comelately
Wild Horses
You've completely missed my point. I'm not talking about intention - I mean what proportion of people, if asked in the street, would say racism and sexism are good things? - but about the concrete consequences of people's actions. Questions that take a bit of thinking about, such as "Will sharing this infantile infographic about refugees, full of specious reasoning and numbers and facts that could be complete bullshit for all I know, help reduce racism?" or "Will joining in this furious Twitter campaign to make this guy I've never heard of lose his job because he allegedly said something which, shorn of all context, could arguably be interpreted as sexist, help reduce sexism?".
Living inside your social-media echo chamber, dismissing out of hand any information that doesn't fit with your pre-existing worldview and mindlessly parroting everything your right-on friends say for fear that they might suspect you of not being right-on - now that is the easy option.
Oh come on mate, do me a favour. As I already said a few posts ago:
OK, a few examples totally off the top of my head.
Hysterical irreason: Feminist groups who insist that men who oppose male circumcision must somehow be in favour of FGM, and must therefore be vigorously pilloried as vile misogynists. Or the Swedish MP who said it's morally worse for a Swedish man to rape a Swedish woman than for a Muslim immigrant to do so. Or look up 'donglegate' if you haven't heard of it. Seriously, I could go on all day.
Moral relativism: see pretty much anything Seumas Milne has ever written. People who can't accept that a country other the USA or Israel might be behind anything bad in the world and reflexively ascribe Russian attacks on Syrian hospitals (for example) to "false flag operations". People (hello zhao!) who can't even wait till the emergency response teams have finished picking up the bits of human offal following the latest jihadi bombing somewhere in Europe to start banging on about how it's all our fault, because Iraq. And so on, and so on, and so on.
Edit: I guess this is subject-creep from 'things the Right gets right' to 'things the Left gets wrong', but the two are related.
Absolving some people of responsibility because 'what do you expect?' and treating others as completely free & responsible moral agents is pretty much involved in any kind of moral system. Not sure where relativism comes into it; it does feel like a snarl word here and little else.
Who here is actually a moral absolutist?
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