I Know There’s A Very Good Chance That In Part 2 It’s Going To Turn Out That Failing To Trade Lives
I know there’s a very good chance that in Part 2 it’s going to turn out that failing to trade lives was actually the right thing to do, because why would you ever let pulling the lever be the correct solution, but for the time being that hasn’t happened.
(I won’t be particularly surprised if the message turns out to be ‘actually, you shouldn’t kill one person to save trillions,’ but I’ll be disappointed.)
(I also want an “I Trade Lives” button. The internet is failing me here, although possibly I haven’t looked hard enough. There are buttons that say “We Don’t Trade Lives” but that is the literal opposite of what I want.)
More Posts from Mjollydragon and Others
In seventh grade, there was this girl in my class that was convinced that I was dating a tenth grader -- not any specific tenth grader, just one of them. One day, she saw me talking to another student (actually a ninth grader, but she didn’t know that).
She then came up to me and said something to the effect of, “Suuuure you aren’t dating a tenth grader. I saw you and him talking in the hallway, obviously you must be dating.”
“That doesn’t even make sense!” I said. “By that logic, you and I are dating, since we’re in the hallway and talking right now. Since we aren’t, there is clearly a flaw in your reasoning.”
Someone in my class overheard this and decided that this meant that she and I were actually dating.
This girl, who at the time was rather homophobic, was extremely bothered by this rumor, and vehemently denied it. This only served to convince our classmates that it was true.
In the end, the rumor stopped spreading because people became convinced I was dating a different person instead.
PleaSe TeLL mE yOur StoRiES
This is by no means an original take, and I probably did not spend as much time as I should have editing the writing into being a coherent take, but:
In an awful lot of movies, Steve Rogers would have been right.
(Or, well, treated-as-right by the narrative, at least; in some of those movies many, many people would have died for his idealism, but this wouldn’t have been treated as wrong.)
When faced with this sort of explicit trolley problem, there are two main messages in pop culture: either you should never pull the level (you might kill a named character) or you should find a way to save everyone. For instance, take The Last Jedi: the narrative treats it as correct that Rose stopped Finn from sacrificing his life, not because his plan wouldn’t have worked, but more-or-less because we don’t trade lives. (Other examples: every fucking YA novel ever. ‘You can choose between your significant other... or saving the world.’ ‘Bye, world.’)
(She is absolutely trading lives, just not in the direction that, you know, saves people.)
(This is not to say that characters never trade off lives! The really obvious example here is that most movies are totally fine with killing the villain to protect innocents, although I’m pretty sure the message is generally closer to “the lives of villains don’t matter” than “pull the lever.” Characters will also sometimes do things like choose which of multiple locations to go to, which is generally understood in their narratives to be trading off lives at least a little. But when there’s this sort of explicit setup, the correct answer as portrayed in the narrative is almost never “pull the lever.”)
Now, I actually can think of counterexamples -- Wrath of Khan is very clear that you should pull the lever, for instance, and since I brought up The Last Jedi earlier I might as well mention Holdo’s choice at the end. But in said counterexamples, the person making the choice is almost always choosing to kill themself, not another person, and they usually would have died anyway.
But when characters are faced with the explicit choice of killing someone, maybe multiple someones, or letting far more people die, the treated-as-correct choice is almost never to kill them.
And I’m glad that we have a movie where that’s not the case.
reblog if you believe that gender neutral bathrooms should be available everywhere
http://news.mit.edu/2016/data-amazonian-piraha-language-debate-0309
It sounds like it’s currently debated.
Taken from: Philosophy Memes For Fantastic Philistines (FB)
Yes, it is true that many of them involved relationships. However, there is a subtle difference between attacking someone for not dating you, attacking someone who is dating you, and attacking your ex.
Nevertheless, you’re absolutely right that all of these are terrible and that stereotyping women as less violent than men only makes things worse.
shocking
“it’s just my opinion”
Newsflash: Opinions can be bigoted. Often times opinions are bigoted. Bigotry operates off of opinions. It being your opinion doesn’t absolve you of bigotry, it just proves it more when you say such.
Wait, but if Tony learned all his history from watching Hamilton, then why doesn’t he list Hamilton as a founding father?
The Best of Independence Day
Texts From Superheroes
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So a while ago I bookmarked a bunch of posts to reblog if I ever got a tumblr. Now I finally can!
@allyfallsdownstairs @themoriarkitty
“The 17-year-old, Hunger Games actor Amandla Stenberg has come out as non-binary.
Stenberg – who plays Rue in the adventure film franchise – says she feels like she’s not a ‘woman’ all the time, and non-binary is a term that she feels comfortable using to describe herself. (She is using female pronouns).
Writing on Tumblr, she said she is organizing a workshop on feminism, specifically how ‘mainstream feminist movements have continuously excluded women who are not white, thin, cisgender, able-bodied and neurotypical’.
Something we are struggling with is understanding the intersection of feminism and gender identity…
We’re both people who don’t feel like “women” all the time – but we claim feminism as our movement.
Basically, we’re trying to understand the duality of being a non-binary person and a feminist. How do you claim a movement for women when you don’t always feel like one?”
Read the full piece here:
#1: THANK YOU AMANDLA FOR YOUR CONSISTENT AWESOMENESS AS AN INTERSECTIONAL FEMINIST AND ROLE MODEL FOR YOUTH & EVERYONE ELSE!
#2: YOU DON’T NEED TO BE A WOMEN OR CIS TO BE FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS. Just like white people can and should advocate for racial equality, everyone can and should advocate for gender equality.
I give Amandla a TON of credit for having to not only grow up in public, but grow up as a non-binary POC in a white / sexist / cisnormative society! She is young and figuring herself and society out. I’m Team Stenberg and am not looking to call her out, I just wanted to make this crucial clarification. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, We Should All Be Feminists
