#red cleaning

The moral value of reds is debatable, certainly. However, even if reds matter very little, they are not completely free of thought or experience.

And those thoughts, those experiences?

Of pollution, constant, violating pollution, suffusing their very beings.

Thus, no. I do not support sentencing 65 million beings to spend their last moments still suffering, having stolen away their last hope of succor.

So Many.  

I am learning the basics of the language because it will probably be useful, and because my mother works in education I’ll probably get  roped into volunteering with...I don’t even know, many things.

I don’t know enough about the topic to say whether this is true, but I’ve seen other people who clearly thought Miolee posed a serious risk to Amentan civilisation, and I don’t want to dismiss their concerns.

Also, if they do fail to run the planet properly and die - my understanding is that the theological consensus is that ex-reds are people, and it would not be good for large numbers of people to die of starvation in a collapsing society. This isn’t something I used to consider a concern, because the general agreement seems to be that they’re still disgusting dysgenic criminals and the life of someone like that isn’t worth the children that law abiding, valuable citizens could have in their place. But we have FTL now. That isn’t a trade-off we need to make any more.

Well, when I started out, so to speak, cleaning didn’t exist, so certainly that’s not something I was thinking of.

Afterwards - I try not to make predictions about the future like that. I was afraid and sometimes I hoped, and I wanted to do what I could. 

‘Live to see’ wasn’t particularly a factor on my mind. I have quite a few years left, and I didn’t particularly expect whatever outcome would happen to take that long. It was considerably more about what I would be seeing while I was living. 

But no I certainly never expected specifically this, and had much less reason to hope for something as desired.

(I would like to add here - it is not every red. And the number can still depend on work we do. Anitam has given its condition on massacres, but as we would all know from the existence of the justice system a strong deterrent is not a guarantee, and it’s additionally not clear where they might draw the line and what ‘accidents’ might be tolerated. 

And even in the best scenario, cleaning remains a medical procedure which not everyone survives (and which some know they cannot survive). This is a number that, as in is generally the case in medical procedures, can to some amount be affected by procedures and supplies and the like. 

Clean caste members in countries planning transition should continue to petition their governments to do this right, so that number can be as small as is in any way possible. 

And I tried so hard to tell them I wasn’t supposed to be there, but they told me it was fine and I could go through cleaning ‘soon.’ But I knew that wouldn’t be for months and months. They kept telling me to do things and go places and I had to touch things to do them, and everyone was acting like me maybe being clean in the future meant that I was clean already?

I was trying so hard to convince them that the stuff I was touching was polluted but no one would believe me and I was so scared. If they didn’t realize I was polluted they would get polluted too and I didn’t want to hurt them! They were very nice dream-greens! And then I worried that if they realized it on their own they might think I tricked them and I didn’t want that either.

@tohigherpurity

By nature, Amenta is blighted by three primary pollutants: garbage, the waste of Amentans, and corpses. The horrible crime of our ancestors added another that has now been present through most of history: reds.

In cleaning, we have the opportunity to redeem our ancestors’ crime and completely and forever eliminate a primary pollutant off Amenta, as well as eliminate the permanent pollution of tens of millions across Amenta, the physical (and constantly polluted) red districts, and so on.

This is an invention of enormous good and progress and a primary moral imperative of our generation is to see it used and done with all deliberate speed and thoroughness. 

Studies show that, controlling for the significantly and obviously effect-having factor of being permanent pollution sources, reds are not more likely to commit pollution violations. In fact, reds are clearly selected and trained for great care against pollution violations - if reds were careless with pollution it would be unconscionable and impossible for society to trust them with the jobs they do and have done for generations, and a red who is seen committing even an inadvertent pollution violation, failing to mark unavoidable pollution, failing to take all necessary precautions, and so in, is and has been highly likely to die.

In any case, individual pollution violations are the (vital and important!) business of law enforcement, and proper habits around pollution are the (vital and important!) business of education. Morality is the business of child-rearing, social institutions, and education, and personal to each Amentan for themselves past that point, and law is the business of law. If there is a need to monitor to prevent pollution violations then of course this monitoring should be thoroughly carried out and this is also of great and serious importance.

If someone volitionally commits pollution violations they should be executed; if someone otherwise is in danger of committing them they should be monitored and given appropriate therapy. This is of course essential and may not be compromised on.

But to say that we shouldn’t support cleaning because some ex-reds might commit pollution violations is like saying that we should not seek to prevent destructive wars because some people who would have died in the war might commit a murder. It is short-sighted and perverse.