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CodeMage 2 days ago

> It's like saying "we shouldn't worry about enforcing traffic laws because we need to use our resources to bring war criminals to justice"

It most definitely isn't. At no point did anyone in this discussion say "we shouldn't worry about small time corruption". In fact, I explicitly said the opposite. And then I highlighted it after you essentially accused me of doing so, as you're doing again.

> Creating an "urgency chain" is effectively the same thing as justifying behavior.

No, it's not. No one is "creating" an "urgency chain". Justice isn't binary. Things can be more or less just, they're not either perfectly just or completely unjust with nothing in between. Similarly, different people have different levels of impact. That's the definition of power in this context: the level of impact your actions have. No one is "creating" these concepts out of thin air.

What is happening here is that people are complaining about injustice and other people -- like you and the person I initially replied to -- are trying to delegitimize those complaints by stating that "all corruption is bad".

Let me repeat this, in case it got lost despite earlier repetitions: yes, we all know that "all corruption is bad". Just like we all know that "all lives matter", but pointing out that banality only got popular after the "black lives matter" slogan surfaced in response to a systemic injustice against African Americans.

You're doing the same kind of thing here.

> Caring about prioritizing things where we do not have coercive power is pointless.

On the contrary. If you always give up on caring because you don't have coercive power, you will never rectify injustices caused by imbalance of coercive power.

Schiendelman 2 days ago | parent [-]

I want you to know that you are making sense, and I appreciate how calmly and constructively you're engaging. :)