Political Correctness

Jaw said:
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=11309

The University of Maryland at College Park announced Friday a new diversity support group to create a “safe space” for white students to discuss their feelings about “interactions with racial and ethnic minorities.”

The support group, called “White Awake,” will help white students who may “sometimes feel uncomfortable and confused before, during, or after interactions with racial and ethnic minorities.”

“This group offers a safe space for White students to explore their experiences, questions, reactions, and feelings,” the description explains. “Members will support and share feedback with each other as they learn more about themselves and how they can fit into a diverse world.”

The description asks students if they want to “improve [their] ability to relate to and connect with people different from [themselves]” or if they want to become a better “ally.” The new group is now one of four in the university’s “Diversity Issues” program series.

So a white kid who has trouble interacting with minorities should look to other white kids who have trouble interacting with minorities for help in interacting with minorities. This entire trend of safe spaces is discouraging.
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Fortunately after four years they leave this cocoon and grow up.
 
Julio3000 said:
http://https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/AFSP-Williams-Suicide-Report-Final.pdf

That’s the study he was referring to. Start around page 11 or so to see conclusions that directly contradict his assertions. Then read the discussion section on page 14 which clearly spells it out.

Also worth noting that he is comparing the suicide death rate in the general population with the suicide attempt rate amongst transgender people. Honest mistake, I’m sure.

I include this one because it is the study to which Shapiro referred. If you like, I can post links to more studies which arrive at similar conclusions, which are shorthand summarized as...exactly the opposite of what he was saying.

Like, you guys will listen to these YouTube dip****s and not bother to check their work because it affirms what you want to be true.

To your last point, I’m not sure who’s saying that gender is unrelated to sex. I’m saying that gender is =/= to sex, which is an important part of the conversation that you, and Ben Shapiro, seem to routinely stumble over.
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sturg, buddy, are you with me here? Here it is, as requested. There’s plenty more where this came from. I’ll be pleased to see whatever YouTube grifter you can summon in response.
 
I’m a libertarian. I believe in individual liberty without comprise. I lecture folks all the time about the consistency and rectitude of my beliefs, and I abhor hypocrisy and double standards. I believe that individual sovereignty exists for every human being except a woman who wants to terminate a pregnancy, because that’s literal murder, and I think that zygote-murderers should be subject to criminal penalties by the state. In fact, I think that people who use birth control methods that prevent implantation are also murderers. I assume, under that logic, that anyone who catches a nut that doesn’t result in pregnancy is also a literal murderer. AMA.
 
my daughter is a neuroscientist doing research on the "rage centers" of the brains of rats...she says for some reason the rage centers of white male rats from working class backgrounds are more easily triggered than those of other types of rats
 
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please note the above post is about rats not people and any apparent connection to people on these boards is apparent not real
 
Adam Best
‏Verified account @adamcbest
2h2 hours ago

Lindsey Graham wants to know how Brett Kavanaugh's accuser, a college professor, paid for a $200 polygraph test.

Lindsey Graham apparently doesn't want to know how Brett Kavanaugh paid for $200K in baseball tickets.

Reveals a lot of what's wrong with our country and politics.
 
@julio & [MENTION=1896]Jaw[/MENTION]

We've been discussing this year how it seems many people seem to be endorsing vengeance to right the wrongs of our history. Jaw and I have been very clear that this is dangerous and wrong, but julio has seemed to be OK with being racist against whites, or sexist against men, etc.

I thought this article was worth the read, if you're curious

https://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/group-rights-zero-sum-thinking-grievance-politics/
 
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sturg33 said:
@julio & [MENTION=1896]Jaw[/MENTION]

We've been discussing this year how it seems many people seem to be endorsing vengeance to right the wrongs of our history. Jaw and I have been very clear that this is dangerous and wrong, but julio has seemed to be OK with being racist against whites, or sexist against men, etc.

I thought this article was worth the read, if you're curious

https://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/group-rights-zero-sum-thinking-grievance-politics/
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Hoo boy. I don’t even know where to start with this . I’ll try, though.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Buckley’s most famous bit (other than maybe calling Gore Vidal a queer on live TV) was something something “standing athwart history, crying “stop!” In this, Goldberg is his genuine heir. You, too, really.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’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?
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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.

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.
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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.

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.
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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?

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.
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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"

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.
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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.

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.
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My point above still stands, but I'd request you provide some examples that you're referring to

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.
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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"

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.
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This seems redundant to me. Just another "if you object to stuff you see you're just a white dude whining" line. Not productive.

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.
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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).

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.
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I agree
 
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I’m going to try to take this in bite-sized pieces, so let’s just look at the “revenge” gloss, individual rights, and South African land ownership.

Your position is that the solution is to protect individual rights now and ignore the past.

So nonwhite South Africans got their **** taken over the course of decades, to the extent that a relative few whites owned something like 90% of private land. Part of the reconciliation and restitution process in their post-apartheid constitution was a mechanism for adjudicating that theft and buying back land. This is a messy process, for sure, but it reflects an effort to compensate an unequivocal and egregious violation of rights. Your perspective is that such efforts should not take place and the paramount consideration should be the individual rights of the people who currently own that 90%.

Now, should those people be dispossessed in turn? Ideally, no. But there is a constitutionally mandated process for buying land back which some people have resisted participating in. Should we look at that and think “well, we can’t violate their individual rights, even though they’re acting in contravention of the law. I guess we should just ignore the violation of individual rights that happened a generation ago and just let things lie.”

I’m just not sure how to get my head around that. You say that rights matter to you in 1994, 1988, 1968, and 1948...but the egregious violation of those rights should be discounted.

So, like, let’s respect individual rights, but let’s start NOW. That’s...awfully convenient.
 
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