[video]
(Source: openlyawesome, via conradverner)
I hate it when people say that human life is “incalculably valuable,” “priceless,” etc.
In a philosophical sense, that can be defended, but it’s completely false on an economic level. Were human life priceless, we wouldn’t risk anything that could cause a death. Saying it makes you sound compassionate and many other empty words that are supposed to make you a good person, but it’s ridiculous to assert that a human life is priceless. It isn’t, and it never was.
Anyone who states that simple fact get maligned as heartless economic robots. In fact, increasing economic productivity and higher living standards have increased the value of a human life.
If you or a loved one was dying, how much money would you pay to save them? Can you put a price on that?
Absolutely you can. That situation doesn’t change anything about my post. I’d pay whatever I could to keep them alive, provided they wanted to live. That’s what love consists in.
Regardless, that isn’t a particularly interesting case. If a loved one and two strangers are about to get hit by a train and they’ll die instantly, but you can choose to save your loved one or the two strangers, which would you choose? If all life is priceless, then you must save the two strangers, but few individuals value life in that way. We’re biased toward the people we care about.
Do you value the life of a six-year-old differently from the life of Hitler? The life of Beethoven differently from the gas station attendant?
Your maths doesn’t quite add up. If all life is priceless then:
any one life = ∞
so if you save your loved one’s life you get ∞
and if you save the lives of two strangers you get ∞ x 2
which is still ∞
So if you get the same infinite / boundless value whether you save one life or two, why wouldn’t you save the life that you like more?
Yeah, the math was wrong, but saying “the life that you like more” is just another way of saying that you assigned greater value to that life than to the lives of the other two random people. If those lives were all of “priceless” value to you, the only way you could pick who to save would be randomly.
And this claim that we consider all (human) life priceless or incalculably valuable is simply false. We can claim that, but in practice we always assign value, even if we don’t want to admit to it or haven’t realized we’re doing it. That’s how we have death sentences, how we have different prescribed punishments for the murder of one person and the murder of a thousand, how in practice the murders of PoC often go unpunished and get lesser sentences…
Watch. Now Lin’s going to learn to platinum bend because she got the Bei Fong gene where they like to prove people wrong.
I’m just waiting for Toph to show up and once again be like
(via poison-ninja)
[video]
I don’t know who Isabella is, but Isabela has a fantastic rack.
(Source: dirtydragonageconfessions)
Well, with a few exceptions like if you didn’t safe Maelon’s data or if Mordin died during the suicide mission or something, but this is if Mordin is alive and you saved Maelon’s data. Or if you didn’t save Wrex (because Wreav’s a dick and if he’s in charge I wouldn’t want the genophage cured, either)
Spoilers ahead if you haven’t played yet.
I really have to disagree. There are a lot of very good reasons to sabotage the genophage cure, and unless you willfully turn a blind eye on half the facts of the situation, it’s a really gray issue and definitely not a clear and easy choice.
First, like 70% of that post is about how you should cure the genophage because it’s important to Mordin’s, and to a lesser degree Wrex’s, character development. But that’s ridiculous. You can make decisions in the game based on what makes for the best story (and, yes, out of all the ways the genophage arc can unfold in ME3, curing the genophage with Wrex and Eve alive does make for the best, most powerful story by far) or what’s best for your two good pals, but a lot of people make decisions based on what’s in their opinion best for the galaxy, or based on what their particular Shepard would do.
And it’s highly debatable if curing the genophage is what’s best for the galaxy.
Krogan are naturally very violent. It is in their nature to solve problems by force, and even when they don’t have any problems, they turn to violence for recreational purposes.
Krogan aren’t big on forgiving, and the big majority of krogan want revenge for the genophage.
Krogan will reproduce very quickly with the genophage cured. EDI says it best in the conversation you have with her after curing the genophage. If you don’t have an “Oh shit, what have I unleashed upon the galaxy?!” moment at least for a second after that, you’re willfully ignoring the extent of the very real threat to the galaxy you just created.
Treating Eve and Wrex as proof that everything will be peachy because they’re such good people is pretty naive. Two people who preach a highly unpopular opinion among their people, and who can easily be assassinated and will inevitably die sooner or later either way (how many centuries old is Wrex anyway?) are not exactly foolproof protection against billions of krogan who are violent by nature as it is, not to mention want revenge badly. But even if all krogan just sit and obey them, Wrex’s plans for after the genophage don’t exactly fill me with confidence that things won’t get real bad real soon.
I’m playing through ME1 and yesterday I had a talk with Wrex where Shepard can ask him why haven’t the krogan found the cure for the genophage themselves. He replies that krogan would rather fight than work on a cure. In my opinion, as long as krogan aren’t mature/evolved/whatever enough to stop mindlessly killing each other long enough to sit down and develop the cure themselves (in addition to rebuilding their planet they destroyed), they’re not mature enough to be trusted not to, if given the chance, destroy the galaxy the same way they destroyed Tuchanka.
Now, I played ME3 twice and both of my Shepards cured the genophage. If I were in Shepard’s place I don’t know what I’d do… I’d probably cure the genophage, primarily because the reapers are a more immanent threat and I wouldn’t dare jeopardise the krogan support. I don’t know what I’d do if reapers weren’t a factor. On the one hand, genophage is so abhorrent I don’t know if I could stomach taking part in maintaining it, but on the other hand, if left unchecked, the krogan could become an unstoppable force in a matter of centuries, and they haven’t shown the minimum of intelligent, mature behavior that would reassure you that the galaxy wouldn’t turn to complete and utter shit if that were to happen.
“We let Willow cut her hair. When you have a little girl, it’s like how can you teach her that you’re in control of her body? If I teach her that I’m in charge of whether or not she can touch her hair, she’s going to replace me with some other man when she goes out in the world. She can’t cut my hair but that’s her hair. She has got to have command of her body. So when she goes out into the world, she’s going out with a command that it is hers. She is used to making those decisions herself. We try to keep giving them those decisions until they can hold the full weight of their lives.” — Will Smith On Allowing Willow To Cut Her Hair Off (via alcoholicgifts)
(Source: larepublicadedet, via musiclily)
[video]
“Gay marriage proponents feed us two flavors of justification for their crusade. For the romantics they supply fantasy — the notion that legal inclusion brings social justice; for the cynics, they tout the thousand individual rights that a marriage certificate bestows…
You’d think in the “age of the 99%,” we teeming masses would be able to see that what’s good for the few isn’t good for us all. It’s true that marriage comes with material advantages — healthcare, citizenship, and inheritance chief among them — but therein also lies the problem. Marriage consolidates privilege by creating a legal basis for denying access to those thousand rights; it literally sanctions discrimination. Instead of bestowing rights based on relationship status, the state should guarantee those rights for all people. Instead we attach basic rights to an institution with a 50% failure rate.
The obsession with marriage also sanitizes the history of queer struggle. Stonewall was not a wedding, it was a riot, led by the very queers who are now erased from the public image of gay equality. Drag queens, trans people of color, young queers, and butch dykes fought systematic violence and in Sarah Schulman’s words, “[…] arose to change society, to expand rigid gender roles, to break down confining social mores of privatized families and to defy the consumerism that accompanies monogamy and nuclear family lifestyle in the United States.” That transformative vision has been sidelined by the marriage crowd, who are content to bestow rights only on the deserving few. Are there really members of our society undeserving of health care?
Only the most privileged among us could possibly see the fight for the right to party as a movement for social justice. Proponents tout the implications for healthcare and immigration status while members of our queer and trans communities are denied basic treatment in prison, while they are harassed and ejected by ICE. Loving couples making a public commitment to one another is a beautiful thing, but it is erroneously touted by gay rights groups as the single most pressing justice issue facing queer people. Issues of access to healthcare, education, and housing go unmentioned.”
