Discrimination:

Why do people get so incensed if a shopkeeper gives them an evil eye while they're walking through the aisles looking for something appealing to buy?

Why do they get outraged when someone refers to them as 'you people' or some other generalization?

Why do they take offense when cops stop them over and over again for no reason?

Time and time again, victims of discrimination are told they just need to grow up and develop a thicker skin.  "It's not like anyone is destroying their property, physically assaulting them, or killing them anymore.  No one is taking blacks as slaves or denying them the right to vote, so why can't they finally admit that discrimination and racism is no longer a problem in America or the world?"

The answer to this question is that this is a false lens to view the problem through.  People are primarily hurt not by physical attacks or property loss, but by insults.  Recall that just a couple centuries ago our future president Andrew Jackson got into a duel because he felt he was insulted, and later died from the injuries received that day.  The same is true of Alexander Hamilton, who was killed in a duel by Aaron Burr, the vice president of the United States, because one of them felt insulted by the other.  When it comes to being insulted, historically, it was considered a fate worse than death, that only death itself could right.  In Romeo and Juliet, Tybalt merely called Romeo a 'villain', and from that alone, Romeo saw fit to stab him through the chest, and Paris besides just because he happened to be there.  If someone merely 'bit their thumb' at someone else, that was enough for a gang war to break out on the spot.

There are countless examples in history of insulted people having their revenge at great cost to themselves or others.  In Medea, the female protagonist kills Jason's children for cheating on her.  And in Chinese history, a mistress to the Emperor who was joked at by her 'husband' as being too old for the job killed him later that night in his sleep.

Recently Steve Sailer was making fun of a site called 'microaggresions' that was a forum that gave vent to people reporting cases of being insulted on the basis of their race, sex, or sexuality and how frustrating such events were.  All the commenters of the Sailer article were saying this was just reality and everyone had to grow up and like an adult accept insults without qualm.  However, have they ever told Andrew Jackson or Alexander Hamilton to grow up and stop acting like a kid?  Do they consider these people to be infantile, thin-skinned losers like they describe the people posting 'microaggressions?'

Let's face it, being insulted remains one of the most horrible feelings on Earth.  In the wild west, an insult would result in a duel.  In colonial times, it would result in a duel.  In medieval times, it would result in a duel.  Basically, any time except today, it would result in a duel.  We have abandoned the custom of dueling, but human nature hasn't changed, and that human nature has found that it is better to risk death and to kill someone than to let an insult stand and fester in the general consciousness or in one's own heart.  We are only being false to ourselves when we downplay the significance of insults.  How many people have been driven to suicide via mass bullying by other schoolkids, on the internet or in the real world?  To all of those people, death was their only escape from a fate much worse than death, being constantly insulted by others.

Even if discriminators do not desire to deprive a victimized group of their lives or property, they still intend to deprive them of their human dignity, by heaping insults over their heads and deluging them in contempt and ostracism.  In fact, between the two situations, most victims would prefer their house burning down or a hurricane tearing it apart, than to be the subject of mass derision, scorn, and ostracism.  There is no such thing as 'humane discrimination.'  The moment you've labeled a group and attached a negative judgment to every single person in said group, you've already done more damage than anything short of a Holocaust anyway.  The harm has already been done.  There's no point saying you wouldn't do x or y to said group, because you've already done z, the worst crime of them all.

Though all insults hurt people's feelings, insults are a hundred times as painful when they are unjust.  When you have done nothing to merit an insult, being insulted anyway feels worse than an assault, it's also a betrayal, and even more than that, it feels like the crumbling and collapse of the entire moral order, the entire divine foundation of the universe, which becomes a cosmic joke and farce instead of a miracle of light and beauty that God intended Creation to be.  When good people are treated like evil people, or evil people like good people, it feels like all effort and purpose in this world is meaningless and only despair is left in the human soul.  That's the cost of just one insult towards someone who doesn't deserve it -- he is left questioning the very purpose or value of life in the universe, it wouldn't be strange for him to become a nihilist who wishes to wipe all life on the planet out as just a smirch upon the clean canvas that is nothingness.

I have related this before, but the symbolic nature of a crime is far more important than its physical manifestation.  Slapping someone does minimal physical harm, but spiritually, it cuts to the bone.  It is an insult, and also a degradation, it's a complete denial of the other person's value as a human being.  The insult is what matters, even in an assault, even in a rape, far more than whatever physical harm may come to the person.  The symbolism of an unjust insult may not be accompanied by a physical act like a slap or rape, but essentially it is the same crime and does the same damage.  You've degraded the other person just as thoroughly either way.  This is why the death penalty as punishment for such a crime is perfectly fair for all three cases.  This is why people would start duels and kill their accusers over such crimes in the past, and why the public as a whole condoned this behavior and thought it perfectly fair and just to do so.

This is why it is extremely vital not to discriminate against people, whether in your personal life or as part of the legal code.  No law should be written in such a way that it tenders an unjust insult to an individual.  There should be no law that calls someone less than human, less than the ordinary dignity afforded to the ordinary person deserves, when he or she hasn't actually done anything wrong to deserve such a label.  Discrimination of this sort is simply too cruel to be accepted as permissible in a civilized society.

There are ways to discriminate against or for groups without tendering any insult.  It is a difficult situation, but for instance, no one considers it an insult to have segregated bathrooms.  There are plenty of additional cases of discrimination which is not meant as an insult, for instance defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.  This says nothing about the moral worth of gay people or polygamous people, it just says that marriage isn't those relationships, however worthy they may be, but is in fact the one single relationship that has best preserved civilization, reproduced the next generation, and raised said children with love and stability, which is just a statistical fact.  Another example of non-insulting discrimination is to ban immigration into your country.  You are not saying anything in particular about the moral worth of people outside your own nationality.  They may be the greatest people since sliced bread.  You are only saying that your country is designed around a homogenous whole and works best when it remains a homogenous whole.  People not born into the looks, personality, behavior, intelligence, language, traditions, history, religion, diets, customs, etc of the natives cannot fit in to this lifestyle and would disrupt it, creating a negative externality just by their presence, despite never doing anything morally wrong.  The assertion that a group of people cannot assimilate into another does not question their worth as human beings when left to themselves in their own homelands.  When making a case for discrimination, for instance, women should not be serving in combat, it must be stressed that this isn't because we think women are awful people, but simply because they do not fit in to this specific situation and would cause more problems than benefits.

But some discriminatory laws are innately insulting.  For instance, if women are banned from voting, it's hard to argue that this is for any reason except that women are stupid and irrational and therefore aren't worthy of the franchise.  When any Joe Bloke can vote but women nuclear physicists are too silly and foolish to be given a voice in politics, this is an incredibly dehumanizing and degrading insult.  The only way to deny people the vote in a non-degrading manner is to make the vote extremely selective.  If, for instance, only a few qualified noblemen could vote, based on fair and objective measures that anyone could theoretically fulfill, it wouldn't be considered a degrading insult to an individual to be part of that vast majority that can't vote.  Sort of like how it isn't considered discrimination, or an insult, to not be accepted to Harvard University or the US Olympic Swim Team.

If blacks are simply banned from living in a neighborhood, no matter how well behaved they are or how much money they are earning, this is a degrading and insufferable insult to all blacks everywhere (whether they wish to live in this neighborhood or not, it stings just as badly to be told they can't because they're innately worthless.)  It would be fine for the neighborhood to have strict ordinances against unruly pets, loud parties, unkempt lawns, or anything else that people have control over and can be good or evil about, but to be excluded simply because they are black is unjust and illegitimate.  This is why Paul Kersey's wish to bring back restrictive covenants is a non-starter.  Whether it's done by private individuals or by the state, it's an unjust insult to black people to categorically refuse to let black people live near you, no matter who they individually may be.  And as stated before, the primary pain of rape is the insult offered to you, not the physical act.  Therefore a single restrictive covenant in America is essentially the same as raping every black in America and then saying there's no problem because the State didn't do it.

I could see a restrictive covenant making a case, just like in the case of foreign nations, that they wish to be a homogenous group centered around a homogenous culture, that racial differences are simply too severe for this homogeneity to thrive, and therefore they wish to be left alone among members of their own race.  This isn't any particular insult to blacks, in fact, most blacks also prefer the company of other black people for the same reason.  But the case must be phrased in an appropriate fashion, not as a response to how destructive and dangerous blacks are, which is a generalization that lumps in innocent people alongside the guilty.  It would apply equally well to most other whites, who would also be excluded, and members of every other race besides.  What's important here is the difference between deliberately singling out a group, and exclusivity.  No one minds the exclusivity of private dinner parties or marriages, in which case the vast majority of mankind is excluded, not just members of a single group.  But saying 'everyone is invited except you,' is a different matter.  Then it feels very bad indeed.

Discrimination is a necessary part of life, that one must do every second of the day.  We must choose what brand to buy from and which to not buy from, we must choose our friends and lovers and who will not be our friends and lovers, we must choose who to vote for and who not to vote for, and so on.  Therefore labeling all discrimination as insulting and demanding that all discrimination everywhere cease immediately is madness.  That would make life impossible, it would just turn into a vague amorphous gray goo.  At the same time, discrimination is often used as a weapon to deliver insults toward hated groups, which unjustly persecutes people who have done nothing wrong, and are told that they are worse than pond scum despite being angelic saints.  It is true that these acts of discrimination are on the same barbaric level as medieval witch hunts and the Holocaust, and no good person can abide their existence.  It is vital that we preserve the ability for people to discriminate in rational matters while denying them the right to discriminate in hateful manners, both sides have merit.  But it's also vital to understand that generalizations do not actually mean '100% of said group' are this way or that way.  It just means a disproportionate or unusual number of people within that group act in this distinguishable manner.  Asking why women love ribbons so much does not mean you think all women love ribbons, but simply that they love ribbons more than men, even if it's still only 1% of women who are actually ribbon-loving perpetrators.  This is not an unjust accusation towards all the women who don't love ribbons, and shouldn't be read as such.

I can't imagine anyone, however prejudiced, who would actually go ahead and label 100% of a group as being all exactly the same with no exceptions.  Such a ludicrous insult isn't within human rationality.  Therefore, it's extremely unlikely for a good person who leaves a good impression on everyone around them to be personally attacked on the basis of being black, gay, or a woman.  These people need to stop taking offense when insulting, disparaging comments are made towards blacks, gays, or women in general, because this generality definitely does not include them, even in the minds of the people making the statements.  They are thinking of a vague group of bad actors who are disproportionately represented in those populations, they are not thinking of everyone in said group, and they are definitely not specifically referring to you.  It is the nature of the English language that we do not endlessly qualify our statements to say something like, "why do gays have a 20% higher probability of lisping their words than straights?"  We just ask why gays lisp.  But we mean the same thing between both sentences.  It is even more ludicrous to feel insulted when a group is disparaged for bad conduct, even when the conduct is a matter of accepted fact, when people do not give the appropriate 'root cause' for this conduct.  For instance, to feel insulted because black crime is ascribed to genes instead of poverty is absurd.  It is a scientific question whether genes or poverty have a larger impact on the crime rate, it has nothing to do with a specific insult to a specific innocent person who belongs to that race.  The fact is, most of the world is far poorer than blacks in America are, but they never do crime, so poverty can't be the cause of crime.  Nor can relative poverty be the cause of crime, because the crime rates of blacks are far higher than the bottom 10% of other countries of whatever actual wealth level.  The lowest 10% of Chinese or Cambodians do not have crime levels equivalent to blacks, despite being the 'relatively poorest,' so that argument also flies out the window.

If blacks are criticized for being criminals, you can't say this is racist because it doesn't accept a priori that poverty is the cause and therefore black criminals are just innocent victims of a white racist superstructure which forces them into lives of crime.  The science behind such a theory simply doesn't work.  The facts don't fit such a hypothesis, the variables don't fit the control (for instance there is huge crime in African countries that don't have any whites oppressing them anywhere in the equation), and so it's ridiculous to insist that everyone agree to this or they're delivering some sort of unacceptable unjust insult to all blacks everywhere.

What we are seeing here is the extension of an originally just demand, to not be insulted, into further and further unjust demands, to not be criticized even on the basis of evidence and logic.  While it is true that it was a terrible thing to kill all Jews in Europe, even women and children who couldn't possibly have done anything wrong in their lives, it is not exactly equivalent to the Holocaust to note their disproportionate roles in the media and banking, or the fraudulent practices in both of those institutions.  This does not imply that all Jews everywhere are maniacal liars and schemers, and it does not imply that the only solution is to round them up and kill them all over again.  People who keep asserting that such reasonable criticisms are somehow the equivalent of this statement are abusing people's inherent sense of justice, the wish to not be insulted for crimes we didn't do, and metamorphosing it into an invincible shield that says only good things can ever be said about any Jew anywhere on Earth or any time in history or you're an anti-Semite.  No one should be accused of anything they aren't guilty of, true, but that doesn't mean we can't accuse people of things they are guilty of as well.  That would put a shambles to the moral constitution of the world just as quickly as the reverse.

I am a huge fan of exclusivity and think it should be applied practically everywhere about everything.  I am not a fan of insults and do not think anyone deserves to be degraded for things they didn't even do.  Finding the balance between these two moral needs is a difficult challenge that well-meaning, rational, intelligent conversations should be all about.  There is no simple solution or universal solution, each case of discrimination must be viewed separately, in a case-by-case basis, to see if it falls under the first category of rational daily living or the second case of unnecessary provocation and persecution.  If people feel like taking offense, they can manage to be offended by nearly anything.  At the same time, truly giving innocent people offense is a truly grave crime that cannot be laughed off or dismissed.  Determining which is which is why we have such large brains, and we should carefully apply them every single time, because the stakes are too high to err in either direction.