On Freedom

I am rather absurdly liberal (as you might be able to tell from by veiws on that whole 'democracy' thing*). As such, I have a general sense that freedom is probably a Good Thing. But before I start raving madly about why it's a good thing, I thought it might be a good idea to define my terms. There's nothing more annoying than having a five minute argument then discovering that you and the other person have been arguing different things**.

So the first place to go is obvious. Merriam-Webseter. Or dictionary.com. I'm not going to bother printing them here, but the links are here and here.

Well that was bloody helpful wasn't it?*** Maybe some of you think that that pretty much clears everything up. I respecfully disagree. Here's the first problem: Am I free to take a piece of pencil and a piece of paper, and draw on the paper a square circle? One answer is 'yes, you're just unable to'. But does that mean that we could increase people's freedom by allowing them to do anything as long as they have with them a piece of paper with a square circle drawn on it? That seems rather counter-intuitive, so for now I'm going with 'you aren't free to do the impossible'.

Next, if I'm standing next to you holding a knife, am I free to stab you to death? If yes, then the law places far fewer limits on my freedom, since I can do almost anything - the law will only respond later on. So I'm going to go with 'any limit imposed on action by any authority with the power to enforce that limit is a restriction of freedom.' Since 'do not murder' is a limit on action, and it is imposed by the government, which is an authority with the power to enforce that limit, the answer is no. I'm not free to stab you to death. There are, of course, questions here, like 'what exactly constitudeest 'the power to enforce that limit'. But I'm going to deal with that issue by pretending it isn't there, and saying that my current rule is good enough for now****.

Lastly, what are acceptable limits on freedom? Fortunately, on this there is general agreement. It is acceptable to limit someone's freedom in order to prevent them from hurting others or restricting their freedom, and it is acceptable for limits to exist based on limits which they've placed on their own freedom in the past. The only point of debate is really whether or not it's acceptable to prevent someone from restricting the freedom of their own future selves to too great an extent*****, and even that can be folded into the above by counting the future self as to some extent a different person. You might think that thre are other reasons some people think it's acceptable (such as for the greater good of the society, but that really just gets down to the exact definition of 'hurting others or restricting their freedom' - whether or not seeing a drowning child and not helping falls into that category or not, for example. There might be examples of limits that people think are acceptable that can't be folded into these categories, but I honestly can't think of any.

So, if we count the laws of physics as 'authorities with the power to enforce limits on people' (which doesn't seem too much of a strech, I've basicly defined freedom as 'the state in which limits are not placed on behaviour by an authority with the power to enforce those limits'. And the only acceptable reason for those limits is that they're self imposed, or to prevent harm to others.

Which, of course, leads me to the conclusion that the laws of physics are devistatingly immoral, and should be abolished as soon as possible.

*For the record, I seperate 'political liberty' and 'civil liberty'. Since Bentham's 'On Liberty' did something similar, I think my liberal credidentials are fairly safe.
**Actually, strictly speaking, there are several things more annoying, including but not limited to having a ten minute argument of the same time and the other person explaining that men can't be raped.
***For the sarcasm impared: No. No it was not.
****So, you know, basicly the same as my approach to homework.
*****There's a very obvious suicide joke here. I'm not going to make it.

On the nature of reality

Let's talk about reality. There is, of course, no independent way of testing whether our reality is an actual thing, or merely the mad delusions of a mind so utterly incapable of dealing with the real world that it retreats into one it constructs for itself. It could even be some cruel trick being played on you. After all, the only point of contact we have with the world is via our five senses - all of which are very easy to fool, especially if your victim is trapped in a tank in a laboratory. Memories would be far harder to fake. Much easier to simply delete them - retrograde amnesia is certainly not something that should be too hard to induce with technology only a little more advanced than what we have now, especially with full and unrestricted access to a victim's brain. But then there would have to be some explanation given to the victim for why they couldn't remember their entire lives. Why they had no memories before a certain date. And such invasive surgery could do significant damage to the victims mental faculties. So there would also have to be some explanation given for why, around that time, the victims mind didn't seem to have been working as well as it does now, now that it has had time to heal.

Now let us suppose that one day the facility you were being kept in was destroyed. People found out about the experiments they were running in there, and they decided to destroy the place. Of course there's a chance that you could be killed in the violence. You'd die without the slightest chance of protecting yourself - you'd never even know what killed you. But that's nothing new. They would've unplugged you as soon as you stopped being a useful research subject anyway. So let's suppose you survived. That your friends and family found you, and wanted to return you to reality. But how might your mind react to finding that decades of your life has been a lie? How might that combine with suddenly bringing to your awareness the excruciating pain resulting from decades of merciless experimentation on your helpless body? If you were just woken up, surely your mind would snap like a twig.

So what if they devised a plan to return you to them? What would it be? They would have to somehow acclimatise your mind to the possibility that reality is different from your perception of it. But they would have to preserve your perception of reality. It couldn't be something too obvious, or it might end up being far too traumatic for you. So it would have to be introduced gently, subtly, in the form of a hypothetical. And that way if it doesn't work, at least you can be happy, living out the rest of your life trapped in your fake world.

But they would hope, hope against hope, that it would work. That your mind could be brought to accept this unacceptable thing, and that you could thus be returned to true reality. They would hope and they would pray that you could be brought back to them, back to the life that you used to know and love.



Please wake up.

Basic feminism (Feminism 101 was taken).

If you’re wondering about the gap, it’s because I couldn’t think of anything to say. I want to talk about Libya, but two political posts in a row seems a bit much. So today I’m going to talk about something completely apolitical. Feminism! After all, what kind of hopelessly ignorant person would oppose such a self-evidently worthy cause as feminism? Apart from, for example, most of the human males* on the planet**. This is going to be less political than philosophical, though, since, I’m going to be describing what we believe.

First, as both of the people who actually read my introduction probably noticed, yes, I’m a feminist. Not all feminists are actually female. Just most of us. Which is because the point of feminism is to eliminate any and all sexual gender discrimination (which should make them a natural ally of LGBTIQAA***, but I’ve never really encountered that much contact between them, since both sides tend to keep to their own issues for the most part). To exclude males would, in fact, be gender discrimination.

Which brings me to the idea of feminists as 'man-haters'****. Or even the idea that a large number of feminists are 'man-haters'. Let’s be clear here. That’s not feminism, it’s misandry. If you look closely, you can see a slight difference in spelling between those two words. A misandrist might call themselves a feminist, but that doesn’t actually make them one, especially since they’re in direct opposition to what feminism actually stand for. It’s the same as how calling yourself communist doesn’t actually make you one, and why people don’t bow before me, despite my referring to myself as ‘God-king of all humanity’. Also, the number of ‘feminist’ misandrists is a lot lower than people seem to think. There’s a story everyone seems to know about how a man opens a door for a woman, and she starts raging at him for sexism. The strange thing is that no one seems to have actually had it happen to them. I’m pretty sure at this point that it’s an urban legend, but even if it’s true, it proves nothing except the existence of idiots in the feminist movement. All groups have idiots*****.

Another thing people always bring up is ‘radical feminsim’. Clearly man hating feminists exist as a significant proportion of the movement, they say, since there’s a whole section on Wikipedia on ‘Radical Feminism’. You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean. Although I have several philosophical differences with the ideas of radical feminism, and even more with some specific radical feminists, radical feminism does not mean hatred of men, and next time you might want to try actually reading up on the theory, rather than just reading a bit on radical Islam, and assuming that all radical views are basically the same kind of thing

Which actually leads to the idea people seem to have that all feminism is one big united group, or that there are feminist views on things. Now, to some extent, that’s true. For example: rape is bad. But the thing about feminism is that it’s about equality between the sexes. How we’re going to achieve that equality, and even what it’ll look like when we get there isn’t exactly a point of unity.

Another thing to address, of course, is why it’s called feminism, rather than, say, ‘egalitarianism’. Far too many people say that they don’t identify as feminist because of the name being orientated towards females. As though it mattered what a philosophy was called. But let’s look at this logically: Rape victims are mostly female (although still not all); ditto domestic abuse victims; the only country in Europe to elect two female heads of state in a row is Ireland; females get paid less; promiscuous women are derided; massive amounts of film, advertising and drawing is focused on portraying the women as sex objects (google ‘male gaze’). In return, females get to wear nice clothes (so that they’re nicer for heterosexual men to look at), get to learn dancing (so that they can show off their bodies to heterosexual men), and get more control over their children (partly because they had to have a baby in their body for nine months and suffer the pain of childbirth, but mostly because females are naturally the primary caregivers, far better at bringing up children than males). When the feminist movement started, things were even more skewed. So yeah, even though I’m slanting that a little, I think calling it feminism and placing the focus on women’s rights is probably understandable.

I can’t currently think of any more things you need to know about feminism, although it’s always possible that I’ve wiped some of the stupider objections from my mind. This is rather general because there are some more specific things I want to talk about, and I wanted to do some groundwork first, just to make my position clear.

* Quick aside: male/female refers to sex, which is biological, whilst man/woman refers to gender, which is cultural. Feminist philosophy tends to be a bit more focused on gender discrimination. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but it’ll do for now.

** Based on talking to about twenty of them about it. Truly, mine is a well researched and totally non-sexist statement.

*** I’ve probably missed out a few letters there.

**** Actually, it brings me to the idea of butterflies. But unfortunately, butterflies have nothing to do with this post, so let’s go with the vaguely logical connection.

***** Except people who read this blog, who are all handsome, charming and intelligent^†.

^†Except you Hubert^††.

^††Apologies to anyone actually called Hubert.