Did you have to take part in this in any way or just observe?
I've had to take training sessions that left me feeling ...hateful, to be honest.
In the Chinese-Maoist sense, a struggle session is where you are essentially forced to take part in some ritual denunciations of self or of your friends/family with the threat of violence or violence applied or looming in the background.
In the American version of this today the threat of violence isn't there but firing and shaming by coworkers/friends; And therein career/social death.
Your session doesn't sound like a struggle session per se (unless you had to take part), it sounds like a "training" where the professional victims shared their stories. But yes, it's a growing industry and they're paid handsomely to embellish their stories.
And that, right there, is how the history books end up filled with horrors like the gassing of Jews. Couldn't happen again? Well, that's the mechanism as to how such things occur. Probably not Jews next time, but some Other; like white men.
I heard an anecdote from a monk once. He knew someone into activism, trying to save something-or-other, I don't remember what. Then, one day, the monk opened a book, and to his utter astonishment there was a picture of the guy. He was in charge of executions.
Great atrocities are perpetrated in the name of righteous anger.
To quote Nietzsche: if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.
The individualization of racism for example feels like a failure both in how it offends people and also how it leads to policy prescriptions that don't really solve the underlying power relations.
Intersectionality is about the experience of privilege/disadvantage/discrimination differing, on a way that is not a simple linear combination of effects, by combinations (“intersections”) of group memberships. While it applies to groups, there's no magical lower bound on size for its applicability, and when you consider more axes of differentiation, the size of the groups represented by distinct intersections approaches one.
Marx subscribed to this way of seeing individuals as mouthpieces for the collective. So did people like Marcuse. You know, one of the influential thinkers from "Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School of Marxism". Name sound familiar? You are giving these people more credit then they deserve.
Common sense is surprisingly uncommon. Some people need to be taught the basics.
One of the problems with the discourse right now is that white liberals amplify those who wallow the most in their own victim hood. The vast majority of Hispanics and Asians, for example (70-80% according to a study linked in this article) say they “never” or “rarely” experience discrimination.
But all the XYZ studies professors and activists marinate in feeling discriminated against. You can’t get tenure in an American university saying “yeah racism sucks but it’s actually quite rare.”
For what it's worth, Pew says that roughly half of Latinos have reported experiences of discrimination. But that's not the point. The most polarizing political slogan of the last several years wasn't "Latino lives matter". In the airless vacuum of a message board, I guess it makes a sort of sense to appeal to the experience of Asians and Latinos as summative of the experience of non-white people in general. But obviously, that's not how the world actually works.
> For all racial and ethnic groups represented in the data, the majority reported experiencing either none or infrequent discrimination.
The majority of non-white people are Latinos and Asians. The discourse has recently pitted whites versus non-whites.
Over the last few years, I’ve seen media outlets and academic institutions amplify the most aggrieved (and frankly weird) Asians as part of the general “people of color” discourse. Hence my comment above.
It’s likely the half that votes left and is told on a daily basis they are being discriminated against.
It is super tiring and doesn't seem to actually be necessary or informative.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkAndTroubledP...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeceasedParentsA...
Granted... Comic plots, in general, are way to dependent on exceptionalism for my tastes nowadays.
Could you give examples? It's hard to understand what you mean. Everyone objects to 'victimhood'; the significance is in the actual events.
Um, what? Victimhood has become THE status symbol of the left. If you aren't a victim you're an abuser, so anyone looking for status reaches for whatever victimhood they can get.
Victimhood is also a potent weapon - if anyone disagrees with you, you can claim they are oppressing you, denying your victimhood, gaslighting you, and so on.
Victimhood is the ultimate passive aggressive weapon in a culture that has seemingly forgotten that everyone lies.
You can't just claim a political movement controlled the public zeitgeist for 50 years without some serious citations.
When I started my career in the ‘80s, I worked at a large metro daily newspaper. There were certainly gays and lesbians who worked there (probably a hundred or more), but you wouldn’t know it because not a single person that I recall out of nearly a thousand people was “out”. Why do you suppose that was? It was because people were afraid of ostracism and losing their jobs and livelihoods. If that wasn’t the equivalent of being cancelled…tell me what the hell was it?
Also, fast forward 40 years—do you think you could find a news organization in the US today with no one out? Attitudes have changed and they have changed because the left was vocal and had political power enough to change culture.
Perhaps you don’t believe that, or you wish it happened faster. But don’t denigrate the progress that liberals made over the last 50 years, while it may be slow progress it’s progress that will stick.
A few weeks ago, the brilliant young lady Alexi Mcammond was cancelled as the new editor of Teen Vogue due to some arbitrary Tweets she made while she was 16 years old (She's now 27). Career ruined, age 16.
A few months ago we saw Harry and Meghan make unspecific claims of behaviour that caused her to have 'suicidal thoughts' (while living possibly the most privileged life imaginable) - while at the same time her own staff and entourage had accused her of bullying, and a lot of information coming out didn't maker her look very good.
The next day, a popular television presenter in the UK essentially disputed some of her claims in slightly terse, but nevertheless polite terms.
The presenter lost is job immediately - which should be very distressing.
If a person claims victimhood - the emotionality of the situation creates a hyper sensitivity such that their story must be in and of itself treated as absolute moral authority.
Tears = Truth.
Merely to disagree publicly with someone's claim is now 'cancel worthy' in polite culture, that's how far we've come.
This is weaponized by individuals, and amplified by some sectors of the press for various reasons, some ideological, some commercial, and then of course the 'reaction' of the 'other side' is weaponized as well ... ad nauseaum.
I feel sorry for Lizzo, the American entertainer, because almost everything ever written about her concerns highly defensive and aggressive posturing by generally leftist press, declaring her victimhood.
I'm not cherry-picking here - this is the most recent article about here in The Guardian (i.e. left wing press) [1]
" They made her into a global star – but also opened her up to extreme and often conflicting attacks beyond anything that Eilish or Lorde might experience owing to being a visible, confident, Black, fat woman: subject to racism as well as arguments that she panders to a white gaze; fat-shamed but also criticised for sharing her experiences of a juice cleanse."
It's always about her victimhood and never about her music. It's predictably comedic, a little sad.
Why does this happen?
I think that some people believe there's too much at stake in the grander scheme i.e. 'racism and police aggression do exist' - ergo - 'this story must presented as evidence of this fact irrespective of the actual nuances and facts'.
In an age where everything is politicized in an ugly way (i.e. climate change, vaccines), I believe that the emotionality of gender and racial issues elevates such things to the level of 'national urgency' and we end up in useless wars over it.
Nobody is arguing over Epstein and Weinstein ... that's not the issue.
But the issue is the perpetual fodder of these issues creeping into our media, culture and institutions without objective thought, dispassion etc. with which they should be approached.
I always believe that 80% of people are quite willing to hear issues of legitimate grievance and 'things they can do to help' but that this goodwill is ruined pretty quickly by irresponsible claims and heavy-handed activism.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/aug/20/billie-eilish-...
Oh, good grief. Consider the things you say. You make a ridiculous claim.
In my experience, it’s an effort made to listen to people whose needs aren’t being met, because whatever policy or design is being discussed either forgot them entirely or designed something inappropriately. Easiest non-political example I can think of is an office bike locker where I worked which had hanging bike racks — as people started using e-bikes, that worked out badly, because e-bikes are heavy and the people using them didn’t all have the strength to hoist them. They weren’t the majority of cyclists, but they were causing the majority the problems of bikes being left in awkward or unsafe places. Turns out some regular cyclists struggled to lift their bikes too, so we installed floor racks (and power outlets) - clutter solved and back injuries hopefully avoided.
That effort to listen is definitely misused by some people who (in my respectful opinion) thrive on attention, but I think you’d find lefties talking about the project in terms of equality and inclusion.
And in addition, both the left and right extremists like to misrepresent the other, and demean them, which is also wrong. The problem here is that someone in the middle, like me, is happily pigeon-holed as an extremist by either side, as you do in your comment. I did not, and have never, demeaned the leftist error as "oppression Olympics" because this throws the baby out with the bathwater. Racist policy has momentum and it's foolish to deny it. What I stand firmly against is the credulity with which every allegation of misconduct is accepted from anyone that has certain characteristics. Privilege is real, but that doesn't imply that everything the underprivileged say is true, or that they would never be tempted to use the power of allegation to achieve personal ends.
This is a ridiculously broad statement. It is not an argument in good faith. It does not contribute beneficially to the discussion. GP needs to do better.
For example, many forms of microaggressions mentioned in the article do not (in my opinion) lead to victimhood. To say otherwise runs the risk of making victims that don't exist. Being offended for example does not _necessarily_ make you into a victim.
Did everyone at the company take it?
I mean, look, I don't want to return to the days where if you were technically good, you could be a sexist jerk or a racist jerk or just generally a jerk. I don't want to work in that kind of an organization. But... equal weighting? Your organization isn't fighting for its life on technical merit, I suspect...
The person working on the engine should be the best qualified person to do so. And similarly for the other technical areas.
Nobody said anything disparaging about the need for sales, communication, or relationships. Only that in those respective fields you would also probably want the person who is most qualified, no?
I found it hard to directly criticize anything they said as the majority of it was common sense and anything objectionable wasn't so egregiously objectionable to warrant any real complaint from me (not that they gave me the option, feedback in the series was suspiciously absent).
The main problem with it as mentioned in the article is the incessant fixation on victimhood. I feel that our culture's relationship to victimhood is no better than the ancients but just in the opposite extreme. Before there were precious few 'celebrated' victims (victims lifted up and supported by society) - they mostly lived and died in obscurity perhaps not even knowing the nature of their victimhood.
Now we want to explore each person's past and expose anything that could possibly be construed as oppression/victimhood and expose it to the world. We end up with the other type of error: people presented as victims who aren't (relative to our perception, of course victimhood is on a spectrum).
No one wants a society full of victims, but we equally can't have a society organized via victim hierarchy (intersectionality).