In 2020, Words Are 'Violence,' Arson Is Not
reason.com
reason.com
I know its intended to incite action, which is certainly overdue. But it has its downside too, mainly that it alienates folks.
A lot of white people claim to be anti-racists but are unwilling to actually act on it, including the most basic step of speaking up when they see it happen, or acknowledging the existence of structural racism. In other words, their claim is more performative and about convincing themselves and others that they are Good People, than actually being interested in challenging a status quo that obviously wrongs a lot of people.
This is also known as being an "enabler" - that is, allowing others to do wrong by looking the other way.
"Silence is violence" merely calls this out. It reminds us that we are enablers of this violence if we remain silent.
The vast majority of defensiveness I see in response to this pretty much just boils down to worrying about one's own position of being seen as a Good Person (by themselves and by others), instead of worrying about what is actually the right thing to do.
If half of the population (the people with power) directly benefits from an unjust system, but says nothing about it, it will never be addressed.
There is a conflict of interest.
How can you benefit from an injustice, stay silent, and still just passively hope it will get fixed? Hundreds of years in isn’t proof enough that sitting around hoping someone else fixes it doesn’t work?
Fix what? Slavery (including the enslavement of whites) is not legal, at least not in the US. Everything is de-segregated and we have laws to protect certain classes of minorities. Beyond legalities I see black-promotion constantly in media. Everything looks perfectly fine from my perspective (I could do without the propaganda though). As a reminder our last president was (half) black.
You're imagining that the US is not beneficial historically to everyone. There's a reason people from Europe, Asia, latin america, etc. immigrated to America. They didn't come because "America is only benefits white slave-owners!" The entire point of the "american dream" is that people without power can find a way to prosper. Are we supposed to pretend none of that ever happened?
So what is this injustice du jour that suddenly, over the last few weeks, has become so pressing? Policing? I don't think there's evidence to support that blacks are targetted by cops because they're black. Poor neighborhoods probably do require more policing than non-poor neighborhoods as, naturally, criminal activity is more prevalent amongst the poor. Relative to other minorities my understanding is that blacks are underperforming in various ways. Surely you can't be so easily deluded into believing statements like "our black kids are being killed by cops every minute!" More whites are killed by cops. Blacks are overrepresented in proportion to their population. That blacks are overrepresented in certain figures does not support a radical claim like "systemic racism," contrary to Twitter logic.
Is it some other "injustice" you're so worked up about? Is it some imaginary injustice that is not even possible to resolve? Why don't you be specific about your radical claims; your statements are empty Twitter platitudes as far as I'm concerned.
Frankly, I resent the implication that I, as a white, am somehow benefiting from "injustice."
when you get this fundamental assertion wrong why would anyone bother reading anything else you have to say on the subject?
i recommend reading the 13th amendment again.
Partisans will accuse anyone who dissents of racism or self-hatred and internalized racism.
"Looking the other way" in the face of blatant racism is of course bad and, IMHO, inexcusable, but it's usually a lot more subtle than this. Besides, that if speaking up may have real consequences for you? What if it risks alienating life-long friends, your job, your volunteer work? And will speaking up actually achieve anything?
Also some people might choose to focus on different aspects of society to improve. A day has only 24 hours, and there are many possible topics you can fight for. Not everyone needs to fight for every cause.
Change requires many people to stop accepting the status quo.
And that requires broad awareness.
Awareness requires people talking to other people.
the problem is, we have multiple parties that are at odds with one another, and there are only two ways to come to an agreement. Either both parties have good will and are willing to cooperate, or one party submits to the other.
"Silence is violence" is telling me to submit, not cooperate, so why would i care to sink time into proving I'm a good person when the general attitude has no good will for my position?
further, I'm also concerned that violence is generally reciprocated with more violence. This sentiment lays the groundwork to commit real violence against good people that are just trying to mind their own business.
A very dangerous period we are entering when honest open debate is framed as anything such. We are walking right into it and worse many are find excuses for specific discussion points as warranting this behavior not fully understanding that once that genie is out of the bottle it may take a generation or more to put it back.
The worst of it is that it is happening in newsrooms where groups want stories written specific ways and certain opinions must be silenced at all cost.
This "moral majority" will go far beyond what many fear mongers thought a "religious right" could ever do because they do not inherent limits to the exercise of their authority or violence needed to administer it.
You pretty much are bound for an authoritarian regime because democracy does not survive in silence. Will we have our own Reichstag fire[1], what form would it take?
Pretty sure you can find quite a few examples
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler%27s_veto [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire
I'm generally a pretty big believer in upholding the law and contracts but a lot of people have been put out of work through no fault of their own, and rather unwillingly. The government did that and I think it makes sense for the government to enforce at least a temporary moratorium on evictions so that things can be done in an orderly fashion.
Regardless, if you agree with the article wholeheartedly, maybe stop to consider why you're getting more worked up over destruction of some property than over the decades-long oppression of black, hispanic and other minority communities by the police.
There is nothing in my comment that indicates that I'm looking to engage in a "political slapfight" - that's entirely your deal.
If that's not what you're saying, you should make yourself clear. Because you imply that you don't agree with my perspective, which I think is pretty straightforward and clear - people are more important than property.
Alice buys a status symbol instead of donating to a charity. Bob says "Alice, stop and think about whether you care more about status symbols than charities!" Even if I agree with Bob's implicit condemnation, I can still see how Alice would feel attacked by the wording. Perhaps Bob wants Alice to feel attacked (this could be an attempt to jar Alice into recognizing her own greed), but it does Bob no good to not understand how he might be perceived by Alice. If Bob understands how he will be perceived then he will be able to craft his message in more useful ways -- ways that I would expect to be significantly friendlier on average, but which may sometimes actually be more combative. Ignorance of the perspectives of others does the message writer no good.
I also feel like I agree with your point, which is significantly more empathetic and less realpolitik than mine.
"two main arguments: damaging a person is morally more serious than damaging an object, and psychologically damaging a person is worse than physically damaging an object."
I couldn't help but think "Yes? That's exactly correct. Who would ever think otherwise?"
The position, as stated, is literally false which my argument by absurdity demonstrates. So what I expect, is that people attempt to make true statements, and where the truth value is contextual, then their phrasing also ought to reflect that nuance, ie. damaging a person is typically morally more serious than damaging an object, and psychologically damaging a person is typically worse than physically damaging an object.
There are no qualifiers in the original claim to reflect this nuance, and like it or not, people absolutely do believe unqalified claims until they are challenged on it. Why do you think slogans and propaganda are so effective.
It's a bit like affirming the consequence. If we posit that (physical) violence causes damage, and that a person can be psychologically damaged, it's not a strong argument to work backwards that anything that causes damage is violence.
With that path of logic I could also say: pan-frying food causes it to become cooked, therefore pan-frying is a form of broiling.
We're talking about language so of course we can overload the word "violence" to mean more than exclusively physical acts. But without hard and fast boundaries, it becomes harder to communicate. And this article is talking about a reduction in clarity to a classification.
We can expect to find that for some number of people, their moral and legislative opinions about "violence" are strictly limited to physical acts. You may disagree with those people, and that's fine. But we can't change their opinions just by unilaterally altering the descriptive boundaries of the words they use to express their opinions.
Is the meaning of this statement independent of the symbols used? Can the meaning be found in nature, outside of our minds, or is it an artifact of our minds or language?
There may be discrete math in the noumenon, but I'm not convinced of that. For all I know the noumenon could be dealing in something else entirely, and math might just be a really useful tool we came up with (like classical physics, and probably modern physics). Math is the simplest case you can make, but I don't see a compelling reason to accept it as a given.
Then define "made up".
> For all I know the noumenon could be dealing in something else entirely, and math might just be a really useful tool we came up with (like classical physics, and probably modern physics).
Suppose it is merely a useful tool. This tool then necessarily has a structure that's isomorphic to part of the structure of the noumenon, otherwise it wouldn't actually be a useful tool.
Therefore, whatever structure it models is itself mind independent, as I said. The symbols and formalisms we use are interchangeable, but the structure revealed is not.
That which is not a part of base reality. If base reality were operating using the same rules as Conway's game of life then cells would be real, but gliders would be made up. Since Conway's game of life actually runs in a simulation on some computer or another, cells are also made up.
>Suppose it is merely a useful tool. This tool then necessarily has a structure that's isomorphic to part of the structure of the noumenon, otherwise it wouldn't actually be a useful tool.
Newton's equations are now accepted as an approximation; they are not isomorphic to part of the structure of the noumenon, yet remain useful when firing cannons. Myths and legends have been useful in compelling people to wage wars and donate to charities, yet we do not suppose that this usefulness means they are isomorphic to part of the structure of the noumenon.
Perhaps fermions and bosons correspond very closely to real parts of the noumenon, but they could also be a phenomenon which is emergent on top of something else -- as made up as chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics.
So in your view, anything that is a composite of two or more primitives is by definition "made up".
Therefore, given a standard definition of natural numbers [1], any number except zero is made up?
> Newton's equations are now accepted as an approximation; they are not isomorphic to part of the structure of the noumenon
They are actually, within the domain for which they are valid. General relativity reduces to Newton's equations in the right context.
[1] Nat = Zero | Succ Nat
Yes. If we start calling higher order configurations "real" then we have to contend with all of the potentially imaginable subdivisions of the noumenon and either grant them all realness or find some arbitrary criteria upon which to deny some of those subdivisions the property of realness. If we grant that an insect is a real thing then I get to make up a new word, say, "kokirombo," that describes the front two-thirds of a grasshopper combined with the left half of a ladybug, some air, a pinch of grass, and the rear bumper of a 1998 Ford Taurus. You can come up with some arbitrary standard by which your gerrymandering of reality is allowed and mine is not, but there isn't anything that makes your standard more valid than mine. In practice we typically use usefulness as our standard for categorizing things, but dogmatically claiming this as the criteria for realness leads to absurd positions.
>Therefore, given a standard definition of natural numbers [1], any number except zero is made up?
I still haven't necessarily accepted zero as not being made up, but I think your Succ function implicitly depends on one being defined as well.
>They are actually, within the domain for which they are valid.
Strongly disagree. If you believe in quantum mechanics then you believe that things move probabilistically. I'm obviously arguing that every scale except the smallest is made up, but even if we hypothetically accepted the validity of larger scales then we would have to admit that there is an ever-so-vanishingly-small chance that any given cannonball will spontaneously jump three meters to the left thus deviating from it's Newtonian trajectory. The fact that you could launch cannonballs from now until the heat death of the universe without seeing this effect at a scale you would typically notice is inconsequential, Newton's equations are still merely a useful approximation and they are not isomorphic to the behavior of the noumenon.
Is it stupid to equate police brutality with riots destroying corporate property? Also yes, though maybe arguably less so.
I don't think this is anything new though, I remember being in debates with libertarians 10-15 years ago who argued that tax is violence. If you want to get philosophical about it, anything that carries any intent or threat to harm if there's non-compliance can be violence, but at that point it becomes kind of a useless word.
I have noticed more political opinion pieces posted here recently. Did the scope of this website change in the past few months?
If NYT is allowed then so should be this
The first line of their about page is: "Founded in 1968, Reason is the nation's leading libertarian magazine."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opinion/objectivity-black...
Also, I am not fighting for NYT articles here. I wish that there would be no opinion pieces that are not tech related. This post just seemed particularly egregious because it is an opinion piece from a new outlet that is openly and explicitly biased.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fee.org
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mises.org
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=theatlantic.com
Overall this site's moderation is hostile to free-market views. The goal is "promoting intellectual curiosity", as long as the goal posts are positioned according to the prevailing biases.