marjaerwin

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?

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.

[Revised Version]

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Both are good things.

Each is a different thing.

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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.

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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.

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.”

[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?

As long as certain abled people continue beating disabled people, and generally screwing over disabled people, those abled people owe compensation.

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.

[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.

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.

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.