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>I don't want to live in a society where people have to fear for their jobs or a public mob action because they espoused an unpopular opinion. And I don't want

>I don't want to live in a society where people have to fear for their jobs or a public mob action because they espoused an unpopular opinion. And I don't want to live in a society where we tacitly accept discrimination because it is labeled as political opinion. There is a huge difference between politics and science. It is a terrible analogy. Scientific hypothesis, by definition, can be tested. If someone is wrong, that can be proven. Even if an entire body of work has been built on a wrong hypothesis, that work can be tossed out or modified in the face of new evidence. It can be painful, sure, but there is a mechanism in place for just such an occurrence. Law and policy are made of pure, sloppy human thought-stuff. Some things might be testable but, in general, that is not the rule. If we allow a body of work to develop under bad ideas they take on a life, an inertia, of their own. We do not have any generally agreed upon or foolproof mechanisms to dismantle such an edifice. In fact, most of the mechanisms are designed to make them as permanent as possible -- to bolster the image of institution and consistency. We do not have the luxury of suspending our judgement in the political realm.

xaa 13y ago
Fundamentally, law/politics are addressing an empirical question: how do we maximize the well-being of the population. I understand that this is a much more fuzzy and difficult question than those addressed by the hard sciences, but it is empirical, and we do see progress. Would anyone seriously argue that our political system, despite all its flaws, is not better now than when we had slavery, only white male landowners voting, regularly massacred Native Americans and invaded neighbors, and had no union rights or worker protection laws? Would any nitpicker say that because we cannot precisely quantify the degree of betterness that it isn't better? Every one of those progressive ideas started out as a niche, minority opinion, and many of them were repressed, not by the government, but by social mores. Liberals who seek to repress the opinions of social conservatives -- who, by the way, have lost the war, long-term -- are being profoundly shortsighted, not to say hypocritical. Finally, I'm not saying that individuals should suspend their judgement. You should feel absolutely safe to speak publicly in favor of gay rights, and, say, donate $1000 to your favorite gay rights organization without the fear of losing your job. But you cross a line when you seek to repress other viewpoints.
- clavalle 13y ago
  There are still people out there arguing that slavery might be an ok system. That landowners or taxpayers should be the only ones with the right to vote. That the slaughter of other peoples is the natural way of things and has some benefit and that workers should have zero protections. All of these things, to you and me, seem obviously like backward movement in terms of general well-being. We don't hear about these extreme views because they are abhorrent to most people and the people that hold them get ridiculed. Can you not see someone losing their job is they publicly support a return to slavery? Would that be repression of that idea? I would argue, no, its not. The discourse has reached a societal consensus that slavery is bad. Why? Because it violates some very fundamental rights of human beings. I think we have reached that threshold with the rights of people with various modes of sexual choice.
  - xaa 13y ago
    The appropriate response to someone who is advocating an idea that has been proven wrong, from flat-earthers, to Holocaust deniers, to slavery advocates, is not to ostracize or fire them (unless their job directly relates to the subject that they're mistaken about), but simply to either a) ignore their wrong opinion, or b) gently explain why they are wrong. The trouble with using "societal consensus" to determine which views should be repressed is that sometimes the consensus is wrong. We cannot know a priori whether the majority or minority is right, so we need to protect all viewpoints, even if it means some wrong ones will persist a little longer. It's ok; eventually they will die off -- two generations from now, a anti-gay-marriage person will be almost as rare as a slavery advocate is today.
    - clavalle 13y ago
      It is a huge mistake to ignore people who are in the wrong. If their ideas gain traction because they are given an unchallenged platform that could lead to bad policy that is hard to reverse. Gently explaining they are wrong is only slightly better than sticking our head in the sand...sometimes worse because it is seen as a legitimate debate. We absolutely do not have to protect all viewpoints. We need to allow people to have them and their freedom to express them but, in the same motion, we must protect others freedom to express disgust. We cannot allow the behemoth of government acting as referee and thus control the conversation. But the conversation must be allowed to take its natural course.

xaa 13y ago

Fundamentally, law/politics are addressing an empirical question: how do we maximize the well-being of the population. I understand that this is a much more fuzzy and difficult question than those addressed by the hard sciences, but it is empirical, and we do see progress. Would anyone seriously argue that our political system, despite all its flaws, is not better now than when we had slavery, only white male landowners voting, regularly massacred Native Americans and invaded neighbors, and had no union rights or worker protection laws? Would any nitpicker say that because we cannot precisely quantify the degree of betterness that it isn't better? Every one of those progressive ideas started out as a niche, minority opinion, and many of them were repressed, not by the government, but by social mores. Liberals who seek to repress the opinions of social conservatives -- who, by the way, have lost the war, long-term -- are being profoundly shortsighted, not to say hypocritical. Finally, I'm not saying that individuals should suspend their judgement. You should feel absolutely safe to speak publicly in favor of gay rights, and, say, donate $1000 to your favorite gay rights organization without the fear of losing your job. But you cross a line when you seek to repress other viewpoints.

clavalle 13y ago
There are still people out there arguing that slavery might be an ok system. That landowners or taxpayers should be the only ones with the right to vote. That the slaughter of other peoples is the natural way of things and has some benefit and that workers should have zero protections. All of these things, to you and me, seem obviously like backward movement in terms of general well-being. We don't hear about these extreme views because they are abhorrent to most people and the people that hold them get ridiculed. Can you not see someone losing their job is they publicly support a return to slavery? Would that be repression of that idea? I would argue, no, its not. The discourse has reached a societal consensus that slavery is bad. Why? Because it violates some very fundamental rights of human beings. I think we have reached that threshold with the rights of people with various modes of sexual choice.
- xaa 13y ago
  The appropriate response to someone who is advocating an idea that has been proven wrong, from flat-earthers, to Holocaust deniers, to slavery advocates, is not to ostracize or fire them (unless their job directly relates to the subject that they're mistaken about), but simply to either a) ignore their wrong opinion, or b) gently explain why they are wrong. The trouble with using "societal consensus" to determine which views should be repressed is that sometimes the consensus is wrong. We cannot know a priori whether the majority or minority is right, so we need to protect all viewpoints, even if it means some wrong ones will persist a little longer. It's ok; eventually they will die off -- two generations from now, a anti-gay-marriage person will be almost as rare as a slavery advocate is today.
  - clavalle 13y ago
    It is a huge mistake to ignore people who are in the wrong. If their ideas gain traction because they are given an unchallenged platform that could lead to bad policy that is hard to reverse. Gently explaining they are wrong is only slightly better than sticking our head in the sand...sometimes worse because it is seen as a legitimate debate. We absolutely do not have to protect all viewpoints. We need to allow people to have them and their freedom to express them but, in the same motion, we must protect others freedom to express disgust. We cannot allow the behemoth of government acting as referee and thus control the conversation. But the conversation must be allowed to take its natural course.