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Sunday, December 21, 2008

"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live." - Oscar Wilde

***

Those who lobby for the welfare of foreign workers are right in that there're plenty of bad employers.

However, there are also plenty of bad maids, and measures to protect non-bad maids from bad employers can be abused by bad maids to exploit non-bad employers.

This principle can be extended to traditionally oppressed groups and people in general: "[Traditional oppressor group] is evil" is just not an adequate principle, since people (both traditionally oppressing or traditionally oppressed) respond to incentives.

In the same vein, HWMNBN supplies the following:

"I try to love my fellow man, with varying success, the poor slaves among the rest. But the truth is I neither like nor dislike them more than any other creatures. Now your stern abolitionist, becaues he detests slavery, feels he must love its victims, and so he insists on detecting in them qualities deserving unusual love. But in fact these qualities are not to be found in them, any more than in other people. Your extreme anti-slaver mistakes compassion for love, and this leads him into a kind of nigra-worship which, on a rational examination, is by no means justified."

[on special consideration due to suffering of slavery] " Special compassion, by all means, just such as I received when I had the chicken pox. But having the chicken pox did not make me a worthier or better person, as some people seem to suppose is the case with victims of slavery. I tell you, sir, to listen to some of our friends, I could believe that every plantation and barracoon from Florida to the river is peopled by the disciples of Jesus. Reason tells me this is false; the slave being God's creature and a human soul, is no better than the rest of us.... God forgive me, when I become just a little tired of nigras."

--- Letters from Lincoln, 1844 to Greeley

(from his archives, so the attribution may be mistaken; "i believe i wrote this shit down from stuff i was reading at either a bookstore or the library in hk in early 2007 but can't remember now")
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