Scrolling down, one sees an ad from none other than Thomas Jefferson:
> In Alberale, a Mulatto slave called Sandy, about 35 years of age, his stature is rather low, including to corpulence, and his complexion light; he is a shoemaker by trade, in which he uses his left hand principally, and is something of a horse jockey; ... Whoever conveys the said slave to me, in Albermarle, shall have 40 s. reward ...
One of the histories of the US that I read mentioned the ridicule that the British heaped on the Americans for their hypocrisy, a copy of the Declaration of Independence in one hand and a whip in the other.
It's striking to consider the self-delusion that must have been necessary for people at the time to believe in such wildly inconsistent notions as "inalienable rights" and slavery.
On the other hand, culture is a powerful reality distortion field. Scratch just a little below the surface and you'll find the most bizarre creatures scuttling for cover.
Jefferson’s and Washington’s psychology was certainly very interesting as far as their attitudes towards freedom and slavery went. I wonder how they justified to themselves having slaves while talking about freedom and liberty.
But we do the same today. A lot of us have pretty unsustainable lifestyles as far as the environment goes but we make ourselves feel good (or even superior to others) by adding a little bit of organic food and organic clothing. The hypocrisy gets even more exaggerated when stars promote climate change awareness while flying private jets all over the world and living in 20000 square foot houses.
The interesting thing is that a lot of famous hypocrites still do good. Maybe not with their own lifestyle but by other people being motivated to do better
> I wonder how they justified to themselves having slaves while talking about freedom and liberty.
Isn't it pretty clear and straight-forward? It was based on the beliefs (regardless of the degree to which you might think from your perspective that those beliefs accurately represent reality or not) that many people held back then that there are significant racial differences between slaves and people, and the same rules do not apply to white ones as to black ones because they are not the same species, they do not have the same brains/possibilities/rights/etc. Just like they did not grant any freedom to animals or trees.
However much one might disagree with the basic premise of the racist argument, it does not make it a hypocricy freedom-wise. If someone was holding these racist beliefs in this past USA (and many of them did) - they could very well believe in freedom of all people, and at the same time not consider the slaves "people" based on their racist beliefs that there are actual important and significat differences between those races.
Just because someone treats someone else badly doesn't automatically make it a hypocricy, the world is just more complicated than that and there are plenty of examples of violence or exploitation being based on well established logical thought systems or even ethical (from the point of view of the exploiter) beliefs. And this is important because if you want to make a change in a society, you might benefit from understanding how that society actually thinks and what ideology is behind it. Just calling it a hypocricy is not good enough.
Do you think horses don’t know that donkeys aren’t horses? And yet they can and do create mules. I imagine that’s how Jefferson felt; after all, there is a derogatory term for mixed race people that begins with “mule”.
We see exactly this kind of thing today. Think about certain political statements to the effect that "immigrants are horrible people and we should keep them out. if we had more immigration it would be horrible". <today they mean it's bad, not in the past>. "But when my forefathers came here, it was different, we were good people <white you mean?>, our forefathers did all this great stuff. immigrants today are not like that". So it's clear this willful lying to yourself is still going on.
Comparing slavery to any critique of immigration (often about illegal immigration!, not any immigration) is surely a stretch. I am sure there is some non-zero number of individuals who think about some races like slaves still, but it is nowhere near the public mainstream.
I have come to the sad conclusion that overestimating the amount of racism is the safest course of thought. It's my obviously anecdotal experience, but I'm continually amazed how many of the people I come in contact with hold racist views.
> there are significant racial differences between slaves and people, and the same rules do not apply to white ones as to black ones because they are not the same species, they do not have the same brains/possibilities/rights/etc. Just like they did not grant any freedom to animals or trees.
Personally, I find it hard to believe that Southern whites, who lived in such close proximity to their slaves, actually believed this. It sounds like convenient bullshit that you would try to tell yourself in order to justify what you are doing. You see these people everyday, you speak to them, you own generations of them, and they raise generations of your own children in your house (mammies). Of course you would see enough to know that they are the same species and every bit as human as you are.
Probably in much the same way people today cry out about freedom of speech in china, while labeling restrictions on speech at home as acceptable (or not even restrictions at all!)
At the end of the day all of these high minded ideals are just excuses to justify ones own actions and world views.
You’ve transformed my comment into your favorite straw man.
CNN will not invite you to rant unless you serve a demographic purpose for reaching its audience.
If you associate with the wrong political groups you will be spied on, and your organization will be disrupted intentionally by informants. Yes, in America.
So, as long as you are within the bounds of what the conversation is defined to be you enjoy freedoms, but then what has freedom become if so?
When I said that these distinctions are the determining factors of empires I am saying that these systems function quite similarly, but the distinctions in how they justify themselves are the breathing room where they are successful or fail to convince the population to go along.
>Jefferson’s and Washington’s psychology was certainly very interesting as far as their attitudes towards freedom and slavery went. I wonder how they justified to themselves having slaves while talking about freedom and liberty.
The history of liberalism, from J.S. Mill to Jefferson is fraught with hypocrisies and inconsistencies like this[0].
I remember being blown away by a line from a Civil War document, a letter or diary of a Southern officer, talking about the units of the Northern army made up of Black people. He wrote something like, "If [black people] can be good soldiers that throws into question our whole theory of slavery."
They had a "theory of slavery"... That's what blew me away. This officer wasn't evil, or stupid, he was the product (or even victim) of his culture. They thought slavery benefited the slaves. As insane as that sounds, that was the everyday psychosis of the culture.
Well what did you expect to find instead? That they just randomly assigned some people as slaves, that they instated this system throughout the country, without ever thinking about it? Of course there were justifications and theories and established rules etc.
Of course these people weren't randomly just evil or stupid - such people do not organize. There is always a system.
> It's striking to consider the self-delusion that must have been necessary for people at the time to believe in such wildly inconsistent notions as "inalienable rights" and slavery.
Perhaps they simply viewed one as the goal to strive towards, and the other as the current, unfortunate state of reality. Especially given that they had a civil war not six decades after Jefferson's presidency, and paid a high price in their own blood to secure those rights.
Edit: By 'they', I meant people in general, not specifically Washington and Jefferson.
Washington had a slave batman whom he kept all through the Revolutionary war.
> William "Billy" Lee (1750–1828), also known as Will Lee, was George Washington's personal assistant and the only one of Washington's slaves freed immediately by Washington in his will. Because he served by Washington's side throughout the American Revolutionary War and was sometimes depicted next to Washington in paintings, Lee was one of the most publicized African Americans of his time.
Washington freed them only after his death and from what I know that didn’t work that well either so a lot of them remained slaves. In what way did Virginia force Jefferson to keep slaves?
> Whoever conveys the said slave to me, in Albemarle, shall have 40 s. reward, if taken up within the county, 4 l. if elsewhere within the colony, and 10 l. if in any other colony ...
Is that "s" for small, "l" for large? small/large what?
According to freedomonthemove.org, there are 22,236 advertisements. If I search (registration required) for transcribed ads, I get 6,920 results. Transcriptions are not visible in the default view. Select the icon on the right to see images and transcriptions side by side.
There's a really good museum that includes info from this period in Montgomery, Alabama. I'd definitely recommend visiting if this is something you're interested in. I wouldn't bring small children since there is a tonne of text and some, entirely optional, graphic imagery.
Protecting the sovereignty of your country will be paramount in the future. Future generations will look back at this borderless craze.. as truly insane.
Strict immigration control is a relatively modern phenomenon, and you should reevaluate your viewpoint if you find it so easy to justify putting children in cages. Scratch that, justify other people putting children in cages. Most people who support these policies wouldn't have the stomach to do the dirty work themselves.
The present state of migration is also a modern phenomenon - otherwise, countries wouldn't be trending from more towards less homogeneous, but would already be in a 'steady state'.
Not true. People have been migrating from place to place for all of recorded history. Cultural homogeneity is nothing more than a "good ole days" fallacy; it's never really been a thing anywhere, except in the most remote parts of the world.
Look at the "Population by country of birth 1900-2016" graph for Sweden [1]. It is at ~100% in 1900, and ~82% in 2016.
The US went from 87.9% white in 1900, to 72.4% in 2010 [2]. Unfortunately, I couldn't find such demographic histories for other countries. But search for "US/Europe becoming more diverse", and you'll find countless articles, from mainstream publications, asserting this. So to claim otherwise is extremely fringe.
And there is mathematically no way for a place to be becoming more diverse, while keeping historically constant migration. If the migration hadn't changed in some way, then it would already be diverse. It also means that, if it's becoming more diverse, that it was less diverse, i.e. more homogeneous, in the past.
Looking at the present, China is 91.6% ethnically Han [3], and Hungary is 93.5% ethnically Hungarian [4]. So unless you think China or Hungary or US in 1900-1970 are "the most remote parts of the world", then no, homogeneity is provably not a fallacy.
So yes, "People have been migrating from place to place for all of recorded history", but both the rate and nature of this migration changed, and just a quick glance at the headlines of virtually any news source is enough to tell you this.
So your thesis is ~100 years ago was some freak historical period when countries were mostly homogeneous (compared to current day. Please don't cite e.g. Czechs and Slovaks living in the same country as diversity comparable to current day), but throughout the rest of history, diversity was much greater.
Do you have sources to back this up? And how did those countries become homogeneous, then?
How do you think all those European Americans got there?
And, modern nation states are very new. For example, France drove to extinction or near extinction all languages besides French spoken in what is now present day France through government policy. Like the language of Bretagne.
Your profound misunderstanding of history is not something I can rectify with citations. Read a book? Like, a scholarly book.
The Middle Ages didn't have anything like borders in our contemporary sense. It's a modern invention that only came into full form in the 20th century.
>Protecting the sovereignty of your country will be paramount in the future.
Well that would be a giant step back from all the gains that have been made post WWII with the development of the United Nations, UN Security Council, UN Charter, and the entire body of international laws which is founded on sovereign nations voluntarily subjecting themselves to these international law, treaties, customs and norms.
I want to keep this civil and perhaps learn something, but what is the specific objection with respect to complaints of detention? Do folks just want better detention conditions or are we advocating for giving citizenship to everyone who wants it?
EDIT: Why the downvotes? I'm asking a genuine question. How did I manage to offend?
Bit of both, really: the detention conditions are deliberately inhumane, and the separation of families is particularly objectionable. The normal solution to people who breach immigration rules is to deport them. Why has the US given up on deportation? Is it really deemed to be cheaper to just endlessly imprison people?
People also want temporary residence to be given to asylum seekers, as specified in the UN Convention on Refugees. Allowing someone to remain in the country is not the same as granting them citizenship. It is also not the same as entitlement to benefits, entitlement to vote, etc.
> Why has the US given up on deportation? Is it really deemed to be cheaper to just endlessly imprison people?
To be fair here, those who support the detention regime are also generally in favour of deportation. However, current US laws require amounts of due process (to evaluate the claim on its merits) that -- combined with current administrative resources -- result in a slow timeline for hearings and deportation.
Therefore, immigration advocates argue for continuing the past practice of release on bail-like conditions, whereas restrictionists argue that such release is itself a threat (e.g., claimants can 'disappear' as illegal immigrants) and detention is necessary notwithstanding the human cost.
In the meantime, there is also evidently an informal argument that detention itself should act as a deterrent, as weaponized cruelty. This argument is legally and morally reprehensible, but as far as I know policymakers have not officially made it.
What else would you call DACA, sanctuary cities, or the proposed amnesty for illegal immigrants, then? Eventually, they or their children become citizens, which is little different from the policy you claim literally no one is proposing.
==Eventually, they or their children become citizens, which is little different from the policy you claim literally no one is proposing.==
Literally none of those are "giving citizenship to everyone who wants it". To take your eventually example to the next step, if their children's children have kids on US soil, they will automatically be US citizens. By your logic, the existing US Constitution is "little different" from the same policy.
Which is why they apply for asylum, a process enshrined in the US Code.
8 U.S. Code § 1158. Asylum
Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or, where applicable, section 1225(b) of this title.
In idiomatic English, "or" can imply a dichotomy as you suggest or an incomplete list, which was my intention. I wasn't thinking about the ambiguity when I wrote it, so that's my fault.
Which means that you're taking as the neutral stance to not have a concern with arbitrary detention of asylum seekers. You have implicitly taken a position on who has the burden of justifying themselves. Do you see how people can take issue with that since it violates international law concerning the rights of asylum seekers?
I'm not taking a neutral stance. I don't understand the issue and I'm asking for clarification on one of the points. I'm not passing judgment on either position nor am I asking anyone to "justify themselves". What a bizarre accusation...
The crisis was created by Obama's DOJ breaking decades old precedent and allowing asylum claims for local crime or safety problems. This opened the floodgates so to speak. Before then valid grounds for asylum claims were (mostly) limited to the threat of harm caused by a government.
Recently, Trump's DOJ reverted policy back to the way had been for decades. This has reduced the incentive to send women and children first because domestic violence/crime are no longer grounds for asylum claims.
You forget to say these kids didn’t magically lend in jail. They were brought there by their parents that purposely broke immigration laws. They possibly even did it with the idea of appealing to emotion of US citizens to get away with it.
> They were brought there by their parents that purposely broke immigration laws.
Yes, they crossed the border illegally, in order to apply for asylum, because they would have been automatically rejected otherwise.
Think though, for a moment, how desperate someone must be, to give up their home, travel thousands of miles (not in an airplane) and put their lives in danger, just for the chance for asylum in the USA.
> They possibly even did it with the idea of appealing to emotion of US citizens to get away with it.
Yes, because parents of children often sacrifice their children's health and livelihood just to make a point. Or as a media stunt.
If you don't care about these people, if you feel no sympathy at all, that's fine (well... it's not fine, but it is besides the point). But such cynicism as to their own motives is not accurate.
You probably mean the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, which was written a century after the founding of the nation.
The founding fathers weren't shy about writing their ideas down. If you're going to speak of the founding, maybe you can quote the actual words of the actual founding fathers, instead of a poet 100 years later. Where did they say the country was founded as a refuge for asylum-seekers?
Also ironic you would bring them up since they were very much an "asylum for me, but not for thee" group, which explains all of the religious refugees leaving Massachusetts during the pilgrim's rule.
> native Americans certainly aren't the dominant people in the US.
“Conquerors” and “immigrants” are meaningfully distinct, and the reason the indigenous people of the continent aren't dominant is at least as much the former as the latter.
You're discounting the fact that most extant native peoples almost certainly displaced other native people by the time the Europeans showed up. To provide a single example, Southern Athabaskans ventured south from Canada and displaced the Pueblo people after Europeans had already started showing up in North America.
Also, "aslyum-seeker" and "immigrant" are two distinct concepts.
What responsibility is bore by the parents who willingly took them into a country where they know they would have a high likelihood of being mistreated?
Ok, you took a gamble, to illegally go into a place that ostensively doesn't want you. The gamble didn't pay off, tough luck.
What the USA is doing is inhumane (news at 11) but I have very little sympathy for people who put their children at risk like that.
I'd turn into a criminal before putting my children at risk like that. Maybe this makes me a worse person. It certainly makes me a person whose children are not in involuntary semi-permanent detention.
Such an ugly response. Their situation is that their children are already at risk.
I don't think you grasp the severity of the situation in Mexico. Perhaps you should go strut your tough stuff over the border. The state dept advise against it due to the high levels of violence and kidnapping.
That wouldn't matter to a would-be criminal though.
Immigrants applying for refuge at the southern border are generally coming through Mexico, not from it. Mexicans are (not quite as) xenophobic towards them, too.
I didn't say it was. I'm saying migrating illegally to the USA is a terrible choice. Hell, legally migrating is already a questionable choice. There are better places to fight for your life.
>Why would someone illegally immigrate to the USA in this day and age is beyond my comprehension.
Specifically to respond to this misconception:
ALL of the people from "the caravan", ALL of the parents of the 70,000 children that were locked up and taken away FOLLOWED THE LAW and DID EXACTLY WHAT WE HAVE TOLD THEM TO DO. They were seeking asylum and political refuge. They followed our law to receive protection/shelter.
Any other dialog is pure rhetoric and Trump based fear mongering.
You don't get asylum because of local crime/safety. Also, you are supposed make the claim for asylum at the first country (Mexico) for your claim to hold up.
So most of these recent claims can and should be immediately rejected. There was brief window where Obama's DOJ changed policy and allowed granting asylum for local criminal problems (non-state oppression). Trump's DOJ changed the asylum policy, returning to international norms.
So unless an alien is fleeing state oppression and they have tried to get asylum at the nearest/adjacent non-conflict country, they have no grounds for receiving asylum in the USA.
Asylum and political refuge? Cause you're poor and from a violent place? Might as well bring in the whole of south America then...
> Any other dialog is pure rhetoric and Trump based fear mongering.
I don't have a horse in this race. I'm a south-American immigrant myself. I didn't vote nor care for y'alls Orange Leader. I just feel personal responsibility shouldn't be downplayed.
Makes one reflect on how much do we take for granted when it comes to ethics.
I remember a (googleable) exchange of letters between the former owner and an ex-slave. The former was genuinely hurt by slave's betrayal and urged them to go back.
There were people for whom owning other people was so normalized that they were actually angry at their former slaves. I wonder if any of our current practices will be viewed as barbaric. Or maybe we'll go back and the future generations will laugh at our idealistic concept of "human rights", while sipping drinks served by their slaves.
Ethical philosopher Peter Singer presents and expands on the following argument in his book:[1]
"First Premise: Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care are bad.
Second Premise: If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.
Third Premise: By donating to aid agencies, you can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.
Conclusion: Therefore, if you do not donate to aid agencies, you are doing something wrong."
I think the way we treat animals today will be viewed as very barbaric within a generation or two. We are everyday learning more about how much intelligence and consciousness something like cows posses.
Agreed; mass production and slaughter of animals at the expense of the environment and generally our health will become frowned upon as alternatives become more available.
„Wage slavery“ and „factory farming“ (aka as concentration camps for other sentient beings) will be viewed unkindly by future generations. Actually, some if us already view it as barbaric but it will need more of us to finally do away with them.
The acceptance of slavery was not universal. Back then there were already people, abolitionists, striving to end slavery. So looking at what small but vocal groups protest now can give a hint at what future people could find wrong or evil.
It's not at all arrogant to think future people will share my ethics, just like abolitionists were not arrogant to hope for a world without slavery. Arrogance would be believing they'd share all of your ethics, and just as well I'm sure most abolitionists were still very racist, sexist, homophobic, ...
Ethic shifts don't come out of the blue; they start as a growing sentiment within a population, which at some point (whether through growth or things being shaken up by e.g. war) reaches critical mass.
>Sure but that's no reason to expect yourself in specific to be on the right side of the shift.
Everyone from Caesar to the crusaders to Martin Luther to the American revolutionaries to the KKK to the Amish to the imperial Japanese to the 1960s hippies to the Taliban to the IRA is on the right side of the shift as they see/saw it.
We can't all be right, some people have to be wrong. Some people will be right on some things and wrong on others. Some people will be so right or wrong on particular things that it will overshadow how right/wrong they were on others.
Clean in vitro meat might be the technology that ends factory farming. An interesting question is how future generations will look at us if they still eat clean meat.
Describing lab-created genetically-modified "Frankenmeat" as "clean" might be one of those things not looked on favorably in the future... Bill Joy is quite likely right that genetic engineering is probably the most dangerous technology ever created, and the one that almost certainly has the highest probability of killing us all.
It may be the most dangerous of technologies currently on the horizons, but it can also have the biggest payoff - it's not just about things like curing diseases, test tube babies, or selective pathogens - it's also the first stop on the way to building living machines, living materials, and cracking molecular nanotechnology, which life is nothing but.
Compared to factory farmed meat it is most certaly clean. No unnecessary suffering of concious animals and far smaller impact on the environment make it that.
I'm not even sure that clean meat relies on genetic modifications, but even if, so what? There is no reason to believe that targeted changes are more harmfull than random mutations.
> I remember a (googleable) exchange of letters between the former owner and an ex-slave. The former was genuinely hurt by slave's betrayal and urged them to go back.
We treat children like that. Largely for the economic value they can provide by making them spend most of their awake life at school. If school wasn't needed, it would look barbaric.
I'm always baffled by the way US (and on a lesser degree UK) people see schools. My (EU/Italian) point of view is that's something that could be improved (like anything) but not the evil I see through your words. There must be some significant difference in the school experience that I don't understand (for lack of knowledge, probably).
Conservatives here actually make things worse in public life as a policy decision...public schools are a perfect example...then run for election based on things being bad in public life.
Since public education became a thing for all the states, conservative Christians have been opposed to it. They will moderate their message depending on the audience, but when discussed among themselves they talk about abolishing it. The really ridiculous thing is how schools are funded. I won't go into it here, but it guarantees that poor people will have a bad education.
Yes, of course. It's visible in many subtle ways. One example is uniforms. Another is how "social studies" now stands where "history" once stood. Nearly 20% of high school graduates are illiterate. A highs school diploma signals something, but it's not being educated.
Some amount of education does occur, but it's incidental to social indoctrination, keeping parents' wages high by forcing kids out of the job market, etc.
A universal property of state run schooling is that schools are literal prisons for children and for many people is the only place they'll experience violence first hand. The finer details will vary by location.
I've been to multiple prisons for children to visit people, they aren't like schools. Also, many children are sent to adult prison and those aren't like school either.
Both public and private schools can be places where people experience violence, but many more people experience violence at home first.
Students are not free to leave and will literally be thrown in a cage for truancy if they do. They don't choose the curriculum, don't get to choose who they work with, and are frequently submitted to dehumanizing treatment like having to ask permission to use the restroom.
Very few countries jail children for simple truancy. Most will let you opt out of the system if you can prove you're maintaining standards in the process and not homeschooling for abusive purposes.
Well... The more radical political philosophies (at any given time) make lots of equivalences (ethical and others) between slavery & other stuff. Wage labour today, and obviously older institutions like tenancy, serfdom, indentured labour, etc. Even many free thinking, but politically mainstream people (eg t cowen) make non-ethical comparisons between slavery and employment.
It's easier to agree with if you widen your concept of slavery, beyond the specific institution of African slavery in the US... during the later years. That system was so brutal and unethical by slavery standards. So, it's hard to compare to.
Before, during & after chattel slavery, the Americas had other systems of "slavery." Most were not that* brutal, but still slavery.
Indentured service was huge, at a certain point. Share croppers. These people probably outnumbered free employees in many times and places.
Serfs were not free to go. Monks were arguably enslaved by abbots. Artisans sometimes bought apprentices as children.
In western Europe, the "tenant" concept that replaced serfdom was often similar to sharecropping.. arguably also a system of slavery.
We know of ancient examples: Greek, Roman, Jewish, Persian, Babylonian... Ancient law codes (including the bible) dedicated a lot of ink to slavery laws. Slaver rights, slave rights, manumission, and such. A Greek slave could be wealthy, and that should help broaden the concept.
Marxism sees slavery in class terms. Ie it's just a name to describe the lowest class, and wage labour is a descendant of slavery.
There are even many modern-economy examples where employers have a say in an employee's marriage or reproductive choices. That arguably is slavery-like.
Anyway... once you widen the concept of slavery with multiple examples that you easily accept as "obviously slavery*, drawing analogies to other institutions is easy.
Indenture, for example, exists, today, in practice, widely... in many forms. Invariably, the "slavers" think it's ethically sound.
By so many metrics our lives are incredible compared to every other period of human history. Of course it's not perfect, there's always room to improve, but there's a stark contrast between how things actually are and how many perceive it to be.
Very few problems are as unambiguous as slavery. A lot of our problems are much more nuanced.
There is almost no "late term" "prophylactic" abortion anywhere. Late term abortion is usually driven by medical necessity. Denying this reality gets women killed by withholding medical treatment from them. It was the death of Savita Halappanavar as a result of this policy that ultimately triggered the liberalisation of abortion in Ireland.
Let's not attack straw men. It's also barbaric to ban medically necessary procedures.
Besides, frequency of an event isn't a defense against charges of barbarism. Lobotomies, the Tuskegee Experiment, and eugenic sterilization weren't all that common, but they were barbaric.
It's easy to make abortion seem barbaric in a HN comment thread. The lives of people are complicated and messy. Your opinion about how other people should conduct their personal lives shouldn't extend to family planning. Period.
If we are being honest, open heart surgery is barbaric. They cut people open and then break all their ribs.
It's not assault or murder, for a variety of reasons that I'm not going to go into.
Further, experience tells me that granting good faith in these arguments is usually a bad idea. I oppose the right-wing on every issue. Abortion is particularly important in this context because it normalizes state based oppression against women.
Do you grant creationists good faith? How about anti-vaxers? Flat earthers?
People have been using free speech absolutism over the last couple of years to popularize poisonous ideas. Should we keep letting that happen?
EDIT: Maybe they have an opinion, but frankly that lot don't spin this as an opinion. It's barbarism. It's murder. It's evil. Don't act like their isn't a larger context to all of this.
I just think full term fetuses deserve at least as much legal protection as a pet dog. It's pretty awful to kill a pet when animal shelters are a thing.
I understand the desire to group that opinion along with PizzaGate or some other toxic nonsense. That's exactly the sort of cognitive dissonance I'm talking about.
I am actually sympathetic to and support single mothers in all sorts of ways, not that people should have to qualify philosophical opinions with virtue signalling.
"Do you grant creationists good faith? How about anti-vaxers? Flat earthers?"
Yes. All of them.
I've never had to do so with a flat-earther simply because I've never met one.
But the others? Sure, I treat them like human beings.
Marginalizing people for their beliefs will not change their minds but it WILL fracture society. I think some people will side with the "opposing view" simply because they are indignant when they see how the sanctimonious mob treats them.
Like I said, nothing happens in a vacuum. People in the anti-abortion camp routinely call people evil, demon possessed, and immoral. They have killed people. There are bills passing now that force women to undergo unneeded medical procedures.
Somehow I'm being sanctimonious because I'm not going to pretend that there is no historical context to all of this.
That's what they have been doing this whole time. The far-right pushes against the bounds of decency and then the center-right says that you aren't being civil when someone brings it up.
I'm not marginalizing anyone. I'm just not going to pretend that there is no larger context.
Actual “Medical necessity” is extremely rare, but since it must be stated on paperwork a strained excuse is normal - giving an official need where none actually exists.
I wouldn't say censorship, but yes, the Overton window is powerful. Currently, it heavily favors individual liberty at the expense of survival of the society or quality of life for future people.
https://freedomonthemove.org
Scrolling down, one sees an ad from none other than Thomas Jefferson:
> In Alberale, a Mulatto slave called Sandy, about 35 years of age, his stature is rather low, including to corpulence, and his complexion light; he is a shoemaker by trade, in which he uses his left hand principally, and is something of a horse jockey; ... Whoever conveys the said slave to me, in Albermarle, shall have 40 s. reward ...
One of the histories of the US that I read mentioned the ridicule that the British heaped on the Americans for their hypocrisy, a copy of the Declaration of Independence in one hand and a whip in the other.
It's striking to consider the self-delusion that must have been necessary for people at the time to believe in such wildly inconsistent notions as "inalienable rights" and slavery.
On the other hand, culture is a powerful reality distortion field. Scratch just a little below the surface and you'll find the most bizarre creatures scuttling for cover.