Google Doodle Upholds Gay Rights Ahead of Sochi Olympics

Censoring pornography doesn't infringe anyone's human rights.

Scott Adams' mild political satire is understandably censored because it is comparable in offensiveness to porn?!

By the way, Google doesn't censor porn. They categorises it. If they were either dropping all porn or replacing all porn images by pictures of little ponies, that would be censorship.

Furthermore, the date on the comic was apparently edited to hide what had been done. If you don't want to publish something because it's contentious, then IMO have the balls to state as much and simply don't publish anything - don't pretend the comic doesn't exist.

There are so many gays in Russia and I have several gays friends back there, and they live the same life as none gay people. There is NO law agains gays in Russia, the law is agains propaganda of homosexuality to kids, thats it. A lot of Russian artists and media hosts are gays and they never hide it and Russians don't really care about it as much as Western media does.

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Hitler wasn't a jewphobe.

Not really. I will explain below.

> This is demonstrably false.

While I would not necessarily agree with the validity view you said, I don't think it is demonstrably false. Please demonstrate that it is false in a way unbiased by your own cultural assumptions of autonomy.

> The fact that Russians support each other via a traditional heterosexual family unit does not in any way mean that someone who is gay should be discriminated against.

Define discriminated against. Is a retire-with-the-kids culture where parents get to say no to spousal choices (but won't if he's made her pregnant) inherently discriminatory?

> The whole premise of your argument is that gays cannot retire with children, so they will be a burden upon the state.

No. My point was that same-sex couples can't have equality if only opposite-sex couples get a veto override (via "accidental" pregnancy) against parental objections. If equality is the goal, one cannot tolerate a retire with the kids culture because parents have so much power over childrens' choice of marriage partners, and this is inherently greater with regard to same-sex couples.

I don't think you read what I wrote very carefully.

As for the cultural validity piece, as I said, I would come back to it. I don't think it can be demonstrated to be false, because cultures function in different ways to the point where apples to apples comparisons are essentially impossible, and so any comparison comes from assumptions, passed on by culture, which determine the conclusion. But at the same time there are certain problems that can't be easily addressed by a position of pure cultural relativity. In my view, these come in two forms: inter-group disputes and breakdown of institutions.

The first includes things like intercontinental slave trade, Germany gassing Polish Jews, Japan's brutal treatment of various occupied areas in WWII, colonial treatment of Africa and Asia, treatment of Native Americans by the US government, etc. You can't solve an intergroup dispute by assuming that both sides are valid actors, so what one is left with is a political resolution.

The second issue is the question of the breakdown of institutions. If a practice is perfectly valid in a culture, then institutions should be perfect, but they aren't anywhere. I think that critique of cultural institutions from a context sympathetic to the culture is a worthwhile endeavor.

So my point is that the traditional family in the sense of three or more generations living under one root, sharing meals, and there being reciprocal care duties between parents and children cannot allow the equality folks are talking about. Destroying that (and establishing the American-style family and retirement as the norm) is a prerequisite to any meaningful equality and that's the source of my objection.

Yes. That's a fair characterization.

> That seems pretty harsh. Minority rights issues very often involve major social disruptions, and social disruption is often "bad" in its immediate effects -- social violence, strife -- and often has long term effects -- difficult economic shifts and reorganisation as in your description.

Minority rights issues are usually borne by groups across generations. The question at issue here is not but rather is borne by individuals or, at the the largest scale, couples.

In other words, if you deprive the Native Americans of land and capital, in 20 generations they will still be in poverty. Trust that wage labor will lift former slaves out of poverty and a hundred and fifty years later, blacks will be under far more crushing poverty than whites. Almost all of the minority rights issues in the US have been of this kind.

And I would add, particularly regarding racial minorities, our treatment of the issues as individual rights issues instead of problems to be solved by communities and families has been a tremendous part of the problem. Too bad Sherman didn't get his way with his 40 acres and a mule plan.

> But where do you draw the line? The same argument would apply -- and, I'm sure, was made -- referring to a society reliant on slave labor.

I guess we should stop looking back at Greece and Rome as great civilizations then, right? ;-)

Honestly your question is particularly loaded because although slavery has meant many different things in different places, our national experience was with a particularly bad kind. I don't know that merely calling something slavery would be enough. I don't condemn the Greek or Roman slavery systems even though I do condemn the tarns-continental slave trade bringing Africans to the New World.

I think you have to ask how slavery fits into society, what structural protections there are for slaves, what incentives there are for freeing slaves, and how the descendants of freed slaves are treated. In societies where slavery is a revolving door and descendants of freed slaves are citizens, I might not condemn that. In a case like the US where descendants were not eligible for citizenship and where slavery was an inter-group, phenomenon with no protections structural or otherwise, yeah I would condemn that, but part of what made that so offensive was the intergroup aspects. American slavery could not have survived in its form if slavery was used as a way to pay off one's own debts for example (as it was in Rome).

So, to be clear, would you say that human rights are faith-based? I.e. are they whatever the individual believes they are? If not, what other basis can they have?

> First, the intentions behind the law must be separated from its function.

To some extent, yes. But as I think you are getting at below, you can't separate either, really, from enforcement, and I would point out you can't separate enforcement from local politics.

> Can gay people now legallly hold hands in public?

Given what I know of Russian culture, I doubt that would be seen as gay.

> You believe "that a gay rights movement really would be deeply socially disruptive in a really bad way in much of the world (including Russia)." I believe that any human rights movement concerning religion, race, color, sexuality, gender, class, political affiliation, etc. is always a good thing. It is always good because humans should be treated equally.

I think you need to define "treated equally." There are plenty of cases where facial equality is in fact not equal at all. The lack of women as new tech founders is not caused by a lack of facial equality, but due to the differences in how a facially equal culture affects men and women differently. If you were planning on starting a family within a few years and knew it would cause an earnings hit, would you work long hours with uneven paychecks for uncertain rewards?

But let's look at specifics. The problem is intergenerational duties and interests. Strong intergenerational duties tend to be associated with difficulty remarrying after having kids, retirement with the kids, strong, enforcible interest in who one's children may marry, and so forth. In such an environment, there is no way to have equality because the tool of last resort to overthrow parental opinion (premarital sex resulting in pregnancy) is unavailable to same-sex couples.

This means, to have equality you have to:

1. Isolate children from their parents, at least as of adolescence and adulthood.

2. Isolate parents from their children in retirement.

These are the things I think would be harmful, in fact so harmful that I don't support internationalizing such movements.

Now obviously we do both of these things in the US, but most of the world doesn't and the question is what right do we have to redefine the parent/child relationship as necessary to give equality on the basis of our notions of sexual orientation.

It's worth noting that Aristotle (who wrote quite a bit about the merits and limitations of male-male sexual relationships) articulated marriage for the Greek world as a purely heterosexual institution for that reason (and therefore same-sex relationships were relegated to being in parallel to reproductive marriage and subject to certain productive limits).

If slavery is structured such that the interests are aligned well enough to politically constrain abuses, yes, and I would argue it would be a defence for the sorts of slavery that existed in the ancient world.

However, regarding the American experience and the intercontinental slave trade, this wasn't the case. You can't take a group of people, subject them to total oppression with nobody to stand up for them, and even insist that if they are freed, their children, born in freedom can never be citizens.

The difference is that in Rome, slavery served a vital social function and the abuses could be constrained because slaves very often had citizen family. In the US, it served merely an economic function and had no alignment of interests.

Livy talks about the controversy concerning the rule in the Twelve Tables that a father could not sell a son into slavery more than three times. Such a non-permanent slavery is not at all comparable to what we saw in American history.

I think the key thing is, one important aspect of retirement with the kids is that it is an important way by which interests are aligned across generations. Parents are far more invested in their children's success, for example. Taking that away due to a notion that it is unfair to some people is a problem.