As I said, it's not really about the leash -- nor the sign.
It's about people who deputise themselves in the service of these rules, and who imagine risk, and appoint themselves enforces of a social order of values that is insensitive to particulars.
There are many things I dislike, take littering. I would find it very obnoxious for a person to litter in a park, and to ignore the signs against it.
But I feel no compulsion to go discipline them, or involve myself in their disciplining, or deputise myself as a member of some social police force. Were they to be murdering someone, that would be different.
I am not a person who 'thinks of the children', quite the opposite. I think of a world designed for children, and would then go out of my way to destroy it.
I am unsympathetic with these 'daily oppressions' which constrain people's lived freedom, in the service of radical abstractions with marginal effects; the service of imagined dangers, and the like.
I would much prefer a society in which people occasionally littered to one in which no one dead out of fear of some reprisal.
The problem with "what's the harm" thinking is its aggregation. When you have disciplined people's daily lives to that degree where all these "what's the harm"-level rules are in operation -- then you're living in a nightmare.
It is for this reason I took against ever living in america. Where 'neighbourly policing' seems everywhere; and 'city bylaws' run amok
Just stop, people want dogs leashed in public for safety. This isn't some social order of insensitive assholes, this is because people actually get maimed by dogs and it's easier to have a blanket rule that all dogs (or all animals) must be leashed.
There is no magical effect of some cadre of people trying to enforce some silliness onto the general public, there's a reason behind these laws.
I once walked up to a woman in a parking lot at night while she was putting groceries away (we were coming out of a grocery store).
She turns and says "please get away from me" in a way that made it obvious she was irrationally fearful, no idea why but I can guess. Most people would not have reacted in that manner.
My point is this: Go tell the victims of dog attacks they're being busy-bodies by wanting dogs leashed in the park.
I doubt the victims are. Its those people wandering through parks having this fantasy of victimisation to drive their 'compassionate' impulse to police others.
If you wander around the world engaged in these fantasies, and police everyone around you such, then you're creating a nightmare for people to live in.
Do you imagine teenagers attacking people, and then keep them out of parks? They're vastly more dangerous than dogs.
Do you imagine so for everything? For knives and forks? For trees? Why! Trees do fall and kill people, we must be ever vigilant for the person with a tree on their property who has not put signs up warning people.
Yes, the world has some minimal danger to it; and people are routinely injured one way or another. If you spend your life in fantasies of this danger you'll only make the world doubly unbearable -- as unsafe as it ever was, and now with self-appointed social police making sure no one can enjoy it
If there's a dangerous dog in a park, that's a problem -- and call the police; make laws against it; make it a crime to own a dangerous dog.
But if there isnt, if you're just having this fantasy that some random guy walking some random dog is endangering the people in the park -- well, I dislike you much more than I dislike that dog. And I'd like a sign to keep you out of the park.
But people who make signs arent the kind to make that one; they're the busy-bodies.
Despite your protestations to the contrary, this is about unleashed animals in the park. It's not about trees, it's not about weapons (although most parks also have prohibitions against weapons), or teenagers. It's about dogs and why people want them to be leashed.
Joel Spoelsky coined a term years ago, architecture astronaut.
> When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all.
> These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts.
It's kind of like those people who didn't believe covid existed until their family members started dying of it. It's really easy to hold such views when the idea of a dog attacking is an abstract idea. When there isn't a real understanding of the level of danger an attacking dog has.
What I'm saying is that you're holding this opinion due to your ignorance.
I have elsewhere defended 'whataboutism' as just another way of asking a person to answer for moral hypocrisy.
Some people clearly want to walk their dogs without leashes. Some people want all dogs leashed. Now, what's the moral standard at work? How do you determine the level of danger?
If you want to constrain people, limit their ability to lives their lives as they wish, you need to have an answer you can defend without bias or prejudice. That you don't like unleashed dogs cannot be grounds for limiting another; there has to be more than your mere preference.
To separate out people disguising their irrational fear from a genuine moral position, one needs to establish that moral position. 'Whatabout' here applies exactly, in moral philosophy its called casuistry: arguing from cases.
So if your moral position is that at a certain level of risk, one must put up signs and start socially policing people -- then ok, let's hear it: what level of risk? what's the principle at work here? (Or does your mind leap to imagined danger in one case, but not another: are you a bigot?).
My view is that I want to live in a society much more tolerant to risk for the sake of avoiding social policing. I dont want to go to parks where people are 'watching out for rule breakers'.
You, presumably, want to live in that society? This is the question.
If you do, so be it. I am not taking a stand against leash laws one way or another. I'm taking issue with a particular mechanism of enforcement of social rules by which emotional busy-bodies go around clutching their pearls and calling the police.
The issue of dog leashes is just one trivial example of this general phenomenon -- and it is this that I am talking about. I have no care whatsoever about what the law should be in the matters of dog leashing.
I gather people in this thread are unable or unwilling to engage in the argument I am making which is at one level of abstraction above the issue around dog leads.
> Was babysitting a family members Pit Bull mix. Her family believes the fatal attack occurred while attempting to stop a fight between the Pit Bull and her 2 Chihuahuas.
...
> Bitten by the family dog while playing outside with adult supervision, later died in hospital.
...
> Was at home to check on his daughters dogs when they attacked him.
...
> A 6-year-old boy was killed by the family dog, a pit bull mix; the boy was severely injured and died in hospital the next day.
---
this isn't abstract or theoretical, this is reality. These are dogs that killed _family members_ in 2023, the list of dogs that injured _people_ is much larger.
The signs aren't abstract and the people who put them up aren't doing them for abstract reasons, but for some reason you want this to be an abstract debate while at the same time complaining that the signs were put up.
If you think that's a reply to me, you havent understood my point. I am well aware of such situations.
The question is whether a particular person, in a particular park, on a particular day, with a particular dog is causing that situation. It is an absurd level of paranoia to suppose they are.
Dogs kill people. People kill people. Everything is harmful to someone at somepoint.
The question is whether we should go around replaying 6olds dying by dogs in our heads when we're wandering around in a park.
I think we shouldnt. And it is a moral and psychological sickness to do so.
That you're still only able to evaluate my position in terms of the saftey of dogs tells me you have not understood it and are making no efforts to.
It seems like you're arguing in bad faith, perhaps because you usually deal with people you can brow-beat into losing arguments by appealing to extreme cases.
You can point to all the murdered children you want; that isn't going to work with me. I'm not an idiot.
One wonders if you also rail at the authoritarian nature of stoplights.
At that on one particular 4-way with that one particular car with that one particular driver, they successfully ran a red light without causing an accident, therefore, we should all just ignore stop lights because they're an authoritarian construct designed to cow us into submission.
Or perhaps it's those authoritarian posters telling young people to use condoms. Because in that one particular bed in that one particular house with that one particular young couple they had unprotected sex without transmitting any STDs or getting pregnant, therefore we can conclude that signage telling people to use condoms is purely a social construct with no long term real world consequences.
But by all means Don Quixote, you keep fighting the good fight.
Sure, conventions that create shelling points to enable coordination on roads are the same as preventing dogs from running around in parks -- the things dogs want to do by nature, in the nature-based parts of cities.
Perhaps it's my inclination against speciesism, and my seeing people much closer to dogs than not -- but I think the regulation of the behaviour of animals, against their natures, is a moral matter.
A convention around how to drive isnt.
As far as STDs go, again: no idiotic blanket rules, indeed. Morality occurs in the negotiation between people in particular circumstances.
Sometimes not wearing a condom is exactly what one should do -- if one wishes, one's partner wishes, and one thinks that this sort of intimate sex is more interesting -- and a core part of a life worth living.
I fear greatly the life painted by how regulated people "ought" be in these trivial matters: how they walk their dogs, how they have sex, and so on. This is very far away from a life which any human animal ought live. It's a life full of petty regulations on behaviour to create the illusion of a safe world.
An illusion which comes at an extremely heavy price: that of enjoying life. A cost I do not want to pay.
Imagine for a moment a person like you, with your impulse to constrain and regulate, was in charge of you
Imagine they did not agree with how you should live your life
What then, would you say to them?
For any issue they wil have their data about marginal changes to safety
You want to do X? why, 0.y% of times X happens, bad things happen!
this is a universal feature of life, and so any idiot can appeal to it
now what do you say to this overbearing regulator of your enjoyment? this person who denies you what you wish to do?
i cannot imagine you are so naive to suppose that what you enjoy is unimpeachably safe
i don't think you have anything to say
rather i read this line of thinking as just moral hypocrisy: you allow yourself to enjoy whatever it is you enjoy, despite these marginal risks -- but when you get no enjoyment from it --- Ah! well then it can be banned
I don't own a dog. And as I've said elsewhere, this really isnt about dogs.
It's about whether the appropriate response to rare events of danger, imagined in abstract circumstances, should be met with 'fantasy compassion' where people go around policing each other.
An unleashed dog in a park is safe as people in the park, indeed, much more so. More people are attacked by other people in parks than by dogs.
If we're going to police society to this level, it'll be a nightmare.
If there's a dangerous person in the park: call the police. Likewise if there's a dangerous dog.
I find it a certain moral sickness to go around in a fantasy that people are all dangerous, or likewise dogs are, or anything else. This is just some internal emotional licence to appoint yourself a police officer.
In the comment i replied to above: why was that woman afraid? Because of a dog? No. She reacted to another person. Another person hurt her.
People are dangerous. I guess we should have a sign 'no people in the park' -- then we can really enjoy it
As far as the topic goes, the topic is about how emotional disregulation in autistic people can lead to feelings of injustice and concequentially hostile behaviour.
Dogs and their owners are just an illustrative case.
As an autistic person, your sense of (in)justice matches mine. I see no greater injustice than the oppression of arbitrary authority (e.g. dog leashing signs); and no worse person than those who perpetuate it.
I classify it into three tribes, using neutral language: the organisers, the dreamers and the demystifies.
Organising autistic people are highly conscientious, motivated by (often disregulated) compassion, rule-imposing, morality is quite personal and imposing, etc. -- board games, civil service, etc. They feel controlled by others having too much freedom, their unexpected behaviour makes them feel unsafe.
The dreamers do not follow any rules, create rich fantasy worlds, like fiction, like high moral principles -- morality is monkish, self-imposing, sacrificial. They feel controlled by too much detail, too many tasks -- they want to live in a removed space.
The demystifiers are ultra pragmatists in many areas (but not all), like non-fiction, are suspicious of 'moral formulas', are suspicious of fantasy, and so on. They feel controlled by others trying to define the bounds of acceptable behaviour. They want to live in a space where everyone is maximally accepted for their invidual preferences.
We're all mixtures, but I find I cannot abide people of the first tribe -- and my friends belong to the other two. That I also have ADHD means I tend to sit across the latter two, depending on the area.
But in general, i'm ruthelessly sceptical of the imaginary worlds people create to make meaning in the world; very sceptical of abstraction in morality; very sceptical of lack of abstraction in philosophy; and so on.
In otherwords, i'm very sceptical of certain emotions (compassion, wonder, ...) and very fond of others (irony, say, esp.).
I think having ADHD also makes you more likely to be in the latter two tribes -- i think the classical popular presentation of autistic personalities lie much more in the first category.
It's about people who deputise themselves in the service of these rules, and who imagine risk, and appoint themselves enforces of a social order of values that is insensitive to particulars.
There are many things I dislike, take littering. I would find it very obnoxious for a person to litter in a park, and to ignore the signs against it.
But I feel no compulsion to go discipline them, or involve myself in their disciplining, or deputise myself as a member of some social police force. Were they to be murdering someone, that would be different.
I am not a person who 'thinks of the children', quite the opposite. I think of a world designed for children, and would then go out of my way to destroy it.
I am unsympathetic with these 'daily oppressions' which constrain people's lived freedom, in the service of radical abstractions with marginal effects; the service of imagined dangers, and the like.
I would much prefer a society in which people occasionally littered to one in which no one dead out of fear of some reprisal.
The problem with "what's the harm" thinking is its aggregation. When you have disciplined people's daily lives to that degree where all these "what's the harm"-level rules are in operation -- then you're living in a nightmare.
It is for this reason I took against ever living in america. Where 'neighbourly policing' seems everywhere; and 'city bylaws' run amok