Thought Examinations, Indoctrination Meetings and Struggle Sessions
falltide.com
falltide.com
Psychologist Robert Jay Lifton wrote an extremely impressive and surprisingly sober book "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism" on the torture methods used in mainland China. He interviewed victims that had just escaped to Hong Kong (then still a safe harbor for civic freedom).
This book has much more detailed, personal impressions of what "struggle" means. Struggle in torture prisons is a sequence of absolute physical and psychological destruction, followed by the attempt of the tortured to break and destroy their old selves, to denounce what they identified with, loved and fought for, to try and re-model themselves into model citizens. Only, what exactly the party demands model citizens to be is often left vague.
I was left with the impression that the extreme violence exerted on individuals cannot be left out of any high-level analysis of what totalitarianism does.
No, instead they torture the tiger until it becomes a zookeeper itself.
The totalitarian brainwashing definitely serves ideology, but the technique is not unique to any particular ideology, any more than the concept of a loop is unique to any programming language. Pre-communist imperial Chinese society was pretty totalitarian in its own right. Over a longer historical scale Chinese history abounds with examples of hyper-authoritarianism, eg printing the emperor's full name in a dictionary was grounds for the execution of your entire family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_taboo
One analogy that keeps coming to mind is the religious rapture of a medieval or early modern crowd as a witch is burned, an act they sincerely believe is good and necessary to save the soul of the person they're burning.
> “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
- C. S. Lewis
Except for what's going on in the Uyghur internment camps. Which does look a lot more like what went on back in the day. And (in the CPC's view) it's for their own good, no less.
Which means it was mostly unplanned mass hysteria...
Classic Maoism is NOT unplanned. It's is all about taking advantage of the dumbest members of society to enforce arbitrary dogma that is pushed by the state.
The tyrannies going on right now are more insidious, because people can be more insidiously cajoled into compliance and more surgically atomised from each other, and out of their moral frameworks.
It's when a hot revolution happens that these highly visual acts of repression happen, as it's a feature not a bug to signal who's boss now. But if everyone already perceived and agreed to who's boss and rendered all their power to the service of the new regime, and there was no need to appease the new ruler's revenge thirst, then all of these struggle sessions would have been wasteful.
Performative struggle sessions are to be expected if there's an active resistance.
They are many things at that point. A source of inspiration, a lesson in how to maybe not be locked up yourself. A target for rebels to rescue (that would be embarrassing).
Getting more extreme doesn't fix it... if you simply execute them, then they're martyrs. It can't be fixed later (like with prisoners, potentially). You don't get to un-martyr them.
The question is how you erase them from existence itself. And the totalitarians have started to figure out the solution to that problem in the 21st century, I fear.
The reaction of the correctional officers to finding a feather in the inmate's cell is particularly poignant. The TV can stay, but any means of creative expression has to go.
Sarcasm of history. Try to survive with that motto in today's China.
It's weird that the side I want to be on tries very hard to stop being a single unified "side".
I'm not exactly sure I catch your meaning, but assuming I do: the self-defeating aspect of many supporters of individual liberty is that they don't recognize how to wield collective action because the psychological tools effective movements employ smell to them of coercion.
It's a similar problem to how democracies and anarchies historically get steamrolled by dictatorships and autocracies because those systems are simpler to use for organization and deployment of vast amounts of violent power.
Is that actually true? Probably not in the 20th century.
But earlier than that, European history in particular is rife with small communities and larger republics or representative democracies eventually getting devoured by the military ambitions of the few and the many who follow them as divine leaders or power-mongers.
My suspicion is that the more open and egalitarian and a democracy is, the more resistant it is to corruption, and the more faith the people have in it. The US was denying like half of our population (women) voting rights until like 1920, so it is hard spot trends in such a short time scale. I mean it is probably just a coincidence of history and geography that we’ve been absurdly successful since then.
Nowadays I’d be more worried about the trajectory:
Democracy->Oligarchy->Populist backlash/Mob rule->Tyranny.
Although I guess that’s really tied to concerns about the long term trajectory for the US (hey at least it isn’t tied to ancient concerns about the trajectory of Athens or whatever).
His view is not that systems collapse due to some immediately apparent failing, but rather due to an excess of the strength of any given system. In democracy that strength, and excess, is freedom. So, for instance, he observes how freedom trends towards a disdain for authority which, taken to its natural extreme, tends to lead to chaos and lawlessness. Another is class warfare. In democracy, the political class is largely comprised of the most effective of the "drones." They will make their way to power, actively looting the wealth of the nation; spreading a taste to the masses for support, while keeping the lion's share for themselves. But of course the wealth of the "nation" is, in reality, the wealth of other people.
Those negatively affected tended to start pushing back. They, in turn, are demonized by the drones in power and next thing you know, there's class conflict. And quite an ironic one at that, as it's led by rich politicians pretending to be part of the masses. Ultimately the end of democracy, and transition to tyranny, comes about when the masses manage to elevate somebody they see as genuinely representing them. And this person is first struck down by the powers that be for fear of what he might to do them, only to come back ever more empowered - and eventually seizing on all of power, something actively cheered on by his supporters.
----
Reading Plato is largely what made me realize that "history repeats itself" is not some abstract concept where things kind of repeat the same patterns if you squint hard enough. It is completely literal. We keep repeating the exact same things, over and over again, with little more than technology providing a change of scenery. My description above sounds like I'm retrofitting current events into Plato. I am not. Current events just fit his text in a completely uncanny fashion.
[1] - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55201/55201-h/55201-h.htm#Bo...
By the way, as a natural born quibbler, I upvoted your post.
If we want to involve fire, I’m not sure… freer, more open societies seem to result in better productivity. Maybe there’s some analogy about burning a workshop to have a big bonfire.
The system basically had an "In case of populism, break glass" feature built in and the nazis figured out how to pick up the hammer. Not to imply they didn't enjoy some popular support from the German people prior, but once they had Hitler clicked in and able to dissolve the Reichstag, that support was irrelevant.
The U.S. isn't an old nation, but it's the oldest continuous democracy. It was meticulously designed to avoid such issues, but I wouldn't say it's immune either.
It's not true today because of how OP the US is in geography+natural resources, but also from alliances like NATO. Without NATO European states would be getting flipped one by one (as seen by what happens to states not in it). Rome also benefitted from her geography immensely. Same for the Swiss.
Isolated democracies are really vulnerable to outside manipulation. Philip II was famous for buying off all the Athenian actors+politicians who love to hang out with his courtiers. The story of Demosthenes is a Cassandra-style tragedy.
Federalism was a giant patch that massively increased the robustness of democracies/republics.
it's like an allergic reaction,
it's as if I went to war against my cells for being 'legacy' and 'old culture'
we may need to delve deep into types and causes of cancer
We are talking over a pile of evidence pointing that this doesn't always happen. But it's quite a jump to conclude that it can't ever happen.
If you are an organism/individual/ensouled being, then a society can be as well.
> Who gets to steer this organism?
It suggests the importance of a central nervous system (e.g. government).
China may be headed that way again, with Xi's one man rule and personality cult.
I think it's clear that the references to 1984 are being used as explanation, not evidence.
In Homage to Catalonia, Eric (George Orwell) writes about how the Communists supported Franco: “The general swing to the Right [occurred] when the USSR began to supply arms to the [fascist] Government and power began to pass from the Anarchists to the Communists.” (He was fighting with the Anarchists, and the Communists were another separate group). He wrote that the Russian terms were ‘prevent revolution or you [the Fascists] get no arms’.
You could say he fought against Franco and Fascism. You might say he was fighting for the individual freedom of working class people - he was fighting with 100% volunteers as equals, so top-down control hardly existed. “the bullying and abuse that go on in a normal army would never have been tolerated for a moment”, “you often had to argue for 5 minutes before you could get an order obeyed, [which] appalled and infuriated me. I had British Army ideas”. “As a militiaman one was a soldier against Franco, but one was also a pawn in an enourmous struggle that was being fought between two political theories”.
Personally I identify with his fight against authoritarianism, and I don’t identify with the left, nor the right. In New Zealand [I suspect] we have a bit more political nuance because we don’t have a two party system.
That didn't last for that long. You might want to read his memoirs on the subject.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/george-orwell-homage...
He wrote about the front: “Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it.”
Are you talking about the rise of the Popular Army?
For the time being, however, the militias were holding the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear, and this fact had to be advertised as little as possible. Drafts of militia returning to the front were no longer marched through the streets with drums beating and flags flying. [] The fact that the militia troops were also, on paper, Popular Army troops, was skilfully used in the Press propaganda. Any credit that happened to be going was automatically handed to the Popular Army, while all blame was reserved for the militias.
[] When I first reached Barcelona I had thought it a town where class distinctions and great differences of wealth hardly existed. [] ‘Smart’ clothes were an abnormality, nobody cringed or took tips, waiters and flower-women and bootblacks looked you in the eye and called you ‘comrade’. I had not grasped that this was mainly a mixture of hope and camouflage. [] Now things were returning to normal. The smart restaurants and hotels were full of rich people wolfing expensive meals, while for the working-class population food-prices had jumped enormously without any corresponding rise in wages. Apart from the expensiveness of everything, there were recurrent shortages of this and that, which, of course, always hit the poor rather than the rich. The restaurants and hotels seemed to have little difficulty in getting whatever they wanted, but in the working-class quarters the queues for bread, olive oil, and other necessaries were hundreds of yards long. Previously in Barcelona I had been struck by the absence of beggars; now there were quantities of them. [] The workers’ patrols had been ordered to dissolve and the pre-war police forces were back on the streets. One result of this was that the cabaret show and high-class brothels, many of which had been closed by the workers’ patrols, had promptly reopened.
One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy ‘proving’ that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the ‘mystique’ of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all. And it was here that those few months in the militia were valuable to me. For the Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. The effect was to make my desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had been before. Partly, perhaps, this was due to the good luck of being among Spaniards, who, with their innate decency and their ever-present Anarchist tinge, would make even the opening stages of Socialism tolerable if they had the chance.
It's popular among people who want to co-opt 1984 as an anti-communist work, to represent Orwell as having been a communist who later saw the light of capitalism, but the truth is that Orwell was a communist until the day he died. 1984 was a criticism of totalitarianism, not communism, and while 1984 focused primarily on how Stalinism had perverted the communist movement, Orwell was very conscious of the fact that many of the symptoms of the disease of totalitarianism under communism, could equally occur under the totalitarian capitalism. But again, I think it's more relevant to see Orwell as an anarchist than as a communist.
Hence Newspeak.
Orwell, 1941: "One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten."
Hence the scene in "1984" where the orator, upon being handed an update notice, switches mid-speech from supporting Eastasia to Westasia. (Or was it the other way round?)
Orwell is worth reading beyond "1984" because he punctures the delusions of all the sides without descending into nihilism. We need more of that today.
Thanks for the correction. I do get that impression from his writings. In this case I was using the word descriptively and any accusation is not intended. He was a "propagandist" as much as anyone who "propagates" messages.
It presents a lot of accounts of how Mao's followers behaved; but those accounts aren't linked to Mao's thoughts or motivations, or really to anyone's motivations.
So why? I'm not illuminated.
So now we see. Now what? Make a buddy. Everything starts with the buddy system. Make a friend and ally in a state under authoritarian control, provide them with the support personally, monetarily, and help them evacuate when necessary.
https://quillette.com/2023/04/13/a-public-servant-stood-up-f...
They exploit the agreeableness of the people in the sessions, and whenever I hear about them, I am reminded of the "blue eyes / brown eyes" experiment I studied at an alternative high school, where we were all oddly innoculated to this nonsense because it was effectively tested on us.
Also, re: drag policing, obviously wrong-headed as it is, there seems to be a lot of popular backlash against cultural indoctrination by schools. Schools should endeavour to soberly, objectively teach children about the world, and leave defining right and wrong to parents as much as possible. As much as we may disagree, you should be entitled to raise your child with a racist or homophobic worldview. Trying to correct for this is not the government's job. It's that pesky American individualism again.
They are certainly trying, but the sober, objective reality is "Some people dress using gender signifiers counter to the traditional ones for myriad reasons, and almost all of those reasons are harmless."
The political friction is coming from the people who think that lesson is, somehow, already too politically charged to share.
> you should be entitled to raise your child with a racist or homophobic worldview. Trying to correct for this is not the government's job.
That's very thorny "we live in a society" territory because in point of fact, the entire underpinning of public education as an institution is that a democratic society requires a populace educated in the practice of citizenry because they have the collective responsibility / burden / obligation to be citizens. "I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength. 1. that of general education to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom..." [Thomas Jefferson]. That obligation ties into the relatively-new concept of "nations" (as opposed to previous structures of clan / tribe / subject of a king / etc.). And in that context: no, it would not be okay for the public education system to just teach racism, because racism is caustic to the national constitution.
When this became apparent during the mid-20th century, the racists in some states temporarily suspended public education. As a useful rule of thumb: always be deeply suspect of those who would claim that topic X is not appropriate to teach at all or, when faced with choosing conservation of what they know vs. allowing public education, would torch the education.
The lessons that are too politically charged are unsurprisingly those that have the least evidential support - namely those rooted in social constructionism. Even the concept of "gender" isn't well-defined enough to teach a child, given that even experts can't ELI5 "what is a woman?". Gender itself is not a plain fact about objective reality (like sex is).
> ...judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom
> ...is caustic to the national constitution
These two things are actually not contradictory. Being racist doesn't stop you from judging what will secure or endanger your freedom, you may just reach different conclusions than other people. This should be OK in a free and pluralistic society.
Kids crossdress in kindergarten; I don't know at what age discussion of why one does or does not do that is appropriate, but I can tell you that absent some rules it's just yet another fun game they play.
> Gender itself is not a plain fact about objective reality (like sex is).
That implies that when a boy picks up the feather boa in kindergarten the appropriate response from public education is to do nothing, right?
> Being racist doesn't stop you from judging what will secure or endanger your freedom, you may just reach different conclusions than other people.
Ah, but here's the rub: we had a whole fight about that topic specifically and decided to kick it out because of the damage we observed it doing. Separate but equal and its ilk didn't work; we have a cultural narrative of "all men created equal" (for temporally-expanding definitions of 'men') that is incompatible with racism.
On that issue, the nation (as a cultural construct) is pretty decided.
There are plenty who would love to reopen the question. The public education system is not obligated to give them a line-item on the SOLs. They can and will try to seize one, of course, via the democratic process (as is their right, and those who disagree with them must be aware that this is their intended design).
> That implies that when a boy picks up the feather boa in kindergarten the appropriate response from public education is to do nothing, right?
Yes, exactly that - nothing. Just like when a kid colours their face with marker, or puts their clothes on backwards, or any other strange thing that kids do when they are developing. The thing not to do is call special attention to this particular play behaviour because it's related to "gender". And if other kids tease or socially reject said boy for picking up the feather boa, then the appropriate thing to do is also nothing. This is how social norms are formed. Interfering with this process is not for educators to do.
> we had a whole fight about that topic
> "all men created equal" (for temporally-expanding definitions of 'men')
> they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness
But importantly, continually diminishing definitions of "liberty". All we've done for the last century+ is expand the obligations of the private person/business owner to the public and the state. Segregation is certainly abhorrent for the government to practice, but a private person should be able to choose whom they serve by whatever criteria they see fit. This is the definition of liberty that the nation (as a cultural construct) was founded on.
I don't know what to tell you on this topic other than "You missed the lessons of the 1960s." The soul of the racist was bared in the fight and it was found to contain nothing but fear and traditional power-lust. Their privilege of calling the shots on this topic was stripped with cause... Not by power-mongers or politicians, but by the people, by a generation coming to feel nauseated at the kind of naked belief in racial superiority that enabled the sins of the past.
The ERA and related Acts were fairly unprecedented, but passed for a very good reason.
And you're right; they are a curtailment of liberty. Most laws are, but we're a country of 330 million people; nobody expects the same laissez-faire approach that worked for a country of 100,000 to work today, right? Do you also rail against the right denied to pilots to buzz a plane twenty feet over your house, or the right denied to motorists to drive on the left side of a divided public road? From whence, then, the umbrage at the notion that a person cannot be fired based on some made-up drop-of-blood rules, or tossed out of a restaurant for having skin darker than the table they're sitting at?
I don't disagree the country was founded on the notion that racism was acceptable. I'd hope it'd be self-evident why we are doing the work to jettison that cornerstone. For what liberty can a man truly have when even the provision of water and bathrooms are arrayed against him for something as irrelevant as the color of his skin?
> nobody expects the same laissez-faire approach that worked for a country of 100,000 to work today, right?
This argument supposes that the only factor in liberty is scale. It seems to be far more complicated than that - there are far smaller and far more collectivist nations.
The point is that you can jettison racism (or any other kind of inequality) while leaving the racists alone. All people need to be is equal under law.
> For what liberty can a man truly have
Being free doesn't mean you're entitled to relationships (personal or professional) with others. It means you're free to navigate these without interference. Just like every other free person, you are born with nothing. Everything that you obtain you do so by negotiating with people.
I think I may need firmer definitions of terms to accept this assertion. Because unless I've misunderstood your meaning, it sounds like this is unworkable. Every law is a curtailment of an otherwise-existant naturally occurring right to do something; the law says, in the universe of all possible things you could do, here is something you must do or must not do, yes?
But for the law, I could keep all my money, but we pay taxes.
But for the law, I could steal all my neighbor's stuff, but we have property rights.
Etc.
Social contract theory (a false story of how we got to governments and civilization, but a useful fairy-tale for thought-framing purposes) tells the story of the rights / protections tradeoff, but the first step of the tradeoff is we give up some liberties. So clearly, individual liberty isn't the most important concern; if it were, we'd have solved the problem by never forming a government.
Rather, the Constitution appears to lay out several overlapping goals alongside "secur[ing] the blessings of liberty." "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." The blessings of liberty are important, but so is the general welfare, domestic tranquility, common defense, and a more perfect Union, etc.
> The point is that you can jettison racism (or any other kind of inequality) while leaving the racists alone. All people need to be is equal under law.
Again, we may be talking past each other if we're operating from different definitions, but how do you do that? The racist wants to operate a business where black people need not apply, nor may they sit at the table. How on Earth do we respect their liberty while preserving the right of every citizen to operate as a citizen? If I understand your meaning correctly, I predict your answer is "one cannot," in which case I direct us back to the Constitution and the note that there are other sometimes-competing objectives alongside the preservation of liberty (it's hard, we discovered, to preserve tranquility or have a more perfect union if a huge chunk of our population just gets to pretend some of our citizens aren't equally citizens in private affairs, not only before the eyes of the law. Hard to the point of unworkable. Violence-in-the-streets unworkable).
> Being free doesn't mean you're entitled to relationships (personal or professional) with others
Quite true. But it is entirely possible that being a citizen obligates such relationships, in specific contexts, at specific times, and there's a compelling reason to force such relationships (under the very narrowly-tailored privilege of "Owning one's own business," for example).
> Just like every other free person, you are born with nothing
Goodness is that ever untrue. For example, you're born with your skin, whether or not it will provide you some net advantages or disadvantages because of the complex sociopolitics that already existed before you came into the world. You don't get to choose it; it's just your birthright.
> 4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.
From here it follows that the only legitimate infringement of liberty is in direct defence of existential threats to liberty itself. Therefore taxing people to pay for police, courts, rights of way, etc. is fine. Even drafting people into the military to defend from an attack is acceptable despite the enormous infringement of liberty that being conscripted represents. Liberty is a right to be free from outside interference, not entitled to public services.
The only clause you listed that may be interpreted more broadly is "the general Welfare". The re-interpretation of this clause in 1936 gave the government much more broad authority to tax and spend. It was previously interpreted very narrowly by the supreme court. This is the exact ruling (US v. Butler) that opened the door to the erosion of fundamental liberty, and it's one I would like to see reversed. The vagueness of "general welfare" has been the subject of debate since the 1800s.
> How on Earth do we respect their liberty while preserving the right of every citizen to operate as a citizen?
Simply by acknowledging that your rights to "operate as a citizen" are nowhere enumerated, and don't generally include dining in private establishments anymore than they do dining in private homes. People should be allowed to choose who goes into their business on their property just like they choose who goes into their house. The civil rights movement had legitimate grievances that needed to be addressed. Segregation in publicly funded institutions (so far as these are themselves legitimate) is unacceptable. We actually have never seen a world with fully integrated public schools, universities, police forces, military, etc, but no opinion on private business. I'm not nearly as sure as you are that it would be a markedly more violent one.
> But it is entirely possible that being a citizen obligates such relationships
It is exactly implicit obligation that I'm against. Obligation should as much as possible be explicit. You're no more entitled to get laid than to eat or work at a restaurant, but in only one of these cases do we recognize the importance of explicit consent.
> Goodness is that ever untrue
It's quite true. Mothers don't (usually) abandon newborns because they have a strong instinct to care for them. Newborns are very endearing. This is the very first relationship negotiation you do - you convince your parent(s) to love you. Everything our parents give us follows from that. We are born with no possessions.
> your skin, whether or not it will provide you some net advantages
Right, but these advantages and disadvantages are your own to exploit/bear just as much as your skin is.
That's an interesting hypothesis but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. A private establishment isn't a home (indeed, there are often zoning laws against conflating the two, lest business interfere with neighbors' domestic tranquility).
Owning a business, including the protections under the law and the separation of the fate of the business from the fate of its owner, are protections granted under the law that are privileges, not rights. They are contingent and revokable. The same governing authority that lets government demand you not dump toxic waste in the river behind your factory lets it demand you serve every citizen who can afford your fees and has not transgressed in a non-protected way against you.
I agree that in the '30s we reinterpreted the general welfare. I like to tell people we're basically on US version 3 now. To our credit, we pulled this one off without the bloody civil war it took to hammer out version 2. But like the change to version 2, it was also quite necessary; we'd tried ad-hoc'ing a functional nation of millions together using massive individual liberty and we got ourselves a Great Depression for our troubles.
> Segregation in publicly funded institutions (so far as these are themselves legitimate) is unacceptable
The bus boycott wasn't about that. Nor were the lunch-table sit-ins. These were all parts of the civil rights movement.
> I'm not nearly as sure as you are that it would be a markedly more violent one.
As I said, you have more to learn from a closer study of the history of the civil rights movement. It was never about mere government equality; this is a government of the people, and those who fought for equality rightly recognized they would never get it without the hearts and minds of the people changing (something that, history has since shown, is a slow process but one that can be accomplished modulo outliers).
> Any obligation or consent should always be explicit.
Oh, it's quite explicit. Form a corporation, and here's the whole set of federal, state, and local laws you're now obligated to comply with. It's quite a bit more than the private citizen complies with.
... and you've completely dodged the fact that though we are born naked, the skin we're born into matters in this society, still. While that is still true, we impose obligations on our citizenry to make it less so specifically because we believe people should have the freedom to do that which injures no-one else... Such as share a lunch counter with a stranger in a restaurant that serves the public.
A private unincorporated business isn't meaningfully separated from its owner, financially or otherwise.
> The same governing authority that lets government demand you not dump toxic waste in the river
But they derive this authority from the defence of the commons, which is fundamental to liberty. The whole point is that "we the people" agree to be governed within these constraints. From where does government derive the authority to make demands on whom you serve?
> hearts and minds of the people changing
Forcing people to change their hearts and minds is abhorrent and divisive. I wouldn't say it has been all positive so far as outcomes are concerned either.
> Form a corporation, and here's the whole set of federal, state, and local laws you're now obligated to comply with
And these laws are enabled by the very same overreaching interpretation of "the general Welfare" that I addressed in my previous comment.
> and you've completely dodged the fact
Sorry, I've included it in an edit to the parent.
> share a lunch counter with a stranger in a restaurant that serves the public.
The person being injured is the owner of the restaurant that can no longer exercise their liberty to choose whom they serve. The exercise of this liberty harms no one else.
... from we the people. Same legal process that passed the other laws those years and nothing in the Constitution countermanding it.
For what it's worth, you will find that most of the equality laws you're concerned about don't apply to private unincorporated businesses. They do, generally, scale with the impact of corporation has on the society around it.
> The exercise of this liberty harms no one else.
I assume the "else" here is necessary because it clearly harms the person who is being denied the ability to buy a meal purely because they have the wrong skin tone for this town.
Would you agree that is a harm and if so, by what right do we stand by and let that harm perpetuate?
(Note: "they could just go somewhere else" is a non-starter because we lived through that, and a separate but equal was not good enough).
> they could just go somewhere else
This is exactly how voluntary association works. As I've said before, we've not lived through desegregated public life and no opinion on private business. I suspect the actual outcomes would vary widely by location, which is the point of limited central authority. Who are you to tell someone hundreds of miles away how to live?
Do you see how easy it would be for an organized group to use a philosophy like that to exterminate another group? Imagine we only offered service to a certain group of people in a certain area. "Yes, you have freedom to trade and do business and have your needs met, but only in this five-block radius."
Now let's, for the sake of argument, call that radius a "ghetto."
Actually, we don't even have to invoke that grim specter. This is America we're taking about.
... We can call it a "reservation."
Actual free societies are made of better than this. This story is no story of liberty.
Those who do leave reservations however, especially those who do so in pursuit of education and not drugs, tend to fare far better than those who stay. This is hardly surprising given that remote areas that find their populations too dense to be supported by their economies tend to do poorly. You don't need to be on a reservation to have awful outcomes in remote areas. The (few) reservations that manage to produce something valuable and govern the proceeds well are hardly grim.
People can just leave. Many people do, and many of those succeed. Our free society produces hierarchies of competence (not privilege)[1]. They're still hierarchies however, with winners in opulence and impoverished losers. More than there being nothing wrong with this, it seems to be a completely unavoidable law of nature. I'd say that's a good enough reason to embrace it.
1. The vast majority of intergenerational wealth transfers fail. People with rich grandparents tend to be middle class. It's (very) hard to raise competent people in a privileged environment, and incompetent people tend to fail in our society.
Oh dear. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you've been sold a bill of goods.
On the social mobility index, United States ranks 27 of the 80 some odd countries index. Poor kids in Estonia are more likely to turn out better than poor kids in the US.
And intergenerational wealth transfer is only one way that privilege transfers. Opportunity and connections are the much larger effects. Seriously, do the research on how many poor people move up a social ladder over their lifetime versus how many wealthy people stay in their ladder. You will be disappointed in the story in America.
And there's a reason the reservations are in remote places. And if you don't find the idea "all they have to do to move up in society is leave the reservation" to be viscerally revolting, you don't understand how a nation slaughters another bation and I think your comprehension of these problems may be too far away from me to reach.
Again, I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I believed in the dream too when I was younger.
This is exactly what I'd expect in a free country. Opportunity is abound, you just have to take the appropriate actions to seize it. Conversely, if you're born into a domestic culture that sets you up for (economic) failure, it's no one's job to intervene. People can of course raise their children in any manner they see fit.
> be viscerally revolting
I'm not sure why I would. Hunting and fishing is simply no longer a sustainable economic model. I did say "that they came about as a result of a long and brutal process of conquest". But all the people who perpetrated it and suffered it are dead. The question is how to make the best of reality today. Living on a reservation in modern comfort (house, A/C, refrigeration, heating, etc.) is just not economically viable, regardless of how one may feel about it.
It sounds more like you're saying "you just have to luck into having parents who understand this."
> Conversely, if you're born into a domestic culture that sets you up for (economic) failure, it's no one's job to intervene.
That's terribly cruel and not a way one should structure a just society. And, indeed, bringing the conversation around to the beginning: this is among the reasons we have a public education system in the first place, to attempt to minimize that inherent unfairness. Because sometimes (as you've now observed) parents are wrong, and we have a valid civic interest in a collective process to ameliorate that error and, in so doing, create a citizenry more prepared to inherit the burden of co-governing the country (and, eventually, governing it exclusively when their parents are retired and gone).
"What do we do when the parents are just plug-stupid and everyone knows it" is one of the oldest questions in centralized education, and we have multiple overlapping approaches to addressing it (including, of course, the right to pull a child out of school and shoulder the burden of educating them oneself, for good or ill).
Your comments regarding reservation life express an incredible ignorance of both the history of reservations and their modern-day structure, and I'm completely disinterested in further conversation with you on that topic. Suffice to say you just don't get it. It would be a useful avenue of study for you to reframe your overall attitude on the inherent virtue of the system you were born (lucked) into.
This whole premise implies that you know what's "right" and "wrong" better than other people. I find it fundamentally abhorrent to impose by beliefs on others in this manner. That is the whole point. Economic success/mobility is only one outcome of many that a child rearing strategy can optimize for. What gives any of us the right to override parental decision making to optimize for this outcome above others?
Regarding reservations, I've not seen any factual refutation of any of the points that I made - namely that most of them are fundamentally economically unsustainable no matter how we feel about it. My life experience supports my worldview - I was born into poverty to immigrants who value education and achievement, and am now quite comfortable. This happens all the time.
To be clear, the authority to remove a child from parental care is exercised with extreme reservation and would be inappropriate to do so merely if parents are teaching their children "wrong" things. But in the larger question of teaching: my goodness, how do you think we teach people to be good citizens without teaching them at least something, as a society, about "right" and "wrong?" It's nonsense to imagine that's a parent-only responsibility. Of course it's a shared responsibility between parents and everyone else in the child's environment; kids aren't raised in a vacuum, and the position "schools have no business teaching right from wrong" is unimplementable nonsense (mostly dreamt up by people who wish they didn't have to be part of a larger society). Rather, it is parents who have the responsibility to be involved in the educational process so that their children are taught what the parents believe is right (but of course, that introduces the challenge that not everyone will agree, so it's good we have processes in place for that).
> My life experience supports my worldview
Yes, I have no doubt that the fact you got extremely lucky supports your worldview. That tends to be how that works. The larger trends look more like https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/13/americ...
> we teach people to be good citizens
There is no one way of being a good citizen. This isn't the PRC.
> something, as a society, about "right" and "wrong?"
The whole point is that in a truly free society, this "something" is the strict minimum required for peaceful coexistence. Basically true crime and property law. These are morally justified in defence of fundamental liberty. Everything else should be out of the scope of government/society's authority. Telling people how to raise their children or what to think is absolutely not justified in defence of fundamental liberty, so it's out.
If you want to raise your kid in a forest school, who is anyone else to stop you? What is the source of moral authority that gives strangers more control over child rearing than parents?
If you want to sell your kidney to fuel your heroin habit or feed your children, who is anyone else to tell you that you can't? What is their source of moral authority over your kidney that supersedes your own?
> parents who have the responsibility to be involved in the educational process
This seems to be a common thought, but where is it codified? Who imposes this responsibility on parents? What is their source of moral authority to do so?
> The larger trends look more like
Your article doesn't address my point about domestic culture.
I don't recall claiming there was one way. There's generally one curriculum, of course, for public school (at least since we decided standardization was valuable), but the standard for social studies tends to include things like teaching critical thinking and how to evaluate multiple competing viewpoints. In my high school, we studied Hobbes, Locke, Marx, Adam Smith, and several other authors whose names currently escape me.
> Telling people how to raise their children or what to think is absolutely not justified in defence of fundamental liberty, so it's out.
Again, the government can and will tell you you may not set your child on fire or starve them to death and will deprive you the liberty of raising them if you try. This is, of course, in defense of their fundamental liberty. Sometimes fundamental liberties clash.
Pure liberty doesn't exist in a society as large as ours. It is always walking hand-in-hand with responsibility.
> What is the source of moral authority that gives strangers more control over child rearing than parents?
Speaking in the broadest sense? The fact those children will be partially deciding the fate of those strangers in the future because they'll vote. This is real "we live in a society" stuff and I think you can't see it because your moral code may be incompatible with living in the kind of collective post-1930s society that has adapted to avoid Great Depressions and the like. This is why even if you raise your kid "in a forest school," as you said, the state will require you to teach some minimum standards and you can be stripped of homeschooling rights for failure to comply (varies from state-to-state).
> If you want to sell your kidney to fuel your heroin habit or feed your children, who is anyone else to tell you that you can't? What is their source of moral authority over your kidney that supersedes your own?
Are you postulating absurdities now? You know this society does not allow you to sell your kidney, right? The state has a vested interest in not allowing for the creation of a market for kidneys in a similar sense to its vested interest in not allowing for the creation of a market for child pornography. Is this an issue you want to discuss? Take it up with someone else.
> This seems to be a common thought, but where is it codified? Who imposes this responsibility on parents? What is their source of moral authority to do so?
State laws, each state, we live in a society and the state has obligations to make good citizens of the children of the state. You can have all these qualities in a free society without it being the PRC; perhaps you didn't know, but while the PRC happened a continent away, the US had a "Great Society" project and a lot of modern philosophy of governance came of it (along with some nifty things like social security, an arts endowment, some pretty neat civil engineering projects...).
I don't know what point regarding domestic culture you mean, so I'm going to merely re-assert that (a) you have a great plan for if parents are good at their jobs but no idea what to do for people who's parents didn't get with the program like yours did (and those are people who, in a fair society, deserve a chance just like you do) and (b) the numbers show that the average case looks a lot more like "they aren't with the program" than your experience.
I appreciate this discussion. It helps me test my priors to have someone from such a radically different worldview call them into question.
> the freedom to do everything which injures no one else
You're always using examples that obviously injure other people. They're a bit nonsensical.
> collective post-1930s society
Yes exactly, we abandoned deontological liberty for utilitarian collectivism. We decided that outcomes were more important than principles. The whole nation was founded on the principle that individual liberty was the primary concern. Being forced to cooperate with someone else's version of "the good", whether that someone was elected or not, is morally unacceptable to many people.
If we're pursuing utilitarianism, then we'll end up in the PRC. Lots of their policies are quite effective from an outcomes perspective. If you embrace collectivism, where and by what principle do you draw the line around individual autonomy? Is it just anything the majority agrees on goes?
I keep asking you about moral justification and you respond with legal obligation. These are not the same thing. How do you determine if a law is moral or not? I've outlined some principles by which to do so, how do you do it?
> in a fair society
I guess we have different definitions of "fair" - would you care to provide your definition? This is kind of my point: different people have different definitions of "good" and "fair" and "just". Given there is no higher authority to appeal to, it's unreasonable to impose your definition on others. Your definition isn't inherently any more correct than mine. The only difference is your comfort in imposing.
Did you know that immediately after the Revolutionary War ended, and among the reasons the Continental Army never actually disbanded (as was the original plan), it was used to put down a tax revolt among Pennsylvanians who weren't interested in paying the new alcohol tax?
We have always forced people to cooperate with someone else's version of "the good." From their point of view, the distillers believed the federal government and PA state didn't have the right to levy that tax. They learned otherwise. Similarly, about a hundred years later, a whole half of the country would try to take their ball and go home on the entire constituted union. They learned otherwise. The coercion you imagine only came about in the '30s was always there; it's probably necessary to maintain the empire. We do, however, get a vote on what we're coerced into (and we did in the '30s also).
The moral justification for collective organization of the country is the old do not die starving cold deaths, children don't go hungry, and we're all better off if some are forced to put more in the till than they would of their own volition (including, ultimately, them; the ultra-wealthy also drive on public roads and use public sewage, and their air is just as clean as their neighbor's because the EPA told them they had to put a scrubber on their factory's smokestack).
Here's a secret about the US and the PRC... We and the PRC have the same goal. We're empires of over a hundred million souls and we instituted governments to provide for the common welfare. We have quite different ideas of how to get there, but ultimately? More similarity than difference and we basically always have, ever since we stole a country from a king. Anyone who tries to calve off a chunk of the country we stole to run as their own isolated compound (like our forefathers did) learns pretty quickly that their freedoms end not at the beginning of their neighbor's nose, but when the outflow from their pockets to the tax coffers dries up. It's always been that way, ever since Washington rode up in front of a hundred men to tell some whisky distillers what the score was now that the king was gone.
As technology has evolved, it's become practically more possible to centralize the federation, and we've generally found that to be useful to improve the common welfare (everything from the interstate rail line network to EPA rules).
> Given there is no higher authority to appeal to
... which is why I fall back to the law. It's the ultimate Chesterton's Fence... if someone wants to tear down, for example, the Department of Education, it's incumbent upon them to explain how our ancestors erred and how we improve the common welfare and strengthen the union by turning back the clock. Because we instituted the thing to solve a problem... Why does that problem not come back if we reverse the old decision?
(Incidentally, if you want to argue the counter on things like this, that's my recommendation to you: talk about how modern society differs so much from the society of the '30s that such-and-such government function is no longer needed because it's redundant or irrelevant. You're trying to roll back a clock, to argue we misstepped... Roll the clock forward instead, explain how, for example, the Equal Rights Act is no longer necessary because the animosities of old were cured.
Sadly, on this specific topic you will fail because the Proud Boys decided to show up and be the living, breathing, carb-eating counter-example. But that's the avenue of argumentation that has promise. Otherwise, you're forever fighting the question "The people in the past passed these laws for a reason... What dragon does the fence keep at bay, and why wouldn't it come back if we take the fence down?").
> We and the PRC have the same goal.
I don't think we do. Or at least I don't think American versions 1 and 2 did. Versions 1 and 2 seemed to be much more interested in maintaining only peaceful coexistence, not forcing nationwide cooperation. Maintaining a standing army, let alone fighting world wars, was still controversial. Most Americans, for instance, saw it as none of their concern what happened in Europe.
The dragon of concern here isn't one that the fence keeps at bay, but one it has created. The last century has shown us the failure of many large, collectivist multi-cultures. The model simply isn't sustainable. People are too different from each other, and too widely disagree on what is good. This increases the friction of every interaction compelled by collectivization. This friction creates rifts in society that only deepen over time, as all camps dig in their heels and fortify their echo chambers.
Forcing people who axiomatically disagree closer together than they are comfortable with is dangerous aside from being immoral. Our ancestors erred because, as they centralized and federated, they did not foresee that the enormous power they were concentrating would be captured by the very interests they were trying to tame and promptly turned against them. Well, some of them did, but they were ignored.
There are only two kinds of power: centralized and decentralized. Each model carries its own risk profile. The only meaningful choices lie on the continuum between the two models.
> How do you determine if a law is moral or not?
This is the question you've been avoiding.
I see what you mean. FWIW, I think there is good and evil, but the disagreements between individuals on which is which are so broad that in the public sector (especially for a country of hundreds of millions of folks), all we have to really fall back on is agreed-upon law as common consensus. Every person should vote their conscience, but when you ask "What is the conscience of the country," well, I have a giant legal code (of a federal level and fifty state levels) and not much else to point to that's actually shared. America is a nation of ideas, but what ideas? Kind of... All of them at the same time.
To that end, I think you carry a notion that's pretty solid to keeping that nation working: with so many competing ideas overlapping, we get more stability when people enjoy the freedom to be left alone.
> The last century has shown us the failure of many large, collectivist multi-cultures.
I think there's wisdom in that (for the second half of the twentieth century); the challenges to multiculturalism have proven larger than the idealists assumed (many believed people would set aside their feelings, and people just don't do that; rather, many if not most of us are feelings-driven, with reason being a neat post-hoc trick we use to rationalize why we did a thing, not plan what we will do).
But the previous half showed us the failure of many small, interdependent-but-separate territorial nations. We fought two world wars over that model (which is, of course, where the US also learned that sitting on our island just wasn't good enough, because if we didn't go join the fight, someone would cheerfully bring the fight to us when it got big enough. Being left alone wasn't an option; the world comes and finds you, and the historical "two big oceans" defense the US enjoyed is moot in an era of planes and ICBMs).
Whatever we do with the fences, the world is smaller now than it was when most of them were put up. And doing nothing tends to just let the problems grow until they can't be ignored because they're physically bombing our land (which happened after 1941 as well).
> How do you determine if a law is moral or not? This is the question you've been avoiding.
You're right, because I don't think it's constructive between the two of us. We've communicated enough that I understand you don't have a framework to consider racism intrinsically evil, so discussing morality with you is in my "nope" bin. If living in this country itself hasn't convinced you of it, a rando commenter on HN sure ain't gonna. ;)
I guess because it just doesn't seem that way to me. All of us have frameworks that we use to discriminate against each other. It's an ape thing. Each difference we find is another reason for hostility. All of that is to say that it doesn't seem evil as much as stupid. Race is a superficial cosmetic feature, and only small minds give importance to superficial features. Excluding people for stupid reasons doesn't strike me as evil. Evil starts when you round them up.
The point I was making that you may have missed is that I defend their right to be small minded. Largely because it's a futile thing attempt to change a small mind. There's also quite a lot of "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". Jews defended the rights of nazis to march in Skokie. The point is we should be able to separate our personal opinions on matters from what of those opinions are appropriate to codify into law and impose on others.
> But the previous half showed us the failure of many small, interdependent-but-separate territorial nations
Yes, but USA version 2 was in the goldilocks zone here. It had enough federation to assure continuity and enough decentralization to assure continued pluralism. Had the constitutional protections enshrining this balance been a little more carefully crafted and explicitly laid out, it wouldn't have changed into the increasingly authoritarian nation we see today.
> we get more stability when people enjoy the freedom to be left alone
It would follow that the instability we've been seeing would be ameliorated by leaving more people alone. The trouble is that the system we've got doesn't go backwards. Laws don't get unmade. Government doesn't shrink. Things grow until they become unsustainable. There's not a known peaceful process to dilute authority. That's why I'm so vehemently against its concentration.
I see it and I respect your right to have that position. I disagree with it as a personal position because of how dangerous an empire is to the rest of the world (as well as itself).
Americans don't have the luxury to be small-minded. Not when we sit on the largest nuclear stockpile in the world. We have the liberty of not caring about what half the planet does day-to-day, but no country on Earth has the luxury of ignoring the US. If we're too dumb, people get very, very, very hurt. We owe it to humanity to be better.
If it's futile to change the small-minded, then the world would be better off if this empire imploded now, as bloodlessly as possible but to no stone left atop another, because the alternatives would be oh so much worse.
To every liberty, an obligation and a responsibility.
> Jews defended the rights of nazis to march in Skokie
Yes, some did, over 40 years ago, when people believed that ideology was dying out. Then what happened? Do we believe that would happen now? Do we believe, in hindsight, it was wise for them to do so given where we are now?
> USA version 2 was in the goldilocks zone here
It suffered a great depression and couldn't reign in the abuses of corporate power. It may have been in a goldilocks zone for a world of a specific intrinsic distribution and scale due to transport costs and time delays, but everything got smaller. How do we justify the philosophy of independent, decentralized authority when an instigator in California can convince a man in Pennsylvania to pick up a gun and kill his neighbors, or a bridge collapse in Idaho means no food in upstate New York, or one strain of one virus making human-jump in one place means total economic disruption for two years?
> It would follow that the instability we've been seeing would be ameliorated by leaving more people alone
I can't disagree. That's why (circling all the way back to the top) it would probably be best if we stopped actively persecuting trans folk and just accepted they are Americans too, with every bit as much right to describe their worldview to our children as Iowans or soccer players or jazz musicians or Irish immigrants.
Exactly! We should never have built an empire in the first place. Are you saying that empire-building was unavoidable and that no other path could have been taken?
It seems that you agree that there's no easy way to back away from empire now extant. I'm not aware of any way to change small minds; they lack the capacity for change. You can substitute race for something else but people who can only keep a small number of things in their head will always focus on the simple ones. Identity politics bears this out.
> Do we believe, in hindsight, it was wise for them to do so given where we are now?
Aye, I do. It was the individualistic spirit of that action that would have kept those very nazis in the margins. That spirit being so diminished is what has given fuel to the fires of extremism. If you leave people alone (and they have enough to eat), they tend not to gather in large groups and cause trouble. It's when they feel pressured, even if it's only in their heads, that bad things start to happen. This is exactly why I'm suggesting we don't pressure people to accept ideas they're not willing to accept freely. It's safer.
Forcing (via education policy) ideologically opposed communities to "accept" trans people exacerbates anti-trans sentiment. It's actually counterproductive to the goal of trans people's wellbeing. Further fuel is added to the fire when policies have absurdist outcomes like Lia Thomas or Isla Bryson, and no reasonable debate is accommodated by their advocates. None of this is good for the average trans person just trying to live their life.
Educating young children should be done in as worldview-neutral a position as possible. It should be about the things the Iowan, soccer player, jazz musician, Irish immigrant, and trans person, can all agree on, using simple dictionary words and definitions.
And I'm ill-convinced that fascists are kept at the margins by individualism. Fascists appeal to and weaponize national mythological ideologies; the "self-made man" is every bit as weaponizable as the übermensch, especially if, say, failure of collectivist-minded policy in the face of an adherence to a "you are paid the money you deserve the money" mythology has allowed the delta between the extremes and the averages in society to grow to such a level that those who believe they should be the inheritors of the self-made-man mantle bust their asses for 40+ hours a day and can't afford rent. It is then the fascist comes to them and says "You would be as great as destiny says you should be, but for..." and makes up an enemy, always one with not enough power to fight back (so rarely, for example, the people who have all the money).
> Forcing (via education policy) ideologically opposed communities to "accept" trans people
... is every bit the same as forcing them to accept the Irish and the black person and the Christian, or to learn state capitols, or to recite the Constitution; no more and no less. They live in America they get with the program. The program is their neighbors are their neighbors and that which they do that harms no-one is of no concern.
My mans wants to pack up and move to Rapture[0]
We need a return to deontology. Laws should be made on principles. Anything can be construed to be for the "general welfare". A wide interpretation can (and has) been used to justify awful things.
There was no principle that justified the ownership of other human beings in a country that ostensibly adopted fundamental rights, yet there we were. That worked until we fought a bloody war to change it, and then another compromise was reached. And that worked until the scale of the economy got to the point that if it wasn't operated in concert, it tore itself apart, and a new compromise was reached. And that worked until men who fought alongside men of other skin colors came back from the war and asked why they were good enough to bleed and die for this country, but not good enough to sit at a dining table next to someone they'd huddled in a foxhole with (while women asked why they were good enough to work the factories while the men were away but not when the men came back), and further new compromises were reached.
It's always been compromises all the way down. Outcome-based law is the lifeblood of a democracy: the best outcome for the most people (with enough backstops against that pure-utilitarian approach to prevent, ideally, the creation of a permanent oppressed minority class).
Wait... So your attitude on being born with dark skin carrying (entirely socially-crafted) disadvantages is "sucks to your luck?"
... Wow.
I hate to be blunt, but that's crap. I think I want no part of your concept of equality or of liberty, and I'm glad wise people in the past saw better than what you're putting on the table.
The liberty of the dice roll and the equality of a seat at the craps table.
What a limiting worldview.
HEY. It's also probably the simplest way to define/justify personhood. (That's gonna be pretty important with future AI.)
... but the anthropological record suggests that human governments formed from the strongest guy with the biggest club organizing the other strong guys with big clubs to go beat their neighbors into following their rules, with more rare instances of confederations and democracies (often a side-effect of two or more groups of strong guys with big clubs realizing that power-sharing was the only option because if they just tried to fight it out, they'd end up either killing themselves off or so weak that yet another strong guy with a big club would swoop in and pick up the remains).
It is dishonest to claim that the definition of liberty has changed without acknowledging that the largest and most important change is the expansion of who the definition applies to.
Biology, the science, makes it clear that such cells are alive. That definition of alive is the only one that can matter to thinking, non-superstitious people. There are no souls or spirits.
Furthermore, the science of genetics makes it quite clear that we won't do a DNA test and discover that the fetus is a wombat, or a giraffe, or a sea urchin. It would test as Homo sapiens, which is the definition of human.
It's objectively the truth.
Besides, science cannot provide definitions. There is no hypothesis to test that disproves "an organism is alive when it can X and Y".
> There is no hypothesis to test that disproves "an organism is alive when it can X and Y".
1. Metabolize 2. Homeostasis 3. Responds to stimuli 4. Growth 5. Reproduction
Never learned the list in school? It often includes "composed of cells", but that one might not make sense for xenobiology.
There are people who only believe in science, I guess, when it gives them the answers they were hoping for anyway.
That's a definition, but how do you prove scientifically it's the right one?
The question doesn't even make sense.
> Never learned the list in school?
Being taught in school doesn't make something science.
I've never had an issue with that.
> and to abort right up to the moment of birth for any fetus with imperfections past a certain criteria (to be clarified later), right?
To be documented and assessed by a pathologist at another location, with charges to be filed against the abortionist and woman if it turns out the kid wasn't anacephalic?
Sure, why not?
I have principles. I'm willing to abide them. You just have outcomes you want to see occur though. I doubt compromise is possible.
Are you saying that some random leukocyte that wandered into the wrong capillary is a living human?
The fetus is physiologically whole and complete. Two arms, two legs, a brain. Two eyes, every major organ.
You introduced new absurdities, acting as if it was some sort of gotcha. If you or I looked at a fetus, we'd see that it didn't bear any resemblance, superficial or profound, to a puddle of blood, and that it bore a striking resemblance to adult humans.
That I have to walk people through these things is absurd. At first, I couldn't believe that everyone is so stupid. But then in some subversion of Hanlon's razor, I realized that none of you are stupid. Everyone's just evil.
Quite frankly, I want abortion to remain legal. I can't wait for those who believe it to finish their self-genocide. No one who could ever contemplate it is anyone I want to see pass on their genes or their attitudes/ideas. I'd happily have abortions be free and pay for it with my taxes.
> "when human life begins" is easy. Biology, the science, makes it clear that such cells are alive.
There was no "this and then that and then you confused me with big words and then I never said that". And now you've degenerated into a rant about how everyone who can actually read what you wrote must be evil and should die out? Yea, please be banned.
In 1951, a 31 year old African-American woman by the name of Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer. A tissue sample of her cancer was cultured in a laboratory, and that cell line survives to this day, having been adopted by numerous research labs worldwide. Those cells are alive, and they have human DNA (albeit with an abnormal number of chromosomes). Is that human life? Does it have the same moral status as a zygote/embryo/foetus/baby?
I think your approach to this issue is completely wrong. Science can’t (in itself) answer moral questions. It can provide us with facts which can be combined with moral principles to produce moral conclusions, but it can’t tell us what are the right moral principles. I know people on all sides of the abortion debate like to claim that science is on their side, but I think they are all making a grave error, in failing to appreciate that moral questions are inherently beyond the power of science to answer.
Are you planning on aborting it? Like, so that it could be a relevant example?
In law, it isn't necessary to be able to determine if that is a human life to be able to determine that the fetuses that are commonly aborted are human life.
Argument by corner cases just isn't very strong, unless those corner cases actually shed light on the problem at hand.
> Does it have the same moral status as a zygote/embryo/foetus/baby?
Books could be written on the immorality of the HL cell line. They have, I believe. An exhaustive listing of each sort of immorality/amorality likely exceeds the maximum post size on this forum.
> I think your approach to this issue is completely wrong.
If you did think it wrong, you'd have chuckled and not bothered to answer. Maybe you'd have reported it or something like that for being stupid gibberish.
What you actually think is that my approach is alarming. You know what you want the conclusion to be, and anything that leads to another conclusion and isn't immediately and obviously stupid... that's potentially dangerous.
> Science can’t (in itself) answer moral questions. I
The moral question has been answered for a long time. Even if we just want to do recent history, it's been settled since Nuremberg.
Don't kill humans. Don't murder humans.
But, murderers like to make excuses. "That one over there isn't human!"
Science is very good at answering taxonomic classification questions though. And, not so surprisingly, every time someone claims "that one isn't human", it turns out it actually was.
> I know people on all sides of the abortion debate like to claim that science is on their side,
No, sometime decades ago, the left (Democrats, whatever) staked it as their territory. And either the right didn't want to stake a counterclaim to it, or thought it a losing proposition and never tried.
If you have some evidence that both do, I'd be curious to see it. Certainly there can't be alot, I'd estimate it has to be at least a 100:1 ratio (for me to personally not notice). Wouldn't ask just to dispute it, keep in mind. Truly curious on this count.
Instead, I am denying them a platform to influence my innocent and impressionable child to become that, which in a free society they are welcome to do when they're of age and understand what they want. But I won't allow the possibility that this thing is steering them into an unattural direction. This is indistinguishable from targeted brainwashing and I won't know if it's because they are actually like that, or if it was because they got brainwashed during their early years.
Definitely not a message we should be inculcating the next generation with, right?
It's not really a bad message. If anything, it's kind of the hacker ethos.
That's what 2A is for.
The article doesn't explain what these regimes really do. The end-goal is inverting the flow of "life-force". Normally it flows upwards when people express any high or selfless aspirations. In demonic religions, this flow goes downward, mostly via two channels: hatred and sexual passion. The two are destructive and creative forces inverted. Wars, concentration camps and prisons create a reliable source of hatred and fear. The cult of unhinged sexuality inverts the creative force of the people.
The author is wrong to think that tyranny wants to break down your will and turn people into veggies. It's an intermediate step. The demonic force behind a tyrant wants its subjects to apply all their knowledge and creativity to demonic ends. This is why creative cruelty was encouraged in Red Guard and other similar cults. Dumb veggies with weak will are of no use to them, but they may serve as the fuel by producing hatred and sexual passion.