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I had an argument (I'd guess this is what spurs many top level comments) about tattoos, and how much you're allowed to judge people for them.
My argument was that I think tattoos are a sign of distasteful character and went something like
These, I think, give me plenty of room to be wary of strangers with tattoos, especially where I am located in a pretty methed up rural area. The beautiful thing is that it's not a protected characteristic, so you can actually judge it as much as you like!
The other party's argument was
I actually don't think I could agree with that, ever! While it is more true the more "normal" people get tattoos, it is still a fact that pretty much any mugshot I see of any likely violent incarcerated individual is going to have a ton of them. They are also something you have to go out of your way to get, and thus, they make a decent indicator that you shouldn't trust someone if they're in the Venn diagram of "has tattoos".
But now I'm curious what is acceptable to judge people about. Let's say you're walking to your workplace or your university class or your school and you see, purposely avoiding anything like a bumper sticker or T-shirt that makes any more clearly identifiable statement or symbol:
Or perhaps we could change the context of how you're seeing this person. Let's say you work at a gas station or other commonly-visited public-facing third-place and you see people
The stance of the refuses-to-judge-on-tattoos individual is a little perplexing to me. I'm certain that I am similarly perplexing to him. But for me, pretty much all of these, plus other considerations like height, sex, and age add up to an impression of the character and of the threat level of said individual. Personally, I think everyone has this kind of unconscious thinking, even if they don't know it or if they have suppressed it significantly. My guess is that people left of center tend to be uncomfortable with associating behaviors like that with anything negative, even though they are not protected characteristics, and even though they almost certainly do it themselves for various things, like word choice (do you say gay people or do you say queer people?), vehicle choice (drives a truck...), or sex and likely choice of gender.
How much should you judge people? On what should you judge them by? Is there something you think it's wrong to judge people for?
Having children is expensive and painful and permanent. Does that mean that you consider having children to be antisocial/unaesthetic, by the same token?
If kids were tattoos, sure! Instead, parents are generally viewed well by everyone except antinatalists, and responsibly having kids in a healthy marriage has got to be a good indicator of lack of criminality or impulsiveness. They also do a lot more than sit on you making a statement. People become parents by accident or they become parents for reasons other than signaling something. This provides pretty good cover for the people who are signaling something.
Getting more than one costly, expensive, loud, and permanent signal directly on your body, on the other hand, seems to correlate a lot with low impulse control and many other problems. Most of my arguments would not apply (as much) to a small, invisible tattoo, or a singular large one. I still would dislike them, though.
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