“Discrimination” is one of so many terms in vogue today, along with “hate”, “social justice” and “equality”, whose usage summons images of sweeping societal change, of epochal drives for a better world. These and others are used so often that their meanings are seldom questioned, and their profferred premises are taken instead at face value.
This has led to some bizarre, if not particularly just, outcomes. What, exactly, for instance, is “hate crime”? Is it a crime where someone killed is that much more dead because the one who killed them, also hated them? Is it supposed to slow the rates of crimes because now everyone has been warned that it isn’t nice to hate while in the commission of a crime? Or that someone imprisoned for their hate is that much more locked up because of their alleged motive? In this instance the very use of motive as an element of criminal wrongdoing in itself, as opposed to a procedural path to take in identifying a perpetrator along with means and opportunity, unintentionally or otherwise alters the very concept of both what crime is and how to investigate it.
In the case of “discrimination”, we see such chaotic outcomes as a weird notion that one perpetrator allegedly having committed one crime of sexual assault or rape on one victim, is now to be interpreted as the college or university with which one or both is associated (even if the crime allegedly took place off campus) also being guilty of “discrimination” against the victim (always a woman) because it has failed to prevent her being discriminated against by means of having failed to prevent a crime. Though law enforcement or prosecution of crimes has nothing whatever to do with the purposes for the school’s existence, such reasoning now sets up that school to both appear to be “preventing” such crimes, to presume that one has taken place at all when one person says it has, and that the named accused is in fact guilty quite outside any process of criminal investigation or prosecution, because not to do so would be to “discriminate” against all women.
“Social justice” poses similar conundrae to logic and ordinary common sense: what is this even supposed to mean, and how exactly are we supposed to go about acquiring it? Oddly, the shortest path to this condition of “social justice” according to some, is to make it permissible to “hate” one sex openly and say so repeatedly (guess which one) and to “discriminate” against one race (guess which, etc) in favor of others. Such methodologies may feel vindicative and even deserved, by those who stand to benefit from altering the terms of bigotry for all rather than outgrowing its compulsions for their own part as individuals, but it is laughable to think that following this path leads inevitably to this “social justice.”
As for “equality”, the term in its current de rigeur self-justification is so hollow and meaningless, and fraught with convenient exceptions, as to require far more space for analysis of its many and comic flaws than what is available here.
