I agree and its disheartening to see the amount of responses in opposition. There is a massive number of comments on this post compared to most social topics, or ANY topic for that matter, and a lot of them are arguing it's wrong or bad to have limits on such behavior. I would suspect many of those arguments are defensive in origin and disingenuous. But for those who aren't personally involved in those behaviors, who opposed limits and rules, I don't know how they imagine a total free for all could work. We need government, structure, rules for society to exist. Otherwise as has been shown when limits are removed, the worst people and of people will ruin it for everyone else. If you could count on people NOT to be terrible it would make all of this a lot easier. You cannot.
What sucks all the air out is people demanding perfectly normal social behaviour be banned for puritanical and controlling reasons.
To be clear, I'm not implying that's your motivation but just as there are bad extremes in the behaviour of some attendees and organisers, so are there extremes in the gatekeeping and sensitivity of others. Both are regrettable.
Perhaps in theory people should be free to express themselves how they want, but we should question why on earth people want to express themselves in these ways and work to solve that.
In the meantime, however, we live in an imperfect society where people are terrible, this does have consequences, and there does need to be some counterbalance against that - otherwise we’d be living happily in an anarchist utopia already.
That's an unfair response. It's reasonable to want the rules to change for society and be willing to play along. That's different from wanting to be the only one to do it.
I'm sorry but that's kind of ridiculous. You're saying that society should not decide that any human behavior is wrong, it should just figure out how to accommodate everything.
Part of the problem is that most human beings are fairly wired through various selection criteria and conditioning to accept even maladaptive behaviors through mimetics. The people that seem to quickly go against societal rules for whatever reasons they may be tend to be viewed as "anti-social" and quickly judged harshly by at least roughly 40% of the population at large. After all, "criminal" behavior and "protest" is mostly distinguished in terms of defining the current social contract as not valid or inconsistent and how many people overall agree, not whether something is simply written down and codified.
I don't really understand this mindset. Are we supposed to treat people like there's absolutely no right or wrong way to live? How are we supposed to have a stable society when there are no standards by which to live by or strive for? Why shouldn't we discriminate against bad behavior and provide positive feedback for good behavior?
The issue is that the people arguing against it don't want to not be a jerk. They want to continue being a jerk, and not face any consequences for doing so.
Clearly that's not enough. Asserting that it should be and doing what amounts to punishing people because you don't like the way they are isn't going to help.
There's individual freedom and there's aggregate outcomes. No person should be prevented from almost anything, but what's causing many people to behave in a certain way, and what are the likely outcomes?
We can be concerned about MGTOW and incel culture etc. without specifically wanting to force people to conform.
I don't think it's too much at all, the persons argument boils down to "because you can't meet everyone, you don't really have free will to change who you interact with", and if they REALLY believe that, the world is hopeless and they may as well just stop trying.
It is ethical, right, and good to cut off all ties with people who actually do violate social rules and hurt others. It's better for everyone, including the person who did the deed, because they will learn fast that it is unacceptable.
There should, as the original post says, be no exceptions for skill or usefulness.
In my time, I've entirely cut off people who I've learned have hit or abused others in any way. I don't care if it's a man sticking his hand in a woman's pants or a guy hitting his boyfriend or a woman verbally abusing her man, or any parent mistreating their child. (All humans, of every gender, age and background, do evil and hurt each other equally.)
I've taken a lot of heat for this, and lost opportunities for money & fame, but you know what? I can sleep easy. I'm not losing my own sense of what's right by drips and drabs of attrition.
That said, you can't make it top-down. It'll never work. There's no way to dictate that others do this, no community "rules" that will work, unless people are willing to look hard at themselves and ask, "Is this the kind of behavior I want to condone? Do I want to even be in the same room with a person who'd act like that?"
It is sad how we allow rude people to get away with selfish behavior and make life for difficult for everyone else. Doing so encourages rude people to be even more selfish and we get the kind of behavior you see discussed in the article.
Addressing the issues directly is often challenging. That is my guess on why we allow degenerate behavior to impose costs on others until it reaches epidemic proportions when we finally attempt to address it.
It also encourages people to isolate themselves in enclaves where people that share certain expectations of behavior can shut out others and deal with those that are at least somewhat considerate of whatever behaviors the group cares about.
Allowing the rudest people to abuse society degrades the public square and tears at the benefits that can strengthen the social contract. Sadly it seems to be a pretty dominate trait in our society these last few decades and it seems likely to just keep getting worse. Hopefully I am wrong.
Not only that, consider the societal advantage of this behavior. Many social rules are wrong and group-level maladaptive. Having a subset of the population that doesn't adhere to those rules benefits society by allowing it to break out of local maxima.
It's not a tendency we should suppress. Punishing people for non-conformity is the act of a villain. And yet we do, so that only people with wealth can survive doing it.
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