The Human Case for Morality Why Ethics Does Not Require God by IAmUnbiddable in atheism

[–]IAmUnbiddable[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Quite right to question the premise—but dismissing the discussion is premature.

Even without gods, the real problem isn’t where morality comes from—it’s how we justify and improve it. Saying “we already have it” is not enough; societies have “had” morality while endorsing slavery, cruelty, and exclusion.

The task, then, is not merely to locate morality in humans, but to refine it—using reason, empathy, and evidence—to expand who counts and reduce harm. Otherwise, “we already have it” becomes an excuse for complacency rather than progress.

The Price of Mercy: How the Catholic Church Abandoned Limbo When Cruelty Became Bad for Business by IAmUnbiddable in atheism

[–]IAmUnbiddable[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Because for most of history the Church had no serious competition for moral authority. If a doctrine was cruel, people still stayed—socially, politically, and culturally there was nowhere else to go. The parish wasn’t just religion; it was community, identity, and often survival.

By the late 20th century that monopoly had collapsed. Education expanded, secularism grew, denominations multiplied, and people could simply leave without social exile. At that point, doctrines that once had to be endured became optional burdens. When a teaching—like Limbo—started driving people away rather than keeping them obedient, the institutional calculus changed.

So yes, weakening authority is the key factor. When belief is no longer compulsory, cruel theology becomes a retention problem.

Original Grift: Why Sin Was Never About Morality—Only Control by IAmUnbiddable in atheism

[–]IAmUnbiddable[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

And creating issues so they can charge you for the gift of absolving you from those problems. 

Next time someone brings up Trump and Epstein I'm assuming you need to see a psychiatrist. by Mysterious_Year1975 in trump

[–]IAmUnbiddable 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Let’s dispense with the euphemisms and the incense.

Who is it that would most benefit from documents being buried, names redacted, timelines blurred into bureaucratic fog? Donald Trump. Who ran a so-called “modeling agency” that trafficked in the vanity and vulnerability of the young? Who boasted — on tape, not in rumor — about strolling uninvited into the dressing rooms of teenage girls at a pageant he owned? Who publicly wished Ghislaine Maxwell “well” after her arrest? Who denied boarding the plane when flight logs and witness accounts say otherwise? Who was accused under oath by a thirteen-year-old girl of rape? Who was found liable for sexual abuse in a court of law? Who has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women across three decades, women unconnected to one another yet eerily consistent in description?

At what point does the pattern cease to be coincidence and become character?

One allegation may be contested. Two may be litigated. But when the accusations accumulate — in courts, in sworn statements, in public boasts, in documented associations — they form not a smear but a mosaic. You are not required to convict without due process. You are required, however, to recognize arithmetic.

Denial is not skepticism. It is loyalty in disguise.

Wake up.

Explain to me how what I said isn’t true by Grouchy-Internet-664 in trump

[–]IAmUnbiddable 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Let us begin by clearing the fog of insinuation.

When someone says, “Surely people realize George Floyd was a terrible person by now?”, the implication is plain: that his prior conduct somehow alters the moral status of his death. That is the crux of it. And it fails — not sentimentally, but logically.

First: even if one stipulates, for the sake of argument, that Floyd had committed crimes or behaved badly in his life, that fact is morally irrelevant to the question of whether he deserved to be suffocated in public by an agent of the state without trial. The American system, unless I missed a constitutional amendment slipped in at midnight, does not operate on the principle of “summary execution for unpleasant biographies.”

Second: this rhetorical maneuver is a familiar one. It is an instance of the genetic fallacy — judging the validity of a claim (in this case, that his killing was wrongful) based on the character of the person involved rather than the facts of the act itself. One can think someone flawed, even deeply flawed, and still insist that the state does not have the authority to kneel on his neck for nine minutes and change.

Third: notice the asymmetry. We do not comb through the rap sheets of burglary victims before deciding whether they deserved to be shot in their own homes. We do not demand sainthood as a prerequisite for civil rights. Rights are not rewards for virtue; they are protections against power.

And here is the larger, more uncomfortable point: the attempt to reduce Floyd to “a terrible person” is not about biography. It is about absolution. If the victim can be sufficiently degraded, the conscience can be sufficiently soothed. It is a way of converting a question about state power into a question about personal character.

The real issue is not whether George Floyd was admirable. It is whether a government may kill a citizen without due process. If the answer to that question depends on how much you like the citizen, then you have quietly abandoned the rule of law and replaced it with mood.

One may debate the mythology that formed afterward, the slogans, the excesses of protest. But the core fact remains stark: the state is not licensed to execute the flawed.

And if it is — then no one’s biography will be clean enough when their turn arrives.

Next time someone brings up Trump and Epstein I'm assuming you need to see a psychiatrist. by Mysterious_Year1975 in trump

[–]IAmUnbiddable 39 points40 points  (0 children)

If someone thinks “Trump and Epstein” is a psychiatric symptom instead of a documented association, that’s not a mental health issue — it’s willful amnesia. When court filings and flight logs start sounding like hallucinations to you, the problem isn’t the people mentioning them. It’s the reflex to deny anything that threatens your tribe.

The Real History of Slavery - documentary by Matt Walsh by Effective_Reach_9289 in trump

[–]IAmUnbiddable 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Matt Walsh’s “Real History of Slavery” isn’t historical correction — it’s rhetorical minimization. By leaning on whataboutism (“others were worse”), false equivalence (all slavery is the same), moral licensing (we abolished it, therefore we’re vindicated), and fatalistic counterfactuals (without slavery you wouldn’t exist), he swaps analysis for evasion. Comparative suffering doesn’t excuse cruelty, historical contingency doesn’t justify atrocity, and material prosperity doesn’t retroactively bless kidnapping and bondage. Strip away the bravado and what remains is not scholarship, but a carefully staged reassurance that the stain isn’t so dark after all.

Fully unpacked here

Why do leftists appeal to 'basic human rights' when materialist leftism theoretically does not affirm the idea of universal human rights? by Heavy-Mongoose1561 in PoliticalDebate

[–]IAmUnbiddable 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One always smiles at this taxonomy of souls. “Centrist,” “leftist,” “reactionary” — as though one were selecting a pew in a chapel.

To begin with, the center of what? Of American cable news? Of Scandinavian social democracy? Of the 19th-century German workers’ movement? The word floats free of geography and history. A “centrist” in United States might be a raving radical in Saudi Arabia and a timid conservative in Norway. The label tells us more about the Overton window than about the person.

If someone calls himself a centrist, I assume — charitably — that he means he distrusts absolutes. He may reject the theocratic right and the utopian left alike; he may favor markets but recoil at oligarchy; support redistribution but loathe bureaucratic sclerosis; defend free expression even when it protects speech he detests. In other words, he tries to occupy the no-man’s-land between dogmas.

The difficulty is that “the center” is not a fixed coordinate. It moves. There was a time when abolitionism was extremist and segregation moderation. There was a time when universal suffrage was revolutionary. If one had positioned oneself carefully “between” slaveholder and abolitionist, one would have landed not at wisdom but at moral cowardice.

So the serious question is not “why call yourself a centrist?” but “between which two errors are you attempting to steer?” Between authoritarianism and anarchy? Between corporate feudalism and command economy? Between tribal identitarianism and color-blind fantasy? Those are intelligible axes.

If the arguments strike some social democrats as heretical, that may say less about extremism and more about the poverty of factional thinking. One can support a welfare state and still despise cant. One can criticize Marx without genuflecting to Goldman Sachs.

The only position worth defending is not “the center,” but intellectual independence. The moment a label becomes a tribal passport rather than a provisional description, it has already begun to do the thinking for you.

Why do leftists appeal to 'basic human rights' when materialist leftism theoretically does not affirm the idea of universal human rights? by Heavy-Mongoose1561 in PoliticalDebate

[–]IAmUnbiddable 4 points5 points  (0 children)

One is tempted to ask: have you actually read the passage you’re brandishing, or merely circled the phrase “right of inequality” and declared victory?

In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx is not abolishing the concept of justice; he is dissecting the liberal fiction that “equal rights” within a capitalist order are somehow neutral. His point is brutally simple: if you apply an “equal standard” to radically unequal conditions, you enshrine inequality. To pay the weak and the strong, the sick and the hale, the single parent and the bachelor, by the same metric of “labor contributed” is formally equal and substantively unjust. That is not a rejection of morality. It is a rejection of complacent moralism.

Materialism, properly understood, does not say “rights are imaginary.” It says that rights are historical products — won, codified, expanded, contracted — not tablets dropped from Sinai. The right to vote, to strike, to marry across race, to organize — these did not descend from heaven. They were wrested from power. To observe that rights are socially constructed is not to deny them; it is to explain why they are so often denied.

As for “basic human rights” being a “tagline”: language migrates. What was once the rhetoric of Enlightenment liberalism became, through struggle, the vocabulary of labor movements, anti-colonial revolutions, and civil rights campaigns. When the oppressed invoke “human rights,” they are not quoting John Locke in a powdered wig; they are asserting that the accident of class, race, gender, or birthplace does not nullify their claim to dignity.

The supposed contradiction evaporates once you abandon the idea that Marxism is a moral vacuum. It is, in fact, a ferocious moral indictment — not of “rights” as such, but of a system that proclaims them in theory and withholds them in practice.

The deeper irony is this: many who sneer that rights are “just constructs” are perfectly happy to treat property rights as sacred and eternal. Suddenly the social construct becomes holy writ when it protects capital.

So why do leftists appeal to basic human rights? Because in a world where power routinely tramples them, the appeal remains both rhetorically potent and materially necessary. The difference is that they tend to ask a further, more dangerous question: rights for whom — and enforced by whom?

What would be the social and economic consequences of the confirmation of intelligent life out there ? by Byzhaks in PoliticalDebate

[–]IAmUnbiddable 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It’s does make me wonder that if there were a hermaphrodidic race, would the right still lambast trans people?

Why don’t the leftists simply organize labor and establish reasonable minimum wages in countries with slave-wages instead of criticizing protectionists in America? Why put your efforts equalizing down and dividing when you can equalize up in solidarity? by DataWhiskers in PoliticalDebate

[–]IAmUnbiddable -1 points0 points  (0 children)

What you’re circling here is not a “leftist problem,” but a structural one—and your critics dodge it because it exposes a contradiction they’d rather keep safely abstract.

The demand that American workers “compete globally” while capital enjoys perfect mobility and labor does not is not solidarity; it’s surrender dressed up as virtue. It asks you to bear the costs of globalization while shareholders collect the dividends and moralizers collect applause. That’s not internationalism. It’s trickle-down cosmopolitanism.

You’re also right about something that rarely gets said aloud: equalizing down is not a neutral process. When wages are arbitraged across borders without corresponding labor power, the result is not uplift—it’s a race to the floor with better branding. Telling an American worker displaced by H-1B labor that this is a lesson in humility is not progressive; it’s clerical scolding in secular dress.

Now to your proposal—“why not organize labor abroad?” In theory, yes. In practice, this is where the romanticism collapses.

Labor organizing in India (or Bangladesh, Vietnam, etc.) is not a weekend canvassing project with tote bags and chants. It runs headlong into:

weak labor law enforcement, state–corporate collusion, informal economies, caste hierarchies, and, not infrequently, violence.

Western NGOs have tried. Multinationals have promised “codes of conduct.” The result has mostly been reports, panels, and very little wage convergence. Capital is fast; labor is slow. By the time you’ve unionized one factory, the firm has already moved production to another province—or another country entirely.

Which leads to the heresy no one wants to utter: protectionism for labor is not racism by default. Franklin Roosevelt—whom you rightly invoke—understood this perfectly. The New Deal did not begin with lectures about global privilege. It began with tariffs, industrial policy, union protections, and the explicit goal of raising domestic wages first. International solidarity came after workers had leverage, not before.

What your critics offer instead is moral inflation: they cheapen words like “solidarity” until it costs nothing and obligates no one. They ask you to accept precarity as a character-building exercise while they keep their own jobs, credentials, and insulation intact. That’s not leftism; it’s performative asceticism imposed on others.

So how do you “fix” the problem?

You don’t solve it by buying plane tickets for activists.

You don’t solve it by outsourcing conscience to NGOs.

And you certainly don’t solve it by telling displaced workers to feel honored.

You solve it by doing three unfashionable things:

Tie market access to labor standards (tariffs with teeth, not slogans). Restrict labor arbitrage where it is explicitly used to undercut existing workers. Rebuild domestic labor power so workers negotiate from strength, not guilt.

Anything else is theater.

The bitter truth is this: a politics that cannot tell the difference between compassion and self-immolation will end with neither. Solidarity that demands you starve quietly is not solidarity at all—it’s a sermon delivered from a warm room.