Kind of just felt like sparking a discussion thread and thought this might be an interesting one.
For me personally, one of, if not, my most controversial takes is that I will associate with anyone. Regardless of their opinions of if I personally find their opinions to be disgusting or revolting. I will give anyone respect who gives me respect.
Another one which I’ve expressed here before is that I do not think someone simply being a pedophile automatically makes them a pure evil child abuser who can’t help but rape every child that they see. And that some people can have this affliction and not actively seek out abusive content or attempt abusive actions.
My opinions on loli/shota/cub are also fairly controversial, but I imagine those are mostly shared by the majority of people here.
That should probably get us started pretty good!
So, What’s a controversial take that you have that most people would disagree with?
Feel free to have peaceful discussions about other people’s responses.
Having individuals (or very small groups) who hold significant power/capital (but are still subject to the rule of law) can be societally useful because they can push forward large-scale, high-cost projects without needing to convince vast numbers of people to care about it.
The old captains of industry argument. Certainly a controversial one lol.
I see the merit in this argument to be honest, it is a very efficient system. But I think the inevitable wealth inequality is too big a tradeoff. You also have to worry about those people becoming malicious or acting like dinguses.
I fundamentally question the claim that wealth inequality is bad in and of itself. It doesn’t really harm me that there exist individuals with significantly higher standards of living, or that there exist individuals more capable of effecting large-scale change than me.
Also, it’s not exactly as though any system can somehow remove bad actors and/or human error/foolishness from the equation. But the scenario I described specifically defined them as being beholden to normal rule of law, therefore limiting the effect of maliciousness on their part to what I would consider a reasonable degree
I’m not sure “they might be foolish” is really that much of a downside either—them allocating resources to long-shot ideas is kinda part of the benefit, and if they throw money at some boondoggle like Elon’s hyperloop… oh well, it’s not like that money up and vanished. It’s not exactly as though paying a bunch of people to consider a foolish idea and build prototypes really meaningfully harmed them or society as a whole.
I agree with you in the broader context. Individually, it shouldn’t matter how much money a specific other person has. And I’m not a big fan of wealth redistribution (I tend to think of it as theft). However, when there is a limited resource that everyone needs, it can cause problems for those with less money.
For example, many workers in Silicon Valley make good money, and they need housing, of which there is a shortage (the reasons for the shortage are important, as well as attempted fixes, etc, but I’ll skip over those so I don’t descend too much into politics). So the price of housing goes up due to limited supply and high demand. And of course sellers want to maximize their sales or rent price, so they charge what the market can bear. Because people there have money, they can pay a lot and so the price goes up. This is fine if everyone is making around the same amount of money. However, those who do not have well paying jobs (income inequality) cannot easily afford housing and are priced out of the market. So the inequality means they can’t easily afford housing. And that’s just income inequality.
One could certainly argue that the income inequality isn’t the only cause, rather the artificially limited housing supply. But, regardless of the cause of the housing crisis there, or potential solutions, I think it provides an example of how inequality can have a negative effect on someone.
EDIT: cleaned up some terminology.
I mean, yeah, it does show how wealth inequality can be some part of causing a negative effect in a specific situation. But, the deeper causes are kinda important if you want to use it as an example of how specifically wealth inequality by itself would cause negative effects.