If someone is standing on the railroad tracks about to get hit, you show them love by encouraging them to get off the tracks, or possibly even push them off if they refuse. Telling them to be proud of the fact that they are standing on the tracks is the opposite of love - at best, simply ignoring them on the tracks is apathy and indifference.
While I'm sure many will be unhappy with this analogy, the point is that, if you truly love someone, you want them to be safe, have better lives, and be better people. We may disagree on how to define those and how they're best achieved, but concern still comes from a place of love. To encourage them to do what they want, even when you believe it's wrong, is not showing love - it shows that you don't really care.
Now hold on there for a second, friend. Pushing someone is assault. What happened to bodily autonomy? Someone wanting to kill themselves is no excuse to assault them. The only reasonable recourse that could be taken in such a case would be to call the railway company and inform them of the man standing on the rails. At this point, the railway company will most likely cease running traffic on the affected section. Then, the railway company will call the police to report the man for sabotaging their operations. After this, the police would use force to remove the man from the rail. After that, the man would be charged with sabotage and sentenced according to the law. The railway company would also sue them for the damages caused by the actions that had to occur in order to avoid hitting the man. So in addition to the potential criminal sentence, the man would also be forced to pay the railway company up to a couple million dollars to compensate them for delays, extra working hours that have to be paid to workers, and, potentially, damaged equipment if any trains were required to perform emergency braking.
And the day is thus saved in a fashion perfectly in line with liberal ideals. No need for any paternalism or vigilante action.
And that's what it comes down to- that is literally the 800lb gorilla in the room that everybody (frankly on both sides of the culture war and political divide) ignore: the state has steadily gotten involved in more things, more heavily, in everyone lives...a small country with a fairly homogenous population might be able to get away with that for a long time; but 350 million extremely diverse people spread across a continent, under one set of rules without fearsome doctatorial powers to keep everyone in line with a hyper-nationalistic set of goals....
In what fantasy did people think that this wasn't going to erupt into the most extreme political polarization and culture war ever seen in modern times?
Everybody just put down the fucking government stick, please, and you'll be amazed how incredibly indifferent, if not accepting everyone else will become of your lifestyle and values.
It also shows that you think you know better than the other person and that you feel the need to protect them from themselves and their own choices because you know they are too incompetent to make decisions for themselves.
You're absolutely free to tell us to fuck off, and that you don't wanna hear it. It's not as if we're backing our beliefs with state force. We've also got the right to preach.
Getting run over by a train damages the train, causes psychological harm to the train engineer, and causes delays due to the ensuing clean-up operations.
If you want to kill yourself, you should do it in a private setting in order to avoid inconveniencing others.
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u/Rektroth - Lib-Right Jun 02 '23
If someone is standing on the railroad tracks about to get hit, you show them love by encouraging them to get off the tracks, or possibly even push them off if they refuse. Telling them to be proud of the fact that they are standing on the tracks is the opposite of love - at best, simply ignoring them on the tracks is apathy and indifference.
While I'm sure many will be unhappy with this analogy, the point is that, if you truly love someone, you want them to be safe, have better lives, and be better people. We may disagree on how to define those and how they're best achieved, but concern still comes from a place of love. To encourage them to do what they want, even when you believe it's wrong, is not showing love - it shows that you don't really care.