Unethical Moderation

[xenologer]

Great quote from my corner of the internet today! Kyle Brodzky has been dropping some truth about the Chick-Fil-A crap which is generalizable to far more than that. Someone brought it to the discussion table that we ought to just never be angry and never dislike anybody so that we can all get along because the alternative is to be EXTREMISTS and extremists are all equally destructive and wrong.

I've always just been raised believing that moderation is where true justice lies, free from bias or anger. I'm annoyed that sitting on poles is so popular, and even moreso by the fact that those wronged by zealotry, ignorance, and bigotry tend toward the same extreme black-and-white mentality. And maybe it is the fault of those who wronged them, but that doesn't make it any less tragic.

Also he called us extremists, because the Golden Mean fallacy is never out of style.

Brodzky was not having it.

I totally get that (name redacted), that you see that people who are wronged can easily fall into the same polarized thinking. It's sort of offensive that you'd have that prejudice, and use it to try to throw cold water on a very cut and dried social justice issue.

But I think that by stating outright that you automatically think that the wronged party here are already caught up in that is sort of offensive. No one's dragging fry cooks behind their trucks on gravel roads. No one's saying their marriages are invalid. No one's saying fry cooks are literally causing a god to make earthquakes happen and kill people for their sins.

When there is a situation where it is clear who is wrong, and who is right, being 'moderate' is indefensible.

There's no honor or valor or ethical highground or medal or trophy for 'not getting involved' when there's very real, abject, and ugly human suffering going on. Sometimes the conscious, willful act of not choosing a side actually makes you a bad person. Not as evil as the people perpetrating heinous acts against your fellow people, but apathy, well, apathy means you're not opposed to the violation of people's lives. It means you don't have the desire to do what a good person would do. It means you are content to rationalize a total disregard for people around you who are in pain, and rationalize it as a virtue.

And when you do that, when you make that apathy a virtue, you are making it harder for people who do care to make progress.

It's literally unethical to go through life acting as if every issue is as important as "Chunky or Smooth." There are times when you are actively hindering the creation of a better, more sane world, when you act as if these issues don't affect you, or they aren't worth getting upset about, or feeling anger or hatred about. If you view something as absolutely important as human rights, in the here and now, as a peanut butter issue not worth thinking about, or getting mad about, or really even spending any time on at all, then you are absolutely dragging down those around you.

If you think the world's problems are dissolvable down to peanut butter issues you can feel smug about ignoring, then I really don't know what to say. This is in part, truly, because you're simply not a person worth talking to.

Yep.

This is definitely linkable, but share this link instead, please and thank you!

Comments

[elf]

The problem with "maintaining neutrality"/"being moderate":

FANATIC: "Kittens are evil! They are the devil's spawn! We must kill all the kittens!"

ANTI-FANATIC: "WTF? Kittens are harmless. There's no need to kill any kittens! If kittens are bugging you, don't go where the kittens are--they don't follow you home."

FANATIC: "The existence of kittens is a bane on my life. I don't want the chance that someone will bring one to my house, and the only way to prevent this is to kill all the kittens!"

ANTI-FANATIC: "No! There will be no killing of kittens!"

MODERATE: "Now, now; let's all be reasonable and try to tolerate each others' differences. We'll kill half the kittens."

[xenologer]

Yes, with a side of, "Don't get so up in arms about FANATIC's sincere belief in the evils of kittens. If you tell them not to kill kittens, you might as well be killing kittens yourself. You don't want to be just as bad, do you?"

Because that is entirely coherent and has no logical problems at all.

[matrexius.livejournal.com]

Yes, but you see, admitting that one of the poles might be right suggests that one should take action, and that's hard. In the case of Chick Fil-A, people are literally worried about having to give up their tasty waffle fries. *sigh*

[charlycrash.livejournal.com]

I think that by and large extreme positions are almost always wrong or at least ill-advised (in my experience, extreme positions are reliant on ignoring an awful lot of fairly unavoidable facts), but: 1) being in favour of equal rights for gay and straight people including an absence of any persecution isn't really an extreme IMO but a moderate position, in as much as there exists much more extreme things like lesbian separatism 2) it of course varies hugely between issues 3) it's not things being extreme that confers their status as being a bit logically dodgy but the premises they're built upon, and it's usually the case that they're built upon questionable foundations i.e. being extreme doesn't automatically mean illogical, and the correct position can be the extreme one.

I think the real problem here is that the two positions are being treated as basically equivalent, and they're not. At all. So it's really a problem of facts: if your position is based on anything other than LGBT people being in a minority, actively and constantly persecuted and only differentiated from the majority by a behaviour that doesn't affect anyone else whatsoever then your opinion is wrong, being based on false premises. However: I suppose it's possible to differ on ethical axioms, in as much as holding to either "Behaviour which causes no harm is always completely acceptable" or something else provides massively different logical conclusions from the above premises.

[fatpie42.livejournal.com]

On the one hand they are right about one thing, there are idiots on both sides. Recently saw a really good article from Lindy West about fat-shaming by anti Chick-fil-A facebookers:
http://jezebel.com/5931275/i-know-youre-mad-at-chik+fil+a-but-stop-taking-it-out-on-fat-people

On the other hand they are wrong about everything else.

I'm reminded of this rather cool cartoon from Matt Bors:

[silveradept]

(That's a D.C. Simpson comic from I Drew This. Just saying.)

[fatpie42.livejournal.com]

That is so odd. As I remember it, the place I always seemed to find those particular comics was via links on Matt Bors blog. I used to ignore the political rants and enjoy the comic strips. (I never even looked at the signature on the strips. In fact I barely even looked at the blog title carefully enough to know whose work I was reading. Who knows, perhaps it was D.C. Simpson's blog all along?) I came to presume that Matt Bors was the cartoonist responsible.

Well, that explains why his material seemed to have gone downhill in recent years. It was Dana Simpson's material I was interested in all along. I've now got a new subscription to add to Google Reader. Thanks! :)

[silveradept]

No problem. Dana Simpson did an entire series of those around 2003-2004, and then stopped some time after the 2004 election. Possibly in despair.