Saw this in hexbear memes yesterday. To me it reads as a satire of the holier than thou attitudes I see around here. But it also had no downvotes and nobody was challenging it, so I wonder if it reads differently to you, and how if so.
I tried asking the OP but I was told not to expect discussion in the memes community
I thought the point of this was that the meme normally has the other track(s) connected to the middle track, so the fact that they’re disconnected means the lever doesn’t do anything and the system is designed to give a false sense of choice to cover up its murderous intent.
That’s how I read it. The tracks have to be connected.
If you are standing with the leaver, the trolley can’t change tracks, no matter how much you pull it.
If you’re standing at the leaverless track, you don’t even have the illusion of control over the situation.
The only moral choice in this image is to get on the moving trolley and try to stop it yourself.
Which is always an option in each one of these trolley images.
Ultimately, the “Trolley Problem” is stupid as a rhetorical device because life isn’t binary.
And still, choosing an empty track doesn’t do anything neither other than letting the person on the bottom feel better about themselves. If the guy on the top is a play on the liberal ‘choose the lesser evil’ sentiment, what is the bottom guy about?
I think, the bottom left text is said first and the top right is a response to it, this makes the meaning of the meme clearer
Yes. I saved the meme way before I posted it. I will put the original later
Hexbear doesn’t have down votes btw. We believe that if you have something to say, come say it and challenge or be challenged and discuss rather than passively down vote it and move on.
No, it’s not satirical
It’s a genuine condemnation of the attitude that “If some people have to die to maintain my life of way, then so be it”
Most of us here aren’t very keen on that particular way of thinking
Is the “holier than thou attitude” refusing to be Hitler lite?
It’s valuing spiritual cleanliness (intellectual opposition to genocide) as much, if not more than material effects of real world actions. Or in the case of this meme, acting as if choosing an unrelated empty track is morally superior to pulling a lever that controls nothing.
I don’t intend to change anyone’s minds, I just thought the meme was too on the nose to be genuine
It depends on your perspective. From our perspective, we’re powerless people who are on the extreme fringes of politics, completely alienated from actually holding power. We are totally opposed to genocide and horrified at the people who are willing to cut a deal and do 1% less genocide.
If you look at it from the perspective of someone who thinks 1% less genocide is an acceptable value proposition, the communists are the unreasonable ones. The meme looks like it’s parodying them, because they don’t see why 1% less genocide is actually a great deal.
But the truth is, even the people who wanted 1% less genocide didn’t have power either.
If the lever controls nothing, by which you probably mean elections in which case I totally agree, then doesn’t that also mean that the material effects of pulling it don’t exist?
This isn’t a democracy and capitalists will still do what capital needs after the election. If that is genocide, then genocide it is. Real change cannot happen from within capitalist institutions, it happens by workers organizing.
Even if elections did matter, what exactly have the Democrats done to prove that they aren’t willing to do just as much as their counterparts? The “debates” were literally a contest of who is more willing to spend more on the war machine, instead of things like public health and housing, things that the working class really need and care about.
I thought its message was “not picking a side isn’t morally superior to picking a side even if picking a side doesn’t change the outcome, people will die either way and the guy holding the lever is a literal nazi”, which in my opinion extends to “so if picking a side has a chance to make it better it is immoral to not try”.
I’m not here to convince anyone of that, I was just confused why someone from here would make a meme seemingly mocking the usual hexbear position but it seems this was edited from a liberal meme
