Did I mention my onions?
A bit of a mistake today – didn’t realise my auto-save option was turned off on my software and ended up losing an hours work. Ah well, I’ll learn next time.
There seems to be a lot of angry intolerance going around at the moment. I always say that in this world there are just two ways to deal with opposing choices as to how to live in society. The first is to persuade the opposition that you are right, the second is to kill the opposition.
Yes, it is a bit simplistic, but I am sure you get the idea. If people don’t fit in to your world view then you can adopt a confrontational approach, which is the pathway to dominating and oppressing alternative views. Alternatively you can encourage people to change their view to yours.
This is becoming a more important topic with all of the discussion over Facebook and other social media. Should Facebook delete content that is against their world view? If it encourages violence can it be accepted?
How do we deal with people saying things that we believe can cause harm to the vulnerable. If they were being attacked by an armed person we would defend them. Do we really believe the pen is mightier than the sword? If so then surely social media can cause real harm.
But what if the majority disapprove of your views – for example if you were a communist in the USA? Should people be able to stop you sharing your political or religious views? Did you know that political leanings are not a protected characteristic? It seems we can discriminate against people based on politics. Odd that.
My gut feeling is to restrict practices that harm the weaker in society, but then you get hit by the need to define harm, and that seems to be very different for each of us., whether we see specific religious or political views as harmful.
Maybe, just maybe we need to accept people being able to say harmful things to avoid the greater harm to society of not being able to challenge wrong.