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Perhaps I am misunderstanding you and you are responding to a particular point, but the buckets are not equal! Your 'bucket' is not just based on your unique id

by neumann 10y ago

Perhaps I am misunderstanding you and you are responding to a particular point, but the buckets are not equal! Your 'bucket' is not just based on your unique identity but on social categorizations which influence others and their (and their government's) policy that can have decades, and even centuries long influences on you and groups of people.

jakelazaroff 10y ago
Exactly! Using the same example, if you're being sentenced for a crime, the race bucket matters much more than the hair color bucket. The study of how these buckets interact is called intersectionality.
zachkatz 10y ago
I'm going to delegate my response: https://youtu.be/aDRgMUoEvcg?t=2445 https://youtu.be/aDRgMUoEvcg?t=2445 Highly recommend the whole thing, but 40:45 to ~46:00 is, to your point, the most eloquent argument I've ever heard about this topic.
- neumann 10y ago
  Thank you for your response. I watched that section, and I offer a rebuttal. My summary:The speaker here argues that post-modernism's great illogical flaw is that it invites all individuals to assign themselves labels of victimhood, and argues that if one were fair and listened to everybody, everybody is a victim. Firstly, that argument doesn't appear very insightful - the individual's narcissism is incompatible with fairness. On a separate note, the speaker uses self-identifying label as a call for victimhood when many individuals (which is the perspective he is using) would never see it that way, so he is revealing a prejudice about the labels he is referencing. Either not self-aware or a deliberate choice. But that's not the point here - this argument has it backwards. It's not about a black person saying 'I am disadvantaged because I am black'. It is about statistical facts showing that black people are disadvantaged, and historical laws showing that this is due to decades of policy and laws which were a result of another bucket of people (whites) saying, 'These people are black, let's disadvantage them'. The segueway about LGBTQIAK label is I think parallel/tangential to this and is itself super interesting with a whole bunch of complications that societies have to unravel, but let's not conflate the two, because they are not analogous. edit:grammar and clarity

by neumann 10y ago

jakelazaroff 10y ago

Exactly! Using the same example, if you're being sentenced for a crime, the race bucket matters much more than the hair color bucket. The study of how these buckets interact is called intersectionality.

zachkatz 10y ago

I'm going to delegate my response: https://youtu.be/aDRgMUoEvcg?t=2445 https://youtu.be/aDRgMUoEvcg?t=2445 Highly recommend the whole thing, but 40:45 to ~46:00 is, to your point, the most eloquent argument I've ever heard about this topic.

neumann 10y ago
Thank you for your response. I watched that section, and I offer a rebuttal. My summary:The speaker here argues that post-modernism's great illogical flaw is that it invites all individuals to assign themselves labels of victimhood, and argues that if one were fair and listened to everybody, everybody is a victim. Firstly, that argument doesn't appear very insightful - the individual's narcissism is incompatible with fairness. On a separate note, the speaker uses self-identifying label as a call for victimhood when many individuals (which is the perspective he is using) would never see it that way, so he is revealing a prejudice about the labels he is referencing. Either not self-aware or a deliberate choice. But that's not the point here - this argument has it backwards. It's not about a black person saying 'I am disadvantaged because I am black'. It is about statistical facts showing that black people are disadvantaged, and historical laws showing that this is due to decades of policy and laws which were a result of another bucket of people (whites) saying, 'These people are black, let's disadvantage them'. The segueway about LGBTQIAK label is I think parallel/tangential to this and is itself super interesting with a whole bunch of complications that societies have to unravel, but let's not conflate the two, because they are not analogous. edit:grammar and clarity