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I think you can disagree with people and come into conflict with them, even violent conflict, while still treating them as fully autonomous advocates for themse

I think you can disagree with people and come into conflict with them, even violent conflict, while still treating them as fully autonomous advocates for themselves. The issue I took was with the mentality that you can ascribe childish, or sub-autonomous agency to another person in order to discredit them and justify dominating them. Slavery, actually, is an example of such pernicious ideas applied to the relation of slave and slave owner. This sort of reasoning is only legitimate in authoritarian philosophies that treat people as at best illegitimately autonomous, needing some sort of patriarchal figure to dictate their lives to them. In your examples you are making the unspoken assumption, for example, that black slaves were part of the political body that kept them in slavery. Yes, if you look at it as an issue between North and South, it looks like the North telling the South what to do for itself, but that seems completely wrong because we are putting the lots of slaves and slave owners together as if they were one coherent entity. In a world where freedom of association holds, I believe my statement would hold to the limit that many, many actions we take that seem only to affect us also affect others, and to the limit that freedom of association, like all freedoms, is incoherent in its absolute limit.

fleitz 11y ago
I would hardly characterize exposing people to opinions/facts they dislike / are made uncomfortable by as domination. It's a simple fact that if you have to have an anxiety attack because you hear things you don't like that you are incapable of emotional self-regulation, hence behaving like a child, hence being referred to as childish. The only thing I would say is unfair about characterizing the behavior as childish is that it is an insult to those under 18 that are able to emotionally self-regulate. It's a reasonable expectation of adults that they are able to regulate their own emotions and hear phrases like "America is the land of opportunity" without having an emotional breakdown.

fleitz 11y ago

I would hardly characterize exposing people to opinions/facts they dislike / are made uncomfortable by as domination. It's a simple fact that if you have to have an anxiety attack because you hear things you don't like that you are incapable of emotional self-regulation, hence behaving like a child, hence being referred to as childish. The only thing I would say is unfair about characterizing the behavior as childish is that it is an insult to those under 18 that are able to emotionally self-regulate. It's a reasonable expectation of adults that they are able to regulate their own emotions and hear phrases like "America is the land of opportunity" without having an emotional breakdown.