The entiretly of the rights appeal is identity politics. Appealing to whites, men, christians, etc. about the coming hordes of non-whites, feminists, LGBTs, muslims, foreigners, etc. They play on these people’s fears of being overrun, displaced and being treated by the newer, younger, browner majority the same way they themselves have treated marginalized outgroups in the past (persecute them, take their voting rights away, oppress their religion, keep them out of the good jobs, etc).
Thats really at the root of what fox news is about. Thats why they obsess over ‘the squad’, four new democratic politicians. They’re all brown, have foreign names, have families who were immigrants, are proudly feminist and proudly liberal.
Really the lefts obsession with identity politics is more a response to the rights efforts to maintain social hierarchies based on social identities.
the difference is that solidly republican voters will reliably get out and vote for whoever has the (R) after their name. liberal voters will sit home and let the other side win because the (D) candidate isn’t 100% in alignment with every single one of their beliefs.
Your OP and this thread is about how you perceive “the left reacts.” You’ve provided zero evidence that it actually reacts this way.
No it isn’t.
You don’t own the thread.
This is simply projection on your part. You don’t know me. You don’t know my values. And you are simply refusing to share your values here in this thread. So you can’t make this claim.
My response to you was to literally find out what common ground we have. What is your opinion of gender issues? What do you think about cultural appropriation?
You refuse to answer. How do you expect me to find common ground when you won’t tell me if we have common ground or not?
So don’t accuse me of “not trying to find what common ground we have, where we differ, whether we can reasonably differ or whether those differences signal a true opposition of core values.” Because that is exactly what I’ve been trying to do throughout this thread. You can’t see that because you are so convinced of the correctness of your position that you aren’t actually listening to anything that I’m telling you.
I’m judging your value based entirely on your perception of me. You are treating me as “other.” You are being entirely hypocritical here.
So I’m your cite then?
I’m responsible for “making things worse?”
Everything is my fault?
Yep! I don’t invite white supremacists around for Christmas. That isn’t a bad thing.
I haven’t “gotten rid of that.” White supremacy is still on my “don’t get a christmas card” list. And who are you to judge what is an appropriate “us and them” to add to my list?
You can clarify your position by providing evidence that your position isn’t just something you invented. I’m entirely open to being persuaded by evidence. But this thread is evidence free.
I literally want to find out if we have common ground or not. That’s what you wanted me to do earlier in this post. Asking you questions about topics that are important to me is my way of establishing do we have common ground. This isn’t a “membership test.” Its how humans actually work.
Those are all just opinions. Tim Lott is an “old man yelling get off my lawn” who also recently wrote a rather positive article about Jordan Peterson. His article had over 2000 comments, many people disagreeing with him. Conor Friedersdorf is a self-described libertarian. He literally says “he is not a leftist” in his article. I don’t find the evidence he provides in the article to be compelling. I kinda got bored in his third paragraph about Abraham Lincoln.
I’m asking you for objective evidence that what you claim in the OP is harmful. Those article contain nothing objective. The “evidence” in those articles is all shaped by the perceptions and the biases of the authors.
I don’t doubt the perception is widespread.
What caused it? Probably by people writing articles like the ones you’ve cited that have convinced people like you that “the perception is reality”, prompting you to write evidence-free-rants here in Great Debates that prompts other people similarly convinced to nod-their-heads-in-agreement. That’s how a “feedback loop” works.
Then don’t make claims we have “common ground on lots of things” when I have no way of knowing if we have common ground or not.
If the position you hold is one that causes my transgender friends great pain and indignity then as far as I’m concerned you are “the wrong kind of person.” It doesn’t matter what common ground we have. I’m not going to sacrifice them for the sake of compromising with you. Are you the kind of person who would tell the restaurant manager that you think that “a man is using the women’s toilets?” Are you the kind of person who would turn your neighbour over to ICE? The fact you are being secretive over your positions leads me to believe that we have much less common ground than you think we have.
It goes to verifying claims you’ve made in this thread. You think we have lots of common ground. I’m not so sure.
I’m not asking you to “self-identify” for fucks sakes. I’m asking for your opinion. You clearly have an opinion about people like me. You’ve written this thread to rail against your perception of people like me. You don’t hold yourself to the very same standard you want to hold me to in this very thread.
In a free society you are entitled to hold whatever opinions you like.
So you don’t want me to dismiss people who hold white supremacist views out of hand?
There is a poster on these boards who holds the position that (paraphrased from memory) “he welcomes immigration to America from all around the world as long as those people are not Muslim.” This poster is a self-described leftist, who holds many positions that one could say we have “common ground.” But I have no obligation to “correct this.” It isn’t my job to “cement the split between us.” This poster holds a position that I personally think is fundamentally inhumane. That you are asking me to not dismiss them out-of-hand is inherently cruel and is, in my opinion, a much more dangerous position to hold than anything I’ve said in this thread.
Its not about “considering myself right.” We all live by a moral code. I’m sure that even you have some sort of a moral code. There are things we all choose not to compromise on. I’m sure you aren’t planning on committing any murders or burglaries over the next couple of days.
You think that me living by my own personal moral code “hurts my side.” I don’t understand this. I don’t see how supporting my transgender friends, opposing white supremacy, supporting indigenous intellectual property rights, fighting people who would oppose Muslim immigration, putting my pronouns on my profile, I don’t see how any of these things hurt my cause. My dismissal of people who literally want to kill me shouldn’t be something you have a problem with.
…the question was about **significant **infighting. How significant was this? What impact did it have outside of academia? If this is the sort of infighting you are talking about then can you objectively demonstrate how this particular incident was harmful to “our cause?” If this is the kind of thing you are talking about I’m even less convinced of your position. This is a nothing-burger.
…I’m sure that some “liberal voters will sit home and let the other side win because the (D) candidate isn’t 100% in alignment with every single one of their beliefs.” But that number would probably be matched by the same amount of Republicans who do exactly the same thing. And at the next election those people will be joined by the ranks of the ever increasing population of “Never Trumpers.”
But the real problem with liberal voters isn’t “identity politics”. Its voter suppression. I wouldn’t worry about the former. You can’t do anything about it. You can do something about the latter.
I would think the whole “Bernie or bust” thing would qualify. Liberal leaning Facebook groups were all afire with talk of abstaining rather than vote for Clinton.
I’m in a bunch of fb groups where this sentiment is loud and clear. There is something wrong with every Dem candidate so they don’t bother voting. The thing I hate most about this attitude is it tries to ascribe virtue to inaction.
We don’t need perfect, we need the best choice from the available choices. I haven’t seen a single liberalish person who thought Clinton would have been worse than trump but they still wouldn’t vote for her.
…but the “Bernie or bust” thing was** a very specific thing**. It had almost nothing to do with what one would call “identity politics” and had everything to do with both “a cult of personality” and direct intervention from the Russian government.
But there is something wrong with every candidate! There is nothing wrong with people pointing that out. And if they decide not to vote whats your problem with that? You live in a democracy. They have a right not to vote. You don’t have compulsory voting.
Are you sure all those people in those “Liberal leaning Facebook groups” are actually real people?
Right, OK, so these didn’t come from people that are members of the right sorts of opinion groups for their opinion to matter. So I also posted a widely-discussed controversy on the left…
Right, OK, so I have to find a cite from the right sort of people somewhere that has a greater reach than that obscure pamphlet of leftist academia, the New York Times.
So what about the book of essays that I pointed to? There’s another one that’s been recently published in Germany, Beissreflexe (Bite Reflexes), which I haven’t read, however, and which has been subject to much controversy.
Now, you might not agree with all of the above (and I don’t know whether the opinion of a ‘former’ leftist is acceptable to you). And it might be that in Germany, the perception of leftist infighting is stronger, as evidenced by the two collections of essays I pointed to. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to doubt that there exists a significant perception that the left is indeed hurting itself—loosing ‘card-carrying’ members—by its fragmentational tendencies.
Well you don’t own me, so no, you’re not going to get me to opine on irrelevant topics just to see if I pass the smell test.
That’s however not the topic of the thread. Why are you so interested in those topics, for instance? I’ve also appealed to organic farming, nuclear energy, and vegetarianism. Why aren’t you interested in what’s on my dinner plate, or where I get my power?
This isn’t looking for common ground (on the issues of this thread), it’s taking the topics most important to you, and seeing whether I’m properly aligned with them—i. e. the very thing I’m criticizing.
No, I’m not. I’m engaging with you, trying to better explain where I’m coming from, providing cites, trying to explain why it doesn’t matter if I eat meat or am pro-nuclear or have the right opinion about cultural appropriation in order to be allowed to argue that insistence on the purity of dogma, caused by the threat to its identity-constructing powers presented by each skeptic, ultimately hurts the cause that the dogma was originally introduced to further. Whether I’m right or wrong about this is entirely independent of my sociopolitical views. Hence, I won’t let you goad me into declaring my allegiance, even if doing so would probably make this conversation a whole lot easier.
No, of course not. But by out of hand rejecting cites I provided because they came from people who don’t have the right opinion on other issues, who aren’t properly aligned with your views, you are indeed demonstrating just the behavior I’ve pointed out in my OP. So yes, in that sense, you are my cite.
You’re right, it is how humans actually work. The thing is just that this is problematic. Humans ‘actually work’ in many ways that are ultimately hurtful. We don’t have a great appreciation of the larger issues in themselves, so we litter, buy too much plastics, and eat too much meat, with all the damage to the environment that entails. We’re really only capable of thinking about ~150 people as humans, so we treat everybody outside of that sphere as less than human. And so on. All of these are ways how ‘humans actually work’; that doesn’t make them good, and doesn’t mean we can’t, or shouldn’t strive to, change them.
Every feedback loop needs an initial signal to get started, though. And as I’ve stated, it’s not the articles above that have prompted me to think about these issues, but an entire book of scholarly articles by scientists in the appropriate fields of study.
I’m nowhere near asking anything of that sort. Let’s try to take another example.
Above, I appealed to a reaction I’d seen to Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘We Are The Weather’. The reaction was that a post chided Foer for not being vegan. Now, think about this in the following way. Foer advocates a reduction in eating meat in order to combat climate change. Let’s for the moment suppose that this is also an important issue to the anonymous responder. They and Foer are thus aligned on that issue; yet, the reaction is not one of support, but one of rejection, because, according to the poster, Foer does not go far enough in the ‘right’ direction.
I’m now pointing out that, as far as the unifying goal—reducing climate change through less meat eating—goes, that’s an unhelpful reaction—that, indeed, it’s conceivable that if this were the most widespread reaction, more meat might get eaten than if one only advocates for a reduction of meat eating. Few people like to join those that denounce them; but if we instead engage people on an equal level, it seems to me we have a much greater chance to actually do some good.
What I’m not thereby doing is infringing on anybody’s activism, be it for veganism, vegetarianism, and whatnot. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t advocate for veganism, much less that they should come around and eat meat once in a while; I’m merely saying that the way you get a message across may influence the acceptance of the message, and if you alienate people, you may achieve the opposite of what you’re trying to do.
So I’m not saying anyone should compromise in their activism. I am on the contrary saying that there may be ways to make this activism more effective, and one of those ways is to not partition the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’, because that’s giving up on ‘them’ and painting them as lost to the cause—which they then inevitably will be.
Depends. What do you mean by ‘dismissing out of hand’? Because I believe that there’s potential for reform even in such cases—I mean, these things do happen, but they won’t if nobody reaches out. So I’m not asking you to send them Christmas cards, and I’m not even going to give you some sort of ‘love your enemies’-speech, but I would ask you not to dismiss them as human beings—misguided, perhaps ignorant, perhaps even downright evil, but still human. Everything else, I think, just gives the game away.
…and none of those articles contained any objective evidence that we can use to determine the accuracy of what they suggest.
I’m skeptical that a self-described libertarian would have anything positive to say about “the left.” And you should be skeptical as well. Why did you choose those two particular articles to cite?
LOL. How widely discussed was this?
The New York Times posts thousands of articles every single fucking year. What was significant about this one? How specifically did this article “hurt my cause?” How does this article fit into your thesis?
You point me to an entire book of essays that you haven’t read that is written in a language that I don’t understand and you want my opinion on this? It might have been “subject to much controversy” but not enough controversy for me to have a fucking clue what it all is about.
You’re citing Front Page Magazine now? I just checked the front page. The lead story is “An Open Letter to Greta Thunberg.” You can read that here. Are you aware that the quality of your citations is getting worse and worse? What next, Quillette? Breitbart? Do you know why Danusha V. Goska is no longer a leftist?
Here are her Top Ten Reasons why she is no longer a leftist.
I believe in God. She believes in god. None of us leftists believe in god. Obviously.
Straw men. This one made me laugh out loud.
Straw men. She felt so strongly about this that she posted it twice.
It doesn’t work. She doesn’t believe left-wing policies work. I’ll remember that next time I see my cardiologist on my scheduled six-month appointment to have an echocardiogram that will cost me nothing-out-of-pocket
It doesn’t work. Yep. Danusha is so good at writing top-ten lists that she only managed to actually list eight things.
Hate. Us leftists? We are the hateful ones.
It looks to me that Danusha V. Goska is exactly the sort of person you are talking about in this thread. I’m an “other” to her. She isn’t a leftist. Maybe its time to rethink your original thesis?
You mean those collections of essays you haven’t read yet? More opinions, but no objective evidence?
You don’t need to argue about perception anymore. I’ve conceded the perception exists. You have nothing to prove here.
What part of “I don’t doubt the perception is widespread” are you failing to understand?
LOL. No need to be so dramatic. It should be no big effort to avoid answering questions. Just don’t answer my questions.
I’m interested if we have common ground on things that are important to me. That is central to your thesis, isn’t it?
Nope. Its looking for common ground. The very thing you asked me to do.
You aren’t “engaging with me.” You have lectured me. You have belittled me. You have twisted my words and put words in my mouth.
You’re sociopolitical views will help me find out if we have common ground on issue that I think are important.
I haven’t demanded your allegiance. I don’t give a fuck how you “align yourself.” Labels like “left or right” don’t matter to me. They obviously matter to you. I’m more interested in your positions.
This is a strawman. I didn’t reject your cites because of “who wrote those cites”, although who wrote those cites did provide me with a degree of amusements. I rejected those cites because they contained exactly zero objective evidence that we could use to measure the validity of your very lengthy OP. This isn’t the behaviour demonstrated in your OP. Your behaviour here demonstrates the behaviour pointed out in your OP. You are the living embodiment of everything you profess to hate.
LOL.
Yep. Humanity is problematic. Messy, uncomfortable, we poop, we sweat, wo do silly things. Its what we are.
Yep. We aren’t a hivemind. And (at least in the country where I live) we have agency, and we have freedom.
LOL.
You are welcome to try. You are doing a very poor job on it with me. I ain’t changing jack-shit for you.
So to be clear: the cites you’ve posted in this thread aren’t the cites that you used to prompt you to think about these issues, but what did prompt you to start thinking about them was a “book of scholarly articles by scientists in the appropriate fields of study?” Can you cite that book then? What are the “fields of study” appropriate to your OP?
How do I know this? I’ve asked for your opinion on gender identity. You refuse to answer. Is this a clue to what sort of answer you would give if you were to give an answer? Why don’t you save us all some trouble and just answer the question?
Is this it?
Is this really the kind of thing this thread was set up to rail against?
Because your problem isn’t that Foer and a random person on the internet don’t align on the issue.
The problem is as technology improves the world gets “a bit smaller” every single day. Could you imagine 20 years ago being able to interact with a celebrity in real time from the other side of the world? Everyone is just one-twitter-post away from a soapbox. There are no filters.
Random person on the internet says something. This is news to you? This is the great big problem that you think needs to be addressed?
Did you know that this thing called internet trolling exists as well? People can invent internet personas and they will pick an author like Foer and they will troll them. Was this a troll? Ultimately does it really matter if it was or it wasn’t?
I hate to break it to you: but you aren’t going to be able to stop this. Its the world we live in now. We are increasingly interconnected. This is a classic example of you having developed a theory, and you’ve taken “the evidence” and twisted it to fit your theory. Everything fits your theory. Apparently even I happen to fit your theory. Its why I’m asking for objective data.
Don’t you think this response is a bit of an over-reaction to what was probably just an example of internet trollery?
It isn’t my job to reach out to White Supremacists. Its my job to survive White Supremacy. Don’t put that burden on me.
You want me to treat proto-Hitlers as human. Aha. Gotcha. Maybe misguided. Perhaps ignorant, perhaps not? Just like Hitler. Poor, misguided, potentially ignorant Hitler. If only I had reached out before he decided to exterminate millions of people.
Here’s the thing though. I do treat proto-Hitlers as humans. Humans are messy and complicated and many are good and some are down-right evil. Humanity is messy. You don’t understand how I tick. You’ve slotted me into a box. You’ve put me into a group. You are assuming the way that I think. You are guilty of everything you rail against in the OP. Why would you think that I didn’t think White Supremacists are human? That isn’t how my brain works.
I can’t believe we’ve reached the point in this thread where you are asking me to reach out to people who literally want me either dead or in chains. You don’t have to worry about me giving the game away. I think you’ve just given your game away.
Wow! Just wow. Banquet Bear’s response to that is a good start but I have to take it a bit further.
To the OP: if that article is the sort of thing that shapes your opinions about the issues of the left, I’m totally flabbergasted. The author of that piece first of all was never a leftist in the sense that we usually understand the term in western democracies – being a progressive liberal. She was some kind of radical Marxist loon. Now she appears to be a radical right-wing loon. And of the ten reasons she gives about why she finds leftist politics unpalatable, not a single one is true – not even remotely. In fact many of them, like hatefulness and aversion to objective fact, have long been prime attributes of the right. The thing is just laughably and completely delusional from start to finish.
It was only later that I noticed the publication it was in: Frontpage magazine. That explains a lot. Here are some of its notable contributors: the racist neocon gadfly David Horowitz, who believes universities are hotbeds of liberal indoctrination; the lunatic Ann Coulter; the raving Islamophobe Robert Spencer; and Trump’s own pet Nazi, Stephen Miller, arguably the scariest of the whole bunch. HMHW, a source like that totally destroys any argument it was supposed to support.
If I wanted to say “shut up and listen” I would have said “shut up and listen.” Do you know why I didn’t say “shut up and listen?” Because that wasn’t what I intended to say. Do you know how we can tell that I didn’t intend to say “shut up and listen?” Because those weren’t the words that I used. I’m glad I could clear that up for you.
My response specifically addressed the comment made by Half Man Half Wit. My use of “debate” mirrored his use of the word “debate.” Like Half Man Half Wit you’ve removed my quote from the context of that discussion. Can you please not do things like that.
I think that what you present in the OP is, in part, a consequence of the current “Attention Economy” brought along by the Internet and the rise of Social Media; many people are in a rat race for recognition trying to out progress everyone else. I see a lot of narcissism in how Identity Politics are expressed, people loading their self worth with all the good done by people who share their identity and all the evil done against them depending on which one they perceive would increase their social capital.
Of course that has always existed, but Internet and Social Media has taken it to previously unfathomable levels, these days one can become the head of a global movement by hitting it right with a one line hashtag or an image.
My guess is that dynamic is more prevalent on the Left than the Right because the Left is more biased towards community (where social capital has more value) whereas the Right tends more to individualism.
Well, it’s got like a foot long wikipedia article, with 74 citations.
Fine. I wasn’t aware of the publication’s reputation. I retract that cite.
No, that was in reference to the collection of essays I actually have read, as noted in the thread—this one. It’s largely what got me thinking about these issues. I didn’t mention it in the OP, mainly because it’s only available in German; I did mention the article by Mark Lilla, and noted explicitly that the claim that the left is hurt by this divisiveness isn’t what I’m actually arguing:
So you’re hounding me for cites on an issue that I’ve explicitly said isn’t my main topic, while dismissing everything I come up with.
The relevance of common ground to my topic is that we tend to only meaningfully engage with those that we believe we share common ground with, and dismiss others.
And I have been at great pains to try and point out that exactly this attitude is what I think is the problem. You want me to declare my allegiance to your cause as a precondition to engaging with my topic; but my topic is wholly independent of whether I’m aligned with your causes.
Ask yourself: Why have you been demanding I declare my position on gender and race, but not on vegetarianism, organic farming, and the like? They stand to my topic in exactly the same relationship as the gender/race debate does: as an issue where the discourse can become closed to you if you don’t clearly state your allegiance to the ‘proper’ view upfront.
I haven’t professed to ‘hate’ anything. I’ve barely professed to be mildly annoyed. So no need for all this drama.
And besides, if my OP is an example of what I’m talking about, then that still means the sort of thing I’m talking about exists…
I’m not asking you to change anything for me.
I have, a couple of times now—this one. But again, as explicitly noted in my OP, this isn’t the topic I want to discuss. I could have just as well used the animosity between supporters of different soccer teams and their sometimes violent clashes as an example, but I had hoped that it’s clear that my discussion doesn’t actually concern the issues (read: vegetarianism, organic farming, nuclear power, gender identity, Man United-support…) as such, but rather, how we behave towards one another if we differ on these issues.
Because that answer doesn’t matter anymore than the answer to the question of what soccer team I support does.
No. This is an example—a hypothetical set up to try and explain to you how what I’m saying is divorced from the actual underlying issues. I. e., I set up the example purely to show that it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking vegetarianism versus meat eating or Man United versus Leeds-support; I’m about how best to fight the fight for one’s cause, not about what that cause is, much less what it ought to be.
I’m not, but, do you think it’s a completely misplaced effort to set up exit programs for White Supremacists, for example? I. e. do you think nobody should reach out to them?
Because I have nowhere argued about what you (in particular) should do. But I think that there’s an issue here regarding what the left (as a group) ought to do in their own interest—and that’s reach out rather than deepen the ‘us’ vs ‘them’ divide.
You conveniently left out ‘and perhaps even downright evil’. Don’t try to paint me as some sort of Hitler apologist just because I’m saying that in many cases, it might make more sense to reach out to somebody, even if they’re not in your particular in-group, than to paint them as other, wrong, or even bad.
There really is no reasonable way to construe anything I’ve said in that way.
It was a quickly googled up hit for a former (self-described) leftist breaking with the left. I shouldn’t have let myself be goaded into providing yet another cite for what I explicitly noted isn’t actually my topic, but I did, and I acknowledge that the cite is garbage.
…its a wikipedia article about a controversy in academia. I just finished writing a report about “The casting of Scarlett Johansson for the movie Ghost in the Shell” that had about 20 citations. So my reaction to the amount of citations is pretty much “there were only 74 citations? I would have expected more!”
Forget about the reputation of the publication for a minute: did you even bother to read the article you cited? Didn’t the article strike you as kinda…absolutely nuts?
Lets start with your first question which was “why there is such a current focus on issues of identity?” My question to you would be “is there a current focus on identity? How are you defining identity? How are you measuring focus? What do you mean by ‘current’?”
This thread is set up to discuss a topic with an underlying premise you have yet to prove. I’m hounding you for cites because your OP (despite all the words) is essentially content free.
Have you forgotten already what it was that you accused me of?
You said this:
Your first mention of “common ground” in this thread wasn’t to say “we tend to only meaningfully engage with those that we believe we share common ground with, and dismiss others.” It was to accuse me of not trying to seek common ground with you. An unfounded accusation. You are acting as if I can’t scroll up the thread to see what was actually said.
You. Do. Not. Know. What. My. Cause. Is.
I have not made it a precondition that you “declare your allegiance” (whatever the fuck thats supposed to mean) before I will engage your topic. I’m engaging your topic. Right here, right now.
You do realize that its you, not I, that is playing identity politics here. I don’t have an allegiance. I’m not affiliated with anything. I’m not trying to trick you.
How many times do I need to answer this very same question? The subjects of gender and race are important to me. Vegetarianism and organic farming: not so much. I wanted to establish if we had common ground on issues that were important to me. That’s it. I think that’s the third time I’ve told you the exact same thing. No tricks. No membership tests.
But they don’t stand in this topic in relation to their importance to me. And this “allegiance” thing is just utter nonsense. What is it do you think I’m going to do if you don’t “pass my imaginary allegiance test?” Why would I do such a ridiculous thing? I mean, when I said before "I don’t give a fuck how you “align yourself” did you think I was joking?
LOL
It would mean that the entire premise of your OP is completely off-base.
I’m asking for cites to back your thesis. I’ve been asking you for cites that back up the topic you want to discuss. Why are you posting cites for things that you don’t want to discuss? Don’t blame me for that.
You want to know “why there is such a current focus on issues of identity?” I want you to prove their is a current focus on issues of identity first.
What soccer team do you support?
It wasn’t a hypothetical. You were describing something that actually happened that you cannot cite. We don’t know if that person was a real vegan or a troll. I don’t know if your recollection of what they said matches what it was they actually said. The entire example is being filtered through your perspective. And based on this thread I’m taking your recollection with a grain of salt, with all due respect. Somebody said something to someone on the internet. That doesn’t shock me at all.
My question to you was “So you don’t want me to dismiss people who hold white supremacist views out of hand?” Do you see the bolded bit? The bit thats says ME? My question was about me. Your answer to **me **was to tell **me **to reach out. The battle against white supremacy is a complex one. But it shouldn’t be the responsibility of black or brown people to come up with the answers. We are busy enough just trying to keep ourselves alive. So don’t ask me that question. It isn’t my responsibility and it isn’t my burden.
This isn’t a “left/right” divide. There are people on the right that are horrified by white supremacy. Micheal Steele, the black former Republican National Committee chairman said last year
You keep playing identity politics. This isn’t about left or right.
LOL.
You can reach out as much as you like. But you were suggesting that I reach out.
Except for the part where I asked you the question "“So you don’t want me to dismiss people who hold white supremacist views out of hand?” and you responded with this:
Give me a fucking break. Don’t blame me because you quickly googled something then posted it without even reading it. You have agency here. This is your thead. This is your topic. I didn’t goad you into googling and I didn’t goad you into posting that link.
Actually there are a number of points in which she is right on the money, in particular
And I don’t think she ever will.
And this demonstrates another of the issues. The left has set up a victimization hierarchy, and anyone lower in the hierarchy is presumed to be less oppressed than someone claiming a higher rank, and has to defer to the more-oppressed based on that alone.
Which is a logical fallacy - claiming an ethnic name does not establish anyone’s authority on the “right way” to think about cultural appropriation, or anything else. The truth or falsehood of a proposition is independent of the identity, even the self-identity, of the one who makes it.
Although it is kind of entertaining to read an OP about infighting and sniping in the left, and then read the responses to that OP. :eek:
You mean it’s an example of your own misunderstanding of a liberal argument? As you’re very fond of pointing out, it’s quite common for liberals to misunderstand and mischaracterize conservative arguments and motivations. Is it really beyond the realm of possibility, in your mind, that conservatives like you might also sometimes make the same kind of mistake?
