this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I don't think the system being wrong is very good justification either. You still run into the same problem I'm pointing out. If some local store near me has an inherently fucked up return policy, I'm probably not justified in shitting in the middle of an aisle or trying to fistfight a cashier in response. Something being wrong isn't an immediate justification for whatever action a person takes in reaction.
Of course you wouldn't be justified in harming a minimum wage worker because the policy of the corporation. That is like the opposite of the point. Its more like, say my neighbor owns a company and exploits immigrants to do lawncare. Maybe I'd pay for it if I knew he was actually taking care of his workers and not exploiting them, but he sucks, boo. So while he is away on vacation I borrow his equipment without asking to do my own lawn. Does it hurt him? I mean technically there is more wear & tear on the equipment. Will he notice? No. Do I give a shit if it causes it to break faster than it would have otherwise? Nah, fuck him.
That's a pretty obvious example of the point I was making when I said: "Something being wrong isn’t an immediate justification for whatever action a person takes in reaction."
This feels like very self serving reasoning. I don't think you're actually justified in doing something along these lines. Even worse, you can actually cause more harm by doing this. Your wear and tear on your neighbors tools can make the jobs of the already exploited immigrants harder and if the tools break the immigrants may be blamed for it. This actually feels like another good example of my point above that a wrong does not automatically imply justification, regardless of how much it might benefit you personally.
Lol what? Goddamn how big is your estate that one single use of a lawnmower is going to so significantly destroy it that it’d be noticeably harder to use? This is like putting 10 miles on a car. Not putting sugar in the gas tank. Jesus.
Point is, if someone is a piece of shit I could care less about inconveniencing them. Which is all stealing from large corporations amounts to.
(Again, large corporations, not smaller shops which even if shitty will do shit like take losses out of cashiers pay checks where it is legal [or not, they often don’t care] to do so, so it’s best not to steal from them either way.)
It seems plausible to that a manager that is already abusing people would go out of their way to do things like docking pay over pretty trivial things like relatively minor tool damage? It doesn't even have to be at the same scale as actually breaking the tools to cause the kinds of harm I'm talking about.
I can sort of get behind the idea that large corporations do a bunch of bad shit, we have an obligation to try and oppose/prevent bad shit from occurring, piracy harms large corporations hence is an act of opposition/prevention, so piracy is justified in that sense. But I don't think this kind of position is free from issues either.
Fair, I think you’re taking it too literal and too concerned about damages where I mean, I know how to use a lawnmower and such without damaging them, so I’m not worried about that lol. But yeah, I don’t think it’s a moral obligation or anything, just definitely an understandable position for people to take given the context rather than stealing just cuz.