AlicetheKurious wrote:Stephen Morgan wrote:If you want to show your solidarity with other humans take part in the collective organisation of society by forming queues, allowing people to keep their seats, and so on, not by giving certain people preferential seat treatment. Treat others as you would like to be treated. Ask for no seat, give up no seat. That is the virtuous way to be.
I agree that we should respect each other's rights by forming orderly queues and allowing people to keep their seats. But nobody's disputing each person's right to keep his or her seat. I was suggesting that freely choosing to give up something that you don't really need, to someone who does, is liberating and life-affirming. There's no virtue without choice, but there's also no virtue in selfishness.
But there's no such thing as choice when burdened with expectation. That's why the European Working Time Directive, which limits the hours one is allowed to work in a week, is involuntary. It doesn't matter if you want to work longer than allowed, rather than being forced by your bosses, the fact that you are working longer will put pressure on your co-workers to do likewise to keep up. If you give up your seat you create an expectation, and a stigma on your still-seated fellow-travelers. Therefore there is a positive duty to keep your seat, rather than merely the option of doing so.
There was a case a few years ago where a girl sued her school for religious discrimination, it was a Muslim girls' school, because she was expected to wear a uniform, which was a salwar kameez which the school had derived from the recomendations of some religious scholars they'd consulted. But she wanted to wear a burqa. Or a chador or something, one of the more all encompassing ones. Now the whole point of a school uniform is to be uniform, so no-one shows off with their dress, presumably the same aim as the religious duty to dress modestly in Islam. But she wanted to show off how holy she was with the non-standard dress, which obviously carries the implication that the others are less holy and will place pressure on them to conform with her trend-setting rather than the official policy of uniformity. Therefore forbidding the girl from wearing her religious garmentry was in the public interest and the common good of the students.
I prefer being on a level playing field with people. I'm not a supplicant and I'm not your mum. I gave someone a gift once, as it made for the most efficient use of that item. Like Plato's thing about a just society giving the best flute to the best player.
But it's not a level playing field, so why pretend it is? One day you'll be old and frail and need to get somewhere, and imagine having to balance on legs that can barely hold you up, holding on to the pole with trembling muscles, on a long bus trip while a young, healthy person sits right there and pretends not to notice. There's something very ugly and frightening about a society where this is viewed as good, or even normal. In a way, I feel even more sorry for the young person, who is convinced he has so little, that he or she has nothing to give.
I wouldn't want to be coddled. It might feel nice to give, but not to receive. Picturing myself on both ends of that relationship, I'd feel a hell of a lot better about having generously given up my seat and gone off patting myself on the back than I would if I'd taken someone else's seat due to my own incapacity. I wouldn't want to make someone else feel like that. Would be horribly selfish.
To be either patronising or obseqious is abhorrent, even if you aren't on a level playing field physically, or monetarily, or however else, it's only compatible with dignity to act as if you are, whichever side you're on.
I don't seem to have that. Funeral processions make me think what a rich fucker the dead must have been to shut down a street or two in town. Normal people get burned and disposed of, as is the right way to do things.
Yeah, but in the end, it all works out to the same. A corpse is a corpse, whether it's inside a golden casket or in some pauper's grave. Death is the great equalizer, the one inevitability. For some of us, coming face-to-face with birth and death can prompt a moment of reflection about the impenetrable mystery that brackets our lives. Not for everyone, of course.
Certainly not for the pawl-bearer. No time to consider the eternal mysteries when you're hefting a great wooden box.
Which implies that you aren't as horrified by his wantonly beating people other than pregnant women. Or pepper spraying, tasing, whatever. Solidarity as humans is the tenet breached, not some taboo against bashing pregnant women.
Absolutely. I agree with you. It's just that in the case of a cop beating an unarmed, pregnant woman, they are so unevenly matched physically it makes his assault even more cowardly and a flagrant abuse of power than usual, just as shooting a dog that was already tied up is simply an act of cowardly cruelty.
It's an American policeman, so presumably he's got a gun, and some pepper spray, and a taser, and a big club for a truncheon, and a car, and a big shotgun in the car, and a bullet proof vest, and there's probably some minimum level of physical stature and fitness to be met to join the police. Now, I like to think I'm quite a tough bloke, but there's no way I'd be winning a fight with a bloke with all that stuff. And even if you win you're then wanted for resisting arrest and assault a police officer. So I don't think the pregnancy significantly increases the power differential here.
Also, the terror she's likely to feel for the life of the baby she's carrying, in addition to the pain of her physical injuries,
Well she'll be worried but anyone can be killed by the police. There was a case here a couple of year ago, a paratrooper was restrained by the police, not even beaten, but restrained in a position on the floor that caused heart failure and a rather slow and unpleasant death. If you're not in severe fear when being physically restrained and chained up then you should be.
adds a further element of sheer sadism or even just callousness that's hard to fathom. Beyond the legalities or the principles involved, it's understandable that people would feel horror knowing that such a person was armed and unleashed against citizens.
You can't really have someone whose job is arresting people, which is to say physically overpowering them and attaching chains to restrict their movement, if he's got any sort of empathy for members of the public. Especially in America where such a big part of the police work involves guns and killings.
