(no subject)
I wrote this.The why tickles my curiosity, but I won't get it from asking him or probably even from internet-stalking him, so oh well.
Everyone is a human being. By definition. So it's certainly explainable with blanket dismissals like "moron", "arrogant", "fuckwad", but it certainly isn't understandable. I could describe multiple people I know in the same terms, and yet recognize completely different motives for their actions.
This is a point I like to make regularly. It's important to recognize even the most despicable of human beings as human beings. I refuse to acknowledge people who say, "Having done that, they've written themselves out of the species." That's not true. Definitionally, humanity does not require one to be humane.
This is not to say they don't deserve (or we superior homo sapiens deserve) retribution in some just form; by all means: burn the heretic, kill the mutant, purge the unclean. But I also demand that you acknowledge they're still human beings, and that you have blood on your hands. If you feel a need to make a moral judgment as a result of that, that's your problem with your morality. Maybe you should fix it, hey?
Same goes for veneration, but it's easy to drag people off their pedestals into the mud, so who cares about that. Mother Teresa condemned. Shield the underdog, rawr!
Honestly, though, the essential problem (and the basis of my moral system) is that dehumanizing and exiling members from the conceptual whole is to leave a hole in your understanding. You need to understand why they did it, what drove them to it (intrinsically or not), how they began and how they reached the inflection point. That's knowledge and it should be known.
Example.
We acknowledge that some murderers are sanctioned, and other murderers are not. There is a good reason for this. That reason comes from understanding. Had we stopped with "Thou shalt not kill" rather than go that next step and acknowledge that it's really "Thou shalt not kill outside of self-defense, or when ordained by society and vested with the power to wield murder in the defense of society itself", a lot more of us would be dead because no one would be stepping up to fight back against those of us who actually would be mass murderers.
The difference isn't something as ridiculous as tit-for-tat. Murder in self-defense isn't okay because it's self-defense, period. It's okay because it's self-defense, and we understand what self-defense constitutes. We understand a credible threat, and we understand lethal force, not to mention that some people can't estimate lethal force, or are unable to bring to bear an equal but non-lethal response. These are things we, as a society, understand. We understand them about people. And all of that understanding ends up distilled as the right of self-defense, even to the point of murder.
(Exercise for the reader: give the same treatment for theft. =P Yes, it's a lot harder and can't be dumbed down into two measly paragraphs, because the premise of property isn't actually all that easy (IMO) to back up in the first place. But come on. It's a challenge: "some thievery is sanctioned, and other thievery is not." Go for it. You can probably do a dozen different interpretations of that assertion. IP? Impoundment? Robin Hood?)
Everyone is a human being. By definition. So it's certainly explainable with blanket dismissals like "moron", "arrogant", "fuckwad", but it certainly isn't understandable. I could describe multiple people I know in the same terms, and yet recognize completely different motives for their actions.
This is a point I like to make regularly. It's important to recognize even the most despicable of human beings as human beings. I refuse to acknowledge people who say, "Having done that, they've written themselves out of the species." That's not true. Definitionally, humanity does not require one to be humane.
This is not to say they don't deserve (or we superior homo sapiens deserve) retribution in some just form; by all means: burn the heretic, kill the mutant, purge the unclean. But I also demand that you acknowledge they're still human beings, and that you have blood on your hands. If you feel a need to make a moral judgment as a result of that, that's your problem with your morality. Maybe you should fix it, hey?
Same goes for veneration, but it's easy to drag people off their pedestals into the mud, so who cares about that. Mother Teresa condemned. Shield the underdog, rawr!
Honestly, though, the essential problem (and the basis of my moral system) is that dehumanizing and exiling members from the conceptual whole is to leave a hole in your understanding. You need to understand why they did it, what drove them to it (intrinsically or not), how they began and how they reached the inflection point. That's knowledge and it should be known.
Example.
We acknowledge that some murderers are sanctioned, and other murderers are not. There is a good reason for this. That reason comes from understanding. Had we stopped with "Thou shalt not kill" rather than go that next step and acknowledge that it's really "Thou shalt not kill outside of self-defense, or when ordained by society and vested with the power to wield murder in the defense of society itself", a lot more of us would be dead because no one would be stepping up to fight back against those of us who actually would be mass murderers.
The difference isn't something as ridiculous as tit-for-tat. Murder in self-defense isn't okay because it's self-defense, period. It's okay because it's self-defense, and we understand what self-defense constitutes. We understand a credible threat, and we understand lethal force, not to mention that some people can't estimate lethal force, or are unable to bring to bear an equal but non-lethal response. These are things we, as a society, understand. We understand them about people. And all of that understanding ends up distilled as the right of self-defense, even to the point of murder.
(Exercise for the reader: give the same treatment for theft. =P Yes, it's a lot harder and can't be dumbed down into two measly paragraphs, because the premise of property isn't actually all that easy (IMO) to back up in the first place. But come on. It's a challenge: "some thievery is sanctioned, and other thievery is not." Go for it. You can probably do a dozen different interpretations of that assertion. IP? Impoundment? Robin Hood?)