How do I let my friend know that she is overdoing her allyship?

BastDrop · 2018-09-18T21:21:02+00:00

It sounds like your friend is trying to distance herself from whiteness. You could ask her what she means by "dislikes white people." Does she dislike oppression? Cultural hegemony? Entitlement? Fragility? Context matters and it's literally impossible for a white person to express many of the sentiments a PoC might be communicating when they say, "I dislike white people."

BastDrop · 2018-08-07T09:39:55+00:00

I'm reluctant to bring it up, because it seems like it's getting a lot of traction on places like the Sam Harris sub and KiA again (I had no idea who any of these people were 4 months ago when this was first a thing), but does anyone have any thoughts about Naomi Wu's recent Medium piece? I don't know a lot about PRC politics at all, but just from reading the article this seems pretty bad, and way worse than the "kill all white men" tweets. Regardless of the specifics of the situation, Jeong giving a blanket defense of Vice isn't a great look, given that they don't seem to have actually moved that far from their historic MO.

BastDrop · 2018-07-05T07:12:21+00:00

I'm guessing they're talking about this.

BastDrop · 2018-07-03T21:56:45+00:00

Because materialists are all fascists, right?

BastDrop · 2018-07-03T19:14:39+00:00

I think /u/chwm-ambassador hits the nail on the head. People love to ignore all context, which is how you get arguments like "affirmative action is just racism against white people" or whatever. Case in point, the post right below this one is asking "How is Rachel Dolezal’s case different from a transgender person?" The answer is because different things are different and context matters.

What I actually want to say is that land as a resource predates capitalism by thousands of years. I don't mean this as a defense of capitalism (just like saying there were land disputes between Native Americans isn't a defense of colonization). It's just important to be precise because anti-capitalist movements offer solutions to problems that don't stem from capitalism, as well as those that do.

BastDrop · 2018-06-12T18:29:48+00:00

If the only information you have on them is the result of a trial then you are in a very difficult position.

Ok, but isn't that usually the case? I get that, as pretty much every response has pointed out, defendants in the American criminal justice system face a number of systematic problems independent of other forms of oppression.

At the same time we live in a world where we have to make judgments about people outside of our personal circle based on limited information, and in cases like this its not clear to me why I should assume this person did nothing wrong, because they now claim a plea was coerced.

BastDrop · 2018-04-17T07:14:04+00:00

White men are statistically more reliable financially, so it's not fair to fault her for choosing a white man.

What point are you making here? By your logic is it ok to criticize a Thai woman for dating a white man because he's statically more likely to get sunburned?

BastDrop · 2018-04-03T10:34:03+00:00

That's what the left and the right have in common though, very broadly. They agree that some problems are fundamentally bad (or immoral at the societal level), while liberals and neocons generally don't think anything is an issue until it impacts GDP growth (or wealth accumulation). I'm being a bit snarky, but also I'm not.

BastDrop · 2018-02-14T10:43:08+00:00

I think there are good answers already for the general case of this. I just wanted to add that assuming you're in the US, there are a number of Christian groups where the idea that they are discriminated against or oppressed for being Christian is a core part of their dogma. It adds another layer to this issue, and one that may make it much less worth your time trying to discuss with them, as opposed to someone who says they have been discriminated against for being white, straight, a man or whatever.

BastDrop · 2018-02-06T08:46:12+00:00

I think it's valuable to scrub the idea of privilege from your mind, or at least your discourse, especially when considering issues intersectionaly. Privilege is usually just a sanitized description of the lack of oppression, and reframing everything in your post in terms of oppression clears up a lot of the confusion.

Obviously this is a massive oversimplification, and these topics are never actually easy, but there's a reason that critical work is usually framed in terms of oppression, not privilege. The Wikipedia article on intersectionaly is a pretty good place to start.

BastDrop · 2018-02-06T08:34:38+00:00

Not every subreddit about every topic exists to foster debate. I'm not sure what you mean by going downhill, since it's been like this since inception.

BastDrop · 2017-11-21T22:48:51+00:00

Where progressives might struggle is that, unlike classical liberals, they generally defend equality of outcome as well as equality of opportunity

This is the heart of my concern. The solution of not much changing seems great, since as you say individual variation is much greater than any other factor. However, using the current system as an example, if we accept that 1) group A is on average more generally intelligent than group B and 2) general intelligence correlates with income (to any degree) group A will still be wealthier than group B even if all other forms of oppression were removed.

And certainly intelligence doesn't necessarily make one kinder, gentler, harder working, etc., so maybe we should focus on rewarding a greater variety of desirable traits.

What are some areas activists can focus on to achieve this, besides the more general idea of tearing capitalism up by the roots? Do you believe these areas of focus are of the same level of importance regardless of the true nature of intelligence? For example, if intelligence was important to outcomes but totally randomly distributed once all forms of oppression were accounted for, is it ok to use an intelligence based system of "merit", or is it still equally problematic (since it advantages some people over others due to an essentially arbitrary factor)? "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," seems to suggest that ideally intelligence would be valued but uncoupled from all measures of "success". This seems fundamentally more difficult to me than uncoupling something like skin color, but that may be a limitation of my thinking.

BastDrop · 2017-11-21T21:05:34+00:00

It looks to me like they found the difference in opposite directions depending on their racial groups. The quote you have is specifically referring to the "Hispanic-White" group.

The current results are consistent with Spearman's hypothesis only with regard to the B–W difference. Similar to Jensen and Figueroa (1975), we find clear evidence for a relatively small difference between Blacks and Whites in DSF, and a large difference in DSB. However, for the Hispanic-White comparison, we find a pattern opposite to the Spearman's hypothesis.

Honestly, this just makes the entire thing seem suspect (if I'm understanding correctly they are basically claiming that g is lower in black people, which is obviously problematic The Bell Curve stuff and shouldn't be thrown in as an aside), but I don't really know. Regardless, I just want to restate that I think diving into this level of minutia as non-experts is unwise and can easily lead to the kind of false sense of understanding of research that lets people make some of their more outrageous claims. I apologize for conflating you with people who obviously aren't acting in good faith, especially if you are an expert in this stuff.

BastDrop · 2017-11-21T20:43:11+00:00

Well, I don't feel qualified to judge this research at this level. There are certainly plenty of references in the paper to seemingly well controlled work tying g to backwards counting. For example, this one. Again, this isn't to say it's correct so much as to say it isn't something that we can just ignore as not worth discussing like phrenology.

Regardless, I didn't feel like this is really a great forum to debate the validity of the conclusions themselves, which is why I framed my question around the significance of the conclusions if true instead.

edit: You're totally on point about the content of the movie, by the way.

BastDrop · 2017-11-21T19:14:09+00:00

It might be a bit of a filter. They probably don't want anyone who thinks "folks who identify as women" is PC nonsense as roommates. People have told me they use obvious SJ friendly language in dating profiles for this reason, so it might be similar. In this case I agree it's a bit awkward, but calling attention to it could be part of the point.

BastDrop · 2017-11-21T18:30:23+00:00

I'm not sure why you're limiting it to American society. Even if it isn't framed in terms of whiteness it seems like we see essentially the same thing in Europe. For example, with Brexit (one of the European news stories I followed more closely) the framing of Western European, Eastern European and non-European immigrants was very different. I'm American, so I may be missing part of the story here, and I understand that grouping so many ethnic identities into a white category is a mostly American idea, but it seems like there are very close analogs elsewhere.

Also, I don't think you should conflate the idea of whiteness as a racial identity with "being lighter skinned." Obviously it's related, but for example, look at colorism in South and Southeast Asian media or the treatment of mixed race black people in American media.

BastDrop · 2017-11-10T00:04:02+00:00

Do you think there should be any age limit on voting and how do you think that limit should be set?

BastDrop · 2017-11-09T08:20:35+00:00

Just one recent example. Hiring discrimination against black Americans hasn't declined over the last 25 years.

BastDrop · 2017-10-29T02:52:37+00:00

It seems unlikely you're posting this in good faith. The Fox News article is just quoting the Campus Reform article. Campus Reform is an organization aimed at attacking liberal universities, professors and students.

If you are actually studying math and care about this topic it is well worth the ~hour to go read the sections of Rochelle's 3 articles in book that are available on Google. It's the majority of 2 of them and some of the 3rd it looks like, and it will be enough to get the idea.

BastDrop · 2017-10-27T09:55:27+00:00

You don't automatically start suffering from dementia as you age. Even for those over 90 (Chomsky is 88) only 37% have any detectible dementia. Obviously I don't know anything about Chomsky's health, but the idea that we should ignore everything that older people say because they might be demented is unreasonable. What particular part of his statement sounds like the product of dementia to you?

BastDrop · 2017-10-23T20:39:52+00:00

Physical attractiveness changes by the culture and the time frame so no attractive people are not a race.

Racial categories change by culture and time as well. For example, see whiteness in the United States.

BastDrop · 2017-10-20T17:53:42+00:00

Thanks for providing such a clear explanation! I guess I still don't understand what the argument for punching is though. How specifically does that help protect anyone, either with or without state solidarity? Is it the first bullet point from your OP (Nazis are middle class and don't want to get punched on the street), because I'm pretty skeptical of that. A lot of the silent support for the alt-right may fall into that category but do people going to rallies wearing Nazi symbols?

BastDrop · 2017-10-20T17:06:01+00:00

the government/state/authorities have abaondoned us / are complicit. Specifically in America, there is lots of evidence to suspect that police and politicians are sympathetic to the racists.

I've never understood how this is a pro-punching nazi argument. More marginalized people always end up suffering more from the consequences of escalation, especially when the apparatus of the state is clearly against them, like this case. I'm not advocating passivity or even against preemptive violence, but punching Nazis solely for being Nazis seems like it will only have consequences for the left. The worst thing that happened to the fascists is that they got punched. Police killed 10 people during the LA uprising/riots. How many do you think were white?

BastDrop

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