Cause and effect can definitely be a two way street there.
There are people who became islamophobic, or at least whose islamophobic increased, because of the wars with Iraq or Afghanistan. I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial statement. Opposition to the country morphs into a distaste for its people’s ethnic and religious group* even when they live in other countries.
(I say “ethnic” because Islamophobia is often wrapped up with anti Arab bigotry, not just dislike of the Quran’s contents).
Likewise, it’s hardly farfetched to posit that some people start out opposed to Israel and end up anti-semitic.
That’s absolutely true, and I’ve seen that happening to some degree among some of the more “guillotine the billionaires” leftists I’m acquainted with. The more that people equate Israel’s government with Jews in general, the likelier they are to have beliefs I find repugnant.
And anti-black bigotry, there’s a lot of equating “black people” with “Muslim” coming from the Right. Obama got a good dose of that.
Belief in these claims in the public sphere endured and, in some cases, even expanded during Obama’s presidency according to the Pew Research Center, with 17% of Americans (including one third of conservativeRepublicans) believing him to be a Muslim in a 2012 poll.
A 2016 Public Policy Polling survey indicated that 65% of Trump supporters believed that Obama was Muslim, and only 13% believed he was Christian
This might be a good time to talk about decolonization therapy and how it’s being weaponized against Jewish people.
Like this DBT conference with a presentation that discussed hate movements that included “fascism, homophobia, and Zionism.”
This blog post is indicative of a disturbing trend in therapeutic circles to use time that should be spent on therapeutic goals trying to get people to confront their privilege. Like, if that’s what you’re there for, fine, but nobody should have that shit thrown at them when they’re reaching out for help. And someone struggling with anti-Semitism should not have a therapist saying, “But what about Gaza?”
One of the absolute hardest parts of my husband’s job, the thing that takes a huge emotional toll on him, is refraining from expressing his political views to his clients, whether they agree with him or not. He has to listen to sexists rave about Jordan Peterson, Republicans shrug about Trump, liberals on the verge of hysteria, and remain neutral about it all. Because of the power dynamic at play, anything else is unethical.
Your work with clients isn’t your personal space to proliferate your pet issues, sorry.
You don’t need institutional power to commit a hate crime or terrorist attack. You don’t need institutional power to riot. Governments in Europe have proved disturbingly willing to pander to minorities who threaten violence.
And the issue I am more concerned about, sexism, absolutely has an effect on a personal and local level. When it goes unaddressed among ethnic minority men and ethnic minority communities, it’s ethnic minority women who suffer the most.
“The powerless”. One of the two political parties in America has taken on representing the interests of minorities as a core part of its mission. Black Americans in particular are a significant part of the Democratic coalition, with policies and appointments specifically targeted towards them. It’s simplistic and wrong to say minorities are powerless in current day America, politically or otherwise.
But I wasn’t talking about black antisemitism specifically. I mentioned it as part of a larger issue. What I see on social media, mostly Twitter, but to a lesser extent Reddit, is that liberal media and left-wing commentators will be very careful not to blame marginalised groups for the crimes and bad behaviour of their members, but have no such care when talking about men, or white people, or especially white men. Worse, people on the left will sometimes take a problem that is mostly confined to a certain group of men (eg particular immigrant groups or ethnic minorities), and insist the problem isn’t X group, it’s men as a whole. I see how resentful men in general get when they feel they are being blamed for the crimes of others.
Then there’s the fact I mentioned before, that when women have problems, eg they are under-represented in STEM, men are blamed, but when men are under-represented somewhere, the reaction is almost always that they need to change. Or when fat women have trouble dating, they get sympathy and men are blamed for being shallow. When men have trouble dating, they’re called incels.
Even the language used reflects the double standard. People on the left are constantly trying to change language to prevent offending or upsetting, and to reduce stigma against marginalised groups. And then they coin terms like ‘whiteness’, for a bad thing that needs to be ‘dismantled’, and ‘white fragility’ - obviously pejorative. Presumably it is okay to encourage stigma against white people.
The only time I remember antisemitism coming up was as part of a meme about how the left ignores, minimises, or downplays crime when the perpetrator isn’t white. It’s hard to know how accurate this is, since confirmation bias is a thing, and very few social scientists are investigating conservative ideas with the assumption that they may be correct.
It’s hard for me to imagine a population more vulnerable than individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder. This is really not okay. It wouldn’t be okay with any clients, but people with BPD have issues with trust, abandonment, self-loathing and impulsive behaviors. The whole foundation of the disorder is interpersonal problems stemming from trauma, a lack of validation, and low self-worth. Putting someone like that in an environment of blaming, shaming, or invalidating their trauma is highly unethical. To do it by co-opting an evidence-based treatment designed to avoid all those things is much worse.
I’m pretty sure the causality is the opposite; that governments typically ignore minorities that aren’t willing to use violence. Right or wrong, violence works while peaceful protest is treated as background noise or an excuse to crack down.
Which to be clear is a mistake in my opinion, it encourages more violence. If governments want peace they should reward the peaceful. Not ignore them or worse.
Not altogether surprising. I’ve heard of similar things happening before, though not in reference to Zionism.
I’m glad you said this. Zionism is a more sympathetic cause, but refusing to treat people because of almost any political view they hold, or engaging in political activism when you should be treating someone is unethical in general.
I feel like fat women and short men both get “blamed” for their troubles dating, but i don’t think men having trouble dating are called incels unless they do more than complain about terrible getting dates.
Exactly. Governments need to incentivise the behaviour they want. Apart from anything else, it sets a terrible example to others of how to achieve their goals.
I think it depends who they complain to. Complain to friends in real life and they will almost certainly get sympathy and advice. Complain to strangers on social media - and this can so easily happen on Twitter and it’s clones by being retweeted outside your group of followers - and the response may well be that the guy must be a misogynist, or only wants sex, or many other unfair and unjustified assumptions. (And similarly, the fat woman complaining may be attacked and derided in the same way by social groups of a different political persuasion.) I imagine it’s the same with politics in general: if you have questions or disagreements with a political ideology and express them offline to your friends, they are very unlikely to ostracise you. But expressing them online can easily lead to a pile-on and attacks from opportunistic acquaintances and judgemental strangers.
In the modern parlance, an “incel” is a man with a specific brand of misogyny. And a whole slew of other negative issues too. Merely having trouble dating isn’t enough.
It’s an entire, exceedingly unhealthy subculture. Not just a lack of dating success.
Many incel communities are characterized by resentment and hatred, self-pity, racism, misogyny, and misanthropy.[48] Discussions often revolve around the belief that men are entitled to sex. Other common topics include idleness, loneliness, unhappiness, suicide, sexual surrogates, and prostitution, as well as attributes they believe increase one’s desirability as a partner such as looks, income or personality.[20][82][38] The incel community has a shared victimhood identity in which individuals fatalistically celebrate their failures and discourage each other from seeking romantic success.
So guess what? If a white Christian woman wants to live a life as a “trad wife”, barefoot and pregnant even, I am okay with her making that choice. Likewise if an observant Islamic woman wants to cover her face or whatever. To the degree either of those are forced as choices while living in a country that I have a voice in it is not okay. I don’t know many liberals or progressives who would say it is.
Yes your belief that Islamic immigrants with socially conservative views are overrunning your culture is well understood by now.
And your belief that men having a hard time finding partners are unfairly being demeaned as incels if they dare complain. I personally have never seen that happen but you have. I accept that it must sometimes happen, at the online places you’ve frequented. But it clearly is not a mainstay of liberals or progressives.
Let’s try to bring this back to intersectionality and that “deference hierarchy” bit.
I submit that you have a point about white males. Shocked aren’t you?!
There is no question that, everything else being equal, whiteness and maleness incurs privilege. But some on the progressive side significantly overweight that privilege. Everything else is not always equal. Less education achievement, fewer higher paying jobs available for them, more daunting dating circumstances … those intersectional circumstances are too often minimized by liberals and progressives as if the aspects of white and male is so huge of privilege as to make them meaningless. They are not.
And IMHO that’s where “my” side loses some voters. Because the aspects of their identities that create major challenges are brushed off and only the white and male dimensions are considered to too great of a degree.
In my husband’s view, people in therapy should have 100% freedom to be racist, sexist or otherwise problematic within the therapy space with zero repercussions.
In his view, if a man espousing sexist opinions seeks help for relationship problems, it’s not even ethical to go fishing for evidence that the sexism is the problem. If the client says, “My wife says I’m sexist” okay, that’s grounds for exploration, but a therapist should be careful about letting their personal views inform how they address the problem.
One very common symptom of OCD is intrusive thoughts. These thoughts are often not palatable and people who have OCD judge themselves harshly for having the thoughts. Part of therapy is learning that intrusive thoughts aren’t indicative of who you are - though they’re usually in opposition to what you value most because that’s how they become obsessive. If they weren’t playing on your deepest fears about yourself, you wouldn’t be distressed by them.
So there are people all the time dealing with distressing thoughts of violence, sexism, racism, pedophilia, punching babies, you name it, some person somewhere is being tortured by their own “bad” thoughts and engaging in compulsive behavior to try to rid themselves of the thoughts because they believe they must be evil to think these things.
When we send the message that only certain kinds of thinking are acceptable within the therapeutic space, we throw up a barrier for clients to get help with the problem they actually have. People need to be comfortable enough to say, “I’m having thoughts that XYZ” without getting some progressive lecture about it.
I do not have OCD but I have had intrusive thoughts. I once got the courage to share them with a therapist and she replied, “Oh, that’s totally normal. Most people have thoughts like that occasionally. You don’t have to pay attention to them.”
Well, that was a relief. I do still have intrusive thoughts sometimes, but I try not to treat them as anything special. I really think that therapist probably saved me from OCD.
I’m glad you had a good therapist. I had intrusive thoughts after my daughter was born: fears about her dying or being harmed, some of which were realistic (she was a vulnerable low birth weight newborn at the start of the COVID epidemic) and others that were physically impossible fantasy scenarios, but which I still could not get out of my head. Mostly I tried to distract myself by thinking about other things, reading and posting on social media etc (I have no idea if that is the therapist-approved method). I think it was a bit easier to handle since I knew these thoughts weren’t normal for me, and thankfully they have mostly faded away with time.
Sounds sensible to me, assuming social media didn’t make you feel worse. My own pandemic birth was a rough ride, too. That is a hard time to become a parent.
I’ve basically been instructed to treat intrusive thoughts like any other thoughts. It helps me to label them, remind myself that I’ve never acted on them, and move along.
I’m really only posting this in case someone out there thinks they are a monster for something they have thought and maybe they can recognize it as intrusive thinking and get it checked out.
I started writing this, became busy and forgot about it, but I may as well finish.
This is a good example of the attitude I’m talking about. When Americans are worried about Christian fundamentalists, I don’t reply with eye roll emojis and strawmen. It’s completely socially acceptable to criticise and worry about what privileged groups do, but always risky to criticise or point out problems found in less privileged groups.
I already told you my worries on this score are mostly about diminished civil rights in the interests of ‘community cohesion’, as well as the exact issue I am talking about here: people being allowed to get away with bad behaviour because they are part of a ‘marginalised group’. Just look at the Asian child grooming gangs scandal: there were two contributors to causing it: sexism and racism, and three to why it was ignored for so long: sexism, classism, and fear of being thought racist or provoking a racist backlash. Everyone is happy to talk about and condemn the sexist and classist elements, but have been extremely reluctant until recently to talk about the role racism, and fear of being seen as racist played.
What would make me less worried about people with conservative views is seeing that they are not handled with kid gloves but subjected to criticism, and social and legal sanctions in the same way as anyone else.
You know what, I take it back about men being called incels. The issue I’m talking about is men being blamed for their problems dating; the default assumption that it must be their own fault, whereas women get more sympathy in the same circles.
Remember when I talked about a racial hierarchy earlier in the thread? I don’t know what you thought I meant that made you refuse to give me a straight answer, but this is what I was referring to.
The usual answer I get from progressives is that while a white man can be disadvantaged for other reasons, being white or a man is still an advantage. I’m not actually sure if that is what you are saying here or not. But I don’t think it’s true everywhere, at least not in an uncomplicated way. If you are trying to get a tenure-track job at a university in the year 2025, for example, being white and male is generally going to be a large disadvantage.
Groups and organisations dedicated to social justice are one of the places where it is not true, or at least not uncomplicatedly true. It’s plausible people are still affected by unconscious attitudes that benefit men and white people. But men, especially cishet white men, are going to feel and be at a distinct disadvantage, because of the explicit desire to promote the voices and leadership of everyone who isn’t them. Obviously this is off-putting to the average young man: why join a group where there is no prospect of advancement and you will always be expected to play second fiddle? But I don’t think it’s the only issue.
The social dynamics of social justice groups just seem more geared towards women. Competing to show the most empathy. The preference for passive aggression over open competition. Gossip, exclusion, trashing people’s reputations, aka cancellation. The whole goody-goodyness of it all. And gaining sympathy and social cachet from being seen as a victim doesn’t work as well for men as for women. Women in business often complain that if they demonstrate similar leadership skills to men, they are viewed far more negatively: as bossy rather than assertive. I think something similar is going on here: casting oneself as a victim goes against the male gender role, which says men are supposed to be strong and hide any weakness. Not only does this make it harder for men to present themselves as victims - because of these gendered expectations, they are viewed less sympathetically when they do.
The consequence is that quite a lot of young men are turning to right-wing groups instead. And that’s bad for the left, and for everyone.
Is this how you see women in general? Because those things are not exclusive to women. Those things are nasty stereotypes about women.
The only thing I’ll add is that I have a friend whose ex-wife left him when she realized she was a lesbian. She recently remarried a child therapist, and has become a progressive feminist to the point of parody. She wanted to make her son go to therapy, he didn’t feel like he needed it, and when he expressed his feelings about it, she responded, “All of this is coming from your straight male privilege.”
To her thirteen year old son.
I can’t think of a better way to radicalize a young man.
(ETA: She determined he needed therapy because of his fondness for crude humor. Not sexist language, just, you know, normative behavior.)
