> Conservatism would actually be encoding the differing treatment for the in-groups vs out-groups directly and explicitly into the law.

No. You can get the benefits in many ways: without a justice system, by encoding it into law or by in group agreement.

The disadvantage of not having a justice system are obvious, the disadvantage of putting it into law is that it very clearly and easily can be pointed out as discriminatory. And most people want to feel like they are good people.

So by doing through in group agreement, the members can simultaneously hold moral cleanliness subjectively while objectively benefitting from a two tier system.

We are all equal, but some are more equal than others. If you want to quote someone clever about it

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monideas 3 hours ago | parent [-]

What we’re talking about is the notion of what constitutes good or “being a good person”.

Within the Liberal frame “not discriminating” or at least “not being seen as discriminating” is good and the opposite is bad.

You’re still approaching this from the Liberal frame. It is very hard to transcend this because it is the totalizing predominate ideological substrate of the modern world.

In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself, only with particular forms of it. Types of discrimination which are considered non-controversially acceptable would be people’s choices of mate, who they hire into their company according to their skillset and “culture fit”, who is invited to a birthday party, or allowed into a home, things like this. These are forms of discrimination. The term itself in common usage has a negative valence which means “bad forms of discrimination”, “bad” according to Liberal/modern sensibilities.

We are talking about modifications to what constitutes bad vs good forms of discrimination.

If someone is still struggling with this, consider the semantics/valence of the phrase “I have a very discriminating taste in art”. This doesn’t have negative valence but the basic idea of discrimination is being invoked here.

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actionfromafar 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, words have different meanings depending on context.

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cauch 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not sure it is true that "discrimination = bad" is a "liberal frame".

On the opposite, I feel that this idea is quite common amongst non-liberals who misinterpret liberals. A liberal would say "this is discrimination, this is bad", and the non-liberal would hear "this is discrimination, all discrimination is bad, this is bad". But similarly, one could say "this is sharing private information, this is bad". Does it mean that the conclusion is that sharing private information is always bad? Even when you share info with your family? Or when you open up to your partner? The mistake done by the liberals is that they assume the context is obvious. They assume that it is obvious for everyone that "that particular discrimination" is one of the bad ones.

(and, sure, I'm sure some liberal people also don't get the distinction and fall into the mistake of thinking that all discrimination is bad. My point is that it is not particularly a "liberal frame")

There is a good way to estimate if a discrimination is "the normal one" and "the bad one". A discrimination is bad if the real principal objective is to favour the in-group and disfavour the out-group.

People use that criteria themselves unconsciously. If I say "I'm not giving this to Steve because I know they don't like it", people will just think it's fine. If I say "I'm not giving this to Steve despite the fact he deserves it but I don't like him", people will notice it's unfair. I think liberal people just assume this is obvious, or even not realise it themselves.

This criteria works well. For example, in the examples you gave, none of these actions have been done because "we don't think the people we excluded from the advantage don't deserve it for not being our in-group".

But it is also true that when it comes to conservatism, there are elements where the discrimination is made to exclude the out-group not on fair principal reason, but for the principal reason that it is advantageous for the in-group and the out-group is arbitrarily considered "not worthy of it".

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monideas 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would say generally speaking under Liberalism the notions of different registers or rings of “collective” are illegible. There is only the individual and the collective, not different types of collective with different rules and protocols.

This is why even ideas like the nuclear family are hard to define or defend within Liberalism.

Remember that Black Lives Matter had on their website a declaration that they rejected the notion of the nuclear family.

Along the same exact lines the notion of what makes someone a citizen of a Western country is very hard to define or discuss. In some sense every person on earth is basically an American, they just haven’t been officially granted citizenship yet. No one can actually define what particular qualities qualify someone to become an American citizen or not, everyone just has vague notions and some ad hoc mishmash of various financial or political interests.

This makes discussions around illegal or legal migration in the West very difficult to have, purely on an intellectual level in terms of the categories.

	▲	Arkhaine_kupo 14 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> This is why even ideas like the nuclear family are hard to define or defend within Liberalism. > Remember that Black Lives Matter had on their website a declaration that they rejected the notion of the nuclear family. The definition of nuclear family is incredibly easy to explain. And BLM rejecting its enshrinement in certain political and legislative situations doesn't make its definition any harder? Like if you are a kid brought up by your aunt, or grandma. Or if one parent is dead, or divorced etc having limited legal protections is silly. We already cover this with the concept of a legal guardian, but its limited and complicated and offers only partial protection. The nuclear family is a cold war political tool designed around car centric suburbs and civic design red lining. It didnt even make sense at the time, when many children had their dad leave for Korea and later Vietnam. And with women working, the primary caretaker being secondary family members. And that is entirely within the framework of white, suburban middle class america. > This makes discussions around illegal or legal migration in the West very difficult to have, purely on an intellectual level in terms of the categories. Only if you pretend that you do not understand what people are talking about, the context of certain discussions and the situations or problems being addressed or discussed. Categories are context dependant and humans are very comfortable making and working with categories, even universalising them. But there is no perfect enclosure so categories NEED to be context dependant, this is equally true in pure Maths as it is in human realities.
	▲	cauch an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well, yes, liberalism is often pushing against building a society where we have "clans" or "groups" that exert authorities on individual actions. I don't think it means that "ideas like the nuclear family are hard to define within liberalism". I think they define them as clearly as in conservative circles (if not better, in conservative circles, these notions are often "gut feelings"). And I don't think liberalism is trying to ban things like nuclear family. People can still have as much nuclear family as they want, as long as it does not impact people who don't recognise their arbitrary authority or who are not part of one (willingly or not). For example, Black Lives Matter is a good example, as they never rejected the nuclear family itself, just said they don't recognize its authority when this structure is restricting the solidarity potential between individuals. Same with citizenship: it is not true that liberalism struggles with this notion. Liberalism is just trying to find a fair balance and avoid cases of unfair restrictions on people whose only crime was to be born on the wrong side of an imaginary line. It does not mean citizenship is rejected in itself, but it means that you cannot arbitrarily invent rules that favourise the group you are part of.

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neuroticnews25 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>A discrimination is bad if the real principal objective is to favour the in-group and disfavour the out-group

Come on, the outgroup is indefinitely big and the resources are limited. You buy icecream for your kid and not for the random kid. You favour the wellbeing of human race to that of aliens. Presumably you understand the will of Sentilese people to not share the island with strangers. Does it matter whether they think "we have to do this to protect our existence" or "we fucking hate white people"?

I think if you try to define what forms of favouring the ingroup are justified and what it means for Steve to deserve X you'll end up with something like "discrimination is bad when it violates the liberal moral intuition". Don't get me wrong, I love meritocracy and the world it built, but I don't think we can navigate millenia worth of social constructs with a simple rule of thumb.

	▲	Arkhaine_kupo 22 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> You buy icecream for your kid and not for the random kid. discrimination is about rules not about individual actions. It would be "everyone can eat ice cream", or "ice cream is unhealthy and no one can eat ice cream". If the rule is "Ice cream has too much sugar and because of the obesity epidemic we decided to ban ice cream, except for my son who is super special boy and he can have it every day" that is discriminatory. Even if your son doesn't eat it and effectively the rule is the same for everyone in practice. On the basis of "resources are limited" you end up with discussions of rights that are equal on paper but discriminatory in practice. "Everyone can buy a house", but some people are rich and some have nothing. You have freedom and equality but also homeless people. Here the question however is about in groups and out groups. So its for example about "theft is wrong" where you only arrest people stealing from supermarkets but not the CEO of the supermarket when he is stealing people salaries with mandatory unpaid overtime. That is a law where rich people are covered by the law (their business is protected) but they are exempt (their theft is unprosecuted). That is the kind of in gorup/ out group being debated
	▲	cauch an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I (and probably the large majority of people who are labelled "liberal" within this discussion, not sure if it includes me or not) perfectly understand the origin of the need of building in-groups. When I buy icecream for my kid, I don't pretend that it is because my kid is more worthy of icecream than the random kid. My objective is not to "favour my kid": I don't think of the icecream as something that my kid should deserve more than a random kid. My point is that when you see a liberal person saying "it's a discrimination. it's bad", it is, in the large majority of the case, a discrimination where the principal motivation is "conflictual", where the principal motivation is based on "there is us, and there is them, and we want to end up with us having X and them not having it". As proof, it is obviously not true to pretend that when you buy an icecream to your kid, the majority of liberal people will come at you and say you are discriminating.

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Arkhaine_kupo an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> What we’re talking about is the notion of what constitutes good or “being a good person”.

For most people it follows pretty basic principles that are based on notions of "goodness" which might include humility, fairness, generosity, courage...

Under those circumstances, almost all humans believe that treating everyone as equals is aligned with those principles and therefore makes you a good person. Having to square that with conflicting dehumanised views of others, means that the easiest way to do it is to simply pretend that you are treating everyone the same while subjecting those you discriminate with a harshness that isnt applied equally.

> In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself,

You are using two different definitions of the word in a way that is sophist and not sophisticated.

Discrimination of humans is the mistreatment of others based on characteristics that are protected (those that are predetermined). Discrimination as the noticing differences and evaluating them based on taste is a second definition of the word, used in very different contexts.

That is not "liberal sensitivity" that is just polysemic words.

In the same way that standing in a room with a very powerful light bulb would not make your argument any brighter.

> We are talking about modifications to what constitutes bad vs good forms of discrimination.

No. We were talking about the psychological tools used by conservative people to deal with the cognitive dissonance of wanting to believe themselves as moral and accepting of inherently good precepts like the equal value of all human life while they want to not accept the consequences of the police state they set up to control people they believe inferior.

YOU tried to make it about the semantic similarity between two of the three meanings of the word discrimination. Which is the kind of parlour trick that only works if your audience is stupid.

Liberalism does neither uniquely hold the axiom that all humans are equal, nor does it shape the minds of people to hold it as a universal principle. It is a pretty universal tenant of almost all ethical systems, the only exceptions being system where some humans are not considered human (to avoid the everyone should be treated the same principle still being upheld), or systems that are openly discriminatory in which case they hardly call themselves moral.

Systems that say "we win because we are more powerful" do not do it based on ethics, and systems that have an underclass tend to dehumanise it (slaves not being citizens in rome). Everywhere else people are "equal", where the upper class are exempt from the worst consequences of legal frameworks (see sunset towns in jim crow america only affecting black people).