Is there more to the Zee story than a bunch of thin-skinned people on all sides with legitimate points of view decided to have hissy fits instead?
You are just completely ignoring what I said in order to bash me. And proving my point in the process.
I said “people don’t like being demonized, silenced or threatened”; not a word about “domination”. But that violates the “white men are inhuman devils” principle, so that has to be ignored in favor of claiming that “domination” has something to do with it.
It’s a pretty remarkable irony to hear you put the words “white men are inhuman devils” in my mouth, in the same sentence where you’re complaining that you didn’t specifically use the word “dominate”.
This is you trying to dominate the discussion. This is exactly what I was talking about. I pointed out a very reasonable set of conversational parameters, that certain people have lived experience more relevant to certain topics, and you literally soccer-flopped to the floor and claimed you were being called an “inhuman devil”. I mean come on, that’s just a a little too on the nose, don’t you think?
This is a great question, which nobody has tried to answer yet.
My issue is that when I bring up an easily observable dynamic, I get blanket denials and accusations that it’s all right-wing propaganda. It feels unpleasantly like being gaslit. Criticising it as too broad a brush, rather than denying it entirely, would be a much more constructive start to the conversation.
I daresay there are people out there who object to this, but it’s definitely not what I’m complaining about. I didn’t mean to imply there is nothing good or useful in these ideas; that’s not what I believe. I think it’s good and important to listen to people with personal experience in an issue. But there are also a lot of ways this principle can be dysfunctional: when people are told they aren’t allowed to criticise - or worse, not allowed to express an opinion on at all - a group they don’t belong to; but only if it’s a group considered more oppressed. When members of groups generally considered more privileged are not given the same chance to speak about problems relevant to them, or their problems are disregarded or minimised. When people use their trauma as a way to divert criticism or silence others.
I don’t think this is just a result of assholes abusing the system. I believe the problem is the abandonment of the principle of treating people equally, which makes it far too easy to justify these excesses if anyone tries to push back against them. Reaffirming this principle wouldn’t mean you can’t value lived experience or personal knowledge, but it would stop people using identity as a cudgel, and it would make the left far less likely to alienate people from privileged groups, especially young men.
IMHO a big part of the problem is unwillingness to accept criticism. You can’t re-evaluate if you refuse to listen when people tell you something is wrong. There seems to be an overriding fear that allowing criticism will help the right, and/or hurt marginalised groups, and solidarity is the best way to avoid this. But you can’t deal with bad actors if you don’t allow criticism of them and of the dynamics enabling them.
No, this is you making up motives for me, so you can characterize me as trying to “dominate the discussion.” And demonstrating my point. I can’t have an honest opinion, I can’t even just be wrong; I have to be evil.
This is an interesting thread. I want to throw out an experience I once had.
It was in an online forum, but a black woman was talking about how when she would talk to her white, female coworkers sometimes they would break down crying. The black woman said she was a victim and the white women were trying to manipulate her. Everyone on the comment section was agreeing with her.
I said that that didn’t sound like what was happening. What sounded like what was happening was she was engaging in toxic, abusive behavior like DARVO and hiding behind her marginalized status to avoid accountability for emotionally abusing her coworkers. People got mad at me for that.
So I proposed a new scenario. If a marginalized person that clicks 2 boxes (black woman) is allowed to abuse and mistreat people who only click one marginalized box (woman), then why isn’t someone who clicks 3 boxes allowed to abuse and mistreat people who click 2 boxes? Why can’t a black woman in a wheelchair bully all her able bodied black female colleagues until they start crying, and then say she is the victim and her coworkers are terrible people?
What is to stop someone who clicks 4 boxes (a black, female, disabled muslim) from coming along and bullying the woman who clicked 3 boxes and saying it was ok.
People told me to shut up white man. So no productive debate ensued.
I think a big part of it is standpoint theory
Standpoint theory, also known as standpoint epistemology,[1] is a foundational framework in feminist social theory that examines how individuals’ social identities (i.e. race, gender, disability status), influence their understanding of the world. Standpoint theory proposes that those in positions of marginalization are able to achieve certain standpoints which put them in a better position to know certain facts about the world related to that marginalization.
First originating in feminist philosophy, this theory posits that marginalized groups, situated as “outsiders within,”[2] offer valuable insights that challenge dominant perspectives and contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of societal dynamics. One’s standpoint shapes which concepts are intelligible, which claims are heard and understood by whom, which features of the world are perceptually salient, which reasons are understood to be relevant and forceful, and which conclusions credible.
Its the theory that unless you’ve lived as a disadvantaged person, you’ll never know the struggles they feel. So only their voices are valid. My problem with that is that marginalized people are also just people. being marginalized doesn’t automatically make you a good person. There are a lot of marginalized people who are shitty people, just like there are a lot of privleged people who are shitty people.
Within the confines of their perspective in the dominance hierarchy, leftists seem to think that people higher on the sociopolitical dominance hierarchy are automatically bad people, and people lower on the hierarchy are automatically good people. Thats not how it works. I run into this a lot when debating Israel-Palestine.
Through the lens of the oppressive, white, judeochristian, wealthy western world (Israel and its western backers) vs the native, brown, muslim, arab, impoverished palestinians, its a pretty cut and dried case of who is good and who is bad. But the Palestinians are not, collectively, good people. Hamas was democratically elected in 2006, and the majority of palestinians when polled support terrorism against civilian targets. Hamas and Palestinians are motivated by the same toxic, tribalistic, oppressive mentality that drives fascism in the west. Just because it is a brown skinned, muslim fascism doesn’t make it a good form of fascism. Palestinians are motivated by the same mentality that drives white supremacists to kick black people out of their neighborhood.
Being marginalized doesn’t automatically make you authentic, right or good. But its an attitude a lot on the left have.
Another thing that sucks is that on the left, when people push for ideological purity it results in alienated moderates and lower voter turnout. On the right, when people push for ideological purity it doesn’t alienate moderates or lower voter turnout.
Like with Harris. She lost 3 million votes in CA, NY & IL vs Biden in 2020. Had she won those votes she’d have had 78 million votes and won the popular vote. She still would’ve lost the election, but the fact that she would’ve won the popular vote would’ve taken some of Trump’s legitimacy away the same way him losing the popular vote in 2016 cost him some legitimacy but he still won the electoral college. But in 2024, Trum pwon both the popular vote and the electoral college, in part because democrats were demoralized about Israel.
meanwhile the GOP gets more and more radical and authoritarian, and it never costs them anything. Trump’s vote share has gone from 66 million in 2016, to 74 million in 2020 and 77 million in 2024. The more abusive, incompetent and dictatorial Trump becomes, the more votes he gets. Meanwhile if the democratic candidate shows signs of lacking ideological purity, they lose votes.
And again, for whatever reason, moderates seem repelled by the far left and their quest for ideological purity, but do not mind the far right and their quest for ideological purity. I have no idea why that is.
Its an insane system. The far left end up alienating allies and disengaging from civics by not voting, while the far left somehow don’t alienate anyone and their voters always show up to vote, no matter how far right they go.
What exactly does this mean?
I’m sure some of the -isms this thread is discussing is at least part of it.
First, I appreciate this discussion very much. It has helped me understand the dynamics of a topic I have been trying to understand for some time without getting caught up in it and expected to take a side. Second, I appreciate @Spice_Weasel 's comments in the context of a sermon I’m working on.
But on to the unanswered question: I don’t think there is a way to prioritize intersections (academic definition) because you’re comparing oranges to grapefruit: they’re both round citrus fruits, and that’s about all you can say. A poor white man’s experience is different from a middle-class black queer woman’s, despite both of them experiencing social marginalization. But even then, they’re in different parts of society with different rules and expectations. To try to prioritize their importance or relevance means you have to create an intellectually dishonest hierarchy that they both fit into, or you align them with your own bias, or you hand-wave away the significant differences. It also implies that there is a single hierarchy of either/or that has to be adhered to. There’s no room for the plausible both/and perspective that addresses needs of one group and does not diminish the importance of the needs of another. I see a lot of maneuvering and manipulating to claim to be the most oppressed and thus the most deserving of what appears to be limited resources. For me, the real limiting step in this equation is the lack of political will to address obvious issues, followed by jealousy in one group when another gets support.
I would hazard a guess this refers to the zero-sum attitude that is popular right now, where someone’s gain necessitates someone else’s loss. Young men who don’t feel they have a place in the world or a purpose in their life explain that sentiment by saying that someone claiming more privilege has taken something away from them.
I’m not who you were asking, but I think part of it is that the status and privilege of being a man is decreasing. Women earn 60% more college degrees than men. In a lot of ways, women’s standards have gone up for various reasons, including their increased educational and financial successes. As a result a lot of men feel they can’t compete romantically. on top of that, a lot of men feel like their problems aren’t center stage anymore. Which comes back to privilege.
When women and POC were losing jobs left and right in the service industry nobody cared. When white men started losing jobs in manufacturing and coal mining, then it became a national emergency to the GOP. White men are accustomed to their problems being taken more seriously, and that is starting to go away.
Looking at it from an evolutionary standpoint, a man not being able to date or have sex means he is a genetic dead end. At that point the man unconsciously thinks he has nothing to lose and he becomes unpredictable. A society where large numbers of men think they’ll be single and childless their entire lives, and only a small % of men are ‘good enough’ to marry or have kids (while the rest of the men end up being stepdad’s to the 10% of desirable men’s kids after the biological father abandons them) mean those men have nothing to lose, and will start trying to tear down society and rebuild society into one where their genetic material does pass on.
Add in the fact that the privilege of being white is disappearing too. A century ago, virtually every position of power and importance was held by white men. Now women and POC are gaining large amounts of finite resources like status, power, good jobs, etc. A lot of people, like it or not, don’t want to share.
I’m not sure what you mean by that. I feel this is a productive debate about sociological and psychological concepts. I don’t understand why moderates would be offended by that, and then run into the arms of a malignant narcissist fascist with dementia just because people discuss intersectionality.
I can’t figure out why up to 6 million democrats sat out the 2024 election due to lack of ideological purity by Harris, but virtually none of Trumps 2020 voters sat out due to his endless flaws.
I think this describes a “tie goes to the runner” situation, and we have nowhere near enough information about the two individuals (and what’s being talked about, specifically) to decide whether or not we have a tie (or who the ‘runner’ might be).
If that’s a sincere question, I think what’s important is that it’s possible to have conversations on priority, rather than set fixed non-negotiable rules whether it’s “A always defers to be B”, or “A is always equal to B, regardless of current situation, regardless of prior conditions and history.”
If it’s intended as a “gotcha”, unfortunately it doesn’t land.
Please quote and underline the part of my post where I said you were evil, or where anyone said you were evil, or anyone called you an “inhuman devil”, or any of the other rubbish persecurtion you’re claiming. This is a reasonable ask, since you double-quoted as if it was a direct quote. I’ll wait.
It was a sincere question. I was curious whether the “pecking order” was context-dependent, or was purely a matter of in-group social status.
Every time you claim my goal is “domination”, you are claiming I’m evil. And I was the one who used the phrase “inhuman devil”, to describe how white males are characterized by people who, for example, refuse to admit a white male can possibly have motives other than “domination”. Which is an accusation that white males are both inhuman and devilish, because humans aren’t like that.
All you need to do is change the target to see how absurd it is. “Left handed people just need to dominate the conversation” would get laughed at.
This is an excellent and writeup, and I see it very often with people’s views of Native Americans: they gush over them, and view them all as peace-loving, nature-loving hippies that were destroyed by evil colonialists. If you point out that some of the Native Americans represented the absolute worst of mankind, and practiced torture, slavery, and murder for hundreds of years before the arrival of the evil people, they shrug their shoulder and become strangely apologetic: “Oh, it’s O.K. That’s just the way they were.” 
I’ll bloody well bet they did!
Yes. An argument I’ve seen people on the left use against conservatives is “they are afraid that if <other group> becomes a majority, they will be treated the way they treat minorities now”. And like, no shit. White people who discriminate against minorities don’t do it because white people are inherently worse than other races; they do it because they are the majority, so they can. People are people; there’s no reason to think if some other group becomes the majority they won’t do the same.
Some on the left seem to believe that suffering oppression is a purifying process that makes a person good and noble, or at least will make them more sympathetic to the suffering of others. But this is observably not the case, as we see with your Palestinian example, or the obvious fact that poor white people are more prone to all the ‘isms’ than middle class ones. IMO the reality is that it’s far easier to be generous and compassionate towards others when you feel secure yourself, both financially and in social status.
It means that under the ‘rules’ embraced by progressives, some people are more equal than others, and men get the short end of the stick. For example, when black kids do worse in education, the response is that education needs to be changed to fix this. When women are under-represented in STEM subjects at college, the response is that we need to change the culture of STEM to make it more welcoming to women. But boys have been doing worse than girls in education for years now. Men are under-represented at college, and the gap has been widening. But when this is brought up, the response almost universally is that it’s boys and men who need to change.
In theory, we should be able to note that most teachers and education professionals are women, especially at the younger ages, so it’s pretty plausible the culture they create is more welcoming to and supportive of girls, even if wider culture may still favour men. And we should be able to suggest ways to change this to help boys achieve on a par with girls. But in practice, this doesn’t happen.
In theory, the rules on standpoint epistemology say the voices of people who have direct personal experience should take precedence, but in practice, not one person in this thread has been willing to come out and say the voice of a poor white man should take precedence over that of a middle-class black queer woman in a discussion on poverty.
This is a problem, and few progressives seem willing to admit it exists, let alone try to address it.
No, what I said is what I meant, and if I wanted to call you evil, I would’ve said that. This this is you placing your sense of persecution at the dominant position of the discussion. If you didn’t intend to dominate like this, you would engage with what’s actually being said, rather than falsely and repeatedly suggesting that you’re being called “evil”.
In other words, you think I’m evil but are avoiding using the word. You keep proving my point.
And of course “engage with what’s actually being said” means “admitting” that I’m a monster since that’s what you are claiming about me, which just proves my point again.
There’s no sense engaging with hypotheticals that intend to portray “standpoint epistemology” as a universal dogma with hard-and-fast rules rather than a nuanced set of general principles. It’s begging the question and accepting the bogeyman framing. Though I would say that poverty could be a reason to center someone’s experience, it depends on the context and the conversation.