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Bertrand Russell wrote that the 'negroe' would be one of the lesser races (together with several species of bird) that would disappear in his lifetime. After seeing the consequences of his thinking, and also the logical flaws presented by the development of the theory, he vigourously refuted this position.
The interesting thing is that even before he did so, he was vehmently opposed to slavery and a supporter of civil rights.
Compare this to other drugs which are socially unacceptable and often illegal, where they may have much less significant impacts. There is no rationality there at all. It's the same with so many things, there is even an article about it in focus about how even when we think we are making rational decisions, we are just voting with our emotions.
When you need to make important decisions about things like social policy, going about with some people's logic and just reading something in the newspaper, getting angry about it, and then making an off hand decision is not going to cut it. What we should do, is put a robot in charge of the planet.
After considering this, I then realised that if you didn't tell the robot that life was precious, brutally rationally speaking, there is nothing special about life except the irrational emotional attatchment we have to it. So given a set of aims - we want to maximise quality of life for humans and other species - then eugenics starts becoming beautifully appropriate.
You should read Plato's Republic and the criticisms of it. His Philospher Kings seem pretty similar to your idea of the robot.
The glaring flaw in Plato's Republic is of course that it rests on a logic that appeals ultimately to metaphysics, e.g: Those philosopher kings will emerge because they will know the form of the good - the form of the good can only be understood by the philosopher kings - ergo, those who understand and uphold the form of the good will be philosopher kings.
Plato can describe virtues, but is unable to explicitly specify precisely what it is - thus we arrive at a circular argument.
"We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."
Eugenics do seem to be the order of the day. A couple of books exploring these ideas are The Pure Society (Andre pichot) and From Darwin to Hitler (Richard Weikart).
Darwin's Origin of Species was initially titled "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life."
Aladdin
Perhaps you will find the question offensive (and others may jump to your rescue) but do think Darwin should be censored ? You implied that dangerous ideas can have dangerous consequences if not silenced.
Indeed, just as our friendly robot godhead may be told to only make rational judgements - but someone is responsible for telling it on what basis to use to decide what is the correct rational judgement - something it would apparently need to inately know in the first place to avoid any abuse.
That would be the same Weikart who works for the Discovery Institute, creators of the Intelligent Design argument?
I must admit I didn't understand the religious and political motivations for using the term 'Darwinism' rather than evolution until reading your posts.
I'm going to play devils advocate. You and I can tell the difference between the works of Charles Darwin and calling for black people to be murdered. However, you believe some people aren't intelligent enough to be to exposed to the full spectrum of material humanity has to offer, and if God of Schmuck could (not that he can or would, because it'd involve something other than nothing-speak) demonstrate that people's lives were being made worse by proponents of Social Darwinism, then Darwins gotta go. Your rules.
This is exactly why we cannot and should not govern life and ourselves by absolutisms and view everything in black and white. History cannot be ignored. The historical implications of racial discrimination and abuse must be taken into account when judging whether something is acceptable or not.
When people start to be slaved, discriminated, abused, tortured and killed in their millions for several centuries as a direct result of Social Darwinism, we can start discussing banning the works of Darwin. Until then, the comparison is as absurd, irrelevant and I suspect insulting to most people's intelligence.
There are plenty of people who think that Social Darwinism was one of the fundamental pillars of Fascism. And even if you downgrade that to a bastardised version Social Darwinism, or a skewed version of Darwinism applied against a social framework, it could be considered very dangerous. Particularly in the hands of dumb-asses.
Whichever way you want to spin it, the comparison still remains as completely absurd and invalid.
I've no idea about statistics, however, I think you're missing the point. When it comes to ideas, 5% of world thinking that Darwinism mandates Fascism could, potentially, be an extremely dangerous number of people. And, according to you, in order to protect the rest of us from said dumb-asses, we should ban Darwinist literature.
That is why you cannot govern yourselves by absolutisms, and why history and common sense must be taken into account. Because let's face it, you know as well as I that there really is no realistic chance of Darwinism becoming a tool of mass oppresion and murder.
So no, no inconsistency at all.
I'm not advocating absolutism.
OK, forget Darwinism for a minute. The Qu'ran has been, and continues to be, the inspiration for some truly horrific acts. Should we ban it?
There are certainly some grounds for it, but again, when one takes into account historical and social facts you realise that would most likely do more harm than good regarding social unrest and violence, so no.
However no harm whatsoever (let alone social unrest or violence) is generated by the fact that incitement to racial murder is banned. So there are absolutely no negative effects from it.
You took the words right out of my mouth . . . . . . . it must have been while you were (Glasgow) kissing me xxxx
But seriously, I am in accord with your advocate's position. I mentioned two publications earlier but there are many more that take a scholarly view at the consequences of the actions of those proponents.
You appear to have an unNatural Selection of censorship. Some may say capricious.
It was more of an idealism really, I don't think an all powerful being would work because we can't make it perfect so to speak. But from a purely philosophical point of view, I find it interesting to imagine a perfect machine number crunching the human race and making political decisions as to maximise global quality of life. First if it had the chance to make all the decisions for all countries, it would abolish armies as they would be somewhat redundant. Next something like a global social and healthcare system And so on and so forth.
My assumptions may be rubbish, mind. It was just an idea that popped into my head from a few days ago, after looking at how many of the things we do as a national policy or whatever are pretty damn stupid and often fuelled not by rationalism but by feelings.
So if people will react badly to the banning then that you're not going to ban it, regardless of content and how many attrocities have been commited in its name?
I don't see why we need to throw 'racial' or 'religious' into these incitement to hatred acts. Why not just encitement to hatred?
We're just not going to agree, I suspect. I don't think it's right for you to arbitrate what people can and can't hear (and to a almost larger extent, what i can and can't hear) based on your assessment of people's intelligence. Banning doesn't address the issue, it mearly masks it, and if people are of the disposition that they'll go commit murder because of a play, or a book, or a speech then I think that speech/book/play is the least of our worries.
Do you actually give some regular thought that it is illegal call for blacks (as an example) to be murdered? Do you feel your freedom is being infringed by it? Because as far as I'm concerned the issue is down there on a par with not being able to legally own and keep a thermonuclear weapon in my basement. Yes, theoretically is a restrictions on my freedoms, but really, who gives a fuck?? I know I don't.
I don't think so. One is a restriction on freedom to kill someone, what you are suggesting is a restriction on freedom to hold certain views.
As for the other one, it is not a restriction to hold views. It's a restriction to incite others to murder.
I just find it really bizarre to be honest. If we lived in a country where people could legally state that blacks, Muslims, Christians, atheists or any others were inferior and should be killed, make no mistake, social tensions would be infinitely higher and many, many people would be regularly attacked, persecuted and killed as a result.
But no matter. Aparently that would be a small price to pay so some of you can get up in the morning with a smile on your faces and say "oh what wonderful free country we live in, where I can call all blacks rapists and robbers and urge my fellow man to kill them, if I so desired".
I cannot think of a civilised country where such actions would be legal, and you know what? I'm willing to bet the immense majority of citizens are just fine with that and don't see themselves as oppressed or their freedoms restricted for it. And in most countries it has not resulted into a 'slippery slope' towards the banning of other freedoms of expression either.
Lets deal with them when they have broken the law. Innocent until proven guilty, and all that. You are doing that straw man thing, saying my argument is one thing and arguing against that, when my argument is completely different. I am saying we shouldn't ban because of the potential of what they might do, we should deal with them when there are imminently about to break the law or are breaking the law.
It shouldn't be illegal for my to shout in my own home I hate black people. Unless it can be construed as a threat or an incitement to violence it should be free for all. Otherwise you have the problem of who decides what is ok to say and what isn't? I think as a people we can police people ourselves, if someone says something racist then you pull them up on it or ignore them. We don't need the police or government trying to look for these people and removing them from society.
You really don't see the issue with someone else deciding what you can and can't be exposed based on their assessment of your intelligence? And even more unnerving, what you are allowed to be exposed to based other people's intellectual capacity? I also don't like your criteria - outside of your assessment of my intellect - for arbitrating what can be banned based on how badly people will react to it.
I've said before I don't believe in unfettered freedom of speech. And directly inciting violence (against anyone) is something i may, given the right evidence, agree with banning. This isn't exclusively what you've been advocating though. You're happy to ban Nick Griffin from speaking, Wilder from showing a film and the Westboro people from protesting. Very different things.
I'm simply being a bit more pragmatic. In an ideal world people would be able to say what they please. But this is far, far from an ideal world.
I think people have the right to be racist and homophobic, so long as it doesn't intefere with other people's rights not to be racially abused and not to be abused for the sexual orientation. So basically, as long as they do it in private, I don't believe in sending in the thought police to make them answer for their frankly ill informed opinions.
Well why don't you go one step further and put people like that in prison before they hurt someone? To have a tolerant, rational society there needs to be the acceptance of different opinions, not the banning of opinions that don't sound nice. Any society that bans talking or thinking is judgemental and narrow minded.
People with extreme views don't "promote social unrest". They often provide a rare opportunity for most of society to agree on something, and for use to see why other people have these extreme views. In my opinion, deciding that someone is evil for making a potentially offensive comment is as bad as persecuting a religious group. Everybody has reasons for acting and thinking the way they do. We will never find out what their reason are and prevent the spread of these ideas unless we allow them to talk.
It seems to me that the idea of limits on free speech is based on the idea that people can't be trusted to form and verbally express their opinions because they'll get it wrong. That, to me, is as far from an ideal world as you can get.
Now let's think of that for a minute. If one is to take a guess as to which countries would legally allow someone to call for certain others to be killed, your best chances would be with the likes of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia or Iran.
So are you telling me that those countries have a greater respect for freedom of speech than Western societies? Or indeed that those societies are freer or better places to live?
Am I missing something here? Are you guys seriously unhappy that people don't have right to say, for instance, that blacks are all rapists and sub-human and should be killed on sight? Do you really think the country would be the richer if we were to allow people to say that?
I mean, what the flying fuck!