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What has been especially frustrating to me is identity politics, where being member of Groups A, B, and C means you must hold Ideas X, Y, and Z because those mu

• debacle 6y ago
  The way that this is weaponized by hyperinclusionists to further radicalize groups is terrifying. "If you don't think X, you aren't A." "Well I don't think X, and I am A." "If you don't think X you aren't A." "Well then I guess I'm not A." "If you don't think Y, you aren't A." ...and so on. We've seen it with a few specific political groups.
  • zozbot234 6y ago
    People usually call this salami slicing when a group does it to their ideological opponents. But sometimes it is a wholly internal, self-driven dynamic where the least committed members of a group tend to quit first, and the group ends up with more and more radicalized members over time.
    • debacle 6y ago
      It seems like every progressive group is slowly forced to adopt the platform of every other progressive group until they are effectively politically sterilized.
      • dgellow 6y ago
        That reminds me of Taleb’s essay “ The Dictatorship of the Small Minority”. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
      • mnd999 6y ago
        It’s an easy mistake to make. Progressive groups need be be better at saying “that’s a nice campaign, but it’s not my campaign. Good luck with that.”
        • debacle 6y ago
          It makes fruitful discussion hard. I support socialized healthcare, but for me it's down as the 5th or 6th greatest problem facing the US medical system today, and I think implementing only socialized healthcare without fixing these other problems would create a system destined for failure. To many people, that means I don't support socialized healthcare.
          • zozbot234 6y ago
            > To many people, that means I don't support socialized healthcare. Well, in a way, you don't. Because you apparently think socialized healthcare should not be an agenda priority in the short term, and what's the purpose of political activism if not agenda setting? Many other people who "don't support socialized healthcare" at this time might well regard it as worthwhile, if the other blatant issues w/ the healthcare system were addressed first.
            • mnd999 6y ago
              And there it is. No it does not mean that. It simply means there are only so many hours in the day and a person only has so much time and energy and they are devoting that to other things right now.
    • philwelch 6y ago
      Sounds like a twist on No True Scotsman to me.
    • emiliobumachar 6y ago
      I've seen this called Evaporative Cooling as an analogy to physics. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...
  • tanseydavid 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
• fedd 6y ago
  Aren't marketers stratify their audience? No matter how silly they categorize an individual person, it works on bigger numbers. And that's just employing sales tactics in politics. There just should be more than one or two parties, than there will be more diversified supply
• newacct583 6y ago
  > identity politics, where being member of Groups A, B, and C means you must hold Ideas X, Y, and Z That's not what it means. That sounds like a caricature of it you read in libertarian media. "Politics" in its modern meaning is about getting votes, not telling people what to think. Identity politics is the recognition that people of similar backgrounds tend to have similar political desires, coupled with the fact that people tend to "trust" politicians who have supported those needs in the past. And that's all it means. So white christians vote republican because of a long history of opposition to abortion rights, black votes have gone to democrats ever since the Civil Rights Act passed, etc... Not everyone, but enough that it makes sense as political strategy to court specific groups via these affiliations. And they're mutable over time. We didn't used to think of the divide between college-educated whites and non-college whites until the Trump campaign was able to exploit that divide. Men/women is getting larger now too, etc...
  • Udik 6y ago
    > Identity politics is the recognition that people of similar backgrounds tend to have similar political desires I'd call it an assumption more than a recognition, and take it from there.
    • newacct583 6y ago
      It's not an assumption. You can measure this, it's experimental fact. White christians vote republican, go check some exit polls, etc...
      • Udik 6y ago
        It's a statistic. It doesn't define or describe individuals.
        • newacct583 6y ago
          Statistics are still facts though! They certainly aren't "assumptions".
• duxup 6y ago
  It's such an issue everywhere, I find it increasing on the internet. Even asking a question, and honest question where I want to hear someone's POV / answer ... and folks assume you're a troll and assume you're the polar opposite of them.... and no amount of explaining otherwise changes people's minds. Even outside questions I'll say "I agree, I think X too." and folks will still insist on arguing about how I believe Y. Bro I just said I agree... It's a strange thing and I find myself constantly having to preface my statements in hopes people won't misunderstand.
  • whatshisface 6y ago
    Internet bad-faith interpretation table: Speaks out against my belief: Mortal enemy. Questions my belief: Mortal enemy who my powerful comrades have cowed into not directly speaking out against my belief. Fails to show appropriate support for my belief at the appropriate times: Mortal enemy sleeper agent. Speaks in favor of my belief, but not in the way I would have: Exploitative opportunist who believes nothing but seeks to benefit from the glorious revolution. Speaks in favor of a belief that's almost identical to mine, but still, subtly distinguishable: The worse kind of heretic; a heretic within the faith.
    • tanseydavid 6y ago
      Political puritanism does seem to be on-the-rise everywhere you look.
  • foofoo4u 6y ago
    I am seeing this prefacing of arguments happening everywhere. For example, Sam Harris finds himself having to preface nearly argument he wants to make as a means to ward off misunderstanding and online retaliation. Unfortunately, no matter how much time he takes to preface, mobs online inevitably misunderstand his positions and call for his head. It's exhausting how no one can make any arguments anymore without going through the ritual of having to convince others they are not a bigot before proceeding with what they have to say.
    • 6y ago
• pea 6y ago
  There is a good book on this called "Uncivil Agreement" which I enjoyed. It covers how, on both sides of the US political spectrum, identity trumps political issues in what people care about. I think identity has been more of a focus of right-wing movements right throughout history, although people frequently refer to it in the context of the current US progressive zeitgeist; identity and nationalism are very intertwined. Identity and what it means to be an American plays a large role in Trump's support, for instance.
• intopieces 6y ago
  >where being member of Groups A, B, and C means you must hold Ideas X, Y, and Z because those must be the views you hold as a member of those groups. This was never more obvious to me than when I was in college. As an out gay guy who studied Arabic, this seemed to short-circuit the expectations of my peers; being in awe of Islamic art, and wanting deeply to travel to Iran and see the mosques of the world was something that, for some reason, didn't compute to them. "But don't they hate your kind over there?" was not an uncommon reaction. I get it, I really do, but sometimes it felt like I wasn't allowed, in their eyes, to have access to those beautiful things in the world, or else I was considered "brave" for trying to access them. But to me they have been wholly distinct interests from the start, and only incidental that they happen to coexist in me as a individual person.
  • mam2 6y ago
    Interesting, but I'm not sure this qualifies to the point, in this case they are worried for your safety for valid reasons.. not trying to force you an opinion on something.
    • oh_sigh 6y ago
      There is absolutely no problem being gay and going to Iran. There isn't some magic gaydar they can scan you with to discover your nature. I'd recommend not trying to find hookup partners while you're in Iran, but that is different than them just figuring out you're gay and deciding to harm you. Being an American in Iran is a far bigger burden IMHO, because of the required government minders.
      • huehehue 6y ago
        "absolutely no problem being gay and going to Iran" doesn't exactly align with having to conceal "your nature"
        • novok 6y ago
          Being gay isn't the only thing on that list when you go to Iran, sadly enough :(
• malandrew 6y ago
  People who believe people in group X must hold belief Y don't realize that they have a good falsifiable statement that they can test, but sadly they either never bother seeking out counter-examples or they actively dismiss or even fight against counter examples they encounter due to cognitive dissonance.
• brightball 6y ago
  I have never in my life understood how being a member of a racial/gender/religious group implied association with some specific political party. When you actually do fit in that box, it creates a perception that you lack the free thought to do otherwise and not that you hold these views for well thought out reasons (no matter what they are). It's one of many forms of labeling that are easily attached to people and it's one of many reasons why I'll be firmly independent until the day I die. Although I'm sure that has a perception associated with it too.
  • michaelt 6y ago
    > I have never in my life understood how being a member of a racial/gender/religious group implied association with some specific political party. Surely it wouldn't surprise you to learn gay voters are more likely to support pro-gay-rights parties?
    • mumbisChungo 6y ago
      Surely it wouldn't surprise you to learn gay voters are individual humans with their own thoughts and perspectives?
      • watwut 6y ago
        How is that argument against what he said? It is precisely own thoughts and perspectives that makes people of common demographics and with common experiences to make different conclusions then from those who did not lived the same way.
        • mumbisChungo 6y ago
          I don't think either of us really posited an argument, but you're right that I shouldn't have responded to a snarky bad-faith comment with my own.
    • brightball 6y ago
      More likely? Sure. To assume that they endorse every other stance of those parties because of that? No. And more so, biologically or religiously based political alignment also prevents the other party from even attempting to win your votes. If they know you won’t sway...why try?
• brlewis 6y ago
  This is analogous to the principle of composition over inheritance. Using is-a relationships (inheritance) is concise and convenient, but sometimes leads to wrong models of the world. It's safer to use has-a relationships (composition).
• specialist 6y ago
  I highly recommend Ezra Klein's Why We Are Polarized. My personal takeaway TLDR: faceted identity is normal. increasing sorting and polarization somehow coincides with all of our identities becoming much more aligned, aka superidentities. the novelty is social media activating and amplifying identity. -- Presumably these social pendulums will swing back. Methinks Millennials and younger will go in the direction of the phyles from Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Where people chose their cohorts, which all kind of mutually coexist. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
• zozbot234 6y ago
  Paul Graham has written about this dynamic in Keep your identity small: http://paulgraham.com/identity.html http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
  • brlewis 6y ago
    "As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?" I want to be on the JavaScript and baking forums that he's on.
    • potta_coffee 6y ago
      Crossfit and veganism are also religions.
    • smegger001 6y ago
      >Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript Really??? Vi vs Emacs Linux vs Microsoft vs Apple Android vs iOS java vs C++ Rust vs any other programing language Gnu Linux vs Linux copyleft vs mit/bsd style licensing js framework x vs yet another javascript framwork y there is a reason these are called religious wars. baking i don't know their religious wars i am not big on baking outside of my cookbook, but pretty much any technical debate degenerates into the same thing in my experience.
• hintymad 6y ago
  Or worse, if you hold idea X, Y, or Z, then you're a racist. See this: https://twitter.com/byronyork/status/1283372233730203651?s=21 https://twitter.com/byronyork/status/1283372233730203651?s=2... "The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, more."Oh, and emphasis on scientific methods. So, for the sake of identity, let's attack modern civilization. This. Is. Fucking. Insane.
  • banads 6y ago
    >"The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, more."Oh, and emphasis on scientific methods. What does that say about the life works of Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?
    • zozbot234 6y ago
      Isn't it obvious? "They were acting white."
      • banads 6y ago
        I'm more concerned with what that implies about the content of their character, rather than color
  • steverb 6y ago
    The article and the infographic in question did not call those signs of whiteness, they are referred to as some aspects and assumptions of Whiteness and WHite Culture. Most of which cause me to wonder what kind of person wouldn't agree with those things... which just goes to show how fully a part of my culture I am. :-) I didn't see the article refer to those things as right or wrong, merely default positions.
  • escape_goat 6y ago
• throwaway_kufu 6y ago
  Since I initially registered to vote at 18 in 2001 I was an independent for precisely this reason...I have never wanted to identify with a party much less party politics. In my experience on any given issue if you were to ask for a simple comparative analysis with 5 points for both sides almost no one can get beyond the talking points of the day from their favorite cable news channel.
• hintymad 6y ago
  Interestingly, Paul Graham follows and interacts with @TitaniaMcGrath. This thread is very revealing for the current identity politics: https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath/status/1281023987242487808 https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath/status/128102398724248780...
  • honkycat 6y ago
    What a weak argument. "Some idiot said something somewhere, that means everyone believes it." If anything that thread illustrates how weak and stupid the "anti-identity politics" arguments are.
    • hintymad 6y ago
      Yes, idiots wrote the articles, but it’s not “some idiot said” when so many media took them seriously. Besides, the arguments in those articles are not that different from NYT and WaPo’s attacks on Mount Rushmore, the founding fathers, and historical figures in general.
  • carapace 6y ago
    Maybe stop referencing twitter like it's important or relevant? I rejoined twitter a few months ago, and quit again: it was inciting negative emotions and it felt addictive. The UI made me feel like I was having a mild stroke. It was disorienting. Having bailed on it again, my take is: generally the loudest and most attention-seeking people are the ones on there making the most noise and seeking attention most thirstily. Twitter is part of the problem, IMO.
    • hintymad 6y ago
      It’s not about the tweet, but a collection of writeups in media. I was hoping that the so-called elites have some common sense.
      • carapace 6y ago
        > a collection of writeups in media ...listed in a tweet. I block twitter though /etc/hosts so I can't click through to see what you're talking about. My point is, get off Twitter entirely. > I was hoping that the so-called elites have some common sense. I still can't figure out whether the world is run by evil sociopaths or well-meaning idiots, nor which possibility is scarier.
• IAmEveryone 6y ago
  It's telling that the top post on an article about "unpopular ideas" is a attack on a concept that is almost universally hated on HN. "Identity politics" even has the benefit of being so generic, it allows everyone to replace it with the worst example they can come up with: you hate "identity politics" for the one time that <person> invoked <their identity> to get <something ridiculous> (see examples in this threat). But you use it to tarnish complaints about black people dying twice as often from COVID and five times as often from police bullets. So, please, continue to be outraged by how unwilling others are to, for once, see it from the perspective of a white heterosexual man with a suburban middle-class background. And how unwilling people are to be "free thinkers" like you, boldly telling people on HN that you kinda think women and black people should shut up. But please stop glorifying reactionary opinions as some sort of revolutionary insight! When people tell you you are wrong, you are extremely more likely to be wrong, and not Galileo Galilei. If in doubt, maybe try to think of something revolutionary in particle physics or plate tectonics, before going all-in on the biological origins of intelligence or whatever it is you're being criticised for.
  • Tainnor 6y ago
    Do you really believe that it's not possible to be left-wing and progressive, even part of a minority, generally accepting the things you mentioned as genuine problems that need to be addressed, while still simultaneously thinking that identity politics is flawed and counterproductive? If I criticise the left it's not because I'm right, it's because I want the left to be better.
    • IAmEveryone 6y ago
      I'm white/mostly hetero/male etc, and in real life I tend to piss off friends by insisting that "mansplaining" is a rotten concept (as but one example). They tend to continue inviting me, so i don't quite belief their intolerance to be quite as extreme as people make it out to be. I find term to be so broad as to be useless. And, like the linked article, and like the litany of generic complaints about free speech on HN in the last few years, I tend to see it as convenient stand-in for people who know their opinions cannot be uttered in polite company. Nobody gets cancelled for proving p!=np, or finding a new antibiotic, or coming up with a melody that is impossible not to sing along. So the shtick about conflating the (sometimes apocryphal) hardships of innovators in the Middle Ages with the bland low-level hate today's young adults come up with to compensate for their mediocracy is getting tiring.
• andrepd 6y ago
  I agree that this is a problem. That being said, it irks me a little while the opinions you couldn't express were stuff like being a communist, promoting gay rights, or other stuff, there was never an uproar against this soft censorship. Suddenly it's stuff like not being a racist that's no longer mainstream to express and it's suddenly a problem (which it is).
  • potta_coffee 6y ago
    We've had a cultural revolution that was directly an uproar against the things you say there never was an uproar against. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to express unpopular, wrong and even vile ideas. I support the freedom of people that I disagree with to express their thoughts and ideas.
  • john-shaffer 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960s
• _bxg1 6y ago
  The key is to decouple your inner self from how you present to the world. Your inner mental model of the world can acknowledge all apparent truths, even if some of them might upset various factions (the legitimacy of which varies; the offensiveness of sensitive topics to particular people is a real thing, but it also sometimes gets invoked inauthentically), without necessarily saying all of them. At the same time, if you're chronically contradicting everyone else you should still see that as a prompt for deeper examination of your beliefs. It's always been a fantasy that the whole of society could accept all corners of a person's thoughts and feelings, as-is, laid bare. Before the internet, we could pretend the fantasy was true because of our mostly-local social spheres. But now the veil has been removed completely. This isn't to say you should never vocalize controversial beliefs. But you should pick your battles. Ask yourself whether it really matters to society that X gets discussed - and that it's therefore worth risking offense and/or backlash - or whether you're just being pedantic. I really liked this quote as a broader description of political correctness: > Perhaps the solution is to appeal to politeness. If someone says they can hear a high-pitched noise that you can't, it's only polite to take them at their word, instead of demanding evidence that's impossible to produce, or simply denying that they hear anything. Imagine how rude that would seem.
• mrinterweb 6y ago
  People can easily subscribe to whatever paradigm they wish. Being able to completely tune into a specific paradigm shapes people's reality. There are specific news outlets that cater specifically to identity politics. For those tuned in, opposing views seem ridiculous. Availability of information and diversity of information is a good thing, but the media outlets that exploit their power they have of shaping people's reality, can be dangerous.
• dkarl 6y ago
  A friend of mine from high school left a PhD program in Latin American studies for basically this reason. His mother was Mexican, he spoke Spanish and English natively, and a lot of people in the department wanted him to identify as an oppressed Chicano, but both of his parents were white and wealthy, people never questioned his whiteness, and when he visited his mother's family every summer in Mexico, he lived in their walled compound with tennis courts and armed guards. He didn't have great disagreements with those other people in the department over ideology or politics (no greater than they had with each other) but they treated him personally very poorly because he couldn't feel emotionally invested in identifying as oppressed. The non-Chicanos in the department resented and distrusted him because they thought he had a special ethnic "in" with the Chicanos, so he left and went to a different program.
  • dilandau 6y ago
    Academia seems to be the source of so much of this anger and resentment. Maybe it's because teachers, rightly and wrongly, feel themselves to be the moral betters compared to the wealthy. And this is all an elaborate cope and power grab.
    • wahern 6y ago
      > Academia seems to be the source of so much of this anger and resentment. It's because academia, especially in the humanities, rewards radicalism. Thus the endless parade of overwrought sociological theories spinning the prosaic into complex systems (in the area of race, phenomenological systems) purporting to not only explain but prescribe and proscribe correct behavior. Yet, none of them seem to add anything of substance that earlier writers, such as Frantz Fanon[1], haven't elucidated in far better detail. (This radicalism is today no less a problem on the right, or in other partisan domains, than on the liberal left. On the right, though, you often see it as an obsession with counterfactuals and supposedly "gotcha" empiricism, very much in the vein of the popular book Freakonomics--many of their "gotcha" theories turned out to be bullshit, but people eat up anything that purports to overturn conventional thinking. Freakonomics was pretty moderate, with authors of liberal sentiments, but that's beside the point. These patterns of argumentation are independent of views, it's probably just accidental or, perhaps, path dependent the degree to which they're adopted by various groups.) All of this debate represents its own privilege. And it reflects our own impotence--our inability to make substantive change, or even to come to an agreement on simple, concrete remediations. For example, qualified immunity probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon, unfortunately. You don't need a theory of white privilege to explain the violence wrought against blacks when barely hidden racial animus is still widespread. In fact, internalizing theories of white privilege is a damned good way to overlook one's own animus as it doesn't address, for example, the palpable fear and angst a white person (or any person, including black) might feel when a young black man walks into a convenience store; but rather diminishes its importance. And you don't need whites to internalize a guilty conscience to agree to substantive changes. It happened in the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when the open views of almost all whites would be unspeakable today. You just need to focus on and emphasize our basic humanity, and the cold consequences of racist policies that can no longer be openly justified. And, most importantly, to do so relentlessly and with a unified voice. (It worked for gay marriage, and without needing the majority to internalize sophisticated, radical theories about sexuality or to even come to terms with gay sex.) Modern culture wars are like trench warfare--when you end up in the gutter of philosophical debate it should be clear your strategy has failed. [1] Somewhat ironically, writers like Fanon often ended up concluding that it's simply not possible for blacks to find complete justice in a predominantly white society. And it's hard to argue with that if you adopt all of his assumptions. (It's certainly hard to find fault in his observations alone.) I can't claim to know of better frameworks for understanding and addressing larger sociological problems. But maybe they'll emerge on the path to addressing the more egregious and indefensible behaviors using solutions that are staring us in the face.
• the_other 6y ago
  > What has been especially frustrating to me is identity politics, where being member of Groups A, B, and C means you must hold Ideas X, Y, and Z because those must be the views you hold as a member of those groups. It completely removes all agency and individuality and instead classifies you entirely as a set of labels. This is how marketing works. Getting really esoteric (and admittedly not thinking to hard about it), I wonder if the prevalence of individually targeted advertising is responsible for amplifying this trend in modern social discourse. How would we study that?
• dkural 6y ago
  I understand what you're trying to say - but that is not what identity politics is, per se (I'm not advocating for identity politics either). The usual criticism of identity politics comes from proponents of class-based politics: American identity politics tends to split the working-class vote and obscure the fundamental inequities of society. In fact what you seem to be arguing against is stereotyping based on your identity. This is in fact a big part of what identity politics argues against, and would consider it to be a form of racism or sexism etc. However a certain type of (usually well meaning, white) college liberal will want to "respect your background" by which they mean what they think you are like, based on various prejudices they have accumulated until then.
  • jjk166 6y ago
    > Identity politics is a term that describes a political approach wherein people of a particular religion, race, social background, class or other identifying factor form exclusive socio-political alliances, moving away from broad-based, coalitional politics to support and follow political movements that share a particular identifying quality with them. Its aim is to support and centre the concerns, agendas, and projects of particular groups, in accord with specific social and political changes. [0] Identity politics is when your politics stem from your identity. Holding opinions that are atypical of people with your background is the cardinal sin of identity politics, as disunity saps your group of its strength. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics
    • dkural 6y ago
      Identity politics simply demands a better future for people belonging to identity X. It doesn't necessarily advocate that people of identity X should have properties A, B, C. This is for a simple reason: You want to attract the maximum number of people belonging to identity X. Thus you have it backwards: The cardinal sin of identity politics is excluding people of identity X by additional property requirements A, B, C. After all, most people belong to multiple groups - one can be black, and a woman. One can be a jewish gay man, etc. Now there is one exceptional case in which you will be denounced: If you argue that people of identity X should not have it better. They'll denounce you all the more if you're of identity X; but will still denounce you either way. Most other atypical opinions are welcome.. (again, I'm not advocating for identity politics per se)