More to it, it’s not anyone else’s job to “prove” that the Left isn’t obsessed with whatever. If you’re making an argument on the premise that the Left is obsessed, you’re going to have to do a whole lot better than “Yeah, is too and you’re just too blind to see it” and a pile of No True Scotsman fallacies.
I am just gonna put it this way: As of now, I am trying to understand how the mechanicisms behind politics work.
Sounds clear? 
But really though, I just hope we can go back to keeping civil issues seperate. I also don’t know if racism against white people is rising or not, same for sexism against men or ableism against neurotypicals, etc etc. The media is as biased as they come so is hard to find out what is true and what’s not true. I say though some could argue a white person could be considered powerless just by now entering a black neighborhood and igniting sh’t out of nowhere, be it a knockout or a kick. Same with women now surviving sexual abuse more than ever…
I am also starting to fight back against bullies who pick on me for my autism…
Edit- But in all seriousness, it would be interesting to see an actual Opression Olympics event sometime. A black Muslim dude vs a Christian white girl. An Asian transgender vs a Hispanic disabled dude. A white transwoman vs a black gay dude. The list goes on and on
The idea that there’s some kind of hysteria regarding intersectionality on college campuses is batshit. The concept originated with sociology and is intended to describe the different social identities a person has, and how they interact in terms of inequality. The big four are race, gender, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation, among many, many others. It has nothing to do with who speaks on college campuses, good grief. We discuss intersections and read about them in my sociology classes because sociology is about guess what, inequality. I’ve heard or read about it ZERO times in my psych classes. It sure does seem like something else conservatives would intentionally misunderstand, so thanks for the warning.
By the standards of the right-wing SDMB, I guess I qualify as an “old out-of-touch liberal” — I’m certainly old and out-of-touch — so I’ll raise my hand too. I’d never heard of “intersectionality.” Clicking at Wikipedia suggests that it was primarily a way for someone to convert the obvious into a PhD in social science.
I don’t know what the “events at Evergreen” are either. Google News points to a possible school closure in Ocala, Florida. Is that related?
Thank you for all of this. I couldn’t figure out how to articulate it. As a professional, I find the concept of intersectionality, as defined in academic circles, to be quite useful, whereas the Vulgar form is intensely alienating to me.
But I’d like to be really clear about where ‘‘intersectionality’’ came from. It’s not from leftwing professors who pulled it out of their asses. It’s from people working in the trenches to serve communities who struggle with multiple issues, such as poverty, drug addiction, domestic violence, and disability. There are a bunch of professionals whose job it is to create programs that help people, to organize communities into helping themselves, to create policy, to run nonprofits, and over time these fields develop best practices - things that are known to be more effective than others. And the professionals said to the academics, "We’ve found that an approach that treats all aspects of a person’s identity is more effective than one that treats them as a sole identity. We find that we are able to help lift more people out of poverty when we do it this way.‘’ And the academics said, ‘‘Let’s call this intersectionality.’’
And then 30 years later some obnoxious Facebook millennials screamed ‘‘Check your privilege!’’ and a bunch of conservatives collectively lost their shit.
What’s happening on Facebook or liberal social media or in the minds of conservatives has really nothing to do with the utility, value, or meaning of the concept of intersectionality as it applies to real, structured, planned, strategically defined social change. People are both mocking and embracing something they don’t really understand.
Evergreen was a horror and a travesty of justice but I see no evidence that it’s an epidemic. As someone extremely close to the modern academic left who took great interest in this case and listened to Weinstein’s 90 minute interview on his own experience, it appears Evergreen was driven by white anarcho-socialists responding violently to the alleged racism of their professor on behalf of students of color (that was the take of the victim, Professor Weinstein, so if you don’t agree with his own view on what happened to him at his own university, take it up with him.) It had absolutely nothing to do with intersectionality, it had to do with an anarcho-socialist interpretation of white privilege. If intersectionality were at play, either academically or otherwise, the prof’s Jewish heritage would have been relevant to their treatment of him. They didn’t give a damn that he was Jewish. They told him to shut the fuck up and threatened to beat down anyone who disagreed with them.
This is what I mean by people criticizing things they don’t understand. I have been in these circles for years, feeling increasingly alienated from certain approaches used by the academic left, and so I’ve got a pretty good grasp on what’s problematic and what’s working in this movement. While I concede certain Vulgar interpretations of intersectionality were used and abused at times (especially in internet debates) and that identity politics as represented by strident voices in online media have gotten out of hand, the idea that what happened at Evergreen is representative of modern leftist thought is so farfetched as to be laughable. When you make generalizations like this to people who have eaten, slept and breathed this culture for years, it’s like telling an astronaut that the moon is made of green cheese.
I know we can be an intimidating bunch and I get the impression English is not your first language. Tenacity and willingness to learn in the face of criticism will pay off. Stick around and you’ll learn a lot.
While we’re on the subject, God I love Weinstein. I would have killed to have a professor like that. If you watch the YouTube video, students were mobbing him with screaming insults and he was still trying to teach them. His love for the students is unquestionable. When I see people spitting in the face of education like that it just enrages me. A good professor, who cares about you, provokes you, makes you think, is priceless.
Thank you.
Well, this shows the limits of using a catchy name, doesn’t it? 
I know you’re right, and that academia didn’t invent what I’ve called the Academic version of Intersectionality, but I needed a term to contrast with “Vulgar” and that came to mind.
Which is quite useful to both sides of this, in that it drives page views and engagement in the advertising sense of the word…
… but I agree with you that it isn’t intentional.* Here I want to distinguish the idea I expressed from one which I’ve had in the back of my head this whole time: The Motte and Bailey Tactic, where someone deliberately makes an outrageous statement (the Bailey) and, when called on it, falls back to a defensible, boring position (the Motte) which is quite unlike what they originally said. That is a deliberate technique, as described much further here.
*(A little peeve of mine is how some people refuse to understand that it’s possible to benefit from a situation you didn’t plan. I guess understanding that would ruin the whole worldview underlying conspiracy theories, which is that the world is, fundamentally, a controlled place where nothing unexpected happens. The Illuminati are on their throne and all is wrong with the world, but wrong in a controlled, intelligible fashion, not in a scary, chaotic one.)
This divide between Academic (or, well, “the position academics are willing to sign off on and defend even if they didn’t originate it”) and Vulgar is more likely to be the product of an over-simplified but more appealing version filtering out of the places it was invented and catching on among the loud and ignorant, where it spreads much further and causes problems far beyond its original remit.
Once you said “the media is as biased as they come” I lost what remained of my interest in this discussion. There is hardly a lazier sentence in English. If you are not intelligent enough to realize that there is all manner of media out there – left, right, center, reliable, unreliable, reputable and disreputable – and that it is the duty of every citizen to figure out which is which, then your ideas cannot be taken seriously. Sorry.
At least I am trying to think critically. And yes, not all media is biased. But is getting there.
I consider myself a critical thinker, and I find it tough to know which media sources to trust. I know some very obvious ones not to trust, but every one has some degree of bias. In this case, I accept that bias is inevitable and I choose sources that provide good journalism.
NPR, for example, is biased to the left, but the quality of journalism and the nuance of coverage is usually pretty excellent.
On the right bias side, I did follow one called American Conservative on Facebook that I liked. It was more opinion pieces, but the opinions reflected a diversity of conservative thought. The Economist would also rank, for me.
I’m a big fan of podcasts. A lot of my favorites (Radiolab, Reply All, The Nerdist) don’t have specific political agendas, but it’s inevitable that you’ll eventually learn something that influences your political thought. Or take something like More Perfect, which examines Supreme Court decisions. I haven’t listened to it but it sounds excellent. The purpose of the podcast More Perfect isn’t to serve a specific political agenda, but it usually offers political insight. For example, I believe that one of the episodes (I may have this incorrectly) talks about how the resurgence of the NRA and the ‘‘right to bear arms’’ interpretation of the 2nd amendment is linked to the rights of the Black Panther party during the civil rights movement. This is fascinating because it links a traditionally considered liberal thing with a traditionally considered conservative thing. When you open yourself to this sort of learning, you have to face the fact that reality is more complex than a uniformly wrong group of people against a uniformly right group of people. You learn that all of these things you hear in soundbites are useless without context, and the context is often very deep. So to generalize, I try to seek out ways to garner political information where the sources aren’t necessarily driven by a specific agenda. If you want to learn to think critically about politics, studying US history is a great place to start.
A good rule of thumb is that if an issue is presented in such a way as to be unequivocally one-sided, it’s probably not good journalism. I try not to take any piece of news at face value just because it supports my beliefs. And there is a lot of news coverage, that, while technically accurate, is a sensationalist, pointless waste of time. I have very little faith in what traditionally passes for news these days.
Would Trump’s new ad calling Democratic politicians “complicit” in murders by illegal immigrants be an example of the MaB tactic?
It would be if he ever walked back his statements to more defensible ones. As it is, just making the insane statements with no intention of dialing it back down when called on your bullshit is simply lying.
No, a motte and bailey approach is like when some celebrity comes out and says that they are not a feminist and feminist groups come out and say that “feminism means only that you believe that men and women are equal” (that’s the defensible motte that is retreated into) but while amongst a receptive audience admit that feminism really means third-wave intersectionalist gender feminism. (that’s the bailey.)
I have served on the Board of Trustees of a “liberal” university. I interacted with professors, staff, and students. I have had four children attend institutions of higher education over the past 10 years, including two in school right now. I dispute this claim of “dominant paradigm.” Yes, there are troubling trends (free speech) in High Ed, but I don’t think it’s that different than it’s always been, or a crisis. We had obnoxious students way back when I was in school, and professors all over the spectrum.
Good example of a fallacious argument I’ve never heard of before. I learned a thing.
Welcome to the Dope.
Here’s a handy reference. I’m not saying it’s gospel or anything but it’s a useful starting point.
Is there some connection between those two articles that I’m missing? They appear to be written by two different people, and published on two different websites, but you seem to be presenting them as if they’re evidence that someone is engaging in some sort of duplicity or hypocrisy.
No. Some specific media is already there. But there were always media outlets like that. The difference now is in distribution and access. And that is a very real difference. The overwhelming presence of Fox News, which can barely be called news at all, in so many people’s lives, is unprecedented (and also, there is no left equivalent, even though there are left-biased media outlets). The attacks on factual reporting when it doesn’t fit a right wing narrative (“fake news”) is also unprecedented. But the NYT and WaPo and WSJ are about what they have always been.
Also keep in mind that a lot of the media is biased, but it’s mostly biased towards getting ratings. If slanting a certain way works, that’s what they’ll do.