Stop reading Rand. Start reading Hegel.
But this is nonsense. How can any reasonable person believe that one's "group" has absolutely no impact on one's life experiences? You're literally saying "one individual's experience as a member of X group has no impact on one's individual experience." Does that really parse in your head?
Look, there's no there there and you can devise silly rationalizations all day. The only thing that matters are the ends. The end goal is to keep those people away, right? The end goal is to make sure absolutely nothing changes, right? People should just be honest about their aims and end goals and we can skip the endless rationalizations.
I find it all a bit too theatrical. Like internships for Pacific Islanders are absolutely harmless. They literally cause zero harm. There are few things in this world absolutely harmless but this is one of them. But here they are being protested as discrimination! It turns out any attempt to be inclusive is decried as some betrayal of "individual experience," whatever that actually means and we get flamboyant resignations in response.
It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off.
This is not a charitable way to interpret the actions of others. Because of the unfortunate treatment of certain people in the past, it doesn't justify poor treatment of others now. The ends do not justify the means. To quote Gandhi:
"They say, 'means are, after all, means'. I would say, 'means are, after all, everything'. As the means so the end...”
Don't think anyone said that. Quite the opposite. You read what you wanted to read, and arrived at that conclusion all by yourself.
> I find it all a bit too theatrical.
Yes, and you're on stage.
See, this isn't being charitable to those who disagree with you, and your attitude is a big problem with why these issues just get more inflammatory. Consider the fact that people who oppose such efforts aren't your enemy, they simply disagree with your allegedly infallible logic.
Few people are actually against "minorities". In the end, the smallest minority is the individual. This is why discrimination any basis is wrong, because the individual's experience, advantages and disadvantages are not dictated by whatever group they belong to. Privilege is a statistical metric, but individual experience is not causally dictated by such metrics.
Group-specific efforts wouldn't be so controversial if they weren't pushing a narrative that denies this basic fact. This should be obvious from the outcry you'd get from trying to organize, say, a male-only tech event, or an Asian-only tech event. Might seem silly given the demographics in these industries, but you'd get serious blowback just from the effort.