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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2822 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I think the US government should legalize freedom of association, allow the formation of ethnic neighborhoods, and devolve more power to the neighborhood level. I don't think what I support should count as white nationalism, per se, because it doesn't explicitly favor white people, and it falls short of creating sovereign ethnostates. I think the USA is like the Ottoman Empire, and I support preserving the empire and creating a millet system rather than breaking the empire apart into nation-states as happened historically to the Ottoman Empire.

We have freedom of association on racial grounds. For example, I am free to invite only people of race X to my birthday party, or to invite everyone other than members of race X. What you are asking is why businesses should not be free to engage in racial discrimination, which is a different question.

Say you're a Swede who lives in San Diego and wants to visit family in Seattle. Everyone on the west coast who doesn't live in those two cities decided to freely disassociate from Swedes. Now you can't stop for lodging or victuals along the route.

Is this realistic in the modern age of capitalism? No. But some people think that things like it might be. Stepping away from the specifics of race, I suspect that many small businesses would freely disassociate from wheelchair-bound people if it was legal to do so.

I suspect that many small businesses would freely disassociate from wheelchair-bound people if it was legal to do so.

"Legal to do so, but you have to note it as part of any advertisement" might be a reasonable compromise. Just like you can sell rat poison as medicine, so long as you label your warfarin correctly, you should be able to sell your ramp-free hotel as accommodations so long as you warn any prospective guests ahead of time. I suspect most small businesses would build the ramps anyway, because it won't just be wheelchair users who will leave "must be accessible" enabled as a permanent search filter.

I think the best steelman I can come up against even that level of compromise is: lots of people would leave such a filter enabled today, but perhaps that's mostly because it took government force to push the majority culture to the point where using such filters would be seen as a good deed and a minor inconvenience, not a weird ideology or an impractical hardship. Likewise for bigotry: people are much more open to other races/etc. today, so legally requiring nearly everybody to provide non-discriminatory service and employment seems like a quaint atavism or at most a way to catch a few secretive villains ... but how much of that is because most people (or at least the earlier generations from whom they learned their culture) were often effectively required to e.g. interact more with other races back when that requirement required serious enforcement and opposition to it wasn't seen as villainous? Even if their "post-judice" from such interaction wasn't always a perfect vision of equality, it might have been "close enough" in many cases where their pre-judice wasn't. There's a Simpsons joke in Homer's Phobia about how if only all gay men could save Homer's life, like the episode's guest star did, then things would be fine ... but I suspect for many people the hurdle to cross wasn't "had my life saved in a dramatic adventure", it was just "regularly spent time among people I'd have been prejudiced to avoid, and yet nothing dramatic happened at all".

The best argument against freedom of association may be the hypothetical scenario of a doctor withholding lifesaving medical treatment from a black person while openly claiming racial animus as the motivation for their inaction. I can imagine a society where most people have freedom of association except for certain professions which are forbidden from refusing service on the basis of race on pain of having their professional license revoked.

Yeah - the medical profession in present day America would not like that. Maybe a doctor could get away with that kind of crap in 1950 Alabama, but not in 2023 Alabama, not openly claiming racial animus. Even if it was legal.

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