If you check "yes" next to showdead on your settings page you can see what I was responding to, which I'm pretty sure you've missed here. Dang taken exception and actions in this thread so it's best not to piss him off if possible so we probably should leave it and I've left this to the next day to give cool off a chance etc.
> It seems to me that this justification is often raised in lieu of engaging with a deeply unpleasant subject.
I go exactly and completely the other way with that.
Engaging in discussions of rights. In this case whether its ok to arbitrarily deny access to a huge section of the market to a developer without explanation, recourse or anything remotely resembling due process. With rights it tends to be the other way around entirely. Hence the length and painstaking nature of my contributions to this thread.
"These people are awful, oppose them" And you look and they are awful so think no further about it. Don't engage at all beyond that.
As opposed to engaging with something that /is/ very deeply unpleasant and necessary. "Our rights are also the rights of people we greatly and deeply dislike because they turn our stomachs. If we are to have rights, these people we find reprehensible must have the same rights or they are not actually rights at all." Which led to me citing the example of Jewish lawyers at the ACLU with close proximity to the massive trauma of the holocaust defending rights they believed in _even_ when the test case was for Nazis. That's engaging very, very deeply with a very, very deeply unpleasant subject. And they did that and did it well despite the fact it must have been just horribly and deeply unpleasant having to explain that point of view to relatives who survived the holocaust and know what the insides of those death camps looked like when they were operational. Imagine doing it. Imagine explaining that.
So yeah, the exact opposite. Engaging deeply with rights is unpleasant. Throwing your hands up and saying "to hell with these idiots, I don't care, they're awful!" is not engaging at all. (And it is always a very tempting response that plays well to our emotions.)
If you check "yes" next to showdead on your settings page you can see what I was responding to, which I'm pretty sure you've missed here.
I have had showdead on since about 2010.
Which led to me citing the example of Jewish lawyers at the ACLU with close proximity to the massive trauma of the holocaust defending rights they believed in _even_ when the test case was for Nazis.
This interview is quite interesting because it includes discussion of Glasner (the legal theoretician you are picking as an example) being confronted by a Polish (& Jewish) Holocaust survivor who had moved to Skokie and did not care to repeat the failed tactic of forbearance.
"Our rights are also the rights of people we greatly and deeply dislike because they turn our stomachs. If we are to have rights, these people we find reprehensible must have the same rights or they are not actually rights at all."
This is a circular argument, which ignores the fact that the people in question define themselves by their specific intention of removing the rights of others. This idea that the best way to fight Nazis is to set a superior moral example has repeatedly proven a failure. It's not deep engagement, it's inflexible absolutism that clings to a fine general idea (rights for everyone) rather than examining its limitations and developing a system for responding to the breach thereof. I'm also in favor of personal liberty against authoritarianism and institutions like prisons in general, but this has limits because some people have a demonstrated propensity for severe and asymmetrical violence.
You know, we have abundant examples of self-professed Nazis committing multiple murders, as well as documentary evidence of Nazi strategists offering both rationales and recipes for doing so. They consider themselves to be in a war for racial survival and have racked up quite the body count in recent years, as you are no doubt aware. And while they're widely reviled, they're still treated with great forbearance - I'm not aware of any any mass murders of neo Nazis, and though a lot of them have been sent to prison lately in the USA, its on the basis of specific crimes already committed.
In my view, once someone states an intention of systematically exterminating other people on categorical grounds, they've renounced any commitment to universal rights and so give up any moral claim thereon. Parading around with a Nazi flag is equivalent to threatening fatal harm to others, notwithstanding a lack of specificity on the method and timing. Arguing that this is nevertheless protected speech is equivalent to saying 'we require innocent blood to be shed before acting, and turns the moral concept of free speech into a grotesque human sacrifice cult. It would be bad enough if this manifested purely as martyrdom, but many free speech absolutists have (without thinking it through) decided that it's OK for other people to be sacrificed on the alter of absolute liberty.
it must have been just horribly and deeply unpleasant having to explain that point of view to relatives who survived the holocaust
No doubt, but far short of the unpleasantness of actually being brutalized or killed by people who loudly announced their intention of doing that. I don't see any free speech absolutists crashing Nazi meetings crying 'kill me first before you commit a worse transgression.'
> It seems to me that this justification is often raised in lieu of engaging with a deeply unpleasant subject.
I go exactly and completely the other way with that.
Engaging in discussions of rights. In this case whether its ok to arbitrarily deny access to a huge section of the market to a developer without explanation, recourse or anything remotely resembling due process. With rights it tends to be the other way around entirely. Hence the length and painstaking nature of my contributions to this thread.
"These people are awful, oppose them" And you look and they are awful so think no further about it. Don't engage at all beyond that.
As opposed to engaging with something that /is/ very deeply unpleasant and necessary. "Our rights are also the rights of people we greatly and deeply dislike because they turn our stomachs. If we are to have rights, these people we find reprehensible must have the same rights or they are not actually rights at all." Which led to me citing the example of Jewish lawyers at the ACLU with close proximity to the massive trauma of the holocaust defending rights they believed in _even_ when the test case was for Nazis. That's engaging very, very deeply with a very, very deeply unpleasant subject. And they did that and did it well despite the fact it must have been just horribly and deeply unpleasant having to explain that point of view to relatives who survived the holocaust and know what the insides of those death camps looked like when they were operational. Imagine doing it. Imagine explaining that.
So yeah, the exact opposite. Engaging deeply with rights is unpleasant. Throwing your hands up and saying "to hell with these idiots, I don't care, they're awful!" is not engaging at all. (And it is always a very tempting response that plays well to our emotions.)