It being obviously fucking stupid to anyone with the slightest grasp of reality doesn’t mean that Thatcher didn’t think it was true and wasn’t one of the people unwilling to think. She should have been sectioned for being deluded into thinking Atlas Shrugged was real life, but instead managed to get elected, and decades later, we’re still dealing with the consequences of putting the country in the hands of someone guided predominantly by their favourite storybook.
There’s really clear evidence that there was an attempt to make normal people buy stocks in water companies in the fact that there was heavy television advertising in the run-up to privatisation encouraging people to buy stocks in water companies while they were still a fixed price. Post-Thatcher privatisation of UK infrastructure and public services, on the other hand, has always been done behind closed doors straight into the hands of hedge funds, venture capital, and individuals capable of buying the whole thing. The end result is always the service going to shit once there’s a profit motive conflicting with the service motive, but if you compare the percentage of these companies that are owned by pension funds and individuals who hold less than a few hundred pounds worth, it’s clear that the water companies have much more of their ultimate ownership in the hands of normal people than, for example Royal Mail. Obviously (to sane people), it’s way less than if the state owned the water companies, but it’s not nothing.
Accusing a post of whitewashing Thatcher when its opening line explicitly states she was evil is a pretty big leap. Calling someone evil should be the opposite of whitewashing, and isn’t inconsistent with saying they thought they were helping. Plenty of evil people are deluded into thinking they’re doing something moral and that, because of that, the ends will justify their amoral means, or they don’t even notice their means are amoral.
leisesprecher@feddit.org 2 days ago
You’re whitewashing, because you’re implying that she had good intentions. She did not. She was not misled by propaganda, she knew what she was doing and what the implications would be.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Stating that Hitler thought he was helping Europe by slaughtering millions of Jews and other minorities doesn’t imply any degree of approval for anything he did or acceptance that if he’d been right, the end state he was aiming for was worth the atrocities committed trying to get there. Evil in the real world isn’t like a cartoon where the bad guy just enjoys being bad for its own sake. Pretending otherwise just makes it harder to recognise when people are doing evil things again just by being simultaneously incorrect and in charge.
It seems like you’re under the impression that thinking you’re doing something good is virtuous, but I fundamentally disagree. I don’t think morality should be solely judged by outcomes, either, but rather whether you take reasonable measures to ensure that even if you’re wrong, you don’t make things worse. Everyone hears the phrase the road to hell is paved with good intentions as children, so should know that having good intentions has little to no bearing on whether they’re a good person unless they’re also making sure they’re not doing evil by recklessness or negligence.
leisesprecher@feddit.org 1 day ago
Are you by any chance familiar with degrees of murder, involuntary manslaughter and insanity?
If I think I’m defending myself, despite no reason to do so, I can’t claim self defense. You can’t argue, that your neighbor certainly didn’t threaten you in any way, but he sometimes looked really weird, so it’s self defense to kill him.
I’m not even sure, what exactly you’re trying to argue here?
It seems like you made impressions on yourself, because that’s completely besides anything I wrote.
Doing something bad and knowing that it’s bad, is bad. That should be very very obvious.
You’re building yourself an entire terracotta army worth of strawmen here.
LwL@lemmy.world 1 day ago
What are you arguing against here? If you think you’re defending yourself then you think you’re defending yourself. If you think you’re helping the people you think you’re helping the people. Neither means the outcome will be good or the actions justified. All the person you’re responding to did was reason about Thatcher’s possible motivations.
Do you actually understand the term strawman because arguing against a strawman is exactly what you did there.
sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 1 day ago
When you start using Hitler and Jews... You lost it..
Other commenter expounded to your the error of your choice. It is up to your to figure if you care where he or she is coming from.
That analysis is solid IMHO tho
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Godwin’s law isn’t claiming that it’s fallacious to compare things to Hitler or that the person who first mentions Hitler is wrong, it’s just observing that comparisons to Hitler eventually happen if an argument goes on long enough. It’s kind of obvious, too. Reductio ad absurdum is a valid form of argument, and as long as whoever you’re discussing something is isn’t ludicrously off the deep end, they’ll agree that Hitler is obviously bad, so if someone says something, and that thing when taken to its logical conclusion would imply (in the logically guarantees sense rather than subtly suggests sense) that Hitler wasn’t bad, it’s quick and easy to point that out as a demonstration that the thing must be wrong.
In this specific case, though, it’s even simpler. Hitler and Thatcher are both obviously bad, and they were putting words in my mouth about Thatcher when objecting to a comment where I’d explicitly called her evil to suggest that I was claiming she wasn’t evil.