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Something I realised I left out of Various axioms of my anti-(racism sexism etc) (this extended conversation is definitely making me express a bunch of interconnected ideas I hadn't properly articulated before :))

EDIT: This is not a self evident truth, it's an axiom of the way I think. This does not mean it's right, but you'll have to work pretty hard to convince me otherwise :) (But one of my other axioms is question everything)

As I said there, if there is a society wide inequality which puts one group in a position of less power with regards to another, then the group with more power cannot be trusted to judge how best to fix that inequality. No matter how good their intentions(*).

Feminism and the fight against sexism needs to be mostly run by women.

Anti-racism needs to be mostly run by POC.

The left needs significant input from the poor and lower class. (Unfortunately once you have the power to change things you generally aren't lower class any more so this gets a bit catch 22ish)

etc.

And if you're in the more powerful group then you cannot rely on the opinions of other people in the same group.
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Someone at femmeconne asked me for some examples of times I'd screwed up talking about race on the internet, which I decided was justification for this tl;dr screed (which I've been working on for ages) I've done "not X" for pretty much every "Do X" listed here, this is basically everything I wish someone had told me a few years ago :)

EDIT: This lays it out much better, read it instead if you like :) Race Relations 101 - What if I screw up?
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(A continuation of my basic principles, inspired by this discussion)

In general, if everyone from group A (women, the poor, immigrants etc) just happens to violate seemingly coincidental and objective value B then:
(a) It really is a coincidence
(b) They're just inferior in general
(c) There's something skeevy going on with the way your values are contructed
(d) You're not applying your values consistently
( And no, you don't get to just assume it's b... )

This is a somewhat vague ramble through various "basic" ideas which underlie my attitudes to feminism and anti-racism etc. It started as a reply to this comment and then grew out of my control :D
( I hate injustice, not the unjust )
( What is racism or sexism or any other -ism? )
( What it means to be predjudiced, and what it means to fight against it )
( The unfair burden of being on top )

Freedom of speech is a nice concept, and one worth fighting for. It's not something you can assume you have a legal right to on the internet, especially when you consider all the different countries' legal systems involved (my own country offers pretty patchy support) Sop when I say "right" here I just mean in the non-legally binding moral imperative sense.

But even when we consider the principle, what it means is that you have the right not to suffer legal consequences for expressing an opinion, and the right to have public spaces in which you can express yourself.

It does not mean you have the right to avoid social repercussions. If it did, wouldn't you complaining about the people complaining about you be a violation of their right to "free speech"?

Secondly, just because something is publicly visible doesn't make it a "public space". If a private individual or organisation is in charge of a space (and this is true of pretty much everywhere on the internet) then they have the right to completely control what is said there, and that includes deleting content and banning contributors. Which is not to say that this isn't sometimes a bad thing for them to do if they are inconsistent or overly harsh, but they still have that right to dictate both the general nature and specifics of what is and is not said.

If you want to say something they don't like, say it somewhere else.

On the other side: if you are in charge of a space (the comments to your blog, say), while in principle you have the right to run it how you like people will be justifiably annoyed if you act inconsistently or (in their opinion) overly harshly.

For further discussion on the specific issues involved with blog comments, you might like to read my post POLL: When is it ok to edit a blog post?.

This post was written as part of my General principles of internet communication.

EDIT: this is a criticism of race as an "objective" biological categorisation. I do have arguments against (or at least about) race as a social phenomenon, but they are outside the scope of this "short" post. Sorry for being unclear!

A while ago there was a post on debunkingwhite challenging people to talk on their ljs about how race has no basis in biology. I added it to my "queue of topics to make thinky posts about" (I find it best to let things stew for a while there, and anyway was feeling sick and stupid ¹) and today got around to reading other people's responses.

Anyway, I reserve the right to make a long thinky post later, but this post and comment in particular really helped crystalise it for me personally:

So. Human beings are not genetically uniform. Different populations have observable genetic differences in their average makeup (ie the percentages present of various genes) and these result in observable differences (and presumably, also more subtle ones we haven't noticed) in things like skin colour, susceptibility to particular diseases etc.

There is also the historical/social concept of "race", which divides the world into fairly strict categories (asian, african etc) based on physical, geographical, and cultural markers, and which associates various traits (intelligence, criminality etc) to each race.

These two divisions, the genetic and the racial? Have pretty much no relationship to each other what-so-ever.
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