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MBlume comments on I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions - Less Wrong Discussion

26 Post author: Multiheaded 25 January 2012 05:43PM

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Comment author: MBlume 28 January 2012 10:57:08PM 17 points [-]

genocidal

This is kind of a pet peeve of mine. "Genocide" has really strong negative moral valence in most people's minds because the last time somebody tried it, it involved killing millions of people. Throwing it around in situations that don't involve death seems... not inaccurate per se, but still disingenuous.

Comment author: CaveJohnson 28 January 2012 11:05:29PM *  5 points [-]

I use it in the technical legal sense and made that explicit too.

Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (Article 2 CPPCG)

People are really inconsistent however in colloquial usage and moral reasoning. I partially agree with your objection. Communist crimes are basically whitewashed because "Mao killed Chinese and he was Chinese so it wasn't genocide so Hitler is still worse". Isn't a life a life? Shouldn't whatever the term one uses, the negative feeling be the same?

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