[governance] Milton is wrong, Segragation is wrong

[Eric Dierker]

Karl,
 
Let us examine where we do agree.   An important role any government has, is in limiting itself as pertains to directing or intruding into the conduct of individuals.
 
People have and are entitled to biases and prejudices. There is a fine and blurry line between making appropriate judgments of others and being judgmental.
 
No Government should expend public funds on actions that support segregation or unequal treatment of individuals. It is settled law and generally settled philosophy that segregation is not in keeping with good equality practice.
 
Here is not where we necessarily disagree but perhaps we use different language.  I would appreciate being "schooled" as to what is considered acceptable.
 
When is segregation different from our rights to privacy and free association?(not Freudian).
When may a publicly funded official/instructor/employee proclaim as appropriate policy the right to private clubbing using public funding. (I ask this in light of pre-WWII hate propaganda)
 
(one of my favorite concepts to mull is segregation of athletic or intellectual competitions based upon the scoring known as handicapping. How horribly wrong in our public funded educational institutions and yet how completely necessary and how horribly wrong to do it any other way)  
 
On our US American Labor Day weekend, I give great thanks that some labor to protect the rights of those whose labor has not brought them the luxury and time to so exercises their rights.
 
 


--- On Sun, 9/6/09, Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com> wrote:


From: Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com>
Subject: Re: [governance] Milton is wrong, Segragation is wrong
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Date: Sunday, September 6, 2009, 6:54 PM


On 09/05/2009 06:41 AM, Eric Dierker wrote:
> This is terribly wrong....

> Any man woman or child is fully entitled to bear hatred, bias and
> prejudice. They are not entitled as Milton suggests to act upon it.
> NCUC, Syracuse and Delft are not "free" and are certainly not free to
> discriminate and cloister and exclude.

I disagree with you and agree with Milton M.

People are, and people will remain, creatures with biases and prejudices.

And people will always aggregate and exclude on the basis of those biases and prejudices.  People will congregate with relatives, friends and like-thinkers.  Communities will form.  Nations will form. Religions will form.

There are specific acts that these communities, particularly national and religious communities, have come to place beyond the pale of acceptance.

People who do these acts, whether from bias and prejudice or not, are generally considered to have violated the law of the community and are to be punished.

Over the last 250 years the idea has developed that government and governance should be exercised without the taint of bias and prejudice that infects individuals.  In the US we tend to wrap that idea with the words "due process" and "equal protection".

There is also slowly developing the idea that in certain contexts, particularly one in which one has power and authority over another (such as in employment relationships), that people's ability to give differential treatment on the basis of sex, race, religion, and sometimes age and mental or physical state, is not to be allowed.

But as a general matter, individual people remain able to give vent to their prejudices either in words or in acts, as long as those do not cross the bounds that have been imposed.  That leaves a lot of space in which people may permissibly exercise their biases and prejudices.

In the context of establishing bodies of government or government statements of aspirations, such as you cite, are nice.  But as a practical matter they do not serve nearly as well as clearly articulated limitations on the power of those bodies of governance.  That's why in the US Constitution our first amendment is cast in terms of limits on the power of our Congress to enact laws that restrict speech - we don't say that "free speech" is a right, rather we say that the government's power to restrict is greatly limited.

        --karl--


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