#pensivehastur

[valc0]

did you delete val-countless-aus?

yeah, been gone 5-6 years now

[forthegothicheroine]

have you ever watched the best Sherlock Holmes adaptation, Priklyuchyeniya Tsherlok Kholms I Doktor Vatson.

I haven't, but that sounds neat! I've seen Cushing, Rathbone, Downey, Miller, a little of Brett, some clips of Cumberbatch, and of course Wishbone as the great detective.

[forthegothicheroine]

Considering that your most recent podcast episode (or at least the most recent episode available on Apple Podcasts) was on The King In Yellow, have you considered doing an episode on "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", or on Borges in general?

I love Borges!  I should get back to the podcast- I know it’s been ages, but my life has been in major upheaval in the last year or so, and that was before the pandemic.  I could do an episode on Borges- he does have some gothic stuff- or on works about fictional places and artwork, which many weird authors have written.

[ante--meridiem]

Do you think that there should be a terminological category distinction between things that directly cause harm to people and things that typically don't cause harm in the individual case but will cause harm if large numbers of people do it (like embezzlement by civil service officials or drunk driving?) Additionally, do you think there should be a legal distinction between these? (honest questions)

Hi! Sorry this took me two whole months to get to, I appreciate the ask. I assume it was prompted by the "things are bad if they harm people and not for other reasons" sentence in my about, so for that context there isn't much distinction to be made since my intention with that is to make it clear I don't believe in judging people for their thoughts/feelings/fantasies and since those are neither direct harm nor cumulative harm (assuming they don't involve an intent to act) the distinction between direct or cumulative doesn't matter much there.

For the non-legal case my first frustratingly general and useless opinion is that if a distinction can be made between things then there probably will be some situations where it should be made because some things will apply to one and not the other, and this is clearly a case where it can be since you were able to differentiate between them in the ask. (As a complete side note, this is why I don't have much patience for people complaining about the granularity of "microlabels" - I see no harm and plenty of use in having words for differences that exist, no matter how granular; they just might not always be relevant but that's not a reason to not have a vocabulary for it in case they are) (to anyone reading this: this is a very minor aside and not the point of what I'm saying please do not turn this post into discourse about identity markers you find too granular).

In order to make this less frustratingly vague and general though I should probably give some opinions on when exactly it is useful to make the distinction and when it isn't though, which is harder for me to say. In one way it's clear that a lot of the time it might be better not to because if, to take some random silly numbers, there's an action where it's bad if sixteen or more people do it but fine otherwise, it's probably better at keeping too many people from doing it if everyone thinks of it as though doing that action caused 1/16th of the harm that would be done if the thresholds were crossed than if they think "as long as others behave I'm not personally having an effect". But then I guess a case where it is useful to make the distinction might be if not doing the action is disproportionately harmful to some specific people - maybe the harm of reaching the threshold is bad enough that people agree no one should get to cause 1/16th of it no matter how badly not doing the action sucks for them, but if we acknowledge they wouldn't actually be doing 1/16th of the harm and as long as the people who don't experience disproportionate harm from not doing the action refrain from it nothing bad will actually happen, then making the distinction allows us to organise things so that specific subset of people can avoid the harm of not doing the action while maybe being stricter on everyone else to make sure the threshold doesn't get crossed. (This doesn't really work for the drunk driving example you gave because that's less "aggregate harm once a threshold is crossed and no harm before" and more "some probability of harm each time the action is taken" and you can't really organise your way around avoiding the probability. But I guess if you tried to apply it here you might land on "we can be more understanding of people who drunk drive if they got drunk and then an emergency happened that caused them to have to drive than we are of people who could have avoided getting drunk since they knew they'd have to drive"). I'm not saying that's the only time the distinction would be important but it is the first/main thing that comes to mind.

Legally, I mean first of all gestures at everything generally wrong with the justice system that makes it hard to make statements about what specific laws should be because the law probably shouldn't work the way it does now at all but that's beyond the scope of the question so. To the extent that my answer ended up being about how we should organise how we respond to people doing the action/who we're willing to accept doing it, and the purpose of a legal system real or ideal is to formalise that kind of thing, yeah, in as much as there is a distinction to be made the law should probably make it too.