“Maybe you see a line between direct murder and indirect. Most people don’t, killing is killing, having it done and doing it yourself doesn’t really change the amount of blood on your hands.”
It doesn’t if, say, you employed someone to kill someone else. But we’re not talking about that here. We’re talking about people who may or may not take drugs, and the fact that the drug industry is systematically violent. You may see the moral equivalent of murder in knowingly contributing money to a violent enterprise, but I don’t. Nor does the law, and with good reason.
“If he’d paid attention he had MONTHS to see it coming, and most importantly PREVENT it.”
So what? You’re talking about practicality now. Morally, Tony still isn’t allowed to murder him, as no one’s ever allowed to murder.
“Who says they’re nice people at the restaurant?”
I suppose I could have put nice in quatation marks. All I meant was to distinguish them in the same manner as you distinguish them, i.e. as publicly respectable, compared to Tony, the “bad guy.”
“They all know what the place is, they all know who goes there. There’s a certain crowd of people that go to expensive restaurants frequented by drug lords.”
Again, so what? Now we’re talking about celebrity culture, Tony as a sort of Jack the Ripper, whom people need to see on the evening news and point a finger at to make their otherwise dull and ambiguous lives entertaining and meaningful. I realize this is a large part of Tony’s rant, and the only part of it that makes any sense, but it’s not the part we’ve been back and forthing about. It doesn’t impinge on the “nice” people being hypocrites, nor there being a moral equivalence between them and Tony, which is what you’re mostly on about.
“I never said subsidize, I said need. There’s a major difference. There’s a lot of stuff in the world we need but never deliberately pay for. Often times we don’t even stop to realize we need it.”
Are we still talking about drugs now, or what? Because what you’re saying makes sense if we switch back to the “bad guy” celebrity thing. I hadn’t thought that was the subject, but if it is, there’s even less of an equivalence and much, much more of a gulf between Tony and the audience who “needs” his villainy.
“And I never said anything about benefactors. Stop adding to what I wrote.”
Oh, please. It’s called sarcasm. What you said, or implied, is that there was less attention on business corruption in the 80s. Hello! Do I really have to respond to this claim? It’s utter ludicrousness basically forces me to parody your claim by talking about benefaction.
“Nobody cares about drug kingpins anymore. Quick name 3 drug kingpins active today. Now name 3 business leaders that are often ‘credited’ with crashing our economy. Bet you can’t do the first but can do the second”
Okay, so Tony’s sort of “kingpin” isn’t popular anymore. I don’t really remember when they were, unless you go all the way back to Prohibition and Capone, except that guy they made “Superfly” about, but whatever. I assume there were real-life inspirations for Tony, and there aren’t anymore. Fine. Drug cartels grab major headlines all the time, but we don’t any longer have names.
That’s not to say criminals (or alleged criminals) no longer make names for themselves. It’s just not drugs anymore. It’s possibly killing your cute little kid, or kidnapping attractive college students in the Caribbean. Point is, criminals are as popular as ever. You have to know where to look.
On the flip side, no, the average man in the street cannot name three individuals off the top of their heads responsible for the ‘08 meltdown. They can name Madoff, perhaps, but of course his story is seperate from the larger issue of the crash. They can name institutions and politicians, but that’s it. The current anti-business climate is just that, climactic. It is generalized and institutionalized, and not comparable to the celebrity culture of Tony.
The killing of that business class go a lot deeper than just buying drugs.
Keep in mind Frank tried to kill Tony first. Frank CHOSE to make their relationship violent, and Tony won. Frank could have been a partner with Tony and probably would have been much richer, he wanted to be an enemy, he got dead.
No we’re not talking celebrity culture. We’re talking about people that are just as bad as Tony just in trades OTHER than the drug trade. The only difference between him and them is the veneer. That’s the entire point of the scene, you can willfully ignore it, but that’s on you.
No, we’re talking about the fact that there’s always multiple types of bad people running around, but the attention span of the masses is only wide enough to focus on one and make them society’s villain du jour. All the bad guys that are getting to run under cover because the attention is focused on the “villain” get the benefit of anonymity. Drug dealers were the target bad guy in the early 80s, that let the other bad guys run free. Today it’s the business bad guys everybody hates, so the drug dealers get the cover. All the anonymous bad guys need the target bad guys.
In the early 80s drug kingpins were the big target, popular is a poor word for it, popular implies liked, they weren’t liked, they were the ones drawing fire. Drug cartels AREN’T grabbing headlines currently. The headlines read more like the one here now http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/blog-who-really-crashed-the-economy . It’s now the business sector’s turn to be the target.
You just proved yourself wrong. You gave a list of people the common man in the street would blame for the economy.