deb8lawd

Ultimately I think it depends on how much one values free self-expression v. hiding distinctions in socioeconomic status background (henceforth SES background) to prevent stereotype threat. I think the latter has value for kids in facilitating a growing sense of self not connected to class background and with less stress from managing stereotypes. On the other hand, the latter also restricts everybody’s ability to express themselves.

Considering though that either way, students of lower SES background have less means of and opportunities for self-expression through commodities, it may instead be better to find a compromise. The lesser ability to self express from students with lower SES background shouldn’t be corrected for by restricting self-expression for others, but this lesser ability should be compensated for by the school. The school could specify a minimal set of dress code standards, and enforce a requirement that clothing for school for each student be bought with the fairly distributed funds that have been allocated to each student by that school.

Btw, I both have attended schools that have a dress code that is followed by provision of uniforms, and schools that have no or minimal dress code and do not use uniforms, so I am intimately aware of both advantages and disadvantages of either kind of school for students.

I think reducing our moral discrimination between killers to a quantitative comparison of kill lists is a caricature of ethics. It is also kind of a pointless exercise since sparing lives is generally morally correct either way. But let’s set aside how silly this is for the sake of argument.

First, only using a quantitative comparison of kills to assess which killer was more morally vicious assumes that human lives are fungible. But, I will not focus on this assumption, as it seems reasonable in effect for cases of people being killed rather than merely being left to die. Effectively we can treat any human life adversely, intentionally affected in some way ζ in relation to the aggregate affected in that same adverse, intentional way ζ as fungible with any other human life in that aggregate, once the aggregate amount reaches a threshold, due to reduced marginal effects of those lives. And I think killings in the millions is certainly already at, if not past, that threshold. This all may sound cold, but you’re the one that decided to make this about morally comparing measures of kills. Anyway, its clear we can treat such lives as practically fungible as a result of the sheer amount of deaths by killing under consideration. So I’m fine with the assumption of fungible lives, or the commensurability of the different deaths by killing.

But the other assumption behind reducing our comparative moral assessment to a simple quantitative comparison of kills is that the way in which those human lives were killed or died fails to make a moral difference. I think questioning this assumption is crucial, particularly when we talk about deaths or killings that have resulted from a government or political administration.

The Nazi State in Germany created an institutional structure, a system, for “useful” managing of bodies whose moral worth they assessed based on bodily stigmata and eugenics. Not only that, but camp policies were crafted for specific kinds of humiliation and dehumanization meant to reinforce the sense of inferiority for those in the camps, or to reinforce the impression of ths inferiority of those at the camps for Germans working in them. There is also the cruelty of human experimentation. The German labor camps were thought of as a free source of bodies to supply production and research needs, and to eliminate what were seen as genetically pathological elements of society.

While Stalin had gulags, they selected camp prisoners based on petty crime (or alleged petty crime, as adjudication was probably neither fair nor well-done) and political affiliations. And while people died in those gulags or were killed, most of it was not part of an officially sanctioned program of death. There was no generalized eliminationist goal made explicit, let alone made part of camp policy. Killings were many times a matter of decree against particular individuals, especially if they were political prisoners. In fact, this is exactly how Stalinist purges (which are separate or independent of the camp system) occurred–through Stalin flexing his autocratic power in order to quell paranoia regarding plots against him or quell paranoia regarding plots meant to ideologically undermine the USSR. In addition, treatment of gulag prisoners was not rationalized based on a pathologized and objectified view of their bodies, even if they may indeed have been objectified and there was a quasi-medicalized psychological approach to political disagreement. This is because the USSR was primarily trying to indoctrinate prisoners, police political thought, and use the prison population as a source of slave labor. The slave labor part and, quite likely present, the power abuses of guards, is where the gulags overlap with the Nazi concentration camps, but the rest of the differences remain.

These differences are also what lead to differences in death rates for gulags v. camps: 11% of gulag prisoners died in or from the gulags, while 61% of Nazi camp prisoners died in or from the Nazi camps.^1,2,3 Of course this ignores total absolute death counts within the USSR and Nazi Germany as a whole, consequent of each of those governments or regimes. I already mentioned Stalin’s purges. But, my point is that regardless of the numbers, the intent behind and form of the killings are also a basis by which they can be compared in order to assess which was worse (which, again, is still a silly discussion when we know sparing lives is the right thing to do in either case). And focusing on the camps or gulags shows also how intent or form of death can influence death rates, which gives us a better sense of which, camps run by Soviet Russia or camps run by Nazi Germany, was deadlier. Now, we could compare fascist camps to other States like the USSR, but it would get complex quickly, as we can see the devil is in the (qualitative) details, and those States still differ qualitatively among themselves. Even if we focused exclusively on the numbers, it also would have to be percentage-wise or per-capita, anyway. Not the absolute amount of deaths or killings. This is because the number of explicitly fascist governments, and Nazi ones in particular, have been less in number than explicitly communist ones, and States vary in their domestic population numbers.

This approach of measuring the number of deaths or kills in communist States in order to evaluate communism is also reliant on a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Communism, the idea, as such is simply not the USSR, regardless of how much it (among other things) influenced the USSR. For the actions of States that self-identify as communist to discredit communism, you would need to make a more specific claim than “States that self-identify as communist are worse than ones that don’t” that ties the worseness of those States that self-identify as communist, logically, to the idea of communism, or to particular practical difficulties that by rational necessity arise when implementing the idea of communism which make immorality such as killings or deaths from mismanagement/neglect inevitable.

1. https://www.britannica.com/place/Gulag
2. https://www.history.com/topics/russia/gulag
3. Wagner, Jens-Christian (2009). “Work and extermination in the concentration camps”. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories. Routledge. pp. 127–148. ISBN 978-1-135-26322-5.

All these middle aged women who have no skills due to raising children would be able to support themselves by giving old men handjobs.

I might just be dumb, but I have no idea what you mean by “no skills due to raising children,” or why the lack of sex work would make it so they couldn’t support themselves, given there are single parents right now that have jobs that don’t involve sex work. Are you just saying a lower legal barrier to entry would make more child-rearing single parents seek employment as sex workers because it would pay more than the lower paid work they otherwise typically get compared to non- child rearing parents? Also, if these single parents are married and tend the house, that they have lower paid work is moot if their partner makes up the difference for the household. It’s not clear to me whether you are referring to single parents here or not tbh.

It seems to me, even if people in general were more likely to engage in sex work when it’s legal, this would have more of a chance of affecting the marriage rate itself rather than the divorce rate. And even that not necessarily.

making it harder for the husband to cheat on payday

Most people who cheat are not opportunistic cheaters, i.e. are not people who were simply waiting for an opportunity to cheat to come along. Getting paid creates an opportunity to go to a brothel, but it doesn’t induce a motivation to cheat the way, say, meeting a cute coworker that you really get along with might. Which I think is more common.

The three scenarios that would have one pay for sex is (1) a desire to fulfill specific sex acts that most people would not or which are socially stigmatized, (2) a need to recuperate sexual confidence, or (3) simply having a more short-term hedonistic sexuality while also being lazy about dating (though in that case, they would be more likely to just propose a different relationship model upfront as opposed to straight-up cheating through paid sex, if different relationship models weren’t stigmatized). A lot of these are also potential reasons for relationship counseling or break-up independent of whether sex is paid for.

My own hypothesis is that, at best, legalizing sex work would lead to higher incidence of payment for sex as a reason for break-ups or divorce due to it allowing ease of access to sex, but would have no effect on break-up or divorce rates themselves.

Its important to first set out what we mean by “right-wing” or “left-wing.” I’m sure there’s a more philosophically enriched understanding of these two terms that has them refer to cohesive, dynamic world-views, but I’ll just begin with a provisional, empirical understanding of these terms as signifiers that merely track a difference in priorities in the context of moral foundations theory (wherein left-wing is higher in care & fairness, and right-wing is higher in loyalty & sanctity, and the values of liberty & authority vary independently within each wing), or a difference in cognitive style (wherein the left-wing involves more divergent, “innovative” thinking and the right-wing involves more convergent, adaptive thinking).

That aside, it is definitely tempting to think that fora that moderate only based on form rather than content lead to predominantly right-leaning culture, given that (α) the right-wing has crafted to some success a culture war narrative that substitutes other political debates with a battle over the dissemination of information (framed in terms of free speech v. censorship), and (β) many fora have in fact clamped down on some content creators that are right-wing, pushing their audience to other platforms/fora, and (γ) there has been a popularly observed growth in online left-wing content creators both in number and in terms of audience support following the aforementioned clamp-down.

However, we should look before we jump. There are a few blind jumps in your argument. While ɑ, β and γ are certainly things that have occurred (maybe one could quibble on the details), by themselves they do not imply that the propagation of left-wing ideas depends on β being true. The successful propagation of left-wing ideas and the censorship of right-wing ideas could be two phenomena that actually lack any causal relationship and may not even correlate long-term, or they could be correlated but both be explained by a third variable (or more), i.e. both caused by a third factor (or more). In the former case, where the two phenomena are causally and perhaps even statistically unrelated, consider that historically there have been moments when it is in fact the left-wing that has ridden on free speech concerns. In particular, we see this in the United States circa 1960s with the Free Speech Movement, which was comprised of many activists and students of the New Left with connections to the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti- Vietnam War Movement. If the left-wing can be ascendant while supporting free speech, this at a bare minimum suggests that free speech is not inherently in conflict with left-wing ideas being popular. A corollary of this is that right-wing ideas are not an inherent consequence of an expansive concept of free speech.

Of course, your claim is more specific to internet media and web communications, and it also defines “free speech” in an expansive way that may not have been shared by the 60s FSM (this would require a more detailed exposition of the ideas of the FSM). Maybe it is disingenuous to use the 60’s FSM as a counterexample to the claim that left-wing ideas require speech restrictions based on content in order to thrive. The internet introduces new conditions for speech that lead to quicker higher volume propagation of speech as a default compared to previous telecommunications. Maybe the left-wing was able to promote free speech while having their ideas thrive in the case of the FSM because they were in an academic setting, which gives their ideas popular respectability, and common but popular ideas propagated less widely compared to those emanating from a university setting. That is, academia’s communication with the public was ahead of any average person’s communications with the public at the time, while this disparity has now been flattened by the growth of the internet. Further, one could claim the expansive standard you mentioned for free speech might be crucial to the undermining of left-wing ideas. Any other standards may have varied results.

But, to the contrary, there’s reasons to be skeptical that academic privileges offset what would have been, according to your hypothesis, deleterious effects of free speech on agreement with left-wing ideas. Academia is right now not only more left than the general populace, at least in terms of self-identification and intellectual tastes, but more left than it even was in the 60s which is when the New Left FSM was active. In fact, it is telling that, if the FSM fought for legitimate free speech, there was tremendous political shift in the university system in the long-run after they fought for it (this doesn’t mean there are 0 bias issues in higher education, but that is a different issue from speech restrictions, and again, a leftward bias would have been comparatively less of a case in the 60s then under the assumption that parity in political affiliations in universities is a sign of reduced bias). This also means that, at the time of the FSM, it was entirely possible for left-wing ideas to get significant pushback initially–in fact, if they were fighting for legitimate free speech, left-wing ideas were guaranteed significant pushback, especially initially (there are different opinions of how things have developed since then in regards to campus speech). And yet, both the FSM’s idea of free speech and their New Left politics seemed to succeed. A hypothesis of academic privileges, let alone left-wing academic hegemony, is not enough to explain this–in fact, it can’t, because the growth of left-wing academia is closer to precisely being what followed FSM’s free speech push. Consequently, “flattening” of the communications disparity between university and the average joe is unnecessary to explaining online right-wing resurgence in free speech spaces, as it should have, according to the hypothesis, already been underway with the rise of the FSM (yet wasn’t). This is not to say that contemporary social media has had no effect on the popularity of right-wing content, or that right-wing views have not significantly impacted a portion of the most recent generations. It is only to say that right-wing resurgence from free speech spaces is not explained by the flattening hypothesis, and would seem an anomaly.

As for the notion that your standard of restricting speech based not on content but other considerations is crucial to the success of right-wing views, or the failure of left-wing ones, I should point out that shifts in politeness norms in a culture can follow shifts in social attitudes that correlate with political affiliation, or can follow shifts in social attitudes that reflect movement of the Overton window. These social attitudes are politically informed, but they need not be politically exclusionary. This is because the norms resultant from these attitudes may be followed based on deference to society and the need for social cohesion, without conformity to them at all restricting the ability to articulate ideological commitments that conflict with what those norms seek to protect. Thereby not inherently leading to restriction of speech based on content. Yet because those norms may nonetheless be politically informed, you get high reactance from older age cohorts or older generations, and even more strongly from those of those cohorts/those generations who have right-wing views. This is often connected with an experience of relative deprivation resulting from the new social expectations. This high reactance leads to behaviors that violate or resist those norms, which then leads to those people being publicly shunned. Therefore, it is entirely possible that censorship of right-wingers not be based on their political identification or the content of what they are saying but on correlated speech acts (so, more-so the way they are speaking or what they are doing with their speech) that violate politeness norms, leading to right-wingers being more negatively affected by those new norms. (I think a great example of a norm that fits what I’m talking about is that of using a person’s preferred pronouns or not devaluing someone’s marriage.)

Even in cases where speech may have been restricted based on its political content, if it is occurring on private fora or private platforms, it is likely a matter of those private entities attempting to approach speech restrictions strategically, with public relations in mind. This means, though, that there are other factors which are favoring left-wing ideas in a way that precedes these intra-platform / intra- forum speech restrictions. A shift in the kinds of speech that are restricted may just as well be a consequence of any given set of ideas getting popular or at least hegemonic (inspiring confidence in the more pro- restriction holders of those ideas), rather than an antecedent for the popularity or hegemony of those ideas. Which is to say that those ideas could be perfectly able to succeed in public environments more lax about speech, even if they go on to introduce new speech standards, particularly in private spaces.

Again, at best, I think either you have cause and effect backwards here or you’re missing a third factor or more that can explain the preponderance of right-wing content in fora / platforms with more expansive free speech policy. The idea that the survival of left-wing ideas depends on speech restrictions is a rather questionable explanation for this.