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by pjc50
1125 days ago
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> We do have shared values that are universally agreed. Everyone wants their kids to grow up to be capable and successful and happy. The debate over trans people has surfaced lots of incidents in which people will say, to the world and to the faces of their kids, that they would prefer them to be dead rather than transition. Sometimes they take steps to ensure this themselves. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/eden-knigh... > Everyone wants clean air and water. .. for themselves. There's always someone who realises that they can make a billion dollars by pouring carcinogens in the river, so why shouldn't they as long as they stick to bottled water? Everything is simple and happy until we get to having to make a tradeoff. |
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Shared values has never meant that every single person agrees including rich business owners who will hurt people to make money, or parents who would wish their kids dead. The whole reason these shocking and horrific viewpoints get talked about is because they’re so rare and so far away, so extreme, from what most people value. The trans debate is in full swing right now and there will continue to be awful headlines and more straw men and gas lighting for a while, but it’s following in the path of what black people, women, gay people, poor people, and others have all endured, and our shared values (in US centric terms, that all people are created equal and deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) will hopefully keep us moving in the right direction like it has in the past.
Same goes for environmental protection. It’s illegal to dump carcinogens in the river for a reason, and that reason is because we already collectively declared that kind of behavior to be anti-social and unsafe. (And BTW the ruthless billionaire might be amoral, but he’s probably not an idiot, and has a decent idea of where bottled water actually comes from.)
The one big danger of the culture wars and the war on science is that this all might be a ruse by some enterprising billionaires to get people to distrust government as being representative of our shared values. The billionaire might get his way and be allowed to pollute the river if he can convince us that we don’t share values with our neighbors. It might work, we might end up convinced we don’t share values with our neighbors, even when we actually do.