Tuesday 20 March 2018

Ultrasnobbery

If one thing defines my life, it is finding people who are being snobby because they think they are smart and out-snobbing them to make them feel the way they are trying to make other people feel.

I had this idea for a book about the idea of god. I'm clearly an atheist by any sensible definition. But the point of my book wouldn't be to say, "Hey, jerks, there's no God, stop doing all that stupid God stuff." No, people who believe in a god of one sort or another have no shortage of books to say that to them. Instead, I'd being going after ignostics.

Ignoticism is the idea that any discussion of God's existence is meaningless because the term "God" is not sufficiently well defined to discuss. It's an extremely snobby point of view held by people who just want to tell other people that what they are talking about isn't worth talking about. I don't know what could be more infuriating to me.

Anyway, I've got the general outline of the book. I've got eleven chapters mapped out and the argument running through them in my head.

But writing books is daunting hard work with no payoff. It would be my third. My philosophy manifesto, world changing as it was, didn't exactly pick up steam. I've been rewriting the second half of my novel about a magical girl from a magical world who finds herself in mundane Toronto for about ten years.

I want to share my prophetic genius with the world, but it seems very hard to find the time. Maybe, though, the idea of sticking it to some snobs will motivate me.

It's hard to say.

Monday 19 March 2018

Where the Line is

I literally have a half-dozen half-written posts from the last month and a half but here I am starting a new one. It's because I've had an epiphany on why free speech for white supremacists is such a problematic issue.

We all agree that killing people is a net negative. We agree on that to such an extent that my tepid description of it a "net negative" makes it sound monstrous because it doesn't convey the extent to which I should condemn killing people. We also recognize that there are various reasons why people kill other people:

  • The killer is angry that the victim was cheating on them
  • The killer is disturbed that the victim is unresponsive to their demands to stop eating the face of another person who appears to be unconscious, maybe dead
So killing people is a bad thing but we are able to draw a line and say: on this side of the line where you are just struggling to deal with your anger the killing is unacceptable; on this side of the line where a possibly-still-alive person is being mutilated by someone who has been driven to psychosis by bath salts, killing is acceptable.

Let's make a five point scale. At five we have situations that are so over-the-top that we all agree that shooting someone is pretty much the best possible option. From
one to three
we have varying degrees of sympathy for the shooter, but we still find it very clear cut that shooting someone was unacceptable. At four we run into the problem cases where we understand why the shooting was justified in the mind of the shooter but think they ought to have made more of an effort to escape the situation, or we think that a reasonable person ought to have known better, or some other set of facts makes us question whether it was justified.

Let's imagine a similar scale for suppressing political speech, for trying to deny people a platform which to spread their views. Just like killing, it's weighted towards allowing people to say what they want. A one might be "I haven't decided who I'm going to vote for." and a two or three might be, "Ice in November? What happened to Global Warming?"

A five would include things that are obviously already illegal. If you specifically ask people to kill your someone of an opposing political view or threaten to kill them yourself, for example.

A lot of people who argue that white supremacists should have the same speech platform as the Green party seem to think that advocating genocide of a group of people based on their ethnicity, religion or skin colour is a four and we are haggling over how far we ought to go. Actually, a lot of them seem to think it's a three.

It's a five.

I've made the joking-not-joking analogy that if we want to protect my freedom to cut vegetables we have to protect someone's freedom to stab people. Free use of knives. That analogy may seem unfair, but that is the degree to which people who say that white supremacist recruitment events are just another kind of free speech sound insane to me.

They think that banning the Communist Party's speech is the equivalent of shooting someone because they killed your father, while banning nazi speech is the equivalent of shooting someone because you felt afraid when your level of fear was totally irrational and you weren't really in danger. I agree with them on the Communist Party bit, but to me banning nazi speech is shooting that drug-addled face-eater. It's shooting the blood-axe-wielding berserker running for the maternity ward. The line is way over there and there is no question that we are across it.

So while they think they are arguing principles of free speech, a tacit part of their argument is that promoting genocide just isn't that harmful. It's not harmful the way saying,
"smash every window in this place"
would be, or the way that
drawing an unauthorized picture of Mickey Mouse
would be.