With respect: homepage

Welcome. This site is my ongoing attempt to consider, envision, arrive at, plot and share a path towards a world of respect in all senses: the kind of world many of us at least thought was possible when we were children, even if we later became pessimistic about the possibility; the kind of world where people, other living beings and the planet itself are approached and treated in the way that it seemed obvious that they ought to be when we were children - all with the benefit of our more experienced adult minds, but in saying this I certainly don't mean to exclude younger readers; in fact, I value my younger readers very much.

This site is living. In another age, I would have published it as a book, complete and static. The internet makes it possible for me to instead share it bit by bit, editing and updating it as I go - why wait for it to be complete before publishing it unless I am afraid of my mistakes, changes of mind and development of ideas being publicly visible? Why delay getting incomplete ideas out there when there is no need for delay? Perhaps an incomplete vision inspires something in somebody of which they would otherwise have been deprived if I had instead waited until I had wrapped everything up before publishing anything at all.

The site will, though, have a sort of continuity approximately similar to a book, so that it should be possible - when it is "complete" - to read it through "from cover to cover", in the order it was intended to be read. For this purpose, I maintain a sitemap (below), which lists all existing pages in the order in which they are intended to be read. Too, at the bottom of each page is a link to the next page in the intended order of reading. The sitemap is a good place from which to start, and to which to return when checking for updates - there I will mark pages newer than, or changed a lot within, the past two months.

Because I live in Australia, some of this site's content is or will be specific to Australia, but much of it is or will be global in scope.

May you find value in this site, and may it inspire you on your own journey.

With respect,
Laird

Sitemap

This is not just a sitemap of current content, but also a plan for content yet to be written. Both the current and planned content are still somewhat disjointed, but hopefully contain some sort of value.

• Homepage: the page that you are currently reading.
• Introduction: what is the notion of respect behind this site, and how is this site put together?
• Grounding principles: a listing and derivation of those principles with which the vision of this site is (or ought to be) consistent.
• Respect for equal political participation: advocating for participatory democracy, in particular as facilitated by the internet, in developing those aspects which are not already bound by principles, of a vision for our societies at every level.
• Respect for indigenous rights and sovereignty: advocating for the recognition, including practical restoration, of the indigenous sovereignty of Australia, and of other countries whose indigenous sovereignty is currently being ridden roughshod over through occupation by foreign forces.
  • Restoration of effective indigenous Australian sovereignty: how, at a somewhat abstract level, we ought to restore indigenous Australians' effective sovereignty over their own country; they are already its sovereigns from a legal or natural justice perspective.
• Respect for non-human life: advocating for the rights of the other life of this planet.
  • The harm avoidance principle: a moral basis for respecting both human and non-human lives.
  • Respecting the non-human life of our planet: a rationale for and description of the entailments of that respect.
    • Stop mowing: save life: a plea to refrain from the harm of mowing.
  • Objections and responses to the harm avoidance principle as applied to the non-human life of our planet: my responses to a set of objections to the advocacy of the preceding pages in this section.
  • A respectful diet: ethical botanical fruitarianism (EBF): a description of the diet that I recommend.
    • Respectful recipes: several dishes to suit an EBF diet.
• Respect for climate and ecology: advocating in particular for the elimination of the use of fossil fuels, and transition to renewable sources of energy as soon as possible.
• Respect for the finitude of the planet's space and resources and for the need to restrict ourselves to our fair share: advocating in particular for both global and national population reduction.
• Respect for the global need for peace: advocating for the global elimination, or for a start at least reduction, of warfare, potentially via centralising armed forces.
• Respect for the human need for physical safety, and physical and economic freedom: advocating for the elimination of slavery and wage slavery, rape, and other forms of human exploitation.
• Respect for the unborn: advocating for the right to life and protection from harm of the unborn.
• Advocating for a respectful economic system, exploring the hazards of capitalism and the potential solutions to these hazards, considering whether socialism meets the bill, or whether some other system or set of - potentially less radical - reforms does, and neither denying nor neglecting to consider the hazards of socialism too.
• Respect for the potential of the combination of automation and artificial intelligence to destroy us: advocating for extreme caution in, and potentially/preferably prohibition against, the development and unleashing of artificially intelligent robots, in particular autonomous weaponry.
• Respect for less functional people, especially those deemed to be "mentally unwell": in particular, but not exclusively, advocating for the right of those currently subject to mental health laws who are of no threat to others to be free from subjection to those laws.
• Respect for the potentially harmful effects of drugs: warning others, especially youth, and especially from my own experience, about the very real psycho-spiritual dangers of psychoactive substances, and a contemplation on the question of whether harm minimisation justifies drug legalisation, and, if it does, what further harm minimisation needs to accompany that legalisation.

Next: Introduction

The next page, Introduction, provides a bit more detail on this site's purpose, content and context.