Full title: “Shut the fk up!” Democrat storms out of event as voters voice criticism of anti-trans bill. “You can’t fking talk to me that way!” Rep. Eugene Vindman said before walking out without taking more questions.
“I’m going to vote to help the vast majority of people the majority of the time,” Vindman told the crowd, according to the Advocate. “Is it going to help everybody? No.”
Dang, this reminds me of what I was saying two years ago:
If a minority group like Palestinians can be sacrificed for the sake of winning an election, then the same can and will be done for any minority group that becomes seen as an electoral liability. The only way for any minority, but especially one as small as trans people, to really achieve security is through solidarity, an alliance of the vulnerable that treats an offense against one as an offense against all. Right now, there might be cis gays watching the democrats blame trans people and thinking that they’ll be safe, but that’s not guaranteed at all.
I’m just saying, if you’re willing to accept excuses like, “Palestine isn’t on the ballot this year” then you’ll readily accept excuses like “trans rights aren’t on the ballot” and so on, until there’s no one left to stand up for you.
Reject trolley problem thinking.
I’m autistic, and as far as I understand it, there seem to be two groups of people able to pass the trolley problem: psychopaths/sociopaths, and autistic people.
I’m going to tell you something. I don’t think this is trolley problem thinking, although superficially it looks that way. I think this is the opposite of trolley problem thinking.
Trolley problem thinking is having zero qualms about doing the thing which causes the most difficulty even when you personally would have to feel responsible for extremely negative consequences, in order to have the best possible outcome for the highest number of people.
The Trolley Problem isn’t an illustration about the difficulty between choosing the deaths of a small number of people versus choosing the deaths of a large number of people. It’s a demonstration that a person has the ability to live with themself knowing that their actions had the best possible consequences in a no-win scenario.
This person’s behavior isn’t an illustration of that. Ironically, the phrase “throw them under the bus” is appropriate here, because Eugene Vindman isn’t doing this for the purpose of winning, but instead because he lacks the ethics to feel that he is causing harm. He’s not doing it because he’s calculated that this will cause the best possible outcome, because if he had the ethics required for that kind of thinking, he would understand that the next step once transgender people are thrown under the bus is to be asked to throw another group under the bus. It’s weird how well this metaphor and the other metaphor illustrate how this is actually leads to more people being run over.
Philosophically it is a test for how far and long people will participate in unjust systems.
It’s about the point people start questioning the system of charging someone with this choice, or the system that has people being lashed to trolley tracks as a point of principle.
The trolley problem is a philosophical thought experiment designed to examine differences in schools of moral philosophy and of people’s moral intuitions. It’s not necessarily about demonstrating that you have to live with the consequences of the choice.
The problem with it comes when people assume that the act utilitarian answer is objectively correct, and that it is broadly applicable to real world problems even when there are huge differences. At that point the trolley problem stops serving as a tool to explore moral philosophy and becomes a rhetorical tool to justify and feel better about throwing people under the bus.
Another thought experiment designed to critique this perspective is as follows: while travelling through the woods, you come across a group of armed men holding prisoner a group of people who were protesting their regime. The leader of the armed men says that if you take a gun and kill one of them yourself, he’ll let the rest go, but otherwise, he’ll kill all of them. From the perspective of act utilitarianism, or trolley problem thinking, taking the offer is morally obligatory.
The problem with that is that you can be manipulated into causing harm by a malevolent actor. All they have to do is threaten some greater harm, and you become their tool, which can increase their power and their ability to threaten larger harm. “You must go out and kill one person, or I will command another of my agents to go out and kill three.” This essentially precludes standing up to any powerful entity in any meaningful way.
Refusing to kill one of the hostages, or pull the lever to run over Palestinians, leaves open the possibility of forming a united front to defeat the people forcing us into such situations in the first place. Keeping one’s own hands clean is not simply a matter of “moral purity,” but rather, an intentional strategy of avoiding actions taken against a particular group.
We can imagine a trolley problem where on the switched track is a foreign diplomat who, if killed, will cause an alliance between two countries to fail, leaving them both vulnerable to a third, and making it essential to save them. This is the hidden cost of pulling the lever to sacrifice Palestinians. But it goes beyond their specific value as allies, it also tells other allies that they can be sacrificed in the same way. In this case, it is better to accept a future where an external force commits a greater immediate harm than to commit a smaller immediate harm ourselves but which jeopardizes alliances and solidarity.
The problem with that is that you can be manipulated into causing harm by a malevolent actor. All they have to do is threaten some greater harm, and you become their tool, which can increase their power and their ability to threaten larger harm. “You must go out and kill one person, or I will command another of my agents to go out and kill three.” This essentially precludes standing up to any powerful entity in any meaningful way.
Refusing to kill one of the hostages, or pull the lever to run over Palestinians, leaves open the possibility of forming a united front to defeat the people forcing us into such situations in the first place. Keeping one’s own hands clean is not simply a matter of “moral purity,” but rather, an intentional strategy of avoiding actions taken against a particular group.
No, those are separate problems, not the trolley problem.
What a weird take to try and justify the way morons didn’t vote to keep their own country functioning. Instead, they helped to directly destabilize the entire planetary governance system but somehow still think it was justified action.
Other countries are not the scope of the US vote. Especially now more than ever.
Conflating internal problems with external ones is just missing the point. Can’t have it both ways. Either the US dictates world policy and you accept that with that will come chaos to other nations, possibly without their consent. Or the US stays completely out of world policy, and you accept that with that will come chaos to other nations, possibly without their consent.
It isn’t a trolley problem. Both sets of tracks are piled with bodies.
You can’t have feelings and turn them into a non-vote that determines your own country’s downfall because of what happens in another country in either of those two scenarios, because destroying your own country helps nobody, and in fact has already led to the death of hundreds of thousands (mostly children) across the planet and many more will follow.
Now, your own country is in jeopardy, and with that comes jeopardy to all the people in your nation and many other nations. Not just trans rights. Everyone’s rights. Everyone’s lives.
RIP: critical thinking.
Other countries are not the scope of the US vote. Especially now more than ever.
Conflating internal problems with external ones is just missing the point. Can’t have it both ways. Either the US dictates world policy and you accept that with that will come chaos to other nations, possibly without their consent. Or the US stays completely out of world policy, and you accept that with that will come chaos to other nations, possibly without their consent.
This is the weird take. The decision to arm and support Israel is not “world policy,” it is US foreign policy. Calling on a change of US foreign policy to avoid causing harm and to stay out of other countries affairs is not “dictating world policy” it is the complete opposite of that. I would be perfectly fine with the US staying out of world policy, although you’ve also set up a false dichotomy here, it is possible to have a foreign policy that’s somewhere in between “complete isolation” and “arming and funding genocide.”
To say “other countries are not the scope of the US vote” is utterly bizarre. Obviously US voters can, should, and do consider US foreign policy when casting votes. It’s also relevant to domestic policy because so much of our tax money is being wasted on the military rather than being used to address actual problems.
Now, your own country is in jeopardy, and with that comes jeopardy to all the people in your nation and many other nations. Not just trans rights. Everyone’s rights. Everyone’s lives.
RIP: critical thinking.
Everyone’s rights would be in jeopardy either way. The only question is whether we allow the ruling class to divide us and turn against each other, like crabs in a bucket trying to screw each other over for our own advantage, or whether we attempt to forge a united front. If we betray each other, our defeat is completely inevitable, and all we’re doing is buying our in-group a little time. To stay united means a willingness to pass on some fleeting offer of short-term security for some of us, but in exchange we have an actual fighting chance in the long term.
You think I’m not thinking critically only because you aren’t aware of the factors that I’m basing my analysis on. The immediate, direct outcome is not the only thing that matters. What we are now seeing, only a few years later, is the beginning of a massive shift towards more progressive, more antizionist politics.
The conventional wisdom was always that if you run centrists who are essentially Republicans but like 10% less bad, then you’ll pick up the centrists and the left with fall in line behind the lesser evil, and so there is no reason to ever run progressives from the perspective of winning elections. If everyone followed your logic, then that’s where we would still be. But Harris’s loss is just one more point of data, together with the wave of progressives like Mamdani, that proves that theory false.
However, if you think I’m being unreasonable, I don’t mind. A “reasonable” person (by your standards) would fall in line behind whatever garbage candidate was placed in front of them. To win in an electorate with enough “unreasonable” people means that you have to start caving to their demands.
Fixing the idiocy is great. Trying to justify abstaining from voting, which has directly led to killing so many humans, even just USAID alone led to 700,000+ deaths, mostly children, all over one president (which alone is dumb as anything, a president isn’t a king, they are just a figurehead that does stuff and takes blame) doing a policy decision based on historic engagement spanning almost a century is basically one-dimensional moronic.
Justify your mistake all you want. The hard line is protecting as many people as possible and then targeting the rot when you’re able to. You don’t just let the rot live and hope you can somehow fix it afterwards with hopes and prayers.
Those that thought they had power by not voting killed so many people with their concept of having power, without thinking of the bigger picture. The ripple effect is huge. Power grids, data centers, transportation, air travel, medicine, elder care, medical, insurance, vaccinations, communications, emergency preparedness, welfare in disaster zones (in the US), water, massive job layoffs, food safety, access to food, health and safety, inter-government agreements. Pick a dart and throw it, you can’t even trust lettuce anymore. All because some idiots didn’t care about their own lives and thought that using their vote in their country for some other far away land might make a difference even though it never would because they were hoping their decision for a leader in one country somehow would have any active effect in a corrupt nation on the other side of the planet that was always dead-set on genocide regardless of who the US puppet is. Instead, they were just unknowing pawns.
It did make a difference. It destroyed everything. Kudos. RIP critical thinking times a thousand.
Runs for politics, which serves the people.
People call him out.
Tells people to shut the fuck up.
Yeah – this guy needs to go.
The problem with having a big tent party to unite everyone that isn’t actively a fascist is you get people who are still white-wing as fuck I suppose… disgusting anti-human representative, and somehow there’s still worse, what is wrong with our world
And note these fucks talk and talk all the time about wanting a “big tent”, then that narrative crumbles into fucking dust the moment leftist voters and DSA candidates enter the chat.
If the LGBTQA+ community and leftists and DSA aren’t invited in, it’s not a very big tent.
They’re invited in. They’re just expected to sit quietly in the corner while the old timers repeat the mistakes of the last old timers.
The “old-timers” are sucking up a lot of air on the media, but they lost control of the DNC in 2024.
Both of the Vindmans are wolves-in-sheep’s clothing and working for Israel. Vote them out.
Bingo.
“Wow! Those democrats are worse than donald trump and the republicans!”. There, is that what we were going for here?
“Wow! The other side is literal demons, so how dare you hold the good guys to any kind of standard?!”. There, is that what we were going for here?
Punch right a thousand times before punching the good guys.
Just a reminder that a shit load of republicans rape kids the president has raped kids and they all support people who have raped kids.
This title is outright lying by the way it mixes another person’s quote with the main subject. Ground News only found right-leaning sources.
This guy serves a swing district. His constituents may equally favor and reject his position on those issues. He does have to listen to all constituents, but it’s also fair that loss of decorum is going to shut down a discussion, if nothing else then because at that point it’s likely to not be a useful discussion. And if roles were reversed–imagine, for example, Sarah McBride saying what Eugene said but to a conservative constituent telling her the same thing–I think that situation would make it easier to see this a different way, and many might be saying “good for her” for walking away from it.
I don’t know, I wasn’t there. I’m just saying this smells to me like a smear piece in a swing district, and it started with unethical journalism by structuring the title the way it did.
loss of decorum is going to shut down a discussion
Can someone explain why this isn’t “civility politics” and simply used as a tool to further marginalize persons that already don’t have enough representation?
When a person advocates for making it harder for other persons to participate in public life, it should be acceptable to have an emotional response, including but not limited to ad hominem attacks, while also building the reasonable/logical/rational/non-fallacious arguments against them.
The constituents can talk to their reps however they fucking want, that’s kind of enshrined in the constitution. The whole idea of “america is so great”, false though it was, was almost entirely based on the Bill of Rights in which the freedom to openly criticize one’s government is at the very top.
If citizens can’t criticize their representatives, then they have no representation and we’re becoming a feudalist system with an untouchable aristocracy. That’s like centuries of regression.
On the other hand, government officials should be held to a higher standard and need to maintain decorum in their own actions and words, so cussing out your constituents and then storming out is conduct unbecoming of the station and makes one unqualified to hold office.
Quit your fucking job then
We’re your fucking bosses. You signed up to be talked to however we fucking like. Whiney little bitch baby.
This guy should have been primaried. Now, without congressional recall elections, we have to live with him for another two years.
How about we try to organize a nationwide protest where we just act like our fucking representatives for a day or two. Get asked a question? Go the fuck home and get paid apparently. Disappear for weeks? Fuck it I’m working from home now apparently.
I got written up and sent home once at work because my pants weren’t black enough and I was making 15¢ above minimum wage. Why does more money and power come with less responsibility?
Or, you could become an active participant in the process.
Look up Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority.
Falwell was a TV preacher who figured out how to take over the GOP at the grass roots.
If the local GOP had an average attendance of twenty people at the monthly meeting, Falwell’s folks would show up with fifty. It started out with them grabbing jobs like sheriff and county clerk, but it was a short step to Congressmembers and governors.
That would require 50+ people cooperate, which the left famously is extremely bad at.
Hierarchical leadership styles might have a tendency to lean towards authoritarianism, but we can’t deny that they’re effective at organizing large numbers or people efficiently.
The left tends to be allergic to even the idea of leadership, so it’s harder for someone to say “I need fifty people at this meeting, and a hundred people at that one” because most people would just be like “You can’t tell me what to do.”
I know there’s a tendency to think of leadership as a cushy do-nothing position of privilege, and bad leadership can certainly be like that, but examples of good leadership exist even though they’re more rare in our current system.
Coordinating and delegating large groups of people is a job in its own right, even if they’re not the ones swinging hammers and doing gruntwork. There needs to be a mind behind it all who sees the big picture and can follow a plan, receive reports and feedback and adjust as necessary. Leftists reallllly don’t like that idea. They’d be more likely to say “Oh yeah, why don’t you show up to all those meetings yourself?”, ignoring the fact that one person can’t be in multiple places at once, let alone participate as dozens of people at even one meeting.
If the left wants to take over the Democratic party the way maga took over the GOP, we need to learn how to do central coordination in order to organize organize ourselves for large-scale and efficient mobilization.
And we need to unify beyond everyone’s individual pet issues and stop competing for relevance as if anyone’s oppression is more important than anyone else’s. We’re all oppressed, it doesn’t matter who’s the most oppressed. We need to work together to fix this system, not fight each other over who gets the gold medal in the oppression olympics.
Judean People’s Front has entered the chat.
“You can’t f**king talk to me that way,” Vindman reportedly responded, before walking away without taking any further questions.
Bad news, sugartits. Your employers can talk to you any way they want.
That’s BS. My employer can’t talk to me anyway they want why should theirs. I don’t know what got him mad but saying you can say anything to a public employee is just wrong.
I agree, although
I don’t know what got him mad
I mean, it’s right there in the article…
A constituent told him to “shut the fuck up.” The title is somewhat misleading, which becomes apparent if you RTFA.
One woman accused Vindman of not listening to his constituents’ concerns about the bill and of showing his privilege. Another committee member told him he needed “to shut up and listen.” Vindman argued that he’d chosen to continue the conversation, but was being “attacked.” The same committee member reportedly told Vindman to “shut the fk up.”**
I did RTFA, and a constituent just told him to shut up, listen, and check his privilege. No swearing involved.
It was a committee member who specifically said to “shut the fuck up”, and it was that committee member that he snapped back at.
Mate, your quoted text even calls both of them committee members. They were from the King George County Democratic Committee, which is compromised of… *drum roll*… constituents!
Sure they are.
But when you say constituent, you imply a random member of the public in the crowd.
A committee member is at a peer-level. It hits harder when a peer drops the professionalism and the restraint and just lays it out like that…as opposed to some rando in the audience.
Today in explaining to Americans how their own government works…
They’re not peers - it’s a group of volunteers that supports the Democratic Party. If I lived in the US, I could join today and attend as a committee member. They hold no office or position and have no authority.
Evidently, they could not. No point in talking tough about it now.
Th headline is misleading.
Another committee member told him he needed “to shut up and listen.” Vindman argued that he’d chosen to continue the conversation, but was being “attacked.” The same committee member reportedly told Vindman to “shut the f**k up.”
“You can’t f**king talk to me that way,” Vindman reportedly responded, before walking away without taking any further questions.
No one has to take that sort of treatment.
People all over the world are treated much worse than that daily, but sure, clutch your pearls because someone said “shut the fuck up” 🙄
And they don’t have to. If I was talked to that way I’d get angry and most people would.
Are you… clutching your pearls because he responded by saying “you can’t fucking talk to me that way”?
Weird to accuse someone of pearl clutching when all they really said was that his response was justified…
I’d argue his job is to listen to his constituents, and since through his actions or inactions this person is coming to harm, that he is not listening. Perhaps he should “Shut the fuck up and listen.” The problem is that while she’s talking, he’s not listening. He’s just waiting for her to stop talking so he can tell her that she’s wrong. This has been a big problem with the establishment of Democrats for a very long time.
Oh wow yeah, the headline made it seem like both quotes were from him. That’s fucked up journalism.
I CANT believe SO MANY Democrats want Change from THIS!
-Media Labeling Socialists as an UPRISING!
It is like when you get the subsitute teacher to quit…
kids = 1 Genocidal_demoncraps = 0y0u cAn’T 🦆king tAlK t0 mE tHaT wAy!
😏 Just did 🏖️
Yo I swear to gord these liberals are covert hogs. I want delegates not representative pullin dem pants down b-team corpo sluts. The USA is a brutal imperialist empire. Fascist are the useful idiots of empire. Democrats are third string. A little light on the bag everytime.
Genuinely, how old are you?
