Whats amused you (in the news) today ?

A beautiful answer sir, and I applaud your parenting, but... I'm not 8 .

Get a room you two!

The dictionary definitions of "liberal" include "willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas" and "respecting and allowing many different types of beliefs or behaviour"

There's worse insults.

I didn't realise that the leading nation of the "free world", where you need to have a credit card to receive medical care, huge piles of cash to run for offices of state now requires you to have large amounts cash to prove your innocence even if you reside in the UK.


www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4ng14j5vqpo

'Equality' has more meanings than 'global equality'. In fact that is a proposition that I have heard nobody proposing let alone AI. 

It is not a proposition that would interest me as people are free to add as many children as they want to the pile needing 'equality'. My view is that what is needed to solve the problem of the humans is a ton of birth control pills. 

So now I'm confused.  If not global equality of wealth, then what exactly do people mean by "equality"?  It's easy to spout the word,  preaching sagely about its unfairness, usually in some virtue-seeking context, we've heard it for years, but what exactly is it calling for?

If it's considered acceptable that some in the system are to be left financially poorer than others, as outlined above, then it follows axiomatically that they will be disadvantaged in other matters of equality, such as equality of healthcare, or equality of opportunity.  For example, they won't be able to pay for the better private healthcare or better private education that other, wealthier people can afford.

Just what are we supposed to make of this holy grail, this nebulous concept of "equality"? 

Well firstly, who is actually talking about "Global Equality" ? I'm not sure that there is any political movement that talks about "global equality" in the terms you are suggesting i.e. all people across the globe are made equal in wealth. Or even equal in opportunity in the sense you have described (that a person in country A should have the same opportunity to access say advanced health care as a person in country B). 

There are movements that push the equality agenda globally, and they may refer to "Global Equality" (e.g. www.globalequality.org/index.php). But what they are talking about is promoting and pushing for equality principles to be adopted globally. That is not the same or even has any remote relation to any idea of levelling up/levelling down globally, or even within country, as you have implied.

The predominantly (universally?) accepted meaning of "Equality" is "equality of opportunity". That is the same meaning you will find in pretty much any EDI training. It encompasses the concepts of "no discrimination on the basis of race/religion/gender/sexual orientation/disability" etc - in UK law what is referred to as  "protected characteristics". That means both direct discrimination but also perhaps the less obvious forms of discrimination such as indirect discrimination, discrimination arising from disability, harassment, victimisation etc.

I can't really answer where your confusion comes from because I don't know where you got the idea that the principle of equality meant anything like you have suggested.