@dontpanda said in RL Anger:
If Sharon refused to sell clothes to men (contra "I sell women's clothing"), would she be in violation of human rights laws? If Amir refuses to bake a cake for a bar mitzvah, is that a violation? I'm not trying to ignore context, I'm trying to find the underlying true principle.
I would actually like to focus on this, since this seems like the heart of what you're asking.
What you're saying seems to be "where do we draw the line", and/or that it's possibly a slippery slope. However, I think the line is pretty clear when you compare contexts against each other.
If Sharon specifically sells a particular type of clothing, that's not the same as refusing to sell clothes to men. There are also men's outlets that only sell men's clothing, but that isn't a refusal to sell clothes to women. I know that it was only an example, but I just wanted to note that specializing in something is not the same as rejecting something.
No business is necessarily obligated to provide a product or service that they do not have.
That said, if Sharon is selling women's clothing and someone off-handedly says "Oh, I'm buying this for a bar mitzvah", and then Sharon goes, "Oh, I can't sell you those clothes then", that's discrimination.
I know that you think people should have the right to decide anything that they want, and then go onto another business, but this ignores historical contexts. You know, like when a ridiculous number of stores start discriminating against people and, considering that most businesses are owned by a particular demographic, you leave large portions of the population at the mercy of something that they have no control over.
Are you aware that there are many, many areas in America where people have no access to buying basic food, and have a ton of difficulty actually acquiring their food? And they are definitely not even remotely in a position to open their own business or save up to open a business. Hell, in these areas, there are often literally no jobs, not jobs they don't want, but literally none. This is not a special case or a minority of places, this is a huge problem in the country.
So, let's say that someone in one of these areas has to walk like ten miles just to buy groceries, and the one store within walking distance of them, because of the neighborhood it's in, is like, "Oh, sorry, we don't sell to you". Discrimination laws are more than just "personal preference", a lot of ideologies try to dismiss things as personal preference so that they don't have to think about how fucked up the country actually is, due to a lot of people living in bubbles where they can blissfully ignore these problems.
There is also a huge difference between "I don't want to make you a Nazi cake", and "I refuse to make a gay marriage cake". I feel like I don't need to go into detail about why these are two wildly different things, and that the reason the law differentiates between them is because we somehow have avoided becoming a Judge Dredd-like dystopia in which the law works soullessly and mindlessly, without rhyme or reason. I like to think that most people use the law in a critically thought manner, which is why it isn't applied equally, and never will be. People are not machines and we as a society are capable of applying critical thought and basic empathy to figure out why one similar situation is different from another, without worrying about highly unlikely slippery slopes.
If anything, I find that a lot of the law hinges on not being a dick. If you look at situations and can't figure out why one thing seems reasonable to the law, and the other one doesn't, then ask yourself "Which of these people was being a dick?"
And I'm sure you might be asking yourself, "Who decides who is being a dick?" Look at all the fiction we've had throughout history. I think we as a species are capable of deciding who is being a dick. If we side with the dick then it probably means we're also being a bit of a dick.
@Coin I very much believe that "Nazi" is a power word. Once you start calling someone a Nazi, you've put them and their entire movement onto a pedestal that is considered one of the greatest historical evils in modern history. So, yeah, calling someone a Nazi is definitely a thing that has an impact. I also understand the nuances and what people mean when they call someone a Nazi in a non-literal way, but I don't believe that erases the actual impact.
I just personally believe that these entitled motherfuckers Nazis, we conflate their dumb bullshit with being as literally bad as all the shit actual Nazis did. Then the next thing you know we're taken totally off-guard when Neo Nazis are fucking curb stomping us and shit, because we got used to a certain level of civilty from these assholes we decided to call Nazis but weren't.
Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know, but I just am very careful about how much power I give something. Putting anyone or anything onto a pedestal is always dangerous, even if it's a negative pedestal. Making people seem less human empowers them in our eyes, because then we become unable to see them as a solvable problem. That's how we end up resorting to violence first and they just end up seeming more sympathetic as a result, which reaffirms our beliefs that they're unstoppable when more people sympathize with or join them, even if it was our actions that triggered it. We just say things like "it was inevitable and there was nothing we could do about it".
