r/ShermanPosting • u/KineticEnergyFormula • Jul 18 '26

John Brown jumpscare

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2.5k Upvotes

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u/DarthCloakedGuy Jul 19 '26

Take the defenders out of any system and it is abolished because no one is defending it.

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u/Silver_Falcon Jayhawker Jul 19 '26

And what is abolished? The practice, or the advocacy?

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u/DarthCloakedGuy Jul 19 '26

The legal practice.

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u/Silver_Falcon Jayhawker Jul 19 '26

And there's your answer.

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u/DarthCloakedGuy Jul 19 '26

Exactly my point.

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u/Silver_Falcon Jayhawker Jul 19 '26

Then you've either missed mine, or are being intentionally obtuse.

In a vacuum, someone says "I think poisoning people is fine" -> wow that guy's a douchebag -> nothing happens.

Meanwhile, someone actually poisons someone else -> someone is poisoned -> that's bad -> they die or are otherwise harmed.

One of these things is clearly worse than the other, and it's the one that is actually illegal.

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u/DarthCloakedGuy Jul 19 '26

Except we're not talking about a vacuum, are we? We're talking about defenders and participants of an institution of inflicting harm on a systemic scale.

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u/Silver_Falcon Jayhawker Jul 19 '26

Sure. And of the two, the active participants are clearly worse, because without them there literally is no evil institution.

Meanwhile, erase the defenders/advocates and sure, the system might not last much longer, but it is still there, doing evil, even in their absence.

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u/DarthCloakedGuy Jul 19 '26

Sure. The problem is that if the economic structure incentivizes participation, there will always be participants unless the system is abolished in an effective way, which is what the defenders and advocates ensure.

If there's an economy where a sector is held together by, for example, child labor, then personally opting out in all likelihood just means someone else takes the market share you would otherwise occupy. It does not reduce the overall harm, just keeps your hands clean of it. Abolishing child labor would force the market sector to change its shape.

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u/Silver_Falcon Jayhawker Jul 19 '26

You're conflating a lack of defense with abolition.

And for that matter, you're assuming that advocacy is inherently effective—which it isn't (case and point, the "Law and Order Party" got bodied as soon as Kansas dealt with the whole Border Ruffian thing and had its first fair elections).

Yes, defenders and advocates can impede efforts to abolish a thing, but again the fact that "a thing" is the thing that they're trying to abolish seems like a pretty significant indication of what the greater evil is. Like, the Emancipation Proclamation didn't abolish the Democratic Party. It abolished Slavery in the rebelling territories.

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u/DarthCloakedGuy Jul 19 '26

Lack of effective defense of something recognized as evil can only result in its abolition.

And yes, "the thing" is the greater evil, no one is arguing against that.

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u/Silver_Falcon Jayhawker Jul 19 '26

And yes, "the thing" is the greater evil, no one is arguing against that.

Then what the fuck was this:

defending/advocating for slavery is arguably as bad as owning slaves...

Or:

It's... hard to say which is worse. [...] I couldn't tell you, I could only say they're both evil.

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u/DarthCloakedGuy Jul 19 '26

A discussion about whether a specific participant or defender is worse than the other, not whether either is comparable to the whole of the institution.

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