"Don't let children work in sweatshops" and "let women vote" were once the "hysterical fringes" of public policy. There's often a benefit to exploring the edges of the Overton window.
You are not exploring the edges of the Overton window when you drown balanced speech. That just creates multimodal extremism.
They were initially fringe. Activism by that initial fringe is what made it mainstream.
Well intended is not always well done and hystery is seldom helping. I remember from my youth(in germany), that work for kids was also forbidden. With some exceptions like delivering advertisement to every door. The result was, that this was a very shitty job, very badly paid (you were replaceble) and the ones illegally working for the bike shed for example, made way more money.
So let me get this straight your hypothesis is that campaign to get kids out of sweatshops were harmfull, and the reason we stopped putting them insweatshops is not public pressure but spontanous mass enlightenment?
Maybe it is your perception of these campaignes as hysterical thats wrong.
My hypothesis is, that just banning kids working in sweatshop is not enough to improve living conditions for those kids, but can in fact worsen them. So I repeat my question, do you have good numbers, that the living conditions actually improved?
Hysteric campaigns from the west often stop exactly there - so the companies can place a label on their product that says free of child labour, but it does not say at all, where those kids are now, but the consumers now feel better.
We've had 26 climate change conferences, the issue was known for 40 years, nobody gave a flying fuck. Some kids blocked traffic in London for 1 day, and suddenly people paid attention.
How are you going to solve Nestle level of indignity and inhumanity?
"Nestlé admits slavery in Thailand while fighting child labour lawsuit in Ivory Coast"
If people were more hysterical, and the HQ of offending corporation burned down occasionally, then Nestle would sort itself out prompto
Yeah, I know. We have the same in germany. The common people now do pay attention to the road blockers and want them all jailed as terrorists. I just do not see, how this will help the cause.
"If people were more hysterical, and the HQ of offending corporation burned down occasionally, then Nestle would sort itself out prompto"
Yes, they would simply tighten up security.
Rage is just rage, it does not solve anything, unless it is channeled constructivly. Lynch mobs just create a state of fear and people driven by fear seldom act smart. We do need the rage to act, but just acting does not improve anything. It is the right act, that can improve.
There was this big rage about poverty and exploitation that lead to socialism. But do you really think, that the socialist states improved anything? I was born into such a state. I do not think so. They were worse for the workers and worse for the environment.
For some it did. In many places socialism was replacing some form of tyrany, foreign tyrany or feudalism, so it was hard to make things worse.
Before the revolutions some of my ancesteors were literally property. They were serfs, with all the fun bits like regular whippings, and living in a wooden hut. They went to nirmal-ish 2nd world life.
The other side of my family had someone who was repressed, i.e. dissapeared.
Today suffragettes are universally praised and noone remmbers that they invented the letter bomb.
I don't advocate violence, but if you want a social movement to suceed, it has to have some teeth and power, either through court, money or civil disobedience.
Before the revolution in russia, there were indeed quite some slaves. After the revolution, there were only slaves. Someone who is locked in and cannot leave the country and has otherwise little freedom to move and act, is a slave by my definition, so for me there was no overall improvement, rather the contrary.
"I don't advocate violence, but if you want a social movement to suceed, it has to have some teeth and power, either through court, money or civil disobedience."
I think it mainly needs to have a clear vision of what to achieve, if it wants to achieve that goal and not just blow of steam and create drama.
So, I am not saying, that blocking roads for example, is always bad, if it creates necessary attention to get a important message across. But what exactly is the message of extinction rebellion? We are all doomed, if we don't stop consuming so much? Because this is the message people are getting.
This is not helping the common people, who struggle daily to feed their family - and if those people have to fear of loosing their job, because they missed work because of a road block, then they certainly will not join the movement.
If you want to convince people, you have to provide solutions.
Green tech is a solution, but activism alone can only bring awareness towards it and not solve anything by its own. Otherwise I would join the road blocks.
This is fictitious argument.
My Grandmother lived in USSR, she had education, a choice of career, could move across thousands of kilometers if she fell like it. She had axess to functional, if basic, medical care.
Her grandmother was property, she was illiterate and had to grind wheat by pulling the mill, untill her legs gave out. She died in agony. She could not leave the place to get medical care, even if she could afford it.
Sure living in USSR wasn't great, but if you think that's equivalent to being forced into slavery, you have left the plane of reasonable discourse.
A house slave in the US was way better of, than a field slave, who were also way better off, than a slave in the mines. Their conditions were not equivalent, but slavery anyway.
"a choice of career"
Only as long as you strictly stayed in political line and had not the bad luck of someone denouncing you falsely. Or the bad luck of being born into the wrong family, etc.
The slaves in the gulag surely had it worse, than the better off ones in Moscow. So yes, the average peasant might have their living standard and freedom raised, but everyone else (except party members) had theirs lowered. Equivalisation of misery, hurey.
But we can probably end it here, because yes, generally not being allowed to leave the country, along with the daily terror of political totalitarian secret police qualifies clearly as a condition of slavery by my definition, to which you disagree in a discourse ending manner "you have left the plane of reasonable discourse."
Socialism is a big tent term.
One one end you have "social democracy" where a market economy exists with some state ownership and taxation is used to ensure a good standard of living for all. This is also referred to a social capitalism or a social market economy. This is the kind of socialism you find in the Nordics and to a lesser extent Canada. Your Bernie Sanders socialism if you will.
On the other end you have "authoritarian state socialism" - the kind of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism you may be thinking of.
Then there's communism in which, in it's final form, there is no state at all.
These are all socialism but each has had very different outcomes.
So to answer your question with a question, to which kind of socialism are you referring? I'd say the former has worked out very well. The middle, not so much. The latter may not even be possible?
Obviously Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and add Pol Pot to that list, among Che Guevara and Castro. Good intentions, but horrible outcome.
"Then there's communism in which, in it's final form, there is no state at all. The latter may not even be possible"
And it is up to debate and depends greatly how you would define "state".
Humans have existed and lived, before formal states were a thing, so it is definitely possible, but apart from that, Humans will always have organisations, to well, organize things. The question is, are these organisations mandatory and formal, or not. And then there are informal hierachies etc. so the main question is, will things improve and how and why, when we get rid of the nation states.
No naive rules of thumb like "well if the public health experts like it then it must be good" or "bigger overton window = better" will ever come close to being a viable replacement for critical thinking on any specific policy matter. If the extreme fringes can't convert people to their cause then is their cause really that worthy?
Eugenics is fringe now. It wasn't in the early 1900s. The point is that "no megaphones for the fringe" can also be a bad thing.
The fact that the fringe was unable to convert the broader public is why the overwhelming majority of eugenics policy was unilaterally adopted by institutions (government or otherwise) vs being legislated by politicians and that's because people didn't really want it en-masse.
"Official policy of 30+ states and upheld by SCOTUS" doesn't fit mine.
That official policy of what you speak is just that, unilateral policy by various government institutions (usually prison systems and public health institutions). Most states didn't manage to get it through the legislature in any meaningful capacity because it was not something the masses cared for and therefore not something that a politician could earn votes peddling. It was as endorsed by the masses as some DOT policy about pothole patching would be.
Eugenics got a bad reputation because of a certain moustachioed leader in Germany.
E.g. there are essentially no children with downs born in Denmark due to sex selective abortions.