Re:Twitter Suspends Prominent Alt-Right Accounts
by pron on Thursday November 17, 2016 @10:37AM
(#12978330)
> I feel like the left seriously damaged their ability to fight racist ideas when they abandoned the idea of equality.
The idea of equality is not some abstract mathematical notion. The left's treatment of social issues, including affirmative action, stems from decades of serious empirical study of society, rather than from an imagined "spherical-cow" sociology. That does not mean that the policy is the right one -- either ethically or the best means of achieving its goals -- but I think that the debate should be carried out based on all we know about our real society, though history, anthropology, sociology and psychology, rather than by deliberately ignoring them in favor of an idealized model that bears no resemblance to reality. You can disagree with leftist policies on many fronts, but you cannot say that the left has abandoned the idea of equality based on your observations unless you choose that imagined model.
The idea of equality is not some abstract mathematical notion. The left's treatment of social issues, including affirmative action, stems from decades of serious empirical study of society, rather than from an imagined "spherical-cow" sociology. That does not mean that the policy is the right one -- either ethically or the best means of achieving its goals -- but I think that the debate should be carried out based on all we know about our real society, though history, anthropology, sociology and psychology, rather than by deliberately ignoring them in favor of an idealized model that bears no resemblance to reality. You can disagree with leftist policies on many fronts, but you cannot say that the left has abandoned the idea of equality based on your observations unless you choose that imagined model.