Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: AthenaSurrenders I will be giving it some thought. That's more than most would. Thank you, Athena. And, yes, I mind the "cultural normalization of sexual violence against women", too, which is why I think it's encouraging that we're seeing results from attempts at changing this status quo up here, and why I mention it as one of the possibilities for dealing with it. There have been experiments here in teaching the kids- of either gender- how to think about consent and the like, from the basic hypothesis that unless this is taught, they will uncritically absorb norms from the environment. For instance, teaching that either party can say no/stop at any time, teaching that there's no such thing as "owing" anyone sex, etc. This could be a worthwhile thing to copy elsewhere. To be clear, I should point out where my problem lies. I have seen, firsthand, the consequences of rape of various sorts. I've seen a wide range of outcomes, ranging from people having their lives ruined permanently, to people that shrug it off with little more than a "fuckin' bastard" and never give it another thought. I've seen men that have been raped, too. Men, women, adults, children, elderly, I get it, I empathize, and I'm all for measures to reduce the incidence of rape, as such. I probably haven't seen as much of it as you, but I get where you're coming from on this point. In rape, the rapists are culpable for their actions. With them lies the cause and the fault. They initiate the violation, the injustice. And there lies the point: initiation. When police arrest someone without anything more to go on than an upset person making allegations, the police might be initiating an injustice, with the full backing of us all, and if you resist, they're allowed to escalate the injustice as far as they like, realistically without consequences for such injustice. This is part of why we have courts and the like, rather than having a highly efficient setup for "corrections" based on weighing statistics for the maximum net good: so as to make sure that we, as a society, do not initiate injustice or violation, but rather only act when we have proof that our actions are just and porportionate. If we fail to prevent the murder of an innocent, we're simply not doing enough good, but we're in the right. If we harm an innocent, we're in the wrong, and we're the ones doing the bad things. I'm not willing to authorize people I don't know to do right and wrong alike so long as they, as a group, average doing more right than wrong, and to back them in applying whatever force they deem necessary and call it right, even those times that they're doing wrong. Each (wo)man wrongly executed is murder, with the blood on all our hands. And each (wo)man wrongly imprisoned is kidnapping under threat of lethal violence, again by all of us, even if by proxy. That mistakes happen, I get. But there's a difference between acknowledging that mistakes will happen, and sanctioning a departure from the principles that should govern such things- "first, do no harm", "innocent until proven guilty", and so forth- which is what it amounts to when we say "well, what would happen without our intervention is a worse outcome than us being wrong in our intervention". This line of thinking neglects responsibility. When the police do wrong, they become responsible, in the same way the criminals are responsible, and without being held accountable, to boot. The ends are noble, but the ends do not justify the means. That's the essence of my point. IWYW, — Aswad. P.S.: On the point of cultural normalization, I would say- having already acknowledged the same harmful norm you point out- that two wrongs don't make one right. P.P.S.: I may have gotten the topic mixed up with another thread. My apologies.
< Message edited by Aswad -- 5/17/2013 7:04:42 PM >
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"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way. We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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