I think you missed my point. It sounds like to me that you are arguing that "we the people" so to speak are supposed to be doing things to change society for the better by acting as a collective fire break, and people like Musk and Mao are examples of us not doing enough?

The person you responded to is making the point that people don't rise up to correct certain problems in society (as an example of where the will of the people regardless of lip service is not carried out), and your answer is to provide a list of people who didn't/haven't died by the will of the people and who go out of their way (or did) to prevent the will of the people from being actualized.

I'm also inclined to think, after reading this entire comment thread that you might be barking of the wrong tree because both arguments have merit.

A lot of people at one time thought it was perfectly fine to own slaves. To perform public executions. To remove children from their parents to Catholicize and colonise them.

There are a lot of examples in history where most people have agreed to some truly horrific and entirely unethical stuff because it benefitted them personally regardless of the detriment to others, especially minorities.

On the other hand I do agree that change needs momentum and that needs people. No one person is an army, and no ethical change happens without that time and momentum made up of people.

No, the implication makes no sense. Mao ZeDong, while he certainly was against killing landlords, quite famously so, still did not prosecute those that did because he understood the pain caused by the existence of the capital class, he lived it after all. Same with Xi, though he's softer. Maduro also quite famously also went against landlords and other sources of mass suffering. So did Stalin.

Trump is a landlord, Hitler loved the concept of landlords and privatized a large majority of socialist Weimar, the Kochs are rent seekers, Putin is a rent seeker, Bolsanaro, famously is a rent seeker and tried privatizing brazil....

Lumping these individuals together in any list that is not 'Men who lived' is as silly as any possible list that includes Eva Braun, Hillary Clinton, and Malala.

Beautiful, it brings a tear to the eye.

The comment they reported is blatantly racist. It doesn't have anything to do with the commenter (quite disingenuously, imo) calling them a tankie. I struggle to understand how you interpreted this as abuse of the report feature.

You don't think using a picture of the Obamas as an example of "Africans" voting in America is racist??? They aren't Africans. They are Americans with African heritage, sometimes called African Americans, but never just "Africans."

That's the racism part, not the tankie part.

Edit: Not to mention the whole birther movement, which is inherently racist, and which anybody would strongly suspect is the reason he picked Obama instead of anybody else.

I thought when I explained the problem, you'd remove the racist comment the next time you logged on, and probably give FiniteBanjo some penalty similar to the one I was threatened with.

I considered reporting it again with more details so that maybe another mod would remove it, but since I was threatened about that, I'm reluctant to do so.

I reported it because that comment goes against the rules of the entire platform, and even if my report was initially misunderstood, I don't think we should leave racist comments up.

Just to recap the racism, I said that Africans couldn't vote in America and that's why democracy wouldn't keep them from being enslaved, and FiniteBanjo responded with a picture of the Obamas, saying that they were Africans voting in America. There's no way that they thought the subject was African Americans. It was African slaves. And they posted a picture of a person who was repeatedly falsely accused of being born in Africa. It's blatant racism.