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Must we marginalize and contain these people? I reject this premise. What we can do is work with them, educate them on how to live a better life, and love them.
Then ideally create a culture that doesn’t lead people down these paths.
I'm certain you don't: you just draw the line a little bit further down the hierarchy. Imprisoning people is marginalizing them. Putting people into custodial care (mentally-deficient adults, etc.) is marginalizing them. Keeping disruptive, aggressive children out of normal classrooms is marginalizing them. This is obviously necessary. Again, the question is where the line ought to be drawn.
It's not hard to imagine an argument that segregation was the humane, minimally-marginalizing functional solution here. Main issue with it being that it was indeed deeply unfair to outliers, genetic hybrids, and so on.
Disagree. That's possible for those who wish to improve themselves; who are willing and able to receive such education. Many do not fall into this category.
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As with HBD the question is what happens if you can't do that (at least at scale) and it's easier to do other things?
In this case "destigmatize" whatever their condition is, which seems to have somehow flowed directly into "publicize" and even "encourage".
You can see why. It's simply much more convenient, and less mean, if society has the problem and it can be made to disappear in a puff by encouraging the "marginalized".
If you take punitive/mean options off the table it's an excruciating problem to find some way of containing bad memes without containing carriers. And, frankly, it cedes power to a certain sort of person I'm not sure it's wise to trust.
You can absolutely love people into more virtue. Christians did it with entire societies and came to basically rule the world.
These are excuses that I don’t accept.
I don't know that the conquest of large sections of the world were really expressions of Christian love, even if Christianity was often invoked as legitimating force and Christian voices often called for temperance in colonial activities in the name of the Gospel (i.e. Bartolomé de las Casas).
It's not quite that simple. In my view the Christian faith led to a massive amount of pro-social coordination to happen, which allowed Europe to evolve in unique ways. Then the wealth of that was misused I must admit.
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This has been the political project of the last 50 years, and it's only resulted in the inmates running the asylum.
I don’t believe it has been done correctly. Love is not endless, empty compassion. Love is pushing people to become better, even if sometimes against their will at the moment.
(Always excellent when I can resort to life lesson from The Wire)
How do you deal with those who are too seasoned?
Because, eventually, you're going to have a non-trivial amount of people who actually have exchanges like this:
- What if you had a life sentence?
- Then I'd fucking escape.
Fat tails are real. Whenever I see someone make your argument of "we have to love them more, and educate them!" I know, and even sympathize, with what you're thinking. You're thinking of my cousin who's just kind of goofy bro who drinks too much, smokes pot, lives in his girlfriend's parents' basement, and has been to jail a couple times. His shit isn't in order, but it could be. Is it his fault? Eh, his dad wasn't there and his mom didn't try. Love him more, educate him.
And that feels good because it feels manageable if we all just pitch in! And for a good number of guys-like-my-cousin, it would probably work! This is why I am a believer in charity in principle.
But what do you do with people like our friend Sean (from the clip) who, when faced with a hypothetical life sentence, immediately defaults to "I will escape from prison so that I can murder a man" -- and means it (inasmuch as he can "mean" anything, driven by immediate emotion and instant gratification as he is).
The fat tails of society are both what lift it to new heights (real entrepreneurs, real political leaders, et al.) and what pose a constant existential threat. The social consensus since 1964 has been to look at that constant existential threat and say ... just got to love 'em more!
I agree that there are people who must be contained for the benefit of others, that's not what I'm saying. It seemed as if @WhiningCoil was making the argument that all progressives are insane and need to be imprisoned or killed. Perhaps I read it wrong.
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The political project of the last fifty years has skipped the "educate them on how to build a better life" part in favor of simple affirmation, partly out of a woeful misconstrual of what love is and partly because our societies have adopted increasingly hollow ideas of a better life.
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