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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35553 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Whats interesting is that the streamer in question distinct "politics" from "human rights", she gives a pretty weak example with Roe V Wade. However i think the distinction between "politics" and "human rights" is shaky to begin with. No one really agrees on what human rights even are, per her roe example, gun control (constitutional arguably, but still) being another one, & there are still societies/people that arent accepting of LGBT although thats been on the decline over some decades. My guess is she is taking this to mean, "you probably shouldnt date a nazi", which is perfectly fine.

... so, I'm going to take an example that isn't dating:

With abortion and birth control rights threatened both around the world and particularly in the United States, RPGnet believes that reproductive rights are human rights. We're committed to that, and will sanction posts supporting anti-human-rights positions.

This is, to skip the chase, a left-leaning site. It is not a tremendous surprise. I don't have access to the internal politics forum that I'm sure sparked this announcement. I'm unsure if they have, or ever will need to have, actual application of this rule -- the place was left-leaning enough a decade ago that the against-the-grain political posters were nicknamed zebras (for getting run down and eaten), and I doubt it's gotten more varied since. To the extent I look at all, it's because the Nobilis/Chuubo's stuff only really gets posted there.

But it's a useful example of a thread I've seen a lot. You criticize that "no one really agrees on what human rights even are", but that misses the point entirely: 'human rights', here, doesn't mean some legalistic or dictionary sense. It means matters so important that the writer is not willing to accept that their edge cases are up for discussion. It doesn't matter whether that's actually present as a descriptive sense: a lot of this class of 'human rights' are not actually protected at all, or may be not especially popular in the broader world (and, conversely, many things are not 'human rights' even if they're explicitly covered by the US Constitution and UN and large majorities in the speaker's country). It's a normative analysis for that specific context: these are axioms that can not and should not be debated in this situation. If the matter comes up, agreeing to disagree isn't acceptable.

The breadth of this application is not something universal, or probably even the majority of progressive spaces. Nor, for that matter, is it something that only shows up in progressive spaces (nor do you have to go into Deep Religious Evangelical SoCon ones to see right-wing variants: this twitter convo has three more open-minded rat-sphere-adjacent people talking, but the gut reaction is still pretty close to the same even if the expression is more amicable).

human rights', here, doesn't mean some legalistic or dictionary sense. It means matters so important that the writer is not willing to accept that their edge cases are up for discussion. It doesn't matter whether that's actually present as a descriptive sense: a lot of this class of 'human rights' are not actually protected at all, or may be not especially popular in the broader world (and, conversely, many things are not 'human rights' even if they're explicitly covered by the US Constitution and UN and large majorities in the speaker's country). It's a normative analysis for that specific context: these are axioms that can not and should not be debated in this situation. If the matter comes up, agreeing to disagree isn't acceptable.

Well, i mean thats kinda begging the question isnt it. Who gave them the authority to decide such a thing?

At the risk of tautology, the audience did, by the bit where they're doing it, and anyone's taking them seriously. I could go through the whole list of how moderators were picked up til 2012ish, but I don't think anyone cares, I don't know if it's changed since, and it's just a pretty shallow duct-tape patch on the underlying will to power. The RPGnet moderators run, for all meaningful purposes, the forum. (You can appeal to the admins, but they usually don't even bother to respond; from the rare times I've heard of them doing so, they just fob it off to the moderators.) There's nothing special about this compared to the "fuck Trump and his supporters" rule, "fuck ICE" rule, the "fuck 'nazis'" rule, or even a decade ago when it actually was a "fuck Nazis" rule, just because they call some of them about 'human rights' and some of them about not protecting awful people. It's just a norm they've set up.

In less formal relationships, the baton pass of the mandate of heaven is less obvious. But it still exists; you give people this power by interacting with them in ways where this power can be used. It's not some deep revelation about universal laws, it's just drawing lines with chalk.

And, to be fair and to steelman, that's how those sort of rules work. Barring some pretty extreme cults, state-run schools, or literal jails (badum-tish), you don't actually have some magical force requiring you to treat people seriously, or for them to treat you seriously. If someone draws lines by chalk, you either obey them, or you give them reason to fuck off.

To be somewhat less charitable, it being within one's power doesn't make it harmless. It's not hard to see what this has done to public discussion.

Well said.

The incentive to put healthcare/trans rights/speech rights in the august company of “human rights” is obvious. Sometimes this is defensible by analogy to (locally) well-established categories like US Constitutional Amendments. Other times it’s better at illustrating the distinct non-universality of right some we take for granted. The number of qualifiers on ICCPR signatories provides prime examples.

Nobilis/Chuubo’s

Some day we’ll get a full version of Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, and only then will we be able to settle these questions of morality.

I mostly see "human rights" as a useful rhetorical trick, it feels like a crushing argument to pro-lifers. I doubt anyones' internal thoughts are best described by "the matter is so important that edge cases are not up for discussion."

I suspect that if I wrote the following

Abortion might not be a human right. Even if you're 100% sure human rights must be protected at all costs, are you 100% sure abortion is a human right?

Nobody would be enlightened, or even take the time to read the linked article.

Geeks on the Internet have this tendency to think "If I say something that can be read literally in one way, and people don't get it, that's their own fault. I mean, how could anyone not understand literal words?"

The world doesn't work that way. We have implicature and context. To quote xkcd: "Communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness."

Asking "are you 100% sure abortion is a human right" communicates, by ordinary conversational standards, "are you 100% sure that abortion specifically is a human right", even if it does not include the literal word "specifically". Saying it when you want to communicate "are you 100% sure about anything at all" is miscommunication, even though it fits your literal words.

Furthermore, in ordinary conversation, "100%" is used the same way; it doesn't literally mean "100%, not even a 0.001% chance that I'm a brain in a jar and abortion isn't real", it means "high enough confidence in ideas unique to this case that for practical purposes they function like 100%." Yelling "Nyaa nyaa, you can't literally be 100% confident" is just communicating poorly with literal words.

Saying it when you want to communicate "are you 100% sure about anything at all" is miscommunication, even though it fits your literal words.

Help this geek understand the quoted portion of your post, and what it communicates by ordinary conversation standards. Because what I interpret is that you thought I was as trying to give this lesson. I wasn't. Let's suppose 100% is a probability, and people can be fully confident about whatever. I assumed that this would have been obvious when I wrote "Even if you're 100% sure human rights must be protected at all costs..."

Now I'm thinking you completely misunderstood my point altogether, which makes me want to reiterate and rephrase it, but I suspect you don't think the "abortion is a human right" discussion is very interesting.

Let's suppose ... people can be fully confident about whatever.

"Abortion is a human right" is an example of "whatever". You did not think people can be fully confident about that.

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