Pretty sure the devout are in fact people as well. But this is exactly my point. You think insulting them is fine.
Also I doubt everyone here would be as nonplused by your comment, were it derogatory to a certain prophet and his followers rather than slaging on the "Satan wrote Harey Potter" crew.
Because It's not infact about a consequencial outcome of the speech, but a prescriptive set of behaviors that are OK or Not OK.
e: The "Satan wrote HP crew" refers to the US hyper Christian groups, not the LGBTQ groups just so there isn't any ambiguity.
Pretty sure the devout are in fact people as well. But this is exactly my point. You think insulting them is fine.
I think this is an intent thing.
If you were doing tarot explicitly ot primarily to offend the parents, especially if it was in direct contravention of their already espoused wishes, then you were probably in the wrong.
But someone getting offended by a regular action, that's not on you.
Eating red meat on Good Friday might offend some devout. Eating pork might offend others. Working on a Sunday. Taking the Lord's name in vain. Etc.
People can have their beliefs. But they don't get to dictate your own behaviour.
But that's not the same as using slurs. Because the purpose of a slur is to cause harm. Even if the act of saying it might not be made out of malice at the time, the perpetuation of the slur is to degrade and insult.
Tarot isn't that. I'm in no way a believer, never had a reading, think it's hokey as fuck. But it's a traditional act going back centuries, that didn't have malice to Christianity in it's creation or evolution.
So again, as long as you aren't doing it for the purpose of pissing off their parents, that's not on you. But it's completely different from a slur.
Pretty sure the devout are in fact people as well. But this is exactly my point. You think insulting them is fine.
Also I doubt everyone here would be as nonplused by your comment, were it derogatory to a certain prophet and his followers rather than slaging on the "Satan wrote Harey Potter" crew.
Because It's not infact about a consequencial outcome of the speech, but a prescriptive set of behaviors that are OK or Not OK.
e: The "Satan wrote HP crew" refers to the US hyper Christian groups, not the LGBTQ groups just so there isn't any ambiguity.
To insult someone for their sexuality, or indeed for any innate trait, is to tell them a part of them is broken, that they are inherently the other for a piece of themselves they have no control over. To insult someone for a belief, no matter how deeply held, is to insult them for a mutable aspect of themselves. I doubt that many would argue that calling a racist a piece of shit is some horrible act of discrimination regardless of how deeply held their conviction that other people are lesser than them.
It is rarely the “do unto others” or “turn the other cheek” aspects of faith that Christians receive reprimand for, more often for using their religion as a screen for discriminating against another’s faith. In your tarot example, the mum is proclaiming her belief that tarot is evil as a reason that no-one else is allowed to practice it, rather than a reason why she herself would not.
Islamophobia, as you allude to, is generally not that. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Islam as there are any religion, but the most common is a proclamation that all people of that faith are scary brown people who want to do a terrorism.
Freedom of speech does not mean you have freedom from the consequence of your speech, if you say something hateful or hurtful, you should expect others to react negatively to you. I do not believe there is an afterlife, but I would not be so insensitive as to mock someone grieving the death of a loved one for thinking that they are looking down upon them from heaven.
Pretty sure the devout are in fact people as well. But this is exactly my point. You think insulting them is fine.
Also I doubt everyone here would be as nonplused by your comment, were it derogatory to a certain prophet and his followers rather than slaging on the "Satan wrote Harey Potter" crew.
Because It's not infact about a consequencial outcome of the speech, but a prescriptive set of behaviors that are OK or Not OK.
e: The "Satan wrote HP crew" refers to the US hyper Christian groups, not the LGBTQ groups just so there isn't any ambiguity.
To insult someone for their sexuality, or indeed for any innate trait, is to tell them a part of them is broken, that they are inherently the other for a piece of themselves they have no control over. To insult someone for a belief, no matter how deeply held, is to insult them for a mutable aspect of themselves. I doubt that many would argue that calling a racist a piece of shit is some horrible act of discrimination regardless of how deeply held their conviction that other people are lesser than them.
It is rarely the “do unto others” or “turn the other cheek” aspects of faith that Christians receive reprimand for, more often for using their religion as a screen for discriminating against another’s faith. In your tarot example, the mum is proclaiming her belief that tarot is evil as a reason that no-one else is allowed to practice it, rather than a reason why she herself would not.
Islamophobia, as you allude to, is generally not that. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Islam as there are any religion, but the most common is a proclamation that all people of that faith are scary brown people who want to do a terrorism.
Freedom of speech does not mean you have freedom from the consequence of your speech, if you say something hateful or hurtful, you should expect others to react negatively to you. I do not believe there is an afterlife, but I would not be so insensitive as to mock someone grieving the death of a loved one for thinking that they are looking down upon them from heaven.
I'd argue the distinction is more whether the target is a willing participant - i.e. in the tarot example, while we might be able to broadly gesture at notions of parental consent, ultimately the participant receiving the reading was an involved participant consenting to it. Whereas yelling homophobic slurs at someone, the target isn't a consenting participant, and you're also generalizing in a way which non-consentingly involves others as well.
Isn’t this debate centered on the (US version) of free speech?
We are saying that people are free to react (even negatively) to speech, especially if it causes harm. Other people are also free to react (even negatively) to that reaction.
Where hate speech intersects with this is that sometimes speech is designed and intended to harm, either directly, via incitement, or via dehumanization of the target. The less power you have in society, the easier it is for speech to harm you. Conversely, the more power you have in society, the more effective your speech can be at causing harm.
This is why “speech is ephemeral” is so often tied to nexuses of privilege. For me, speech largely is harmless, because I’m a cis white male with a house and a job. The most cutting or threatening speech to me is probably someone pointing that out - which is pretty weak. Because I (or folks that look like me) have an outsized level of power and authority.
Reverse those group identities (even just one!) and suddenly there are cracks in the armor of privilege, and there are effective avenues for speech to meaningfully threaten or dehumanize me.
As to the example
1. The use of a fundamental property of a person as a pejorative for any bad behavior affects people that have that property. People naturally internalize this and it both hurts those targeted directly if they hear it, and creates an environment where that kind of speech is accepted or even dominant. This in turn drives the targeted group away from the space, which can result in harms both lesser (no more Xbox live), and greater (not getting employment in that environment). I did this too as a dumb kid in the 80s/90s - and I absolutely did not recognize the harm it could cause.
2. Violating someone else’s taboos (even unintentionally) is also a jerk thing to do. Why this example feels different, beyond just left/right bias, is that you suffered consequences for the speech (well action, but bear with me). The girl and her family felt comfortable telling you what you did was wrong - this is not something marginalized groups often get to do.
My position fundamentally is that private entities expressing different opinions can both cause and suffer harm as a result of that speech. The US Constitution’s prohibition on government infringing on free speech doesn’t shield you from the reaction of private entities to your speech.
Teaching a religious kid tarot and committing a hate crime are so entirely divorced from one another I don’t know why anyone is trying to connect them like it’s a good faith argument to engage.
Like I tried for a second to consider how to approach this argument and I can’t, cause it’s fuckin stupid.
Just a complete non sequitur of Totally incongruous examples.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me" is a contemptable lie, and if you haven't figured that out by listening to the people on the receiving end of bigotry, that's on you.
Just like "I'm rubber you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you", "sticks and stones" is a positive affirmation that you have to give power to other people's words to let them hurt you. It's a verbal reminder to yourself that you can exercise control over your own emotions. Describing it as a law that says peoples can't be hurt by words doesn't reflect how it's used.
I also enjoy the simple wisdom of "When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm."
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me" is a contemptable lie, and if you haven't figured that out by listening to the people on the receiving end of bigotry, that's on you.
Just like "I'm rubber you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you", "sticks and stones" is a positive affirmation that you have to give power to other people's words to let them hurt you. It's a verbal reminder to yourself that you can exercise control over your own emotions. Describing it as a law that says peoples can't be hurt by words doesn't reflect how it's used.
I also enjoy the simple wisdom of "When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm."
Said with the blithe confidence of someone who's not dealt with chronic, sustained verbal bullying or other such situations.
Words do have power. You can't positive think yourself out of someone making it clear that they hate you, every single bit of you, and will see you dead by any means they feel like.
Which is what queer folk have to deal with every fucking day, especially if they're trans.
Or the r-slur and neruodivergence, where people will make it very fucking clear that you are in fact less than them, and they will screw up your life because that's easier for them.
They'll usually parrot the shit you just said too if called on it.
You can exercise control over your own emotions, sure. But when the source of your distress is external, such as the fact that people literally see you as an abomination they should be allowed to lynch in the street, no amount of emotional control is going to fix your distress
Because it's fucking external and exists for very good, very concrete reasons.
Also, saturating an environment with hate raises the level and likelihood of hate-based acts within that environment.
Letting people get away with slurs leads to more slurs and steadily increases the likelihood of violence, even if the speech isn't overtly calling for violence.
So even if you did want to discount emotional pain, it's still harmful to allow unchecked hate speech.
The whole idea that "thats a shit thing to say and you shouldn't say it" constitutes censorship is silly
But that is a much different claim than what keeps getting asserted.
There is difference between saying "it's rude to fart in an elevator" and "farting in an elevator harms people"
People keep making consequentialisist claims(X act causes harm) and then act like having to prove that the consequences actually happen is an absurd barrier that shouldn't even be entertained.
But clearly(from this ir the education/book ban discussions). People dismiss claims of harm all the time.
Or to approach this another way. Here are two actual examples from my youth.
1) I regularly used gay slurs in video game chat.
2) I bought a deck of Tarot cards, and did readings for other kids. Including a neighbor's daughter. Said neighbor was very upset because I taught her daughter witchcraft.
What makes the harm I commited from the first real and the harm I commited in the second absurd.
Because there is demonstrable harm caused by slurs (and by accusations of witchcraft, for that matter), but not by tarot cards?
The whole idea that "thats a shit thing to say and you shouldn't say it" constitutes censorship is silly
But that is a much different claim than what keeps getting asserted.
There is difference between saying "it's rude to fart in an elevator" and "farting in an elevator harms people"
People keep making consequentialisist claims(X act causes harm) and then act like having to prove that the consequences actually happen is an absurd barrier that shouldn't even be entertained.
But clearly(from this ir the education/book ban discussions). People dismiss claims of harm all the time.
Or to approach this another way. Here are two actual examples from my youth.
1) I regularly used gay slurs in video game chat.
2) I bought a deck of Tarot cards, and did readings for other kids. Including a neighbor's daughter. Said neighbor was very upset because I taught her daughter witchcraft.
What makes the harm I commited from the first real and the harm I commited in the second absurd.
Because there is demonstrable harm caused by slurs (and by accusations of witchcraft, for that matter), but not by tarot cards?
I mean come on now.
Yep.
About the one real harm you could associate with tarot cards is grifters in the vein of phony psychic types.
Every actual witchy person I know uses them in a fashion that's more about storytelling - just personal storytelling that's good for self reflection
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me" is a contemptable lie, and if you haven't figured that out by listening to the people on the receiving end of bigotry, that's on you.
Just like "I'm rubber you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you", "sticks and stones" is a positive affirmation that you have to give power to other people's words to let them hurt you. It's a verbal reminder to yourself that you can exercise control over your own emotions. Describing it as a law that says peoples can't be hurt by words doesn't reflect how it's used.
I also enjoy the simple wisdom of "When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm."
Said with the blithe confidence of someone who's not dealt with chronic, sustained verbal bullying or other such situations.
Words do have power. You can't positive think yourself out of someone making it clear that they hate you, every single bit of you, and will see you dead by any means they feel like.
Which is what queer folk have to deal with every fucking day, especially if they're trans.
Or the r-slur and neruodivergence, where people will make it very fucking clear that you are in fact less than them, and they will screw up your life because that's easier for them.
They'll usually parrot the shit you just said too if called on it.
You can exercise control over your own emotions, sure. But when the source of your distress is external, such as the fact that people literally see you as an abomination they should be allowed to lynch in the street, no amount of emotional control is going to fix your distress
Because it's fucking external and exists for very good, very concrete reasons.
The thing to remember is that a lot of these "positive affirmations" are designed to "transfer" blame to the victim. The whole point of "sticks and stones" is to say that the problem isn't that the victim is being verbally abused, but that the victim isn't just stoically tolerating that abuse.
And that is the reason why it is a contemptable lie.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me" is a contemptable lie, and if you haven't figured that out by listening to the people on the receiving end of bigotry, that's on you.
Just like "I'm rubber you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you", "sticks and stones" is a positive affirmation that you have to give power to other people's words to let them hurt you. It's a verbal reminder to yourself that you can exercise control over your own emotions. Describing it as a law that says peoples can't be hurt by words doesn't reflect how it's used.
I also enjoy the simple wisdom of "When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm."
"It's your fault people bully you because you can't eliminate your own internalized self-hatred"
fuck gendered marketing
+13
Options
ElldrenIs a woman dammitceterum censeoRegistered Userregular
I have spent 25 fucking years in the closet because of the environment of fear and hate and violence created by "just words"
Don't you fucking dare tell me they can't hurt me and this is all my fault for not being emotionally strong enough.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me" is a contemptable lie, and if you haven't figured that out by listening to the people on the receiving end of bigotry, that's on you.
Just like "I'm rubber you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you", "sticks and stones" is a positive affirmation that you have to give power to other people's words to let them hurt you. It's a verbal reminder to yourself that you can exercise control over your own emotions. Describing it as a law that says peoples can't be hurt by words doesn't reflect how it's used.
I also enjoy the simple wisdom of "When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm."
Said with the blithe confidence of someone who's not dealt with chronic, sustained verbal bullying or other such situations.
Words do have power. You can't positive think yourself out of someone making it clear that they hate you, every single bit of you, and will see you dead by any means they feel like.
Which is what queer folk have to deal with every fucking day, especially if they're trans.
Or the r-slur and neruodivergence, where people will make it very fucking clear that you are in fact less than them, and they will screw up your life because that's easier for them.
They'll usually parrot the shit you just said too if called on it.
You can exercise control over your own emotions, sure. But when the source of your distress is external, such as the fact that people literally see you as an abomination they should be allowed to lynch in the street, no amount of emotional control is going to fix your distress
Because it's fucking external and exists for very good, very concrete reasons.
You know less than nothing about me and what I have lived. My experiences have taught me not to give power to the words of those who don't deserve it.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me" is a contemptable lie, and if you haven't figured that out by listening to the people on the receiving end of bigotry, that's on you.
Just like "I'm rubber you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you", "sticks and stones" is a positive affirmation that you have to give power to other people's words to let them hurt you. It's a verbal reminder to yourself that you can exercise control over your own emotions. Describing it as a law that says peoples can't be hurt by words doesn't reflect how it's used.
I also enjoy the simple wisdom of "When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm."
Said with the blithe confidence of someone who's not dealt with chronic, sustained verbal bullying or other such situations.
Words do have power. You can't positive think yourself out of someone making it clear that they hate you, every single bit of you, and will see you dead by any means they feel like.
Which is what queer folk have to deal with every fucking day, especially if they're trans.
Or the r-slur and neruodivergence, where people will make it very fucking clear that you are in fact less than them, and they will screw up your life because that's easier for them.
They'll usually parrot the shit you just said too if called on it.
You can exercise control over your own emotions, sure. But when the source of your distress is external, such as the fact that people literally see you as an abomination they should be allowed to lynch in the street, no amount of emotional control is going to fix your distress
Because it's fucking external and exists for very good, very concrete reasons.
You know less than nothing about me and what I have lived. My experiences have taught me not to give power to the words of those who don't deserve it.
Certainly not.
However, even if you do take power and affirmation in those words; that's something you chose to do and nothing more. You feel stronger from them, that's great! It cannot be the case that others may or even do take the same feeling of strength as you do. Affirmations are like that, we can (and I'd say should) share the ones that we've found to work for ourselves; but it must always be understood (and accepted) that the choice to take them up or reject them lies with the other person(s) always.
And "sticks and stones" is absolutely told to people as a way to say "don't be upset by hateful words" all the time. You hear it from teachers and parents and kids all the time while growing up. It's just a "don't be so sensitive" bundled up in different packaging when told at others. That's what people are disagreeing with.
I'd also really say that I don't like the "When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm." statement at all. As, like others have said, it is way too prone to being read as saying the "true" problem is self-hatred. Which, No. And secondly, there are enemies outside that can and do cause great harm and wish to make it worse.
It's also not a 0% or 100% thing; speech harms reduction has many facets. So when you're thinking about how to reduce the negative impact of someone's speech, it's often going to have a lot of ingredients, some through community action, some through practicing and teaching methods of self-preservation, and a smaller portion through legal action.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent"
"If you are feeling depressed, go for a walk outside"
"Eating green vegetables will improve your diet and/or weight"
"If you don't like your job, pursue training and get a better one".
Taken as such, these are decent pieces of advice and there's nothing wrong with affirmation that you do have some control over your response to circumstances. But as people have said, these are often used to blame victims, excuse those who are actively harming others, and stall efforts to make society/circumstances better.
And the thing is, we can do both. People can respond with strength to bad circumstances while we also work on improving those circumstances.
And in this case, "improving circumstances" is just not being jerks anymore. And since we're talking about building character, it turns out *not* being a jerk is better than being a jerk! So how about we focus on telling the jerks to improve their character instead of only telling their victims to do so?
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent"
"If you are feeling depressed, go for a walk outside"
"Eating green vegetables will improve your diet and/or weight"
"If you don't like your job, pursue training and get a better one".
Taken as such, these are decent pieces of advice and there's nothing wrong with affirmation that you do have some control over your response to circumstances. But as people have said, these are often used to blame victims, excuse those who are actively harming others, and stall efforts to make society/circumstances better.
And the thing is, we can do both. People can respond with strength to bad circumstances while we also work on improving those circumstances.
And in this case, "improving circumstances" is just not being jerks anymore. And since we're talking about building character, it turns out *not* being a jerk is better than being a jerk! So how about we focus on telling the jerks to improve their character instead of only telling their victims to do so?
There's a meta skill in doing both. How do you get the best possible outcome in getting someone to cease or modify a hostile behavior or get victims to adopt good coping skills? Often, the answer isn't intuitive.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The whole idea that "thats a shit thing to say and you shouldn't say it" constitutes censorship is silly
But that is a much different claim than what keeps getting asserted.
There is difference between saying "it's rude to fart in an elevator" and "farting in an elevator harms people"
People keep making consequentialisist claims(X act causes harm) and then act like having to prove that the consequences actually happen is an absurd barrier that shouldn't even be entertained.
But clearly(from this ir the education/book ban discussions). People dismiss claims of harm all the time.
Or to approach this another way. Here are two actual examples from my youth.
1) I regularly used gay slurs in video game chat.
2) I bought a deck of Tarot cards, and did readings for other kids. Including a neighbor's daughter. Said neighbor was very upset because I taught her daughter witchcraft.
What makes the harm I commited from the first real and the harm I commited in the second absurd.
generally we want to have an actual notion of what constitutes harm.
Mill's list isn't bad as a starting place
x is harmful to a person p in the case that x:
1. violates at least one right that p holds (so I have a natural right to bodily autonomy, any action that deprives me of that is harmful)
2. causes loss or damage to p (you can't steal my stuff or cause damage to my body, etc)
3. causes some other person q to fail to meet their obligations to p (so a parent getting totally wasted and not being able to care for their child has harmed the child because they are obligated to care for them)
4. x is a falsehood or is duplicitous (lying to someone harms them)
5. x is an instance of selfish indifference (here Mill is mostly concerned with actions that can save someone's life. failing to do something that could reasonably save someone's life is a harm to them)
6. x is an instance of the unfair use of advantages over another (this is the harm done by nepotism, etc)
This is not to say that these are all clear and there will never be any disagreement over whether a particular event is or is not harmful. There's a lot of detail work. Is using a slur harmful? Well, according to which of 1-6?
This also comes along with Mill's Harm Principle, namely that the only justification for either the law or society (via custom or social punishment) to interfere in the conduct of a person is if their conduct causes harm to others. It also comes along with his notion that the harm has to be direct and in the first instance. So if I do something that starts a chain of events and 8 steps later someone is deprived of a right, I didn't deprive them of the right, so as long as what I did initially wasn't harmful I haven't harmed anyone. Someone may have still been harmed, but my action wasn't the harmful one just because it started the whole chain that resulted in harm.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Except using slurs isn’t just a singular action to be considered as an a to be to c action cascade. It is participating in a collective cultural action. Like if I invent a slur for something and it never catches on then yeah probably didn’t do much harm. If I’m using a slur with history, or worse inventing one that really catches on and normalizes the hate behind it, and propagating the cultural pressures surrounding that slur then yeah I’m causing harm. Because I’m reinforcing a cultural force that crushes people to dust. You’re not just saying a word that doesn’t directly hurt anyone. You’re participating in a culture that causes harm to large swaths of people.
You know outside the pure and simple harm of hurting the person I hurled it at.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me" is a contemptable lie, and if you haven't figured that out by listening to the people on the receiving end of bigotry, that's on you.
Just like "I'm rubber you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you", "sticks and stones" is a positive affirmation that you have to give power to other people's words to let them hurt you. It's a verbal reminder to yourself that you can exercise control over your own emotions. Describing it as a law that says peoples can't be hurt by words doesn't reflect how it's used.
I also enjoy the simple wisdom of "When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm."
When I was a child, I was bullied constantly by my classmates. I was academically gifted and socially hopeless. They made fun of my clothes, my food, my weirdness, my mannerisms. They made things up out of whole cloth to insult me with. I was a smart, dorky kid and you know how children are.
One day I read a suggestion in Highlights magazine that when people call you names, you should imagine yourself surrounded by a bubble. You could picture the words bouncing off the bubble and sliding upside-down and backwards along the ground. How funny!
So I did that. I got good at it. Eventually I learned to let the words bounce off me without visualizing the bubble.
What I did not realize at the time was that what I'd done was teach myself not to feel anything when people mocked me - or rather, to shove the hurt down deep where it wouldn't show and make me vulnerable. As a result, I spent all of high school and most of college deeply out of touch with my own emotions, and with a severe case of social anxiety.
I thought all this was normal. I basically thought emotions were bullshit because they were a liability. I was terrified to get too close to any of my peers, because my experience up to that point was that my peers would hurt me if they saw an opening.
I deeply regret the friendships I missed out on because I assumed everyone was a predator. (This is not to say I didn't have friends; I did. But there were also overtures of friendship that I rebuffed because I thought they were mocking me.)
It took an abusive relationship to crack the walls I'd built around my feelings, and it took years of therapy to repair the damage I didn't even know I had. I had to learn to actively identify and name my emotions, and I still struggle with depression and derealization.
Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can hurt you so deeply you can't even feel what you've lost.
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent"
"If you are feeling depressed, go for a walk outside"
"Eating green vegetables will improve your diet and/or weight"
"If you don't like your job, pursue training and get a better one".
Taken as such, these are decent pieces of advice and there's nothing wrong with affirmation that you do have some control over your response to circumstances. But as people have said, these are often used to blame victims, excuse those who are actively harming others, and stall efforts to make society/circumstances better.
And the thing is, we can do both. People can respond with strength to bad circumstances while we also work on improving those circumstances.
And in this case, "improving circumstances" is just not being jerks anymore. And since we're talking about building character, it turns out *not* being a jerk is better than being a jerk! So how about we focus on telling the jerks to improve their character instead of only telling their victims to do so?
One of my favorite demotivators is a skewering of the first "affirmation" - "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent...but you'd be a fool to withhold that from your supervisor."
The whole idea that "thats a shit thing to say and you shouldn't say it" constitutes censorship is silly
But that is a much different claim than what keeps getting asserted.
There is difference between saying "it's rude to fart in an elevator" and "farting in an elevator harms people"
People keep making consequentialisist claims(X act causes harm) and then act like having to prove that the consequences actually happen is an absurd barrier that shouldn't even be entertained.
But clearly(from this ir the education/book ban discussions). People dismiss claims of harm all the time.
Or to approach this another way. Here are two actual examples from my youth.
1) I regularly used gay slurs in video game chat.
2) I bought a deck of Tarot cards, and did readings for other kids. Including a neighbor's daughter. Said neighbor was very upset because I taught her daughter witchcraft.
What makes the harm I commited from the first real and the harm I commited in the second absurd.
generally we want to have an actual notion of what constitutes harm.
Mill's list isn't bad as a starting place
x is harmful to a person p in the case that x:
1. violates at least one right that p holds (so I have a natural right to bodily autonomy, any action that deprives me of that is harmful)
2. causes loss or damage to p (you can't steal my stuff or cause damage to my body, etc)
3. causes some other person q to fail to meet their obligations to p (so a parent getting totally wasted and not being able to care for their child has harmed the child because they are obligated to care for them)
4. x is a falsehood or is duplicitous (lying to someone harms them)
5. x is an instance of selfish indifference (here Mill is mostly concerned with actions that can save someone's life. failing to do something that could reasonably save someone's life is a harm to them)
6. x is an instance of the unfair use of advantages over another (this is the harm done by nepotism, etc)
This is not to say that these are all clear and there will never be any disagreement over whether a particular event is or is not harmful. There's a lot of detail work. Is using a slur harmful? Well, according to which of 1-6?
This also comes along with Mill's Harm Principle, namely that the only justification for either the law or society (via custom or social punishment) to interfere in the conduct of a person is if their conduct causes harm to others. It also comes along with his notion that the harm has to be direct and in the first instance. So if I do something that starts a chain of events and 8 steps later someone is deprived of a right, I didn't deprive them of the right, so as long as what I did initially wasn't harmful I haven't harmed anyone. Someone may have still been harmed, but my action wasn't the harmful one just because it started the whole chain that resulted in harm.
I think target value also factors into this. We've socially accepted that if you're part of the game, you have it coming some way or another, but getting innocents involved is a mortal sin.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me" is a contemptable lie, and if you haven't figured that out by listening to the people on the receiving end of bigotry, that's on you.
Just like "I'm rubber you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you", "sticks and stones" is a positive affirmation that you have to give power to other people's words to let them hurt you. It's a verbal reminder to yourself that you can exercise control over your own emotions. Describing it as a law that says peoples can't be hurt by words doesn't reflect how it's used.
I also enjoy the simple wisdom of "When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm."
Said with the blithe confidence of someone who's not dealt with chronic, sustained verbal bullying or other such situations.
Words do have power. You can't positive think yourself out of someone making it clear that they hate you, every single bit of you, and will see you dead by any means they feel like.
Which is what queer folk have to deal with every fucking day, especially if they're trans.
Or the r-slur and neruodivergence, where people will make it very fucking clear that you are in fact less than them, and they will screw up your life because that's easier for them.
They'll usually parrot the shit you just said too if called on it.
You can exercise control over your own emotions, sure. But when the source of your distress is external, such as the fact that people literally see you as an abomination they should be allowed to lynch in the street, no amount of emotional control is going to fix your distress
Because it's fucking external and exists for very good, very concrete reasons.
You know less than nothing about me and what I have lived. My experiences have taught me not to give power to the words of those who don't deserve it.
You're right, I don't know anything about you.
But the very fact that how I phrased things has provoked a defensiven & justifying reaction from you, while ignoring the other additional points people raised... well that's pretty illustrative that my words had an impact. Strong enough to garner a reaction, implicitly an emotional one - because why else defend things like this?
It's hardly a leap from there to you see how words can do serious, really harm.
Alternatively, an analogy to consider:
Humans are good at dealing with dramatic shocks. A broken limb is a bad fucking time, but for most animals it's a death sentence. We shake it off incredibly well. And sure, the limb will never be quite is strong. It might not heal right, Etc
But you'll survive. Its one of the things we're good it, we have an amazing capability to deal with big shocks
Now, take a needle and stab someone with it. The next day, stab them in the same spot. Keep doing this, every single day. Do it right and they might never consciously notice you stabbing them each day - not at first
That person will not survive. They will rapidly grow sick, their blood will go septic and all sorts of fun horrors will happen - because they never get a chance to heal. All from just being jabbed by a tiny needle, time and and again.
Except using slurs isn’t just a singular action to be considered as an a to be to c action cascade. It is participating in a collective cultural action. Like if I invent a slur for something and it never catches on then yeah probably didn’t do much harm. If I’m using a slur with history, or worse inventing one that really catches on and normalizes the hate behind it, and propagating the cultural pressures surrounding that slur then yeah I’m causing harm. Because I’m reinforcing a cultural force that crushes people to dust. You’re not just saying a word that doesn’t directly hurt anyone. You’re participating in a culture that causes harm to large swaths of people.
You know outside the pure and simple harm of hurting the person I hurled it at.
right, but how do we separate the things that are harmful from the things that are not harmful, regardless of whether we are looking at the actions of the individual or the environment created by society? We need a principled way that we can say of someone that they were harmed. Lots of people claim to be harmed but not every claim of having been harmed is actually an instance of harm. And not everyone who is harmed is perhaps pressing a claim to having been harmed. It's not about enforcing a sort of "only one individual can harm another individual" but rather it is about getting at what precisely harm is so that we can identify things that are causing harm. Mill's notion of harm is perfectly compatible with the idea that a black man is harmed not only be the individual actions of people but also by society at large having structures in place. A lone person that deprive that black man of his rights, but also a social structure can deprive that black man of his rights.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
The whole idea that "thats a shit thing to say and you shouldn't say it" constitutes censorship is silly
But that is a much different claim than what keeps getting asserted.
There is difference between saying "it's rude to fart in an elevator" and "farting in an elevator harms people"
People keep making consequentialisist claims(X act causes harm) and then act like having to prove that the consequences actually happen is an absurd barrier that shouldn't even be entertained.
But clearly(from this ir the education/book ban discussions). People dismiss claims of harm all the time.
Or to approach this another way. Here are two actual examples from my youth.
1) I regularly used gay slurs in video game chat.
2) I bought a deck of Tarot cards, and did readings for other kids. Including a neighbor's daughter. Said neighbor was very upset because I taught her daughter witchcraft.
What makes the harm I commited from the first real and the harm I commited in the second absurd.
generally we want to have an actual notion of what constitutes harm.
Mill's list isn't bad as a starting place
x is harmful to a person p in the case that x:
1. violates at least one right that p holds (so I have a natural right to bodily autonomy, any action that deprives me of that is harmful)
2. causes loss or damage to p (you can't steal my stuff or cause damage to my body, etc)
3. causes some other person q to fail to meet their obligations to p (so a parent getting totally wasted and not being able to care for their child has harmed the child because they are obligated to care for them)
4. x is a falsehood or is duplicitous (lying to someone harms them)
5. x is an instance of selfish indifference (here Mill is mostly concerned with actions that can save someone's life. failing to do something that could reasonably save someone's life is a harm to them)
6. x is an instance of the unfair use of advantages over another (this is the harm done by nepotism, etc)
This is not to say that these are all clear and there will never be any disagreement over whether a particular event is or is not harmful. There's a lot of detail work. Is using a slur harmful? Well, according to which of 1-6?
This also comes along with Mill's Harm Principle, namely that the only justification for either the law or society (via custom or social punishment) to interfere in the conduct of a person is if their conduct causes harm to others. It also comes along with his notion that the harm has to be direct and in the first instance. So if I do something that starts a chain of events and 8 steps later someone is deprived of a right, I didn't deprive them of the right, so as long as what I did initially wasn't harmful I haven't harmed anyone. Someone may have still been harmed, but my action wasn't the harmful one just because it started the whole chain that resulted in harm.
I think target value also factors into this. We've socially accepted that if you're part of the game, you have it coming some way or another, but getting innocents involved is a mortal sin.
I don't understand what "the game" refers to here. The video games in which people are yelling slurs? Participating in the tarot readings?
I would say that if we are to consider either the use of slurs (by anyone, not just the single user of Tinwhiskers) in video game chat, we have to be able to say why such a thing is harmful. Not merely to show that it does x or y, but that x or y are in fact instances of harm.
An example (though one I'm not necessarily committed to) - Using slurs in video game chat is harmful because it causes damage to the person who is the object of the slur. Psychological damage is as serious and real as physical damage. So instances of speech are harmful because instances of speech can in fact fall under 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6 (this is the most tentative). If we seek to restrict speech, we can motivate that restriction based on the harm done.
Now, it's also true that being harmful does not mean that we ought to intervene. There are things that we allow that are harmful to others. The clearest example being that we allow people to break up with other people. To end romantic relationships. I think that it's not hard to make a case that people are harmed by break ups, or at least that some people are harmed by some of them. Hell, some people are harmed by some relationships. But, in general we think that we are better off having a society where people are free to enter and leave romantic relationships regardless of the harm that they may cause in doing so. So merely being harmful is not sufficient for intervention by law or society, but in order to intervene it must be the case that something is harmful.
And this is also not tied to any specific country or society. I mean Mill was a British guy writing in the 1800s. This should be a standard of harm that works, and a justification for the restriction of liberty that works regardless of where and when you are.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
The whole idea that "thats a shit thing to say and you shouldn't say it" constitutes censorship is silly
But that is a much different claim than what keeps getting asserted.
There is difference between saying "it's rude to fart in an elevator" and "farting in an elevator harms people"
People keep making consequentialisist claims(X act causes harm) and then act like having to prove that the consequences actually happen is an absurd barrier that shouldn't even be entertained.
But clearly(from this ir the education/book ban discussions). People dismiss claims of harm all the time.
Or to approach this another way. Here are two actual examples from my youth.
1) I regularly used gay slurs in video game chat.
2) I bought a deck of Tarot cards, and did readings for other kids. Including a neighbor's daughter. Said neighbor was very upset because I taught her daughter witchcraft.
What makes the harm I commited from the first real and the harm I commited in the second absurd.
generally we want to have an actual notion of what constitutes harm.
Mill's list isn't bad as a starting place
x is harmful to a person p in the case that x:
1. violates at least one right that p holds (so I have a natural right to bodily autonomy, any action that deprives me of that is harmful)
2. causes loss or damage to p (you can't steal my stuff or cause damage to my body, etc)
3. causes some other person q to fail to meet their obligations to p (so a parent getting totally wasted and not being able to care for their child has harmed the child because they are obligated to care for them)
4. x is a falsehood or is duplicitous (lying to someone harms them)
5. x is an instance of selfish indifference (here Mill is mostly concerned with actions that can save someone's life. failing to do something that could reasonably save someone's life is a harm to them)
6. x is an instance of the unfair use of advantages over another (this is the harm done by nepotism, etc)
This is not to say that these are all clear and there will never be any disagreement over whether a particular event is or is not harmful. There's a lot of detail work. Is using a slur harmful? Well, according to which of 1-6?
This also comes along with Mill's Harm Principle, namely that the only justification for either the law or society (via custom or social punishment) to interfere in the conduct of a person is if their conduct causes harm to others. It also comes along with his notion that the harm has to be direct and in the first instance. So if I do something that starts a chain of events and 8 steps later someone is deprived of a right, I didn't deprive them of the right, so as long as what I did initially wasn't harmful I haven't harmed anyone. Someone may have still been harmed, but my action wasn't the harmful one just because it started the whole chain that resulted in harm.
I think target value also factors into this. We've socially accepted that if you're part of the game, you have it coming some way or another, but getting innocents involved is a mortal sin.
I don't understand what "the game" refers to here. The video games in which people are yelling slurs? Participating in the tarot readings?
I would say that if we are to consider either the use of slurs (by anyone, not just the single user of Tinwhiskers) in video game chat, we have to be able to say why such a thing is harmful. Not merely to show that it does x or y, but that x or y are in fact instances of harm.
An example (though one I'm not necessarily committed to) - Using slurs in video game chat is harmful because it causes damage to the person who is the object of the slur. Psychological damage is as serious and real as physical damage. So instances of speech are harmful because instances of speech can in fact fall under 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6 (this is the most tentative). If we seek to restrict speech, we can motivate that restriction based on the harm done.
Now, it's also true that being harmful does not mean that we ought to intervene. There are things that we allow that are harmful to others. The clearest example being that we allow people to break up with other people. To end romantic relationships. I think that it's not hard to make a case that people are harmed by break ups, or at least that some people are harmed by some of them. Hell, some people are harmed by some relationships. But, in general we think that we are better off having a society where people are free to enter and leave romantic relationships regardless of the harm that they may cause in doing so. So merely being harmful is not sufficient for intervention by law or society, but in order to intervene it must be the case that something is harmful.
And this is also not tied to any specific country or society. I mean Mill was a British guy writing in the 1800s. This should be a standard of harm that works, and a justification for the restriction of liberty that works regardless of where and when you are.
You're in "the game" if you deal significant and intentional harm to someone for any reason. We're all in the game. We've all emotionally manipulated and verbally abused people, either because there's something messed up about us or because we're trying to enact justice on someone who has themselves emotionally manipulated or abused others.
There are people who don't want to hurt others for any reason, usually young people. They are not in the game.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The whole idea that "thats a shit thing to say and you shouldn't say it" constitutes censorship is silly
But that is a much different claim than what keeps getting asserted.
There is difference between saying "it's rude to fart in an elevator" and "farting in an elevator harms people"
People keep making consequentialisist claims(X act causes harm) and then act like having to prove that the consequences actually happen is an absurd barrier that shouldn't even be entertained.
But clearly(from this ir the education/book ban discussions). People dismiss claims of harm all the time.
Or to approach this another way. Here are two actual examples from my youth.
1) I regularly used gay slurs in video game chat.
2) I bought a deck of Tarot cards, and did readings for other kids. Including a neighbor's daughter. Said neighbor was very upset because I taught her daughter witchcraft.
What makes the harm I commited from the first real and the harm I commited in the second absurd.
generally we want to have an actual notion of what constitutes harm.
Mill's list isn't bad as a starting place
x is harmful to a person p in the case that x:
1. violates at least one right that p holds (so I have a natural right to bodily autonomy, any action that deprives me of that is harmful)
2. causes loss or damage to p (you can't steal my stuff or cause damage to my body, etc)
3. causes some other person q to fail to meet their obligations to p (so a parent getting totally wasted and not being able to care for their child has harmed the child because they are obligated to care for them)
4. x is a falsehood or is duplicitous (lying to someone harms them)
5. x is an instance of selfish indifference (here Mill is mostly concerned with actions that can save someone's life. failing to do something that could reasonably save someone's life is a harm to them)
6. x is an instance of the unfair use of advantages over another (this is the harm done by nepotism, etc)
This is not to say that these are all clear and there will never be any disagreement over whether a particular event is or is not harmful. There's a lot of detail work. Is using a slur harmful? Well, according to which of 1-6?
This also comes along with Mill's Harm Principle, namely that the only justification for either the law or society (via custom or social punishment) to interfere in the conduct of a person is if their conduct causes harm to others. It also comes along with his notion that the harm has to be direct and in the first instance. So if I do something that starts a chain of events and 8 steps later someone is deprived of a right, I didn't deprive them of the right, so as long as what I did initially wasn't harmful I haven't harmed anyone. Someone may have still been harmed, but my action wasn't the harmful one just because it started the whole chain that resulted in harm.
I think target value also factors into this. We've socially accepted that if you're part of the game, you have it coming some way or another, but getting innocents involved is a mortal sin.
I don't understand what "the game" refers to here. The video games in which people are yelling slurs? Participating in the tarot readings?
I would say that if we are to consider either the use of slurs (by anyone, not just the single user of Tinwhiskers) in video game chat, we have to be able to say why such a thing is harmful. Not merely to show that it does x or y, but that x or y are in fact instances of harm.
An example (though one I'm not necessarily committed to) - Using slurs in video game chat is harmful because it causes damage to the person who is the object of the slur. Psychological damage is as serious and real as physical damage. So instances of speech are harmful because instances of speech can in fact fall under 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6 (this is the most tentative). If we seek to restrict speech, we can motivate that restriction based on the harm done.
Now, it's also true that being harmful does not mean that we ought to intervene. There are things that we allow that are harmful to others. The clearest example being that we allow people to break up with other people. To end romantic relationships. I think that it's not hard to make a case that people are harmed by break ups, or at least that some people are harmed by some of them. Hell, some people are harmed by some relationships. But, in general we think that we are better off having a society where people are free to enter and leave romantic relationships regardless of the harm that they may cause in doing so. So merely being harmful is not sufficient for intervention by law or society, but in order to intervene it must be the case that something is harmful.
And this is also not tied to any specific country or society. I mean Mill was a British guy writing in the 1800s. This should be a standard of harm that works, and a justification for the restriction of liberty that works regardless of where and when you are.
You're in "the game" if you deal significant and intentional harm to someone for any reason. We're all in the game. We've all emotionally manipulated and verbally abused people, either because there's something messed up about us or because we're trying to enact justice on someone who has themselves emotionally manipulated or abused others.
There are people who don't want to hurt others for any reason, usually young people. They are not in the game.
Okay, so "the game" is just....i guess everyone who ever hurts anyone in any way for any reason. So, your initial contribution is that everyone in the world who has ever harmed anyone in any way for any reason "has it coming"
Which implies that everyone deserves harm, seemingly in retribution for their past history of harming others? I guess there's no problem with doing anything harmful to anyone then, provided they've done something harmful to someone else earlier. But then, that means that there are maybe actually a lot of people running around who have only ever managed to harm those who have harmed someone before which means that they are still innocent, despite having harmed someone.
No, actually, I don't know exactly what it is that I'm supposed to get out of your initial comment that there is some sort of "game" that some people are "in" and some are not and thus "innocent" and that matters to the problem of trying to understand what manner of thing harm is.
It seems totally like you just wanted to come in and declare that we all of us are sinners, with our nasty histories of harming other people. But so what? I mean, even if you're right (which you aren't), and we do all deserve to be the target of harm, so what? Does that matter at all when trying to figure out what sorts of things are harmful and what are not?
It's also important to stress that it's pretty hard, unless you just define 'harm' as 'is bad', to make the case that people should never be harmed by anything ever. We allow people to lie to one another, to cheat on one another, and to break one another's hearts because we are, in general, better off with the freedom to do those things that we would if we controlled everyone's actions tightly enough to make such things never happen.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
The whole idea that "thats a shit thing to say and you shouldn't say it" constitutes censorship is silly
But that is a much different claim than what keeps getting asserted.
There is difference between saying "it's rude to fart in an elevator" and "farting in an elevator harms people"
People keep making consequentialisist claims(X act causes harm) and then act like having to prove that the consequences actually happen is an absurd barrier that shouldn't even be entertained.
But clearly(from this ir the education/book ban discussions). People dismiss claims of harm all the time.
Or to approach this another way. Here are two actual examples from my youth.
1) I regularly used gay slurs in video game chat.
2) I bought a deck of Tarot cards, and did readings for other kids. Including a neighbor's daughter. Said neighbor was very upset because I taught her daughter witchcraft.
What makes the harm I commited from the first real and the harm I commited in the second absurd.
generally we want to have an actual notion of what constitutes harm.
Mill's list isn't bad as a starting place
x is harmful to a person p in the case that x:
1. violates at least one right that p holds (so I have a natural right to bodily autonomy, any action that deprives me of that is harmful)
2. causes loss or damage to p (you can't steal my stuff or cause damage to my body, etc)
3. causes some other person q to fail to meet their obligations to p (so a parent getting totally wasted and not being able to care for their child has harmed the child because they are obligated to care for them)
4. x is a falsehood or is duplicitous (lying to someone harms them)
5. x is an instance of selfish indifference (here Mill is mostly concerned with actions that can save someone's life. failing to do something that could reasonably save someone's life is a harm to them)
6. x is an instance of the unfair use of advantages over another (this is the harm done by nepotism, etc)
This is not to say that these are all clear and there will never be any disagreement over whether a particular event is or is not harmful. There's a lot of detail work. Is using a slur harmful? Well, according to which of 1-6?
This also comes along with Mill's Harm Principle, namely that the only justification for either the law or society (via custom or social punishment) to interfere in the conduct of a person is if their conduct causes harm to others. It also comes along with his notion that the harm has to be direct and in the first instance. So if I do something that starts a chain of events and 8 steps later someone is deprived of a right, I didn't deprive them of the right, so as long as what I did initially wasn't harmful I haven't harmed anyone. Someone may have still been harmed, but my action wasn't the harmful one just because it started the whole chain that resulted in harm.
I think target value also factors into this. We've socially accepted that if you're part of the game, you have it coming some way or another, but getting innocents involved is a mortal sin.
I don't understand what "the game" refers to here. The video games in which people are yelling slurs? Participating in the tarot readings?
I would say that if we are to consider either the use of slurs (by anyone, not just the single user of Tinwhiskers) in video game chat, we have to be able to say why such a thing is harmful. Not merely to show that it does x or y, but that x or y are in fact instances of harm.
An example (though one I'm not necessarily committed to) - Using slurs in video game chat is harmful because it causes damage to the person who is the object of the slur. Psychological damage is as serious and real as physical damage. So instances of speech are harmful because instances of speech can in fact fall under 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6 (this is the most tentative). If we seek to restrict speech, we can motivate that restriction based on the harm done.
Now, it's also true that being harmful does not mean that we ought to intervene. There are things that we allow that are harmful to others. The clearest example being that we allow people to break up with other people. To end romantic relationships. I think that it's not hard to make a case that people are harmed by break ups, or at least that some people are harmed by some of them. Hell, some people are harmed by some relationships. But, in general we think that we are better off having a society where people are free to enter and leave romantic relationships regardless of the harm that they may cause in doing so. So merely being harmful is not sufficient for intervention by law or society, but in order to intervene it must be the case that something is harmful.
And this is also not tied to any specific country or society. I mean Mill was a British guy writing in the 1800s. This should be a standard of harm that works, and a justification for the restriction of liberty that works regardless of where and when you are.
You're in "the game" if you deal significant and intentional harm to someone for any reason. We're all in the game. We've all emotionally manipulated and verbally abused people, either because there's something messed up about us or because we're trying to enact justice on someone who has themselves emotionally manipulated or abused others.
There are people who don't want to hurt others for any reason, usually young people. They are not in the game.
Okay, so "the game" is just....i guess everyone who ever hurts anyone in any way for any reason. So, your initial contribution is that everyone in the world who has ever harmed anyone in any way for any reason "has it coming"
Which implies that everyone deserves harm, seemingly in retribution for their past history of harming others? I guess there's no problem with doing anything harmful to anyone then, provided they've done something harmful to someone else earlier. But then, that means that there are maybe actually a lot of people running around who have only ever managed to harm those who have harmed someone before which means that they are still innocent, despite having harmed someone.
No, actually, I don't know exactly what it is that I'm supposed to get out of your initial comment that there is some sort of "game" that some people are "in" and some are not and thus "innocent" and that matters to the problem of trying to understand what manner of thing harm is.
It seems totally like you just wanted to come in and declare that we all of us are sinners, with our nasty histories of harming other people. But so what? I mean, even if you're right (which you aren't), and we do all deserve to be the target of harm, so what? Does that matter at all when trying to figure out what sorts of things are harmful and what are not?
It's also important to stress that it's pretty hard, unless you just define 'harm' as 'is bad', to make the case that people should never be harmed by anything ever. We allow people to lie to one another, to cheat on one another, and to break one another's hearts because we are, in general, better off with the freedom to do those things that we would if we controlled everyone's actions tightly enough to make such things never happen.
This isn't a fable with a moral. It's simply the way the world works. I don't make statements like "x is bad," because that's super vague.
When someone harms someone else, they give license for others to harm them. We don't take the harm against them as seriously or endeavor to put a stop to it or in some cases even admonish it. But since everyone has a right to defend themselves or others, that also makes tertiary retributive harm less onerous.
That's what I mean: the nature of the target modifies how severe we consider the harm, same as the variables you put forth.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The whole idea that "thats a shit thing to say and you shouldn't say it" constitutes censorship is silly
But that is a much different claim than what keeps getting asserted.
There is difference between saying "it's rude to fart in an elevator" and "farting in an elevator harms people"
People keep making consequentialisist claims(X act causes harm) and then act like having to prove that the consequences actually happen is an absurd barrier that shouldn't even be entertained.
But clearly(from this ir the education/book ban discussions). People dismiss claims of harm all the time.
Or to approach this another way. Here are two actual examples from my youth.
1) I regularly used gay slurs in video game chat.
2) I bought a deck of Tarot cards, and did readings for other kids. Including a neighbor's daughter. Said neighbor was very upset because I taught her daughter witchcraft.
What makes the harm I commited from the first real and the harm I commited in the second absurd.
generally we want to have an actual notion of what constitutes harm.
Mill's list isn't bad as a starting place
x is harmful to a person p in the case that x:
1. violates at least one right that p holds (so I have a natural right to bodily autonomy, any action that deprives me of that is harmful)
2. causes loss or damage to p (you can't steal my stuff or cause damage to my body, etc)
3. causes some other person q to fail to meet their obligations to p (so a parent getting totally wasted and not being able to care for their child has harmed the child because they are obligated to care for them)
4. x is a falsehood or is duplicitous (lying to someone harms them)
5. x is an instance of selfish indifference (here Mill is mostly concerned with actions that can save someone's life. failing to do something that could reasonably save someone's life is a harm to them)
6. x is an instance of the unfair use of advantages over another (this is the harm done by nepotism, etc)
This is not to say that these are all clear and there will never be any disagreement over whether a particular event is or is not harmful. There's a lot of detail work. Is using a slur harmful? Well, according to which of 1-6?
This also comes along with Mill's Harm Principle, namely that the only justification for either the law or society (via custom or social punishment) to interfere in the conduct of a person is if their conduct causes harm to others. It also comes along with his notion that the harm has to be direct and in the first instance. So if I do something that starts a chain of events and 8 steps later someone is deprived of a right, I didn't deprive them of the right, so as long as what I did initially wasn't harmful I haven't harmed anyone. Someone may have still been harmed, but my action wasn't the harmful one just because it started the whole chain that resulted in harm.
I think target value also factors into this. We've socially accepted that if you're part of the game, you have it coming some way or another, but getting innocents involved is a mortal sin.
I don't understand what "the game" refers to here. The video games in which people are yelling slurs? Participating in the tarot readings?
I would say that if we are to consider either the use of slurs (by anyone, not just the single user of Tinwhiskers) in video game chat, we have to be able to say why such a thing is harmful. Not merely to show that it does x or y, but that x or y are in fact instances of harm.
An example (though one I'm not necessarily committed to) - Using slurs in video game chat is harmful because it causes damage to the person who is the object of the slur. Psychological damage is as serious and real as physical damage. So instances of speech are harmful because instances of speech can in fact fall under 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6 (this is the most tentative). If we seek to restrict speech, we can motivate that restriction based on the harm done.
Now, it's also true that being harmful does not mean that we ought to intervene. There are things that we allow that are harmful to others. The clearest example being that we allow people to break up with other people. To end romantic relationships. I think that it's not hard to make a case that people are harmed by break ups, or at least that some people are harmed by some of them. Hell, some people are harmed by some relationships. But, in general we think that we are better off having a society where people are free to enter and leave romantic relationships regardless of the harm that they may cause in doing so. So merely being harmful is not sufficient for intervention by law or society, but in order to intervene it must be the case that something is harmful.
And this is also not tied to any specific country or society. I mean Mill was a British guy writing in the 1800s. This should be a standard of harm that works, and a justification for the restriction of liberty that works regardless of where and when you are.
You're in "the game" if you deal significant and intentional harm to someone for any reason. We're all in the game. We've all emotionally manipulated and verbally abused people, either because there's something messed up about us or because we're trying to enact justice on someone who has themselves emotionally manipulated or abused others.
There are people who don't want to hurt others for any reason, usually young people. They are not in the game.
Okay, so "the game" is just....i guess everyone who ever hurts anyone in any way for any reason. So, your initial contribution is that everyone in the world who has ever harmed anyone in any way for any reason "has it coming"
Which implies that everyone deserves harm, seemingly in retribution for their past history of harming others? I guess there's no problem with doing anything harmful to anyone then, provided they've done something harmful to someone else earlier. But then, that means that there are maybe actually a lot of people running around who have only ever managed to harm those who have harmed someone before which means that they are still innocent, despite having harmed someone.
No, actually, I don't know exactly what it is that I'm supposed to get out of your initial comment that there is some sort of "game" that some people are "in" and some are not and thus "innocent" and that matters to the problem of trying to understand what manner of thing harm is.
It seems totally like you just wanted to come in and declare that we all of us are sinners, with our nasty histories of harming other people. But so what? I mean, even if you're right (which you aren't), and we do all deserve to be the target of harm, so what? Does that matter at all when trying to figure out what sorts of things are harmful and what are not?
It's also important to stress that it's pretty hard, unless you just define 'harm' as 'is bad', to make the case that people should never be harmed by anything ever. We allow people to lie to one another, to cheat on one another, and to break one another's hearts because we are, in general, better off with the freedom to do those things that we would if we controlled everyone's actions tightly enough to make such things never happen.
This isn't a fable with a moral. It's simply the way the world works. I don't make statements like "x is bad," because that's super vague.
When someone harms someone else, they give license for others to harm them. We don't take the harm against them as seriously or endeavor to put a stop to it or in some cases even admonish it. But since everyone has a right to defend themselves or others, that also makes tertiary retributive harm less onerous.
That's what I mean: the nature of the target modifies how severe we consider the harm, same as the variables you put forth.
It's also not a good thing. We ought to take harm seriously no matter who the target is, and our response to harmful behavior ought to be to correct the behavior without doing unnecessary* harm to the perpetrator (while prioritizing the victim(s)' health and safety, obviously).
But the social animal in us loves to punish people; and especially when we're powerless to stop other people's bad behavior, we tend to default to hurting them back instead. Or celebrating when someone else does it.
*if the only way to keep everyone else safe from a dangerous person really is to remove them from society permanently, then it is the state's responsibility to do that. "Maximum compassion, minimum harm" doesn't mean "soft on crime."
The whole idea that "thats a shit thing to say and you shouldn't say it" constitutes censorship is silly
But that is a much different claim than what keeps getting asserted.
There is difference between saying "it's rude to fart in an elevator" and "farting in an elevator harms people"
People keep making consequentialisist claims(X act causes harm) and then act like having to prove that the consequences actually happen is an absurd barrier that shouldn't even be entertained.
But clearly(from this ir the education/book ban discussions). People dismiss claims of harm all the time.
Or to approach this another way. Here are two actual examples from my youth.
1) I regularly used gay slurs in video game chat.
2) I bought a deck of Tarot cards, and did readings for other kids. Including a neighbor's daughter. Said neighbor was very upset because I taught her daughter witchcraft.
What makes the harm I commited from the first real and the harm I commited in the second absurd.
generally we want to have an actual notion of what constitutes harm.
Mill's list isn't bad as a starting place
x is harmful to a person p in the case that x:
1. violates at least one right that p holds (so I have a natural right to bodily autonomy, any action that deprives me of that is harmful)
2. causes loss or damage to p (you can't steal my stuff or cause damage to my body, etc)
3. causes some other person q to fail to meet their obligations to p (so a parent getting totally wasted and not being able to care for their child has harmed the child because they are obligated to care for them)
4. x is a falsehood or is duplicitous (lying to someone harms them)
5. x is an instance of selfish indifference (here Mill is mostly concerned with actions that can save someone's life. failing to do something that could reasonably save someone's life is a harm to them)
6. x is an instance of the unfair use of advantages over another (this is the harm done by nepotism, etc)
This is not to say that these are all clear and there will never be any disagreement over whether a particular event is or is not harmful. There's a lot of detail work. Is using a slur harmful? Well, according to which of 1-6?
This also comes along with Mill's Harm Principle, namely that the only justification for either the law or society (via custom or social punishment) to interfere in the conduct of a person is if their conduct causes harm to others. It also comes along with his notion that the harm has to be direct and in the first instance. So if I do something that starts a chain of events and 8 steps later someone is deprived of a right, I didn't deprive them of the right, so as long as what I did initially wasn't harmful I haven't harmed anyone. Someone may have still been harmed, but my action wasn't the harmful one just because it started the whole chain that resulted in harm.
I think target value also factors into this. We've socially accepted that if you're part of the game, you have it coming some way or another, but getting innocents involved is a mortal sin.
I don't understand what "the game" refers to here. The video games in which people are yelling slurs? Participating in the tarot readings?
I would say that if we are to consider either the use of slurs (by anyone, not just the single user of Tinwhiskers) in video game chat, we have to be able to say why such a thing is harmful. Not merely to show that it does x or y, but that x or y are in fact instances of harm.
An example (though one I'm not necessarily committed to) - Using slurs in video game chat is harmful because it causes damage to the person who is the object of the slur. Psychological damage is as serious and real as physical damage. So instances of speech are harmful because instances of speech can in fact fall under 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6 (this is the most tentative). If we seek to restrict speech, we can motivate that restriction based on the harm done.
Now, it's also true that being harmful does not mean that we ought to intervene. There are things that we allow that are harmful to others. The clearest example being that we allow people to break up with other people. To end romantic relationships. I think that it's not hard to make a case that people are harmed by break ups, or at least that some people are harmed by some of them. Hell, some people are harmed by some relationships. But, in general we think that we are better off having a society where people are free to enter and leave romantic relationships regardless of the harm that they may cause in doing so. So merely being harmful is not sufficient for intervention by law or society, but in order to intervene it must be the case that something is harmful.
And this is also not tied to any specific country or society. I mean Mill was a British guy writing in the 1800s. This should be a standard of harm that works, and a justification for the restriction of liberty that works regardless of where and when you are.
You're in "the game" if you deal significant and intentional harm to someone for any reason. We're all in the game. We've all emotionally manipulated and verbally abused people, either because there's something messed up about us or because we're trying to enact justice on someone who has themselves emotionally manipulated or abused others.
There are people who don't want to hurt others for any reason, usually young people. They are not in the game.
Okay, so "the game" is just....i guess everyone who ever hurts anyone in any way for any reason. So, your initial contribution is that everyone in the world who has ever harmed anyone in any way for any reason "has it coming"
Which implies that everyone deserves harm, seemingly in retribution for their past history of harming others? I guess there's no problem with doing anything harmful to anyone then, provided they've done something harmful to someone else earlier. But then, that means that there are maybe actually a lot of people running around who have only ever managed to harm those who have harmed someone before which means that they are still innocent, despite having harmed someone.
No, actually, I don't know exactly what it is that I'm supposed to get out of your initial comment that there is some sort of "game" that some people are "in" and some are not and thus "innocent" and that matters to the problem of trying to understand what manner of thing harm is.
It seems totally like you just wanted to come in and declare that we all of us are sinners, with our nasty histories of harming other people. But so what? I mean, even if you're right (which you aren't), and we do all deserve to be the target of harm, so what? Does that matter at all when trying to figure out what sorts of things are harmful and what are not?
It's also important to stress that it's pretty hard, unless you just define 'harm' as 'is bad', to make the case that people should never be harmed by anything ever. We allow people to lie to one another, to cheat on one another, and to break one another's hearts because we are, in general, better off with the freedom to do those things that we would if we controlled everyone's actions tightly enough to make such things never happen.
This isn't a fable with a moral. It's simply the way the world works. I don't make statements like "x is bad," because that's super vague.
When someone harms someone else, they give license for others to harm them. We don't take the harm against them as seriously or endeavor to put a stop to it or in some cases even admonish it. But since everyone has a right to defend themselves or others, that also makes tertiary retributive harm less onerous.
That's what I mean: the nature of the target modifies how severe we consider the harm, same as the variables you put forth.
So, none of what I initially put forward was supposed to be about how severe the harm was, but rather whether harm was done at all.
points 1-6 are not variables, they are an attempt to make an exhaustive account of what each and every instance of harm done by one person to another falls under. If A harms B, it has to be in one of those ways. It's merely an attempt to define what sorts of things count as harms.
It seems that a discussion of how naughty it is to harm A as compared to how naughty it is to harm B is not germane.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
The whole idea that "thats a shit thing to say and you shouldn't say it" constitutes censorship is silly
But that is a much different claim than what keeps getting asserted.
There is difference between saying "it's rude to fart in an elevator" and "farting in an elevator harms people"
People keep making consequentialisist claims(X act causes harm) and then act like having to prove that the consequences actually happen is an absurd barrier that shouldn't even be entertained.
But clearly(from this ir the education/book ban discussions). People dismiss claims of harm all the time.
Or to approach this another way. Here are two actual examples from my youth.
1) I regularly used gay slurs in video game chat.
2) I bought a deck of Tarot cards, and did readings for other kids. Including a neighbor's daughter. Said neighbor was very upset because I taught her daughter witchcraft.
What makes the harm I commited from the first real and the harm I commited in the second absurd.
generally we want to have an actual notion of what constitutes harm.
Mill's list isn't bad as a starting place
x is harmful to a person p in the case that x:
1. violates at least one right that p holds (so I have a natural right to bodily autonomy, any action that deprives me of that is harmful)
2. causes loss or damage to p (you can't steal my stuff or cause damage to my body, etc)
3. causes some other person q to fail to meet their obligations to p (so a parent getting totally wasted and not being able to care for their child has harmed the child because they are obligated to care for them)
4. x is a falsehood or is duplicitous (lying to someone harms them)
5. x is an instance of selfish indifference (here Mill is mostly concerned with actions that can save someone's life. failing to do something that could reasonably save someone's life is a harm to them)
6. x is an instance of the unfair use of advantages over another (this is the harm done by nepotism, etc)
This is not to say that these are all clear and there will never be any disagreement over whether a particular event is or is not harmful. There's a lot of detail work. Is using a slur harmful? Well, according to which of 1-6?
This also comes along with Mill's Harm Principle, namely that the only justification for either the law or society (via custom or social punishment) to interfere in the conduct of a person is if their conduct causes harm to others. It also comes along with his notion that the harm has to be direct and in the first instance. So if I do something that starts a chain of events and 8 steps later someone is deprived of a right, I didn't deprive them of the right, so as long as what I did initially wasn't harmful I haven't harmed anyone. Someone may have still been harmed, but my action wasn't the harmful one just because it started the whole chain that resulted in harm.
I think target value also factors into this. We've socially accepted that if you're part of the game, you have it coming some way or another, but getting innocents involved is a mortal sin.
I don't understand what "the game" refers to here. The video games in which people are yelling slurs? Participating in the tarot readings?
I would say that if we are to consider either the use of slurs (by anyone, not just the single user of Tinwhiskers) in video game chat, we have to be able to say why such a thing is harmful. Not merely to show that it does x or y, but that x or y are in fact instances of harm.
An example (though one I'm not necessarily committed to) - Using slurs in video game chat is harmful because it causes damage to the person who is the object of the slur. Psychological damage is as serious and real as physical damage. So instances of speech are harmful because instances of speech can in fact fall under 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6 (this is the most tentative). If we seek to restrict speech, we can motivate that restriction based on the harm done.
Now, it's also true that being harmful does not mean that we ought to intervene. There are things that we allow that are harmful to others. The clearest example being that we allow people to break up with other people. To end romantic relationships. I think that it's not hard to make a case that people are harmed by break ups, or at least that some people are harmed by some of them. Hell, some people are harmed by some relationships. But, in general we think that we are better off having a society where people are free to enter and leave romantic relationships regardless of the harm that they may cause in doing so. So merely being harmful is not sufficient for intervention by law or society, but in order to intervene it must be the case that something is harmful.
And this is also not tied to any specific country or society. I mean Mill was a British guy writing in the 1800s. This should be a standard of harm that works, and a justification for the restriction of liberty that works regardless of where and when you are.
You're in "the game" if you deal significant and intentional harm to someone for any reason. We're all in the game. We've all emotionally manipulated and verbally abused people, either because there's something messed up about us or because we're trying to enact justice on someone who has themselves emotionally manipulated or abused others.
There are people who don't want to hurt others for any reason, usually young people. They are not in the game.
Okay, so "the game" is just....i guess everyone who ever hurts anyone in any way for any reason. So, your initial contribution is that everyone in the world who has ever harmed anyone in any way for any reason "has it coming"
Which implies that everyone deserves harm, seemingly in retribution for their past history of harming others? I guess there's no problem with doing anything harmful to anyone then, provided they've done something harmful to someone else earlier. But then, that means that there are maybe actually a lot of people running around who have only ever managed to harm those who have harmed someone before which means that they are still innocent, despite having harmed someone.
No, actually, I don't know exactly what it is that I'm supposed to get out of your initial comment that there is some sort of "game" that some people are "in" and some are not and thus "innocent" and that matters to the problem of trying to understand what manner of thing harm is.
It seems totally like you just wanted to come in and declare that we all of us are sinners, with our nasty histories of harming other people. But so what? I mean, even if you're right (which you aren't), and we do all deserve to be the target of harm, so what? Does that matter at all when trying to figure out what sorts of things are harmful and what are not?
It's also important to stress that it's pretty hard, unless you just define 'harm' as 'is bad', to make the case that people should never be harmed by anything ever. We allow people to lie to one another, to cheat on one another, and to break one another's hearts because we are, in general, better off with the freedom to do those things that we would if we controlled everyone's actions tightly enough to make such things never happen.
This isn't a fable with a moral. It's simply the way the world works. I don't make statements like "x is bad," because that's super vague.
When someone harms someone else, they give license for others to harm them. We don't take the harm against them as seriously or endeavor to put a stop to it or in some cases even admonish it. But since everyone has a right to defend themselves or others, that also makes tertiary retributive harm less onerous.
That's what I mean: the nature of the target modifies how severe we consider the harm, same as the variables you put forth.
So, none of what I initially put forward was supposed to be about how severe the harm was, but rather whether harm was done at all.
points 1-6 are not variables, they are an attempt to make an exhaustive account of what each and every instance of harm done by one person to another falls under. If A harms B, it has to be in one of those ways. It's merely an attempt to define what sorts of things count as harms.
It seems that a discussion of how naughty it is to harm A as compared to how naughty it is to harm B is not germane.
I think you have a good point that the variables I put forward and the ones you put forward are different in nature. I think, however, that they are merely different steps in the same process.
It's not enough to classify something as harm: you also have to determine if the harm is significant. You can do damage or be selfishly indifferent to someone else, which can qualify as harm, but if the act of harm is very minor - especially in certain cases of speech related harm - then you're probably not going to do anything about it, pragmatically.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
A federal judge in Atlanta on Tuesday rejected a bid to bar a small venture capital fund from awarding grants to businesses run by Black women, in a case brought by the anti-affirmative activist behind the successful U.S. Supreme Court challenge to race-conscious college admissions policies.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Thrash during a hearing denied a request by Edward Blum's American Alliance for Equal Rights for a preliminary injunction blocking Fearless Fund from considering applications for grants only from businesses led by Black women.
Blum's group had asked the judge to temporarily block the Fearless Fund's "racially exclusive program" while the court considered the merits of the case. The judge said he would issue a written decision later.
With a Saturday deadline approaching for this year's grant applications, Blum's organization quickly filed an emergency appeal asking the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to prevent Fearless Fund from picking a grant winner.
It said Thrash's decision rested on a single ground: That Fearless' charitable grant program was a form of speech protected by the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, a holding that Blum's group said "would obliterate nondiscrimination law."
So, I do have an issue with the expansion of what qualifies as "speech" - that is the road to Hell that got us Citizens United, after all. But if we're going to play the "money = speech" game, then that means that entities can put their money where their mouth is, and that this particular goose can go fuck off.
Stuff like this is why you either have absolutist free speech or no freedom of speech. The middle is an illusion, where you are only allowed to express a range of opinions approved by the government, which they can change at any time.
Looks like France is getting in on it too. Can't let the people protest against genocide.
Or, you have two nations who - for both historic and ongoing reasons - have a desire to avoid dealing with anything resembling anti-semitism looking at how these protests have been unfolding in the US and reacting accordingly. Neither France nor Germany is obliged to turn a blind eye to what's going on. It is a shitty look overall, but to argue that they aren't responding to events is disingenuous.
But beyond that, the reality is that no government protects "absolute" free speech, for reasons that Mike Lindell is getting very acquainted with. And free speech "formalism" becomes a very easy way to destroy freedom in the name of freedom, as we saw with Clearview's arguments that facial recognition is protected by the First Amendment.
Looks like France is getting in on it too. Can't let the people protest against genocide.
Or, you have two nations who - for both historic and ongoing reasons - have a desire to avoid dealing with anything resembling anti-semitism looking at how these protests have been unfolding in the US and reacting accordingly. Neither France nor Germany is obliged to turn a blind eye to what's going on. It is a shitty look overall, but to argue that they aren't responding to events is disingenuous.
But beyond that, the reality is that no government protects "absolute" free speech, for reasons that Mike Lindell is getting very acquainted with. And free speech "formalism" becomes a very easy way to destroy freedom in the name of freedom, as we saw with Clearview's arguments that facial recognition is protected by the First Amendment.
I'm sorry I don't think the French government stamping down on pro-Muslim rallies deserves a single smidgeon of support. Given their historic reasons for loving to do so.
Looks like France is getting in on it too. Can't let the people protest against genocide.
Or, you have two nations who - for both historic and ongoing reasons - have a desire to avoid dealing with anything resembling anti-semitism looking at how these protests have been unfolding in the US and reacting accordingly. Neither France nor Germany is obliged to turn a blind eye to what's going on. It is a shitty look overall, but to argue that they aren't responding to events is disingenuous.
But beyond that, the reality is that no government protects "absolute" free speech, for reasons that Mike Lindell is getting very acquainted with. And free speech "formalism" becomes a very easy way to destroy freedom in the name of freedom, as we saw with Clearview's arguments that facial recognition is protected by the First Amendment.
France and Germany are turning a blind on whats going on. They're just being selective about who they see
Posts
Pretty sure the devout are in fact people as well. But this is exactly my point. You think insulting them is fine.
Also I doubt everyone here would be as nonplused by your comment, were it derogatory to a certain prophet and his followers rather than slaging on the "Satan wrote Harey Potter" crew.
Because It's not infact about a consequencial outcome of the speech, but a prescriptive set of behaviors that are OK or Not OK.
e: The "Satan wrote HP crew" refers to the US hyper Christian groups, not the LGBTQ groups just so there isn't any ambiguity.
I think this is an intent thing.
If you were doing tarot explicitly ot primarily to offend the parents, especially if it was in direct contravention of their already espoused wishes, then you were probably in the wrong.
But someone getting offended by a regular action, that's not on you.
Eating red meat on Good Friday might offend some devout. Eating pork might offend others. Working on a Sunday. Taking the Lord's name in vain. Etc.
People can have their beliefs. But they don't get to dictate your own behaviour.
But that's not the same as using slurs. Because the purpose of a slur is to cause harm. Even if the act of saying it might not be made out of malice at the time, the perpetuation of the slur is to degrade and insult.
Tarot isn't that. I'm in no way a believer, never had a reading, think it's hokey as fuck. But it's a traditional act going back centuries, that didn't have malice to Christianity in it's creation or evolution.
So again, as long as you aren't doing it for the purpose of pissing off their parents, that's not on you. But it's completely different from a slur.
To insult someone for their sexuality, or indeed for any innate trait, is to tell them a part of them is broken, that they are inherently the other for a piece of themselves they have no control over. To insult someone for a belief, no matter how deeply held, is to insult them for a mutable aspect of themselves. I doubt that many would argue that calling a racist a piece of shit is some horrible act of discrimination regardless of how deeply held their conviction that other people are lesser than them.
It is rarely the “do unto others” or “turn the other cheek” aspects of faith that Christians receive reprimand for, more often for using their religion as a screen for discriminating against another’s faith. In your tarot example, the mum is proclaiming her belief that tarot is evil as a reason that no-one else is allowed to practice it, rather than a reason why she herself would not.
Islamophobia, as you allude to, is generally not that. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Islam as there are any religion, but the most common is a proclamation that all people of that faith are scary brown people who want to do a terrorism.
Freedom of speech does not mean you have freedom from the consequence of your speech, if you say something hateful or hurtful, you should expect others to react negatively to you. I do not believe there is an afterlife, but I would not be so insensitive as to mock someone grieving the death of a loved one for thinking that they are looking down upon them from heaven.
I'd argue the distinction is more whether the target is a willing participant - i.e. in the tarot example, while we might be able to broadly gesture at notions of parental consent, ultimately the participant receiving the reading was an involved participant consenting to it. Whereas yelling homophobic slurs at someone, the target isn't a consenting participant, and you're also generalizing in a way which non-consentingly involves others as well.
We are saying that people are free to react (even negatively) to speech, especially if it causes harm. Other people are also free to react (even negatively) to that reaction.
Where hate speech intersects with this is that sometimes speech is designed and intended to harm, either directly, via incitement, or via dehumanization of the target. The less power you have in society, the easier it is for speech to harm you. Conversely, the more power you have in society, the more effective your speech can be at causing harm.
This is why “speech is ephemeral” is so often tied to nexuses of privilege. For me, speech largely is harmless, because I’m a cis white male with a house and a job. The most cutting or threatening speech to me is probably someone pointing that out - which is pretty weak. Because I (or folks that look like me) have an outsized level of power and authority.
Reverse those group identities (even just one!) and suddenly there are cracks in the armor of privilege, and there are effective avenues for speech to meaningfully threaten or dehumanize me.
As to the example
1. The use of a fundamental property of a person as a pejorative for any bad behavior affects people that have that property. People naturally internalize this and it both hurts those targeted directly if they hear it, and creates an environment where that kind of speech is accepted or even dominant. This in turn drives the targeted group away from the space, which can result in harms both lesser (no more Xbox live), and greater (not getting employment in that environment). I did this too as a dumb kid in the 80s/90s - and I absolutely did not recognize the harm it could cause.
2. Violating someone else’s taboos (even unintentionally) is also a jerk thing to do. Why this example feels different, beyond just left/right bias, is that you suffered consequences for the speech (well action, but bear with me). The girl and her family felt comfortable telling you what you did was wrong - this is not something marginalized groups often get to do.
My position fundamentally is that private entities expressing different opinions can both cause and suffer harm as a result of that speech. The US Constitution’s prohibition on government infringing on free speech doesn’t shield you from the reaction of private entities to your speech.
Like I tried for a second to consider how to approach this argument and I can’t, cause it’s fuckin stupid.
Just a complete non sequitur of Totally incongruous examples.
Just like "I'm rubber you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you", "sticks and stones" is a positive affirmation that you have to give power to other people's words to let them hurt you. It's a verbal reminder to yourself that you can exercise control over your own emotions. Describing it as a law that says peoples can't be hurt by words doesn't reflect how it's used.
I also enjoy the simple wisdom of "When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm."
Said with the blithe confidence of someone who's not dealt with chronic, sustained verbal bullying or other such situations.
Words do have power. You can't positive think yourself out of someone making it clear that they hate you, every single bit of you, and will see you dead by any means they feel like.
Which is what queer folk have to deal with every fucking day, especially if they're trans.
Or the r-slur and neruodivergence, where people will make it very fucking clear that you are in fact less than them, and they will screw up your life because that's easier for them.
They'll usually parrot the shit you just said too if called on it.
You can exercise control over your own emotions, sure. But when the source of your distress is external, such as the fact that people literally see you as an abomination they should be allowed to lynch in the street, no amount of emotional control is going to fix your distress
Because it's fucking external and exists for very good, very concrete reasons.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Letting people get away with slurs leads to more slurs and steadily increases the likelihood of violence, even if the speech isn't overtly calling for violence.
So even if you did want to discount emotional pain, it's still harmful to allow unchecked hate speech.
Because there is demonstrable harm caused by slurs (and by accusations of witchcraft, for that matter), but not by tarot cards?
I mean come on now.
Yep.
About the one real harm you could associate with tarot cards is grifters in the vein of phony psychic types.
Every actual witchy person I know uses them in a fashion that's more about storytelling - just personal storytelling that's good for self reflection
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
The thing to remember is that a lot of these "positive affirmations" are designed to "transfer" blame to the victim. The whole point of "sticks and stones" is to say that the problem isn't that the victim is being verbally abused, but that the victim isn't just stoically tolerating that abuse.
And that is the reason why it is a contemptable lie.
"It's your fault people bully you because you can't eliminate your own internalized self-hatred"
Don't you fucking dare tell me they can't hurt me and this is all my fault for not being emotionally strong enough.
You know less than nothing about me and what I have lived. My experiences have taught me not to give power to the words of those who don't deserve it.
Certainly not.
However, even if you do take power and affirmation in those words; that's something you chose to do and nothing more. You feel stronger from them, that's great! It cannot be the case that others may or even do take the same feeling of strength as you do. Affirmations are like that, we can (and I'd say should) share the ones that we've found to work for ourselves; but it must always be understood (and accepted) that the choice to take them up or reject them lies with the other person(s) always.
And "sticks and stones" is absolutely told to people as a way to say "don't be upset by hateful words" all the time. You hear it from teachers and parents and kids all the time while growing up. It's just a "don't be so sensitive" bundled up in different packaging when told at others. That's what people are disagreeing with.
I'd also really say that I don't like the "When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm." statement at all. As, like others have said, it is way too prone to being read as saying the "true" problem is self-hatred. Which, No. And secondly, there are enemies outside that can and do cause great harm and wish to make it worse.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
"If you are feeling depressed, go for a walk outside"
"Eating green vegetables will improve your diet and/or weight"
"If you don't like your job, pursue training and get a better one".
Taken as such, these are decent pieces of advice and there's nothing wrong with affirmation that you do have some control over your response to circumstances. But as people have said, these are often used to blame victims, excuse those who are actively harming others, and stall efforts to make society/circumstances better.
And the thing is, we can do both. People can respond with strength to bad circumstances while we also work on improving those circumstances.
And in this case, "improving circumstances" is just not being jerks anymore. And since we're talking about building character, it turns out *not* being a jerk is better than being a jerk! So how about we focus on telling the jerks to improve their character instead of only telling their victims to do so?
There's a meta skill in doing both. How do you get the best possible outcome in getting someone to cease or modify a hostile behavior or get victims to adopt good coping skills? Often, the answer isn't intuitive.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
generally we want to have an actual notion of what constitutes harm.
Mill's list isn't bad as a starting place
x is harmful to a person p in the case that x:
1. violates at least one right that p holds (so I have a natural right to bodily autonomy, any action that deprives me of that is harmful)
2. causes loss or damage to p (you can't steal my stuff or cause damage to my body, etc)
3. causes some other person q to fail to meet their obligations to p (so a parent getting totally wasted and not being able to care for their child has harmed the child because they are obligated to care for them)
4. x is a falsehood or is duplicitous (lying to someone harms them)
5. x is an instance of selfish indifference (here Mill is mostly concerned with actions that can save someone's life. failing to do something that could reasonably save someone's life is a harm to them)
6. x is an instance of the unfair use of advantages over another (this is the harm done by nepotism, etc)
This is not to say that these are all clear and there will never be any disagreement over whether a particular event is or is not harmful. There's a lot of detail work. Is using a slur harmful? Well, according to which of 1-6?
This also comes along with Mill's Harm Principle, namely that the only justification for either the law or society (via custom or social punishment) to interfere in the conduct of a person is if their conduct causes harm to others. It also comes along with his notion that the harm has to be direct and in the first instance. So if I do something that starts a chain of events and 8 steps later someone is deprived of a right, I didn't deprive them of the right, so as long as what I did initially wasn't harmful I haven't harmed anyone. Someone may have still been harmed, but my action wasn't the harmful one just because it started the whole chain that resulted in harm.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
You know outside the pure and simple harm of hurting the person I hurled it at.
When I was a child, I was bullied constantly by my classmates. I was academically gifted and socially hopeless. They made fun of my clothes, my food, my weirdness, my mannerisms. They made things up out of whole cloth to insult me with. I was a smart, dorky kid and you know how children are.
One day I read a suggestion in Highlights magazine that when people call you names, you should imagine yourself surrounded by a bubble. You could picture the words bouncing off the bubble and sliding upside-down and backwards along the ground. How funny!
So I did that. I got good at it. Eventually I learned to let the words bounce off me without visualizing the bubble.
What I did not realize at the time was that what I'd done was teach myself not to feel anything when people mocked me - or rather, to shove the hurt down deep where it wouldn't show and make me vulnerable. As a result, I spent all of high school and most of college deeply out of touch with my own emotions, and with a severe case of social anxiety.
I thought all this was normal. I basically thought emotions were bullshit because they were a liability. I was terrified to get too close to any of my peers, because my experience up to that point was that my peers would hurt me if they saw an opening.
I deeply regret the friendships I missed out on because I assumed everyone was a predator. (This is not to say I didn't have friends; I did. But there were also overtures of friendship that I rebuffed because I thought they were mocking me.)
It took an abusive relationship to crack the walls I'd built around my feelings, and it took years of therapy to repair the damage I didn't even know I had. I had to learn to actively identify and name my emotions, and I still struggle with depression and derealization.
Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can hurt you so deeply you can't even feel what you've lost.
One of my favorite demotivators is a skewering of the first "affirmation" - "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent...but you'd be a fool to withhold that from your supervisor."
Which neatly illustrates why they don't work.
I think target value also factors into this. We've socially accepted that if you're part of the game, you have it coming some way or another, but getting innocents involved is a mortal sin.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
You're right, I don't know anything about you.
But the very fact that how I phrased things has provoked a defensiven & justifying reaction from you, while ignoring the other additional points people raised... well that's pretty illustrative that my words had an impact. Strong enough to garner a reaction, implicitly an emotional one - because why else defend things like this?
It's hardly a leap from there to you see how words can do serious, really harm.
Alternatively, an analogy to consider:
Humans are good at dealing with dramatic shocks. A broken limb is a bad fucking time, but for most animals it's a death sentence. We shake it off incredibly well. And sure, the limb will never be quite is strong. It might not heal right, Etc
But you'll survive. Its one of the things we're good it, we have an amazing capability to deal with big shocks
Now, take a needle and stab someone with it. The next day, stab them in the same spot. Keep doing this, every single day. Do it right and they might never consciously notice you stabbing them each day - not at first
That person will not survive. They will rapidly grow sick, their blood will go septic and all sorts of fun horrors will happen - because they never get a chance to heal. All from just being jabbed by a tiny needle, time and and again.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
right, but how do we separate the things that are harmful from the things that are not harmful, regardless of whether we are looking at the actions of the individual or the environment created by society? We need a principled way that we can say of someone that they were harmed. Lots of people claim to be harmed but not every claim of having been harmed is actually an instance of harm. And not everyone who is harmed is perhaps pressing a claim to having been harmed. It's not about enforcing a sort of "only one individual can harm another individual" but rather it is about getting at what precisely harm is so that we can identify things that are causing harm. Mill's notion of harm is perfectly compatible with the idea that a black man is harmed not only be the individual actions of people but also by society at large having structures in place. A lone person that deprive that black man of his rights, but also a social structure can deprive that black man of his rights.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I don't understand what "the game" refers to here. The video games in which people are yelling slurs? Participating in the tarot readings?
I would say that if we are to consider either the use of slurs (by anyone, not just the single user of Tinwhiskers) in video game chat, we have to be able to say why such a thing is harmful. Not merely to show that it does x or y, but that x or y are in fact instances of harm.
An example (though one I'm not necessarily committed to) - Using slurs in video game chat is harmful because it causes damage to the person who is the object of the slur. Psychological damage is as serious and real as physical damage. So instances of speech are harmful because instances of speech can in fact fall under 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6 (this is the most tentative). If we seek to restrict speech, we can motivate that restriction based on the harm done.
Now, it's also true that being harmful does not mean that we ought to intervene. There are things that we allow that are harmful to others. The clearest example being that we allow people to break up with other people. To end romantic relationships. I think that it's not hard to make a case that people are harmed by break ups, or at least that some people are harmed by some of them. Hell, some people are harmed by some relationships. But, in general we think that we are better off having a society where people are free to enter and leave romantic relationships regardless of the harm that they may cause in doing so. So merely being harmful is not sufficient for intervention by law or society, but in order to intervene it must be the case that something is harmful.
And this is also not tied to any specific country or society. I mean Mill was a British guy writing in the 1800s. This should be a standard of harm that works, and a justification for the restriction of liberty that works regardless of where and when you are.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
You're in "the game" if you deal significant and intentional harm to someone for any reason. We're all in the game. We've all emotionally manipulated and verbally abused people, either because there's something messed up about us or because we're trying to enact justice on someone who has themselves emotionally manipulated or abused others.
There are people who don't want to hurt others for any reason, usually young people. They are not in the game.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Okay, so "the game" is just....i guess everyone who ever hurts anyone in any way for any reason. So, your initial contribution is that everyone in the world who has ever harmed anyone in any way for any reason "has it coming"
Which implies that everyone deserves harm, seemingly in retribution for their past history of harming others? I guess there's no problem with doing anything harmful to anyone then, provided they've done something harmful to someone else earlier. But then, that means that there are maybe actually a lot of people running around who have only ever managed to harm those who have harmed someone before which means that they are still innocent, despite having harmed someone.
No, actually, I don't know exactly what it is that I'm supposed to get out of your initial comment that there is some sort of "game" that some people are "in" and some are not and thus "innocent" and that matters to the problem of trying to understand what manner of thing harm is.
It seems totally like you just wanted to come in and declare that we all of us are sinners, with our nasty histories of harming other people. But so what? I mean, even if you're right (which you aren't), and we do all deserve to be the target of harm, so what? Does that matter at all when trying to figure out what sorts of things are harmful and what are not?
It's also important to stress that it's pretty hard, unless you just define 'harm' as 'is bad', to make the case that people should never be harmed by anything ever. We allow people to lie to one another, to cheat on one another, and to break one another's hearts because we are, in general, better off with the freedom to do those things that we would if we controlled everyone's actions tightly enough to make such things never happen.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
This isn't a fable with a moral. It's simply the way the world works. I don't make statements like "x is bad," because that's super vague.
When someone harms someone else, they give license for others to harm them. We don't take the harm against them as seriously or endeavor to put a stop to it or in some cases even admonish it. But since everyone has a right to defend themselves or others, that also makes tertiary retributive harm less onerous.
That's what I mean: the nature of the target modifies how severe we consider the harm, same as the variables you put forth.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
It's also not a good thing. We ought to take harm seriously no matter who the target is, and our response to harmful behavior ought to be to correct the behavior without doing unnecessary* harm to the perpetrator (while prioritizing the victim(s)' health and safety, obviously).
But the social animal in us loves to punish people; and especially when we're powerless to stop other people's bad behavior, we tend to default to hurting them back instead. Or celebrating when someone else does it.
*if the only way to keep everyone else safe from a dangerous person really is to remove them from society permanently, then it is the state's responsibility to do that. "Maximum compassion, minimum harm" doesn't mean "soft on crime."
So, none of what I initially put forward was supposed to be about how severe the harm was, but rather whether harm was done at all.
points 1-6 are not variables, they are an attempt to make an exhaustive account of what each and every instance of harm done by one person to another falls under. If A harms B, it has to be in one of those ways. It's merely an attempt to define what sorts of things count as harms.
It seems that a discussion of how naughty it is to harm A as compared to how naughty it is to harm B is not germane.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I think you have a good point that the variables I put forward and the ones you put forward are different in nature. I think, however, that they are merely different steps in the same process.
It's not enough to classify something as harm: you also have to determine if the harm is significant. You can do damage or be selfishly indifferent to someone else, which can qualify as harm, but if the act of harm is very minor - especially in certain cases of speech related harm - then you're probably not going to do anything about it, pragmatically.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
So, I do have an issue with the expansion of what qualifies as "speech" - that is the road to Hell that got us Citizens United, after all. But if we're going to play the "money = speech" game, then that means that entities can put their money where their mouth is, and that this particular goose can go fuck off.
Stuff like this is why you either have absolutist free speech or no freedom of speech. The middle is an illusion, where you are only allowed to express a range of opinions approved by the government, which they can change at any time.
Pretty reactionary and twisted, hopefully there is a court process they can follow to get that lifted.
MWO: Adamski
Looks like France is getting in on it too. Can't let the people protest against genocide.
Or, you have two nations who - for both historic and ongoing reasons - have a desire to avoid dealing with anything resembling anti-semitism looking at how these protests have been unfolding in the US and reacting accordingly. Neither France nor Germany is obliged to turn a blind eye to what's going on. It is a shitty look overall, but to argue that they aren't responding to events is disingenuous.
But beyond that, the reality is that no government protects "absolute" free speech, for reasons that Mike Lindell is getting very acquainted with. And free speech "formalism" becomes a very easy way to destroy freedom in the name of freedom, as we saw with Clearview's arguments that facial recognition is protected by the First Amendment.
Obviously they will ban the pro-israel protests because of how those protest have been unfolding?
I'm sorry I don't think the French government stamping down on pro-Muslim rallies deserves a single smidgeon of support. Given their historic reasons for loving to do so.
France and Germany are turning a blind on whats going on. They're just being selective about who they see