“The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be regretted. We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid. I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.”
21-year-old
Otto Warmbier,
another man from Ohio who last week was convicted of subversion for
stealing a propaganda banner in North Korea, and sentenced to 15 years
hard labor. […] my mother’s callous reaction to Micahel
Fay’s sentence is my reaction to another young white man who went to an
Asian country and violated their laws, and learned that the shield his
cis white male identity provides here in America is not teflon abroad.
It goes on to talk about how acting recklessly in North Korea is a side effect of having been raised in the US with white privilege and says that, effectively, he deserves whatever he gets.
No! Bad! WTF is wrong with you?Are we so stuck in a crab bucket mentality that, when oppressive power comes down on an arbitrary member of the out group, we have to celebrate it?
Coming from a country filled with citizens who lambaste black victims of
state sanctioned violence by telling us that if we obey the law, we
wouldn’t have to face the consequences, Warmbier should’ve listened. […] And if Eric Garner
is to be blamed for his own death for selling loose cigarettes or if
Sandra Bland is dead because she failed to signal when changing lanes,
then Otto Warmbier is now facing a decade and a half of hard labor
because he lacked both good judgment and respect for the national
autonomy of a country which has made its hatred for and vendetta against
America unequivocally clear.
Yep, nothing but crabs in a bucket. “A member of your tribe has to suffer the arbitrariness of state violence, because members of my tribe do, too!” Eric Garner shouldn’t have been killed. That was terrible. Nobody should be treated so despicably by a “justice” system.
But that fucking means ‘nobody’. The world isn’t made a better place by “balancing out” the suffering of one group of people with the suffering of another. It isn’t improved by an attitude that laughs gleefully whenever Those People come to harm.
And if your social justice sees oppression and says “Hooray! The hated out group is bleeding”, then there is no ‘justice’ in you.
And if your social justice sees oppression and says “Hooray! The hated out group is bleeding”, then there is no ‘justice’ in you.
I think this is the most #endorsed statement anybody has ever made to me about sj.
[Epistemic status: I do not endorse all the positions outlined in this post, and I stated several more strongly than I normally would.] [Unrelated donation request: Here is a GoFundMe for my friend Katie Cohen, a mentally ill rationalist single mother, and her daughter Andromeda. They are struggling and helping out would mean a lot. Come on, libertarians! Do that nonstate social support!] As far…
Getting really tired of political arguments that are just about how (un)virtuous a particular faction is.
I truly don’t care how you feel about Democrats or Republicans or
liberals or libertarians or conservatives or leftists or SJWs or MRAs or
rationalists or feminists. If there’s a belief or pattern of behavior
you want to discuss which is associated with a particular group, by all
means talk about that. But if your thesis is ultimately about praising
or condemning the group rather than saying something about the specific
beliefs or behaviors, I usually won’t have any idea how to evaluate your
claim or any good reason to try.
For example: If you say “There’s
a common belief among libertarians that the prices set by a free market
are the morally correct prices. I think that’s incorrect and harmful,
and here’s why,” then great! We can discuss that idea, its philosophical
basis, and its consequences. You might manage to convince someone who
previously believed in it to change their mind. Someone might accuse you
of attacking a strawman, but it should be easy enough to show that some
people actually hold the belief you’re talking about.
On the
other hand, if you say “Libertarianism is terrible because it claims
that the prices set by a free market are the morally correct prices,”
then you’re going to end up arguing about how many libertarians actually
believe that, who actually counts as a libertarian, what beliefs are
essential to “the libertarian worldview”, how someone’s actions might reveal
a belief in a particular principle even if they don’t state that it’s
true, etc. These discussions are difficult, contentious, and almost
completely pointless. At best, they can change how someone chooses to
label their beliefs. But how someone labels their beliefs is a lot less
important than what they actually believe, and you’re not going to make any headway on the latter as long as you’re arguing about what counts as libertarianism.
(This
was written with the assumption that when you debate, you’re attempting
to change someone else’s mind –either your interlocutor’s or a third
party’s– but it’s just as applicable if you’re trying to test and
clarify your own opinions. If you have no hope of changing anyone’s
view, even your own… I don’t want to tell you how to live your life,
maybe what you’re doing is enjoyable and/or healthy for you. But please
keep it away from me.)
I don’t think people realize how much of an impact this kind of support can have, I don’t think everyone knows what these little things can mean to us.
It may just be me, I don’t know. But every single time I see this on my dash or on someone’s blog or anywhere else, I kind of just breathe a sigh of relief. That’s one more person who cares. That’s one more person who doesn’t hate me.
Because it means so much, especially when all the media is spewing out is that I’m a terrible person and no one wants people like me near them. It means so much because I’m tired of people who won’t sit next to me in class, or who choose to join the longer line at the grocery store because they don’t want to be beside me and my family. It means so much when I have to lift my head any time someone says the words Islam or Muslim because I’m scared that they’ll say something that’ll hurt, when I have to pay attention to the news because who knows what so and so is saying now, who knows which of my people are being attacked now, who knows what’s going to happen to me now.
It means so much because I’ve been given the idea that the world is against me. And a huge part of it may be, but at least I’ve been reminded that some of it, just a small group of people, acknowledges that I’m a person too. That people like me are just that, people.
Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know. But now you do, so thank you for believing that I’m human when so many people don’t.
That phrase could be taken a very different way though…
Yeahhhh, that’s where I thought this was going. And profiling is one thing (that is still often bad), but collective punishment is way worse.
like im trying to think who would NOT benefit if dresses and skirts were universally accepted as gender-neutral clothing? and i think the answer is: it would be good for all of us
This might make it harder for trans girls to pass as girls. They might get more “cool dress man” type statements.
Yes. This. This is a thing. This is a very important thing. Gender-coding is very important to people with strong genders.
what if systems of meaning are actually good
what if everyone had a gender symbol tattooed on their foreheads that took priority over whatever clothes they were wearing huh what then punk
assign a color to each gender and have its members use / wear that color preferentially
or we could have a complex system that combines color options with different clothing fashions and even hairstyles and accessory choices to indicate gender!
wait-
Or we could stop gender-coding to give the trans girls plausible deniability to experiment with, switch to universal pronouns and aim to diminish the importance of gendering, while letting people be what they say they are. Cherry-picking a single example of gender systems that benefits trans people is kind of like saying that drone bombings aren’t that bad because one target was actually planning to hurt people. The benefits of gender-coding to some people with strong genders don’t necessarily come anywhere near to outweighing the harms of gender-coding to other people with strong genders, and all people without strong genders. For example, I know quite a many trans guys who still want to wear dresses but are having a lot of trouble with it because it leads to misgendering.
I think a good guideline that if I listen to it at least 3 times, I should reblog it.
This song is the first music video of the band Pig with the Face of a Boy. An interview with the artists and a copy of the lyrics is here.
Also, I’d like to note that I’m the person who showed this to Alison.
(As usual, I feel morally awkward about my music preferences, but I cannot think of a song it would not be a bit morally awkward to like (maybe the Free Software song? It’s a pretty harmless movement, but I haven’t listened to the song yet), so I’m not apologizing here.)
Looks like I found a new æsthetic appeal I wasn’t aware of.
Do you people know it’s dangerous to make oppression this sexy to me? 3:42 is practically an existential risk!
What are the rules of challenging someone to a duel? I demand satisfaction from Azathoth.
that’s the eastern continent in Warcraft right? i don’t think you can challenge landmasses to duels under any rules. even Caligula only attacked the ocean
I don’t know if you’re kidding about not knowing but the place in WoW is Azeroth. Azathoth is the rationalist personification of evolution.
You’re thinking of Azathoth. Azathoth is… okay, it actually is the rationalist personification of evolution.
idea: we fundraise money to run ads on 4Chan saying “DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN BE A GIRL IF YOU WANT TO?”
Banner ads are $50 for 250,000 views, which translates to 20 cents per view*. Transition normally saves 6.5 QALYs at a cost of $23,619 or $9314 per QALY**. Let’s assume for convenience’s sake that exactly one person out of those 250,000 realizes that she can in fact be a girl if she wants to, and decides to transition. This means we’d be adding $50 to the total cost of helping someone gain 6.5 QALYs, or $7.7 per QALY. Givewell’s estimate of AMF’s effectiveness give us a figure of $2,838 per child’s life saved***. Assuming the child would otherwise live for 60 years, all of which are a full QALY, this translates to $47.3 per QALY.
*https://www.4chan.org/advertise?selfserve
**http://nonbinary-confessions.tumblr.com/post/132018260580/societal-implications-of-health-insurance-coverage
***http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF#Costperlifesaved
Oh yes. BRB figuring out 1. where to get money 2. how to optimize the impact of the ads 3. how much total money needs to be collected to become efficient when the costs of creating the advertisements are practically fixed
I suppose every evil genius needs to have regular “I’m surrounded by incompetents” breakdowns.
most people regress to the mean and why am I constantly surprised by this I just want to fork myself maybe a couple dozen times and do all the shit myself because otherwise nothing gets done properly look it’s not that hard I mean it’s not necessary to be literally me but I’d appreciate not making it so immediately obvious that I’m an outlier adn should not be counted when it comes to ability to just do shit like maybe be a little bit more organized and efficient and reduce the vulnerability of single points of failure in project X
