The ghettoization proposal… honestly, I think it was too absurd to me to even generate a coherent image, but if I try to force my imagination to produce one it’s pretty horrible.
This is actually a huge part of what I was upset about, and it’s really helpful to have you make that explicit: The fact that no one else seems to have bothered to take the initiative to concretely visualize this proposal and respond to the implications of its literal content. And then, when I tried to point out the problem by pointing out a structural analogy to a thing there’s some agreement is bad, a mod criticized me for doing that. Which is, itself, a sort of epistemic “no punch-back” rule.
It’s not so much that “bully” is a natural group now, as that proposals like this make that particular division—between people who like punching people with no punchback and people who don’t take initiative in that sort of game—more salient, and create a visible minority group that’s fair game for (initially mild) abuse by the punching caste. (The “safe space” proposal made that really, really obvious to me once I noticed it.)
Jews are interesting because they’re a cultural and ethnic group that actually does noticeably resemble punchbug noninitiators. For just under two millennia, the Jewish strategy was to basically assume that while they’d face the occasional damage from a crusade or pogrom or expulsion from a country, this was an acceptable rate of loss, and keeping a low profile and mostly not bothering people would be a better deal than fighting back ad hoc, which would most likely lead to much more organized persecution by the authorities, or trying to create a nation-state, which would both require them to engage in organized violence (which is very much neither fun nor productive) and make them a more obvious target (this strategic shift was a response to three successive failed rebellions against the Roman empire). The 20th Century was pretty strong evidence that in the modern world this is not a reliably stable or sustainable arrangement, as about a third of Jews worldwide were rounded up and murdered within a single generation.
This is actually a huge part of what I was upset about, and it’s really helpful to have you make that explicit: The fact that no one else seems to have bothered to take the initiative to concretely visualize this proposal and respond to the implications of its literal content. And then, when I tried to point out the problem by pointing out a structural analogy to a thing there’s some agreement is bad, a mod criticized me for doing that. Which is, itself, a sort of epistemic “no punch-back” rule.
It’s not so much that “bully” is a natural group now, as that proposals like this make that particular division—between people who like punching people with no punchback and people who don’t take initiative in that sort of game—more salient, and create a visible minority group that’s fair game for (initially mild) abuse by the punching caste. (The “safe space” proposal made that really, really obvious to me once I noticed it.)
Jews are interesting because they’re a cultural and ethnic group that actually does noticeably resemble punchbug noninitiators. For just under two millennia, the Jewish strategy was to basically assume that while they’d face the occasional damage from a crusade or pogrom or expulsion from a country, this was an acceptable rate of loss, and keeping a low profile and mostly not bothering people would be a better deal than fighting back ad hoc, which would most likely lead to much more organized persecution by the authorities, or trying to create a nation-state, which would both require them to engage in organized violence (which is very much neither fun nor productive) and make them a more obvious target (this strategic shift was a response to three successive failed rebellions against the Roman empire). The 20th Century was pretty strong evidence that in the modern world this is not a reliably stable or sustainable arrangement, as about a third of Jews worldwide were rounded up and murdered within a single generation.
Okay, I think I see where you’re coming from. I’ve definitely updated towards considering the OP proposal scarier. Thanks for spelling things out.