Tiresia

I mean, can you or can you not picture your job being done by a pig wearing clothes in a children's book?

Because I can picture a pig with a boater hat and round glasses carrying a pile of half-unspooled film reels, a pair of safety scissors and a roll of tape on their belt.

And before you complain about it being an old-fashioned depiction, the OOP isn't exactly how a modern butcher works either.

I understand if you disagree on whether, by expecting children to go without respect and people to submit to the natural hierarchy, their comment promotes a form of child abuse. But do you disapprove of the methods or of the choice of target?

If it is the methods, do you want me to report everyone who makes similarly rude statements about fossil fuel companies so you can ask them to tone it down a little? Because fossil fuel companies too are neither outlandish nor hateful. Perhaps even about right-wing politicians? Many of them are hateful, but is it really right for us to act disrespectfully in turn?

If it is the choice of target, then would you please add a clarification to the rules where you outline what determines who is a valid target?

I'm frankly confused about your second paragraph. Do you have a different definition of "definition"? Because I didn't give a definition, I did not mean human rights, and the notion that respect can and should be earned also isn't a definition. I and your "common understanding" only give two different priors for who deserves respect.

Is it so hard to fathom the notion of actually respecting children? Because I mean actual respect. Feeling the same gravitas at your infant child who wants a cookie before bedtime as at a CEO who wants that report on their desk by tomorrow morning when you clock out in five minutes, and vice versa. Just two people who have their own unstated reasons for wanting something that from your perspective appears unreasonable. The only difference is that the state uses its monopoly on violence to enable you to abuse one and enable the other to abuse you.

People will often find themselves in the position where they're forced to accept abuse from others, but that doesn't make it right for them to pass it on, and it doesn't make it right for them to claim that the abuse is fair or compatible with anarchism.

As far as I've seen, it's rare to find someone for who "having earned their respect" isn't code for someone having power over them, and for who "not having earned their respect" isn't code for them having power over someone.

You should learn the difference between deference and delegation, and then learn to delegate choices and research to experts rather than deferring to them. Where doctors are concerned, it could literally save your life and those of your loved ones.

Children, too, should learn to delegate rather than defer. Deference maintains a gap in someone's understanding, and as soon as the parents stop providing that service the child becomes lost. A baby who cries when they feel uncomfortable is already choosing when to cry and when not to cry. They don't defer the maintenance of their body to their parents, they delegate it, and as soon as they are able to control those bodily functions they rescind that delegation.

Deference is always archist. "Natural hierarchies" were an archist lie when it referred to racist and sexist hierarchies and it's an archist lie when it refers to familial, professional, and social hierarchies. Respect is due to everyone, not just to the powerful or to your "natural superiors". Every infant deserves respect, every wife, every teenager, every mentally disabled person. What the fuck is wrong with you that you think otherwise?

I think your depiction of community requiring people to accept abuse from "the community's authority" comes from growing up in a legal and cultural framework where abusers are systematically protected and rewarded. Where being able to cheat colleagues out of their fair share because the contract is written in just the right way gets you more money than you can ever spend; where victims of rape aren't allowed to warn each other because the community will judge them for making accusations, or find them guilty of libel.

How could a community in a statist society end up with any other choice than between falling apart or accepting the abuse of the guy the police will protect? But that's not an inherent property of community, it's just an inherent property of statism.

That is not to say we have to wait for the end of states for communities to be more egalitarian. The bylaws of a community organization can do a lot of work towards making it more pleasant for its members, similarly to how the democratic Separation of Powers doesn't solve tyranny but does make it a lot more mild. Ultimately sufficiently dogged abusers will find a gap, but it's nice for the time that it lasts.

For the more general insight that a community needs some pressure to prevent it from falling apart under internal forces even if those internal forces are neither assisted by outside forces nor empowered through crappy internal bylaws, you're conflating coersion and incentive. Coersion is typically violent and based on positive punishment. But there are also negative punishment, positive reinforcement, and negative reinforcement. Poor people cooperating to survive is an example of negative reinforcement: their cooperation allows them to use their resources more effectively to avoid harm.

In short, when an authority is abusive: you have three options. Leave, submit, or remove them from power. It is not the fault of communities that states make this last option difficult.

I (don’t) wonder how this might change if the child in question wasn’t cisgender and/or heterosexual.

Simple: non-cishet children quickly stop being part of religious communities, and so the religious community is very accepting to all its members. Classic survivorship bias.

but the vast majority of us aren’t doing anything at all that depletes resources at a too-fast rate.

Sure, but only because the vast majority of us aren't European or North American.

Rich people and companies are the winners of a game that hundreds of millions actively support through purchasing patterns, voting, peer pressure, and political activism. Populists winning elections on platforms of ignoring climate change are responsible, yes, but so is everyone who voted for them.

Every example you name for how you could reduce consumption involve you remaining an individual consumer, continuing to work within their system. But there are co-ops, library economies, unionization, political groups, collective activism - many ways to work together to far greater effect. They want us to see ourselves as snowflakes in an avalanche, none of us strong enough to fight the system, but we can fuse our economic power and become a boulder or a barricade, digging into the ground and taking energy out of the system rather than adding to it.

This is something we have always been able to do, and we, as western consumers in relative privilege, are responsible for every second that we do not do so, and let ourselves vote with our wallets instead.

If two people doing little more than breaking a fence and climbing into a machine can seriously damage your nation's essential infrastructure, that's more on the government than on those two people. Any actual sabotage and there might not have been an infrastructure left to save.

The electrical grid should be able to handle any one power plant shutting down unexpectedly. Ideally it should be able to handle severed power lines and multiple simultaneous failures, with emergency generators for anything essential. Not even because of sabotage, just because power plants are complex machines that can just unexpectedly fail.

Because by using their definition consistently you ridicule and defang the phrase, same as 'queer'. Even by your definition, there have been good terrorists like the abolitionist John Brown, so it is in everyone's best interest to stop acting like terrorism is worse than fascism.

John Brown was a based terrorist. The British Suffragette movement had a bunch of based terrorists. Mother Jones was based, and as much of a terrorist as most of Al Qaeda (i.e. not personally involved in terrorist attacks, but supporting movements that did engage in terrorism).

All you need is a sufficiently abhorrent status quo and terrorists who are otherwise decent human beings.

Alice says that the fear response is dangerous because it can get people to get drawn in by reactionaries, but fear is often legitimate. It's a visceral signal to remove yourself from the dangerous situation (such as social media), into a position where you can evaluate your options safely.

Fear becomes dangerous if you are unable to escape it for a long time, if you hold on to it, or if it is misdirected so you end up trying to remove the wrong things. If you are posting about social media about how bad social media is, fear is detrimental, but if you find yourself unable to cut down on social media even though you want to, fear is valid and proportional.

... yeah, it is horrifying how I'm on here spending limited introverted energy speaking with strangers through text, and then don't have the energy to organize stuff with friends offline. I'm gonna go now.

5 years later: "Why did nobody warn us social media consumers that social media was bad?"

"Good news, after decades of searching we have finally been able to imagine one (1) possible future world that is worse off than we will be."

I need a drink.