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You cant have identity politics without identity.

eesmith 9y ago
Sure, but irrelevant, and your comment is seemingly more a random attack against liberals than anything deep. It's more likely a marketing term. It's much easier to sell to people if you can convince them of a special identity, and promote things as being part of that identity. Marketers spend a lot of money trying to identify and target certain demographics, and they will try different things to see what works. Consider Malcom Gladwell's TED talk on "Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce". Prego made a lot of money by identifying different market segments with different tastes and preferences in pasta sauce. You can think of it as a k-means clustering, where each cluster center is a different flavor ... or a different group of people. Of course, sometimes there aren't 'k' clusters, or the clusters have been misidentified, or the boundaries are simply vague. In any case, it could also simply be that talking heads love to promote their sociological interpretation of how the world works.
- oceanghost 9y ago
  Gladwell is pop science at best. He weaves everything into a neat narrative which is too convenient. It's funny how you construe the mere mention of "identity politics" as an attack on your beliefs. :)
  - eesmith 9y ago
    It's funny how irrelevant "identity politics" is to the topic, and yet you keep bringing it up. I thought my example was quite apropos. Most of marketing is based on pop science. That is, I believe that this so-called identification of (micro)generations comes from a marketing technique of identifying sub-populations that can be marketed towards. Gladwell gives an example of why marketing people try to do that. I then relate it with clustering, where there's a long history of finding good - and bad! - cluster centers. Would you care to explain how identity politics provides a more meaningful interpretation than what I gave? Or, for that matter, how it provides any meaningful interpretation, other than "talks about identity therefore must be associated with identity politics." To be clear, I think that 'identity politics' can be meaningful. Consider the transphobic bathroom bills which sprang up last. That's a clear case of people using the formal political system to castigate others based on identity. Similarly, when a security guard attacks someone who identifies as a woman and who was assigned female at birth, for using the woman's room because she didn't look feminine enough (on the presumption that she must be male), than that's an informal use of identity politics. (This is not hypothetical: https://www.advocate.com/business/2015/06/17/detroit-woman-kicked-out-restaurant-bathroom-looking-man-sues https://www.advocate.com/business/2015/06/17/detroit-woman-k... ). But politics must somehow be involved for this to be "identity politics", and I just don't see it.

Sure, but irrelevant, and your comment is seemingly more a random attack against liberals than anything deep. It's more likely a marketing term. It's much easier to sell to people if you can convince them of a special identity, and promote things as being part of that identity. Marketers spend a lot of money trying to identify and target certain demographics, and they will try different things to see what works. Consider Malcom Gladwell's TED talk on "Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce". Prego made a lot of money by identifying different market segments with different tastes and preferences in pasta sauce. You can think of it as a k-means clustering, where each cluster center is a different flavor ... or a different group of people. Of course, sometimes there aren't 'k' clusters, or the clusters have been misidentified, or the boundaries are simply vague. In any case, it could also simply be that talking heads love to promote their sociological interpretation of how the world works.

oceanghost 9y ago
Gladwell is pop science at best. He weaves everything into a neat narrative which is too convenient. It's funny how you construe the mere mention of "identity politics" as an attack on your beliefs. :)
- eesmith 9y ago
  It's funny how irrelevant "identity politics" is to the topic, and yet you keep bringing it up. I thought my example was quite apropos. Most of marketing is based on pop science. That is, I believe that this so-called identification of (micro)generations comes from a marketing technique of identifying sub-populations that can be marketed towards. Gladwell gives an example of why marketing people try to do that. I then relate it with clustering, where there's a long history of finding good - and bad! - cluster centers. Would you care to explain how identity politics provides a more meaningful interpretation than what I gave? Or, for that matter, how it provides any meaningful interpretation, other than "talks about identity therefore must be associated with identity politics." To be clear, I think that 'identity politics' can be meaningful. Consider the transphobic bathroom bills which sprang up last. That's a clear case of people using the formal political system to castigate others based on identity. Similarly, when a security guard attacks someone who identifies as a woman and who was assigned female at birth, for using the woman's room because she didn't look feminine enough (on the presumption that she must be male), than that's an informal use of identity politics. (This is not hypothetical: https://www.advocate.com/business/2015/06/17/detroit-woman-kicked-out-restaurant-bathroom-looking-man-sues https://www.advocate.com/business/2015/06/17/detroit-woman-k... ). But politics must somehow be involved for this to be "identity politics", and I just don't see it.