EquALLity wrote:
Do you think gerrymandering should be replaced?
Oh yes. One person, one vote. Not districts or electoral college or any of that nonsense. We have the technology now.
We should also have another voting system, like approval based voting, or instant runoff, or something along those lines.
EquALLity wrote:
Well, they passed policies that disproportionately reduced votes from minorities (and students) for no legitimate reason. It's not just about the students.
Their reason was not legitimate, but it wasn't a racist reason. It was to rig the system to reduce
democrats voting. They're happy to have votes from anybody if they're for republicans.
EquALLity wrote:
I'm saying that I was thinking of what I would reasonably perceive to be oppression, not things like 'Christian persecution' in America, and that it's pretty much always harmful.
That's pretty subjective, though. You perceive those things to be oppression because they're harmful, I think, not the other way around.
EquALLity wrote:
Are you saying that oppression is subjective, so Christian persecution really is oppression since there's no objective definition?
Basically, yes.
EquALLity wrote:
If you think that 'oppression' is subjective... Well, I pretty much just mean cruel treatment by it.
That's not the definition, though (it's only one possible definition in a much broader usage), so we should use another word.
Also, what would or would not be considered "cruel" can even be subjective.
"willfully causing pain or suffering to others, or feeling no concern about it."
Christians may think it's cruel to stop them from leading class prayers. We do it willfully, and knowing that they don't like it, and this causes them emotional pain because they're unable to fulfill their religious duties as they see them. I'm also not much concerned with this pain caused to them: I have to admit to being pretty calloused toward it, I can get behind the "cry me a river" mentality there. And it's true to some extent that it's cruel. That doesn't mean it's wrong, because it's even more harmful for them to be allowed to do it.
I think the only useful metric looks at consequential harm -- not cruelty itself, which is manifold, but the net harm vs benefit -- and that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what would commonly be called "oppression" or even "cruelty" which could serve a larger purpose sometimes and may or may not result in net harm. Unnecessary cruelty is probably more relevant.
Animal testing is cruel -- pretty much all of it -- some is clearly unnecessary, and some is arguably necessary, and there's a big difference there.
It may seem cruel to lock away murderers, but it may be the least of evils because it's even more cruel to others to release them upon society.
EquALLity wrote:
So, we should care about pretty much all forms of cruel treatment, but not mix them together. Whether or not the word oppression is used or not doesn't really impact what I'm saying.
I think we should care most about unnecessary cruelty; cruelty that is avoidable, and serves no justifiable purpose. But we should also try to fixate on those things where our efforts will produce the most benefit, not more complex and difficult matters that are very hard to affect (and where we might easily inadvertently do more harm than good).