I swear to fucking god the next white dude who tries to play Devil's Advocate with me is getting throwen out the window.
getting throwen out the window.
Dude! You had the perfect opportunity to use the magnificent word "defenestrated"!
Wdym? They got to use throwen
But did you know that the devil wears cool skirts you can buy?
just to play devils advocate here. Lets say there's a window behind you, and i'm not currently playing devils advocate. And then i throw you out of the window first...
Honestly it's fucked up how our school system treats children. We need to talk about racism but also about how children are not to be seen as some sort of human clay that we need to form into whatever we see fit.
It's not entirely clear what you're saying, but the sooner we acknowledge that children are inevitably formed by their environment and there's no "natural" way to let them somehow form themselves the sooner we can start discussing what is good to teach them and the correct way to do it.
and can we please start to talk about how parents are not fit to raise children?
we need child care as a profession.
children are clay. That's the problem. The issue arises with how do we best raise them to be most equipped to tackle every day things.
Personally, i'm of the belief that we should teach them as much as possible, get them into more complex fields earlier, sociology and psychology especially. A good psych/socio class experience in HS can REALLY change someones life for the better.
Saying that children aren't to be treated like clay is wrong. They are clay, we need to be conscious of that, and sculpt them into a properly functioning human, who can enjoy life, and respect others. Not just raise them to be a wage slave or whatever the fuck the current meta is now. We saw this exact problem with the "feral child" incident.
There was a weird incident in class where a good amount of my classmates, including some who were POC, believed that black people were biologically more aggressive based on anecdotal experience.
I'm white but I was arguing against this because it made no sense. As a possible explanation I argued that black communities are typically poorer because of history (slavery, segregation, ect) and that poor and desperate communities are whats more likely to be violent.
It seemed to get them to pause for a moment. I'm sure I wasn't as nuanced as I'd be now but I was a dumb reactionary teenager talking to dumb reactionary teenagers.
you were right, class solidification has been happening and has had an effect since long ago.
Ok, so my boring take on this: I think the word privilege is overused. In my mind there is a basic level of human decency everyone should be treated with. If you are treated above and beyond that, you have some privilege. Situations like the one mentioned in this post (to my mind) don't speak to a lack of privilege, but to the presence of oppression.
I see your point, but I do think that "privilege" is normally used in a way that includes freedom from oppression.
I'd agree with that, but calling it privilege is a bad name. Because how do you implement equality when dealing with privilege? You take from the privileged to level the playing field. So when you apply that to being privileged because you aren't being discriminated against, the solution is to remove that privilege? So... do more discrimination so everyone is equal?
When you instead identify those that are oppressed and those that are not, the solution to equality is to remove the oppression. So when applied to our situation, remove the discrimination so everyone is equally not discriminated against.
Shouldnt be and being are two different concepts. Lack of discrimination shouldnt be a privilege, but it is. I dont think hiding it is a part of the solution
Privilege comes from "private law", so would mean the ability to be judged in a different way to other people and therefore to perhaps avoid punishment for things others would suffer.
I have personally been called slurs in my school and been forced to explain why I don't deserve death for "invoking gods wrath which will cause the death of humanity" (the great sin is being Asexual).
How dare you not think people are hot.
Not in high school. I was privileged and lived in a wonder-bread suburb. But a lot of people then (fewer now) believed those with mental illness should be treated like Jason Voorhees and gunned down like a rabid animal or locked in an institution and kept tranquilized my the nurses.
I did believe in the late '80s I could negotiate with law enforcement and was able to navigate though some troubling encounters. If I wasn't Scandinavian white, those could well have gone differently.
You do know that Jason Voorhees murders people, right?
I say this because it’s not like he’s a misunderstood crazy person…
Yes, in the 1980s, it was presumed by the ignorant public that all crazy people were a danger to themselves or others. It was the era of serial killers, psychopaths and sociopaths.
A serial killer is a specific kind of killing pattern identified by law enforcement investigators (contrast spree killers and rampage killers.) Serial killers are extremely rare, and don't have a corellation to mental illness or any specific diagnosis. Despite reports in the 70s that asserted (without evidence) serial killers are responsible for 5000 homicides a year in the US (they are not), in fact, you're more likely to get killed by lightning (less than 50 per year in the US) than by an active serial killer.
A psychopath is a designation by an expert witness in a courtroom, often by a psychiatric professional who has not actually assessed the suspect, but is guessing based on publicly known facts regarding his behavior, the way an armchair psychiatrist might guess that Trump suffers from NPD. In the 1980s, designating a suspect as a psychopath was to suggest he doesn't need a motive. Psychosis is the category of diagnosis, but isn't related.
Sociopathy was a personality disorder (Personality disorders are actually, less abnormal than what I have, a psychosis called Major Depression, though their dysfunction can be more evident) Sociopathy was retired in the DSM V, and replaced with antisocial personality disorder. While dangerous APD subjects exist, their rate of violent crime per capita is less than the general population. Though their rate of being victims of violent crime is higher than the general mean. Sociopath is also used as a forensic term to convince juries that a suspect is too dangerous for society.
These days, while we have more awareness of mental illness, there still remain some stereotypes and biases. The public doesn't want me to have access to guns, for example, on the single basis I have a diagnosis. (It's a difficult sell, since the US has a lot of veterans with diagnoses and guns, and could not be easily disarmed without creating a big bloody mess. They also go on and off suicide watch, and some counties have a delicate let your friend hold your gun for you program so as to not endanger law enforcement by forcing them to disarm trained soldiers with combat PTSD and justifiable grounds for paranoia)
Then there's the matter that the institutions in the United States intended to secure inpatients are closely tied to its institutions for securing inmates (for whom we have no love and are glad to leave in squalor). Inpatients get about the same degree of abuse as inmates by their alleged caretakers (violence or sexual assault by orderlies, or abuse of pharmaceuticals by the nurses, who are fond of over-administering tranquilizers to keep the kooks quiet). Our public has about the same empathy for the crazies as they do the convicts, even when the inpatients didn't necessarily do anything wrong to be denied their civil liberties.
So yeah, the likes of Voorhees and Kruger and Dolarhyde and Lecter have affected sentiments about us lunatics the way Peter Benchley's Jaws affected attitudes about sharks, the effects of which are seen to this day, say when police routinely gun down subjects of mental health crises (which are disproportionately counted among officer involved homicide.)
Both tbh
Me to :/
It happened to me because we were discussing the Nazi's views on racial hierarchy in sophomore honors history class and I'm ethnically Jewish. It was a surreal experience.
I always took the weak position in persuasive essay assignments and debate class. I thought it was more of a challenge to argue for the wrong side.
i hate when debate pieces are presented. It's such bullshit. Just let me talk about the two sides and then fuck off. You don't need me to explain to you how to think about something. You have a brain, i put ALL the shit you could ever possibly want right in front of you and now you decide "oh no i need you to tell me how to think, i no rember, it hard" Fuck you.
don't get me wrong, i enjoy researching and writing them. But fucking hell, you don't have to have an opinion about every little fucking thing to exist.
I think you're right up to a point. I disagree about teaching people how to think. I credit a particular lesson in early high-school in a media studies class with giving me the framework to critically consider the media I consume and the headlines / viewpoints I read.
Whether debate is the best format for that, I dunno. But I do think teaching kids how to think critically is valuable.
I use the inverse of this strategy; whenever I figure out that I'm wrong about something, I immediately admit I was mistaken and change my position. All I have to do is make sure my logic is impeccable and I'll almost always win an argument.
No you won't.
In the situation I'm talking about, you could simply choose to argue for the correct side (as most did). You're usually given a choice between 2 options. Or at least, I was in high school, and to be fair my school sucked. I saw the exercise like a game and I was picking hard difficulty. I didn't actually believe in the position I took. It was just more interesting to argue for.
The one debate I had in high school was whether or not humans should incorporate artificial (bionic) parts into their bodies. I had to argue against so much stupid bullshit that I lost plenty of respect for most of them - I do not even want to imagine how I would have felt if the matter of debate had been whether or not I should have equal rights. The following day everyone agreed that I won the debate though.
I don't get it, why would one debate human rights? Is it because it's unfortunate to have dumb people in class or what are we talking about here?
I debated abortion in school a couple decades ago. I would consider that a human right but I had to debate the opposite at the time.
Comes up in politics or ethics discussions a lot. Or at least it used to when I was in school. Things like gay rights, women's rights, right to die, etc etc
It's worse because you aren't debating human rights, you are debating what human is.
because the entire field of philosophy is based on questioning existing systems, and existing beliefs, this is why things like nihilism and anti natalism exist.
The only way to keep learning is to keep asking questions. The more questions you ask, the more deeply you can delve. Simple as.
It's easy to say everyone should have human rights. But what if one person goes against anothers human rights? What is a just punishment?
And that's before even getting into what rights people should have. You can very easily have everyone be theoretically equal while still effectively disadvantaging some people (and getting rid of that entirely is not even possible, we can just minimize it). There's a lot to debate.
What I don't get is why there would ever be a debate about excluding some people from human rights without them first violating others'. The only argument for that is "if we oppress this group, this other group will have better lives". Which is often true, sure, but that's just being a selfish asshole.
Not a topic settled globally, yet!
Star Trek, one day we hope
I teach - I have to debate my basic human rights every day (sleep and time spent not working are apparently not rights I hold according to our more entitled students/managers).
I'm so privileged that when I was born I owed taxes to the government for my future earnings.
There is no debate. Fuck you. I'll do what I want.
This is a dumb comment, to millions even being allowed in school is a privilege. source
idk, it sounds like fun. I would do it.
Debating whether or not people should have human rights sounds like a fun one ngl.
The unfun part is when its your personal rights (personally) and you have to discuss them to defend yourself.
i would still fucks with it not gonna lie.
I think it would be funny to argue against my own humans rights just to make a point lol.
I'm trying to think of any semi logical argument why people shouldn't have human rights, and I'm struggling. Best I can think of is the kind of Aristotlean argument against democracy and in favor of hierarchical society.
I have an argument, but it's kind of a dumb one.
Goes something along the lines of, if we have enshrined "human rights", if we have human rights as a concept, then that draws attention to the fact that we have them. It would be better to have it be the case that what we call "human rights" are so defaulted to, as a concept, that we need not even refer to them at all semantically. We should get rid of the term "human rights", get rid of the conceptualization of it, but then still have the thing itself while not thinking of it at all. We have the concept so ingrained, that there is no reference to it. It would be better, if it were so ingrained, as so it couldn't possibly be contested.
I think probably supporting arguments would be something along the lines of like, you only really need human rights when you create situations in which you are presented with a detestable action in the first place which must be opposed. A state of affairs which must be defined and then opposed. Or, a state of affairs which must be kind of withheld, and then human rights are to be defined as a default. Sort of like, ancient society encounters slavery as a concept, then they need to define their contract of human rights and build it around slavery. Is it the right of all people to not be slaves, or only the right of some people to not be slaves? Contrast that with a society which hasn't encountered slaves ever, or has no need for them, and then that question doesn't make any sense, and so the idea of having a "human right to not be a slave" doesn't really make any sense to implement, in that situation. It's a superfluous concept.
Then you would argue that the society whose conditions will lead them to exist naturally without slaves, is a better society, even if it's only by happenstance, than the society that kind of has to deal with the question of slaves because they've naturally been led to a path where they're even having to make that decision to begin with.
Which possibly makes sense, and points towards root causes as maybe being the things to be combated in the overarching state of affairs, rather than like, just kind of slapping "everyone should have these human rights" on things and then pretending they'll be okay, or trying to work that backwards into the situation without having solved the root causes, right.
But more realistically I think it's probably not something you can predict in advance, the situation of, slaves or no slaves. To slave or not to slave. A society encounters that by happenstance, it's really hard to predict, and even if a society were to predict that as a future set of conditions, they'd still have to grapple with the question and create a value set that either says, full slave society, or, no slave society, but we kind of just stay right here and don't change too much, or we change the minimal amount, or like. Okay, how could we change it to avoid slaves. It still requires a value set and a grappling with that question, even if you could possibly see it coming. Probably you're not even able to fulyl process the consequences of that question, because those things haven't really happened yet. You might just hear slaves, in a pre-slave society, and be like "oh yeah that's probably fine" and not realize how bad it is, or whatever.
and this is the reason why we question why people should have rights. Because it turns out, people should. And there are a lot of rights people don't currently have.
Questioning why you should, often leads to instances where an existing non right, is brought up, talked about, and then people may decide it should actually be a right, the right to die for example. Medically assisted death.
And besides, it has the benefit of forcing you to think for yourself, which often forces you to think about the underlying reasons as to why you believe something, which pushes you to find a reason to believe it, and if done sufficiently. Leads to a very stable principle base, leading to very consistent, and fair beliefs. Though unfortunately this requires you to think about particular things most of the time, trans rights for instance. But like i said, it leads to me believing that people should be able to do what they want, because having more options at your disposal, leads to a happier more complete life, that you will be capable of getting more out of.
