marjaerwin: (Default)
I really, really, really hate that quote that implies that the Nazis were evil because they lacked pure blood, that "evil is a lack of pure blood."

Now I have to assume "pure blood" meant something different at the time. But "pure blood" seems intended to include one group, and exclude all others.

I'm autistic. We tend to have trouble understanding allistic people. So we're said to "lack pure blood." And allistic people have a lot of trouble understanding us. So, again, we're said to "lack pure blood." We do tend to care about other people. So either that's irrelevant to whether we "have pure blood," or it's another way we "lack pure blood." If anything, I think we may have a harder time knowing-not-knowing, and dismissing people's humanity because they're not our in-group. And maybe caring too much and too freely will be defined as "lacking pure blood." Some people will insist that, really, we "have pure blood," but I don't see the point in arguing for it; better to drop the whole idea so that no one will be condemned for "lacking pure blood."

P.S. Whoops, the word was "empathy," not "pure blood." Not that it changes anything. It's still implying that some people are born good, and others born evil, and it's still subject to arbitrary redefinitions to define the out-groups as born evil. It probably didn't imply that in 1945, but in my experience, it does in 2025.
marjaerwin: (Default)
A lot of politics is about whom people include in or exclude from their moral universes.

Sometimes people substitute "empathy," but that isn't the same as moral inclusion, and it becomes a basis for moral exclusion.

Sometimes people have a principle of trying to include everyone. Sometimes people have a principle of excluding “those people.” Sometimes people have a principle of accepting what they can’t change, which tends to narrow their moral universe, especially in authoritarian regimes, and makes it harder to make things change. Sometimes people have a drive, that is "empathy," to include people, but that often weakens with distance.

Sometimes people make a habit of inclusion or exclusion, making it easier to include or to exclude.

Now empathy has become another reason to exclude people: If we’re autistic and other people can’t understand us, then we “lack empathy.” If we’re autistic and we don’t understand other people, then we “lack empathy.” If someone is sociopathic then they also “lack empathy,” in another sense… true some do hurt other people… But the people who connect with their friends and families and neighbors while supporting war or closing the borders to refugees or the like, they “have empathy,” and what do they do with it?
marjaerwin: (Default)
I don’t understand anti-immigrant politics.

To begin with, it’s cruel to decide that people can’t live the lives they want because *those* people were born on the other side of *that* line. And unjust.

By the way, the 1924 law kept the Franks from becoming refugees in America, so they could only get refuge in the Netherlands, and that didn't last long enough.

In America, these policies were introduced for white supremacism, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act, and for eugenicism, both partly motivated by the idea that the target populations were less intelligent and more fertile. While they have been changed, they haven’t been abolished due to institutional inertia. Of course many people insist that they support these policies because they’re the law rather than because of white supremacism or because of eugenicism, but now many of these people want to tighten/worsen the law– because what?

To continue, if you believe different countries represent different values, and if you also want to restrict immigration, then you’re saying that people can’t choose a country that represents their values, and you’re saying that this country should represent your cruelty, and not my rejection of this cruelty. I’m disabled and can’t travel, and would be turned away because of my disabilities if I could travel.

Now many insist that “each nation” “has a right” “to restrict immigration”. I think rights are something which protect people from arbitrary power, including state power, so these restrictions are the opposite of rights.

So right now the rulers impose these restrictions, and then they have a growing police state to enforce the restrictions, and concentration camps to enforce the restrictions, and disappearing children, and mass graves on the border.

Now some insist that the mass graves justify further restrictions, because “people smugglers,” but there wouldn’t be any people smugglers without the original restrictions.

So it looks like cruelty, for the sake of cruelty, or for some other evil end.
marjaerwin: (Default)
The family separation policy uses people’s humanity as a mere means to punish them for seeking asylum, to enforce white supremacy, rather than treating people’s humanity as an end in itself.
marjaerwin: (Default)
It doesn’t just belong to the rich and powerful.

It doesn’t belong to our rulers, giving them the “sovereign right” to hurt others to defend their “sovereign right” to hurt others.

It shouldn’t be carved up among the rich and powerful.

It doesn’t just belong to abled people either. Or white people. Or cis people. Or het people.

It isn’t right to force the rest of us out of society and out of public spaces, with beatings, strobe lights, bashings, and the rest.
marjaerwin: (Default)
[Revised Version]

***

Both are good things.

Each is a different thing.

***

Freedom of speech is the right to speak your mind without fear of punishment.

Governments and death squads have often violated this. Telecom monopolies can also violate this. Other corporations have too much power, but don’t usually have the same ways to violate this.

Unfortunately, American society still doesn't respect this for whistleblowers exposing government secrets, didn't for anti-war organizers condemning the draft (Schenk) didn't for union organizers until the government tried to use anti-Union and anti-left laws against the right (Brandenburg v. Ohio), and still doesn't for people laughing at Jeff Sessions.

Freedom of speech often extends to protesting against someone else’s speech.

Freedom of speech doesn’t generally extend to death threats, defamation, or fighting words. It is debatable whether it should extend to outing people, or deliberately forcing people to relive trauma. But any legal restrictions are more likely to protect the rulers and police spies than to protect the rest of the people.

***

Open discussion is the good practice of creating space for informed discussion of different viewpoints.

Unfortunately, American society gives a bigger mic to people with more power, or more money.

Furthermore, the limits of language give a bigger audience to people with more widespread experiences. Consider the stereotypical problem of a sighted person trying to explain color to a blind-from-birth person. It's not so different for a photosensitive sighted person trying to explain strobe symptoms to a non-photosensitive sighted person. Descriptions such as violence, and endangerment, may be taken as hyperbole, metaphor, or balderdash. Metaphors may also be taken as descriptions. I'm not sure it's easier for those of us who experience pain and loss of balance and direction at low frequencies to explain these to someone who experiences seizures at high frequencies either, or vice-versa.

A lot of times, on an issue-by-issue basis, it would make sense to give the biggest mic to people who are more affected by an issue, or are more knowledgable about it. But who decides? I wouldn’t trust any power structure to decide. Freedom of speech helps keep governmental power structures from deciding for the rest of us.

At the same time, death threats, defamation, outing people, or deliberately forcing people to relive trauma, can all keep people from speaking up. These undermine open discourse, and can violate freedom of speech. If individual platforms and individual groups adopt their own standards, these could protect people's ability to speak and participate.
marjaerwin: (Default)
1. It can allow the victim-blamers to pretend there was no injustice, and to pretend there is natural justice.

2. It can enable the victim-blamers to trigger victims who speak out, by forcing us to describe our experiences, again, and again in more detail, to show we weren’t doing anything to provoke our attackers.

3. It can enable the victim-blamers to silence victims who don’t want to be triggered again.
marjaerwin: (Default)
I am tired of cultural chauvinists who insist that every good value and every new technology comes from the “west,” apparently unaware of how much comes from elsewhere, while dencouncing everyone else for being cultural relativists.

No one is absolutely relativist, but it helps to be somewhat relativist, and to try to understand societies in their members’ terms. Especially if, like Boaz, you are an anthropologist.

Now as far as it goes many key technologies have come from the west, in the past couple hundred years. Part of that is because of the mutually-reinforcing coal-mining and machine-building industries in mid-modern Britain. Part of that is because of trade connections around the world. But to me, those seem like luck, rather than proof of “western” superiority.

And as for values, the important ones, such as freedom and equality, have never been unique to the “west,” and are under threat from anti-immigrant movements and other authoritarian movements in the “west.”
marjaerwin: (Default)
In any discussion of eugenics, 4 out of 5 abled people will say it’s not eugenics, and 9 out of 10 will say it’s a good thing.

This isn't about the sometimes-awkward intersection of anti-eugenicism and reproductive rights. This is about the idea that the way to address disability issues is to eliminate certain groups of people, rather than to try to include and accommodate all people. This scares me.

In any discussion of eugenicism, abled people will speak over disabled people, and silence disabled people, to decide whose life is worth living.

Abled people don’t generally have the knowledge or the moral authority to say we should eliminate some inborn condition among disabled people. Disabled people, living with that particular condition, may have the knowledge and moral authority, and we may disagree with each other. Abled people, if anything, have an obligation to en-able those they have previously dis-abled.
marjaerwin: (Default)
[border authoritarians, drug warriors, swefs, etc.]

It’s not right to hurt people, although there may not be any right way to prevent someone from hurting someone else. It’s not right to enforce injustice. So how can it be right to hurt people to enforce injustice?
marjaerwin: (Default)
I wish, if the people mandating backup beepers think they’re so valuable, that the safety of the many so outweighs the safety and not-getting-beaten-to-the-point-where-we-want-to-die of the few with sensory processing issues, that they’d think them valuable enough to try to compensate those of us with sensory processing issues.

But no, just valuable enough to ignore those of us with sensory processing issues.
marjaerwin: (Default)
As long as certain abled people continue beating disabled people, and generally screwing over disabled people, those abled people owe compensation.
marjaerwin: (Default)
There are a lot of issues with the concept of rights, but there is a lot of value in asserting that people should have certain rights, and that these should not be subject to the whim of the ruling class, or for that matter, of temporarily-misguided majorities.

There are some people saying that states should have rights, or that nation-states do have the right to hurt people for this or that, e.g. to "protect their borders."

These people are pushing nonsense. They aren't offering any insight about the limits of the concept of rights. They are simply using "right" as a catch-phrase to excuse the violation of rights and to take any meaning from rights.
marjaerwin: (Default)
http://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/56502381

[blockquote]No the problem is that when you legalise something you normalise it[/blockquote]

No you don't, unless your society has too much respect for law and too little respect for people making their own decisions.

This actually explains a lot. It explains why some people are so opposed to equal rights and bodily autonomy. It also explains why some people assume, when I talk about how we shouldn't normalize eugenicist attitudes, that I must want to ban certain selective abortions.
marjaerwin: (Default)
there is no logical reason to help others, outside our borders.


http://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/54496056

No, but there's our common humanity.

If we care about our own survival, then other people share much of our selves. It is enough reason, I think, to care about other people, even other people on the other side of arbitrary lines, and even other people after we die.
marjaerwin: (Default)
[Trigger Warning: Violence]

Beating, gassing, and incapacitating people to “force compliance” is not justified, and does not even make sense.

Does not even make sense: when all you can see or hear or feel is pain, you’re convulsing in pain, you think you might die from the gas they sprayed down your mouth if it got in your lungs, and you want to die to escape the pain, you couldn’t comply if you wanted to.

Is not justified: if you beat people to make them do what you want them to do, that’s bullying and abuse. that’s not a gray area like self-defense.
marjaerwin: (Default)
For example:

* If theu have to, to obtain work, housing, etc. and it isn't directly relevant to that work.

* If they have to, all the friggin' time, regardless of whether they have the time and energy, whether they have other things they need to do, whether they have had to deal with the same arguments from six different people in the past day, etc.

* If they have to deal with Gish gallops and other forms of wilful ignorance.

* If the idea depends on subjective experience. It can be hard to explain things to someone who has never had similar experiences, and is quite insistent that there are no such experiences. It can be valid empirical evidence for someone who has had some unusual experiences, and not for someone who doesn't.
marjaerwin: (Default)
I am saddened that some people think a die-off or even an extinction of humanity would be a good thing.

http://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/53244370

Here someone argues that we should abolish effective medicine, and should "open up the research labs - am sure a few pathogens would be good for the planet - to remove us."

If you're interested in unethical ways to reduce population, forcing billions of people onto birth control would probably be less unethical than killing billions of people through disease.

... Of course, that still violates bodily autonomy, and that would also be targeted at ethnic minorities, disabled minorities, etc. who the ruling class wants to eliminate.

If you're open to potentially-ethical ways, you could encourage people considering having children to take the right hormones at the right times so more people are lesbian, whether cis or trans, and fewer people are likely to have accidental pregnancies.

Of course, in the long run, the earth can't support too many people, ... using too many things, in an economic system which is too unequal and too wasteful. We just shouldn't take the first problem as the only problem. We should also note that racist imperialist anti-immigrant policies are another problem, and aren't a solution to that problem. And, in the short run, global warming, ocean acidification, overfishing, and nuclear weapons, are the urgent threats.
marjaerwin: (Default)
What kind of praxis would it take to keep bad rumors, misinterpretation, and defamation from spreading?

I know I often misinterpret things…
marjaerwin: (Default)
If you think it is justified for police to shoot and kill people for disobeying their orders…

Then you think it is okay for some people to shoot and kill other people for disobeying their orders.

I have no words for how vile this is. It means you think it is okay to kill people for being unable to hear those orders, for being unable to make sense of those orders, for being disabled, for ignoring those orders, for ignoring that force-propped authority, for being human in an inhuman world.

That so many people think it is okay for some people to shoot and kill other people for disobeying their orders makes me wonder who would want an inhuman world, and why, when they can’t really live without a more human world.

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