but instead just shut up - just because one has a "choice" of A, which will shaft you, or B which will shaft you, doesn't mean one has to like it or rush out in defense of a specific kind of shafting by pointing out that "yeah, but those other guys will shaft you too" when somebody points out that it is, indeed, a shafting.
Nobody can be blamed for the conditions they were born into, but they certainly can for how they reacted to it.
You do get that the comment you're replying to was using the Trump administration as an analog for what could happen in the Biden one, right? You do understand that?
It's a second order variant of the same logic:
Instead of "whatabout those other guys" it's "whatabout what those other guys' boss did when those other guys didn't want to do what this one just did".
Whilst it's more convoluted, it's still whataboutism because there is no causal relationship between the choices of A and the choices of B's boss, hence it's not logical to pull that into the argument about the morality of A's choices.
This lady had the option to "do evil" and keep getting the benefits she has been getting (money, prestige, career advancement), to leave and not do evil or to stay, not do evil and see how the boss reacts. She chose the option of doing evil. Guess both her own Moral and Ethics as well as her opinion of the boss' own Moral and Ethics (relevant for choosing or not option #3) defined her choice - one can only expect that she's a better judge of the boss' Moral and Ethics than most people in this World.
The whole "I shall do evil lest the boss fire me and replace me with somebody that does Evil" twist is just a variant of what the Nuremberg trials determined to be invalid as an excuse, only this variant is even weaker because it's about what some other boss did to some other people.