3 ms·

I trust you’ll maintain that view if and/or when you become a marginalized group, and the dominant group shifts the meta-rules of society and its institutions i

I trust you’ll maintain that view if and/or when you become a marginalized group, and the dominant group shifts the meta-rules of society and its institutions in ways you don’t like? This view usually strikes me as hypocritical because it’s almost always paired with a paranoia of becoming a marginalized group and a belief that maintaining majority status for their group is “right” in some way. It’s easy to quote Spock when you make sure that you’re always part of “the many” and never part of “the few”.

faggotbreath 2y ago
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pessimizer 2y ago
"Marginalized" groups have not been helped in any way by any of this. Lumping everyone together into a group who is not a white straight man diminishes everyone's individual material problems into a generic "marginalization," and unfairly centralizes white straight men. It's something that wealthy powerful people do in order not to have to discuss their wealth and power, and the fact that they all grew up in sundown towns. This wave of wealthy white people screaming "bigot" at other white people without health care hasn't raised the condition of the descendants of slaves at all. Instead it's been an expansion of welfare for well-off white women and affluent immigrants. Everybody has been oppressed like black people except for the descendants of slaves, and everybody has been stuck in a caste system except for Dalits. "Marginalized" people want to be addressed as individual humans with material problems like other humans. Instead a bunch of people so wealthy and comfortable that they are almost completely detached from the material world and have never missed a meal treat everyone like symbols and try to read the world like literary critics. > It’s easy to quote Spock when you make sure that you’re always part of “the many” and never part of “the few”. Assuming that everyone you're talking to is "the many" is not good. Your argument should work no matter who you happen to be talking to.
- everforward 2y ago
  Refusing to address the shared material hardships diffuses responsibility to the point where the hardships can be dismissed. There are too many branches on that tree to address, which makes it very easy to just do nothing. No one but celebrities get their individual hardships addressed, it just doesn’t scale to this size of a country. > Assuming that everyone you're talking to is "the many" is not good. Your argument should work no matter who you happen to be talking to. I don’t think it’s a wild presumption that most people in the few aren’t terribly excited about being asked to pay the cost for the many again. “Please lock us in another generation of poverty” is not a political slogan I hear very often. If that’s what you want to stand on, go ahead I suppose, it’s a free country.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  Not to mention the fact that heterosexual, cis-gendered, christian, male is about a quarter of the US population[1], so categorizing it broadly as "many" vs "few" is already over-simplifying. Intersectionality was intended to add nuance to discussions of discrimination (e.g. a black woman's experience is not reduced to "sexism" plus "racism"), but it seems to have popularly had the opposite effect of reducing everybody to a demographic venn-diagram. 1: If you exclude "male" and "christian" from the criteria, you do end up with a majority. If you switch "christian" to "protestant" then you make the minority even more stark, but anti-Catholic sentiment among protestants has significantly declined over the past few decades, so I don't think that historical division of categories makes sense anymore.
deleted 2y ago
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rayiner 2y ago
That’s an invitation to think emotionally rather than rationally. (And not that it matters, but I recall white people literally crying back in 2016 that a certain president would put me and my kids in an internment camp. I’m glad I kept thinking rationally rather than emoting.)
deleted 2y ago
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CleaveIt2Beaver 2y ago
Not to mention that Spock is consenting to his fate in taking on the role of "the few... or even the one." He's clearly rationalizing, not stating a universal constant.

faggotbreath 2y ago

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pessimizer 2y ago

"Marginalized" groups have not been helped in any way by any of this. Lumping everyone together into a group who is not a white straight man diminishes everyone's individual material problems into a generic "marginalization," and unfairly centralizes white straight men. It's something that wealthy powerful people do in order not to have to discuss their wealth and power, and the fact that they all grew up in sundown towns. This wave of wealthy white people screaming "bigot" at other white people without health care hasn't raised the condition of the descendants of slaves at all. Instead it's been an expansion of welfare for well-off white women and affluent immigrants. Everybody has been oppressed like black people except for the descendants of slaves, and everybody has been stuck in a caste system except for Dalits. "Marginalized" people want to be addressed as individual humans with material problems like other humans. Instead a bunch of people so wealthy and comfortable that they are almost completely detached from the material world and have never missed a meal treat everyone like symbols and try to read the world like literary critics. > It’s easy to quote Spock when you make sure that you’re always part of “the many” and never part of “the few”. Assuming that everyone you're talking to is "the many" is not good. Your argument should work no matter who you happen to be talking to.

everforward 2y ago
Refusing to address the shared material hardships diffuses responsibility to the point where the hardships can be dismissed. There are too many branches on that tree to address, which makes it very easy to just do nothing. No one but celebrities get their individual hardships addressed, it just doesn’t scale to this size of a country. > Assuming that everyone you're talking to is "the many" is not good. Your argument should work no matter who you happen to be talking to. I don’t think it’s a wild presumption that most people in the few aren’t terribly excited about being asked to pay the cost for the many again. “Please lock us in another generation of poverty” is not a political slogan I hear very often. If that’s what you want to stand on, go ahead I suppose, it’s a free country.
aidenn0 2y ago
Not to mention the fact that heterosexual, cis-gendered, christian, male is about a quarter of the US population[1], so categorizing it broadly as "many" vs "few" is already over-simplifying. Intersectionality was intended to add nuance to discussions of discrimination (e.g. a black woman's experience is not reduced to "sexism" plus "racism"), but it seems to have popularly had the opposite effect of reducing everybody to a demographic venn-diagram. 1: If you exclude "male" and "christian" from the criteria, you do end up with a majority. If you switch "christian" to "protestant" then you make the minority even more stark, but anti-Catholic sentiment among protestants has significantly declined over the past few decades, so I don't think that historical division of categories makes sense anymore.

deleted 2y ago

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rayiner 2y ago

That’s an invitation to think emotionally rather than rationally. (And not that it matters, but I recall white people literally crying back in 2016 that a certain president would put me and my kids in an internment camp. I’m glad I kept thinking rationally rather than emoting.)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

CleaveIt2Beaver 2y ago

Not to mention that Spock is consenting to his fate in taking on the role of "the few... or even the one." He's clearly rationalizing, not stating a universal constant.