Personal responsibility exists but not in the victim blaming way libs imagine. It is not the personal responsibility of the unemployed they they can't find work and it is not the personal responsibility of graduates that they are burdened with suffocating debts. Those situations exist because of systematic factors that leaves individuals with nothing but bad options to choose from.
No, personal responsibility is a relevant concept in those cases where people in positions of power, who have every possibility to make better decisions still choose to make decisions that hurts people. Jeff Bezos is personally responsible for grinding his workers down, Joe Biden is personally responsible for not forgiving student debt, Marine Le Pen is personally responsible for the intensifying racism in France, Netanyahu is personally responsible for war crimes against Palestinians, Derek Chauvin is personally responsible for murdering George Floyd.
Oh yeah, I totally agree. I meant it the way libs say it.
the only argument I have against this is how disgusting people are to me. People living in urban America must train themselves to ignore the suffering of desperately impoverished and mentally ill houseless people. We just went through another instance of the isreali-palistinian conflict where despite all the footage of suffering Palestinians, libs and conservatives shrugged their shoulders and said "well Hamas is a terrorist organization." We murdered somewhere between 250,000 to a 1,000,000 people in Iraq and said "welp, that's why pencils have erasers." All of human history is littered with massacres and genocide.
The faults of society are expressions of the evils we as individuals are capable of justifying imo. Of course we should strive to improve society, but perhaps the path forward is for the average person to stop focusing on the external and to earnestly look within. The internal is as ugly as the macroscopic outside world.
I'm kinda depressed and lowkey believe primates were a mistake. Let's give the dolphins/whales a chance.
:meow-hug: Haha yeah humans suck. Dolphins and whales are kinda assholes too though.
Apparently, there is a communal type of spider, that seems pretty rad.
I like lemurs too.
orangutangs might be ok with a few million years of evolution. They only interact with each other in adulthood when they mate. Can't create nations/industry when you're all just chilling alone.
also, octopuses. They seem cool.
I wish I had balls to wash. :deeper-sadness:
(But of I did, I'd never wash them and you wouldn't be able to stop me hahaha!)
I'd disagree with the "just" part. We are not just individuals, but we are individuals. Obviously the phrase "personal responsibility" is often used to deflect criticisms about society, but I think there are a lot of good things I think could reasonably be categorized under "personal responsibility".
If you replace the phrase "personal responsibility" with "self-care", I find it more palatable, and I think the two concepts have a lot of overlap. I could get behind the attitude of "I'll take care of me for you, and you take care of you for me" but applied to society as a whole. Or, to think of it another way, if I want something in society to change, I'll be able to help make that change more effectively if I'm able to take care of myself and have the ability to achieve my own goals.
Another thing I was thinking about recently was the idea of "cleaning up your own house before you criticize the world", or however that gets phrased. I think that, in the general sense of "you should never criticize anything until your own life is 100% perfect in every way" is absurd. But I think it makes some sense when applied to one issue at a time, e.g. "You should be careful about haranguing other people about their racism until you're sure you're able to manage your own racist tendencies."
