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I’m going to start with the false equivalence between Dr. Ford’s allegations of sexual assault and Ed Whelan’s ****show this week. To Jonah Goldberg, this is “brilliant trolling” because he views it as two unverified accusations, and treats them as being categorically equal. They’re not, though. Are they?
No. I think Goldberg took it easy on his friend there. But they are indeed two unverified accusations and they should both be treated as such.
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As for the idea of collective grievances over time...sure, he cherry-picks some examples that sound scary on their face—like, grr, men should be scared because women have been scared for millennia. Sounds bad. But there’s an undeniable kernel of truth there...we’re approaching a society in which the tradional balance of power is shifting and men are more likely to be held to account for bad behavior. You’re positing that this is reaction run amok, and it may indeed sometimes be that, but you’re also conflating that idea with basic accountability and restorative justice. You’re holding out a shift in societal attitudes towards equity and justice as merely revenge.
Seems to be revenge to me. You literally have a US senator telling men in this country to just "shut up"... You have countless articles by well known media outlets talking about how men are responsible for countless problems. There's the privilege movement now, where a man's opinion is less weighted due to his penis. On this very board, you and others have defended bad behavior simply because the victim today was the victor yesterday.
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This piece is basically just a long screed (with some reasonable points interspersed) that reminds me of conversations I’ve engaged in over the past couple of decades when, say, white people pull the “well, I didn’t own any slaves, so why should I apologize or otherwise feel bad about slavery.” Well, that’s logically consistent in a vacuum, and I know it’s good enough for you, but it’s not good enough for me. Because I—you, me, we—have benefited in uncountable ways from that legacy, and its successor states. This argument, whether about race or sex, assumed that all of those group- and class- based inequities that Jonah Goldberg and your eminent self do not subscribe to have been satisfactorily addressed in our society, when they have not.
Well, I didn't own slaves. Nor did my family. So I'm not sure why you want to hold me accountable to such an offense. I'm not sure why you think I've benefited from it, but ignoring that, I do not understand why there is such insistence on evening the score. If we believe it's bad behavior, why do we condone the other way in an effort for... revenge?
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I agree with you that life is sometimes unfair—to all of us at times; to men, to white men, etc. But you seem to exist in this constant state of grievance based on your identity as a white male, yet seem to have no empathy for the historical and contemporary inequities suffered by out-groups without that privilege.
You seem to think I'm on the streets marching about white male victimization. Of course I am not.
I hate double standards. And I hate when bad behavior that got us in this mess is condoned in today's society. I don't understand why people like you support that, I really don't.
Meanwhile, I DO take offense to the "you're only successful because you're a white male" line that I have heard on this board. As a guy who grew up relatively poor (household income of less than $60K for 2 working adults and two children)... I studied hard in school, got good grades, got into a good college, worked summers and throughout college and paid off my debt. Did something great in school which got someone's attention to offer me an internship... and did great work as an intern to get a full time offer... and then brought innovative solutions to my company to increase the businesses by tens of millions, and was rewarded for that financially. I've since left for bigger roles.
All that to be dismissed by "you have your priviledge to thank for that"
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So Jonah doesn’t believe in “group rights.” You want to know who did believe in “group rights”? The conservative intellectuals who founded the National Review. They believed it was the right and duty of whites to preside over a segregated society. William F. Buckley certainly believed that. So, a few decades of social upheaval later, when people have actually bled and died for equal rights across numerous fronts, Buckley’s intellectual descendant, writing in the pages of the same damned magazine decides that hey, there’s no such thing as “group rights.” We’ll just continue the game in the bottom of the 7th with a 10-0 lead instead of starting over, because that’s the fair thing to do. No accountability necessary, no restorative justice. If we agree to your right to be on the field, that’s all that matters.
That is a nice diversion to the point. I often harp on individual rights. Ron Paul did too (I know I know, we're both racists!). We can't look at people in groups or we end up exactly where we are today.
I'm pretty sure Goldberg acknowledged the fight for group rights (like women's, etc). was necessary and worthwhile. But if we looked at individual rights from day one, we never would have needed to.
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He’s portraying the wholesale disenfranchisement of groups of people as an offense only against individual rights. He’s claiming a respect for the rule of law as if that proverbial judge is and has always been a neutral arbiter with respect to “group rights.” It isn’t, and hasn’t been. He’s seizing on a series of strawmen (tweets from comedians?) as emblematic of a wholesale desire for revenge, rather than justice. It works, in the narrow and obtuse headspace you seem to live in—I get that. But it’s a perverse misrepresentation of the wider world.
My point above still stands, but I'd request you provide some examples that you're referring to
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I think we saw that in the brief conversation about the prospect of the seizure of white-owned farms in South Africa. You can point to political demagoguery on the issue, and rightfully worry about equity and wisdom in these decisions, but to boil it down simply to revenge is to criminally ignore context and commit a massive historical erasure—ignore, say, the fact that people were dispossessed and herded like cattle into ghettoes in our very lifetimes...but to try to redress those wrongs is actually the larger crime. Those folks were dispossessed on the basis of “group rights,” but were their rights not also violated on an individual basis? So there’s a process in place to rectify the situation, but you say it’s invalid because a) there’s all the sudden no such thing as “group rights,” and b) individual rights are supposedly being violated now, which apparently matters in 2018 but not in 1994 or 1988 or 1968 or 1948.
You always seem to play the either/or game with me. It's not productive.
the fact that people were dispossessed and herded like cattle into ghettoes in our very lifetimes...but to try to redress those wrongs is actually the larger crime.
You similarly do this with "racism is bad, but accusations of racism is the larger crime!"
Why don't we call them both crimes? When you play this game, your position does appear to come from a place of revenge. I wasn't around when the first crime was committed. I'm around now. I have an opinion now. And I don't think the government should just take people's land away based on the color of their skin. If you are OK with it, then you're OK with an act of revenge. Fine if you are - but just own it.
And if you're asking sturg33, individual rights matter today. They mattered in 1994, and 88, and 68, and 48. Those things happened. It's done. We can't change it. So we can start protecting individual rights right now, or we can keep doing this tribal game and continue to not make any progress.
I choose "let's do the right thing today, even if we didn't yesterday"
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Your garment-rending over the plight of white men in contemporary society, as usual, rings pretty hollow in context. The piece you’ve linked is, at the end of the day, just another cry for sympathy for folks who have lived at best in blissful ignorance and at worst in enthusiastic collaboration with an inequitable and immoral order. “Revenge” just looks like to me like a very ahistorical sour-grapes gloss on the fits-and-starts establishment of a more just and equitable social order. It’s not unlike the cries of the Southern grandees during Reconstruction. You want that to be your legacy? That’s up to you, I guess. Just like the folks at the National Review can argue for segregation and against women’s lib then be all concern-trolly about people on the margins who want to take it out of their ass when the worm turns.
This seems redundant to me. Just another "if you object to stuff you see you're just a white dude whining" line. Not productive.
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Finally, the last bit of glossing over. Jonah allows an exception for collective historical grievance among nation-states: the example he gives is the grievance of the Armenians over the genocide perpetrated by the Turks. Well, he says, the Turks should apologize. Fine. In the same graf he says that a Jew born in 1980 shouldn’t hold a German responsible for the Holocaust. Also fine, but it brings up an important point with regard to the collective expiation of and restitution for guilt. Postwar Germany has gone quite a ways in expiation the sins of the Nazi era. That lack of collective grievance was bought by concrete actions. In an American context, I need only refer you to the threads on this board about Charlottesville and Confederate symbols and monuments. If you want to argue that there’s no need for collective historical grievance, you have to demonstrate genuine remorse and expiation of historical sin. If Jonah thinks it’s ok for an Armenian to still have a beef with Turkey because they haven’t adequately accepted and collectively internalized guilt for the Armenian genocide, why are we fighting about flying the stars and bars and displaying revisionist monuments to the Lost Cause? Those threads clearly indicate that we have, collectively, not done the heavy lifting of expiation, remorse, and restoration.
I can only speak for myself and not others, but I'm arguing from a position that Mr. Lee was fighting for his state and state rights, not slavery. He was an enormous figure in US history and should be remembered as such.
On the other hand, the statues of the avowed racists can be pulled down. I've said as much (though still believe that's the state's decision - not DC)
I also get concerned that we villify folks like Jefferson because of his slaves, and wipe out all other things he did to allow this country to become what it is today. But that where are - I think it's a big problem. Because while we focus on the history of how evil white guys are for owning slaves, we don't seem to have that same focus on how evil socialism is (young people now favor socialism to capitalism).
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If you don’t want revanchists to control the conversation, you have to make a good-faith attempt to acknowledge the historical and contemporary realities that got us to the current moment. If you’re unwilling to do that, I’m not sure what to tell you.
I agree