Bad Choices Need to Have Consequences

Let More People Fail

If you live somewhere like Florida or North Myrtle Beach, SC, you tend to get a little blasé about hurricanes. As someone who has taken their dog out to pee in the middle of a tropical storm (the trees were moving like they were alive, but my dog didn’t seem bothered, so neither was I) or who has driven TOWARDS a declining Category 1 hurricane on roads so deserted they looked like that famous scene from the Walking Dead, you don’t freak out just because a hurricane is on the way. Still, you pay attention to how serious the hurricane is supposed to be:

At a Category 2 or below? You hang in there, prepare for the power to go out, and hope there’s no significant damage to your house. Once it gets to a 3, there’s a significant chance of damage and a possibility of death, so ideally, you skedaddle. A Category 4 or worse yet, a Category 5? You get the hell out of there because you could do everything perfectly and still end up dead as your house implodes like a mound of ants after someone runs over it in his car.

Yet and still, even if people get warned a Category 4 or 5 hurricane is going to hit, some people decide to stay anyway. Sometimes people in that situation are fine, but sometimes they also end up with a, “case of dead.”

So, what should we think about people in that situation? Should we be sorry if a life was lost? Should we still try to save them afterward if there’s an opportunity to do so? Sure. But are they victims? No, not really. They chose to do something dangerously stupid and they died in the process. Should you feel sorry for them? No, not really. They knew how dangerous what they were choosing to do was and they chose to do it anyway.

At a certain point, if you do things that anyone would know is a bad idea and it doesn’t work out, that’s your decision and the consequences should be on you.

With that in mind, we have an interesting parallel situation playing out between the Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza right now. The government of Gaza, Hamas started a war on October 7^th of this year by launching one of the worst terrorist attacks in history against Israel.

Israel decided to respond to that attack by wiping Hamas out, however, this isn’t an old-school battle that will take place between two armies maneuvering in a field. It’s going to be urban warfare in Gaza, where Hamas has moved their military assets into hospitals and schools and has tunnels running under the city.

Although it puts their troops at much-increased risk, the Israelis told the Palestinian civilians where the fighting was going to be, where they could go to be safe and as it turned out, gave them lots of time to go. More than a million did. However, a large number of Palestinian civilians, including some with kids, decided to stay in the middle of the fighting to be human shields for Hamas, because they wanted to be “martyrs” or just as their own way of saying, “Screw you, Israel. You don’t tell me what to do!”

So, every time you see a dead civilian in the Palestinian territories, assuming it’s real since the Palestinians rather famously fake a lot of the footage coming out during wars, how much pity should you feel for the civilians that get killed under those circumstances? If I decided to fly to Ukraine on vacation next week, so I could get as close as possible to the fighting between Ukraine and Russia and get some great selfies, would you eternally curse whichever side shot me to death because they thought I was part of the fighting or go, “Did he get kicked in the head or something? How was that guy such an idiot?”

Speaking of idiots, have you ever heard someone tell a person that made them angry that they should, “go play in traffic?” In other words, “Go into traffic so you can get hit by a car, you moron!” Yet, this is now a regular, real-life protest tactic.

Groups protesting environmentalism, the police, that everyone doesn’t get a free unicorn, or whatever, are quite literally playing in traffic. They stand in the road and sometimes even ATTACK cars that are driving on the road and then, claim to be victims if they get hit by a car or dragged off the road by angry drivers. How much sympathy do these people deserve if something bad happens to them? Not much. Not much at all.

Have you seen stories about the ongoing controversy in Texas? One of the ways Greg Abbott is protecting that state’s borders is by putting sawblade-equipped buoys in the water:

The argument is supposed to be, “What if the illegal immigrants swam up to the SAWBLADE BUOYS and got hurt or drowned on them?” Well, so what if they did? There’s no legitimate reason for them to be trying to swim into sawblade buoys. They’re trying to enter the country illegally and Texas doesn’t want them. So, if they get hurt or killed by knowingly swimming into SAWBLADE BUOYS, that should be considered a personal problem tied to their embrace of lawlessness and their low IQ, not a problem for anyone here.

How about the people DEMANDING that the government pay off their student loans? Keep in mind that not only did they willingly take out the loans, but statistics show that people with college degrees make so much more than high school graduates throughout their lives that the loans will pay off for them in the long run. So, how is this even a conversation? Oh, you don’t like owing money? Well, who does? If it’s too much for you, DON’T TAKE OUT THE LOAN.

Believe it or not, this whole topic was brought to mind by a post I saw on Twitter AKA X yesterday that at first glance, seems very different from all these topics, but actually is very closely related:

Most men aren’t interested in dating other men, even if they call themselves women. This is not and has never been a secret. Yet, what’s happening with this guy? He’s chosen to try to transform himself into a woman and now he’s mad that men aren’t interested in him. Well, duh, what did he expect to happen?

How did so many people get this way? How did many people in our society conclude that they should be able to do whatever they want and not necessarily just the world, but REALITY should bend to their will?

Is it straight narcissism being taught to kids in our schools? The combined impact of late-stage capitalism and our decadent culture making people think they’re the “main character” in the world and everything just exists to serve them?

In the early days of the Internet, people used to try to clearly distinguish between the Internet and the “real world.” Almost as if the things that happened on the Internet didn’t count somehow. Is that where a lot of people are now? A lot of people feel like they’re real and everyone else “doesn’t count?” Maybe it’s really nothing more than our society is increasingly full of man-children who embody that famous Sowell quote:

People don’t like how something impacts them or how it makes them feel, so it has to stop. Why does it have to stop? Because it makes them feel bad, so, therefore, it is bad.

The problem with all this is that no one likes to suffer, but suffering often has a very real purpose. It’s a learning tool. It’s a reason for people to go, “Wow, look at the dumb thing that guy did and how it turned out for him. You better change your ways, or you’ll end up like that.”

If it is something society doesn’t want and people have been clearly warned of the risks but do it anyway, then there can be a very real benefit to allowing people to fail. You can be a good example in life, or you can be a good example of what not to do. When we save people from the consequences of their actions, sometimes all we are doing is encouraging more of that same bad behavior. Let them fail.

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