PART 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

 

So if you've been reading this series, you now know what identity politics is, and why we've all been talking about gender and race and .... and .... getting so fucking tired of it all. But if you've been reading, now you know what caused all the nonsense, why it stinks so much, and why it's been causing so much bloody conflict. 

Here's something else about it that stinks. If you've been around academia or company's personally departments, you'll have heard the term "intersectionality." And if you've been listening in to people who want to make victims out of everybody, you'll have heard them shouting about it -- and shouting even louder about how they need to silence those who have so-called 'privilege.' 

So just what the hell is this "intersectional analysis"? And why should you care? Your second-favourite blogger is on the case...

Intersectionality: How some tribes are made more equal than others

"Identity politics amplifies the human proclivity for us-versus-

them thinking. It prepares students for battle, not for learning."

~ Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind

THE "MYSTERIOUS HIDDEN FORCES in society” mentioned in Part 4, those concealed agents of oppression that Marx + Marcuse allegedly uncovered, are what they say justifies the blatant suppression of free speech. To fight against this would-be censorship, you have to know how they generally go about it.

Marcuse’s hidden structure is given legs by the left’s tool of so-called “intersectionality.” In essence, it's an engine to divide and conquer -- to create in innocent folk the omnipresent feeling of victimhood, and in others the disarmingly guilty feeling of unearned privilege. Why would someone do this to others? Simple. Because they want power. If you can talk on behalf of some folk while you help silence others, then political power can be yours, you hope. It might be only a stone's throw away.

In his best-selling book The Coddling of the American Mind, American academic Jonathan Haidt traces the emergence of this influential tool to a 1989 essay by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor then at UCLA (and now at Columbia, where she directs the Center on Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies). In the essay, she argues that a black woman’s experience in America is more than just the sum of “the black experience” and “the female experience.” There are “layers” of structural oppression, she claims, that this would allegedly gloss over.

Crenshaw’s important insight [explains Haidt] was that you can’t just look at a few big “main effects” of discrimination; you have to look at interactions, or “intersections.” More generally, as explained in a recent book by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge: ‘Intersectionality as an analytic tool examines how power relations are intertwined and mutually constructing. Race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, ethnicity, nation, religion, and age are categories of analysis, terms that reference important social divisions. But they are also categories that gain meaning from power relations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class exploitation.’[1]

These categories can be mapped on a diagram as a series of bipolar dimensions, as one Kathryn Pauly Morgan did in a famous diagram now taught in university classrooms around the western world. Every graduate from the last two decades in most disciplines has had this rammed down their impressionable young throats. The simplified diagram shown below shows only seven axes of victimhood; Morgan herself identifies fourteen!

In an essay describing her approach [says Haidt], Morgan explains that the centre point represents a particular individual living at the “intersection” of many dimensions of power and privilege; the person might be high or low on any of the axes. She defines her terms like this: “Privilege involves the power to dominate in systematic ways …. Oppression involves the lived, systematic experience of being dominated by virtue of one’s position on various particular axes.” Morgan draws on the writings of French philosopher Michel Foucault to argue that each of us occupies a point “on each of these axes (at a minimum) and that this point is simultaneously a locus of our agency, power, disempowerment, oppression, and resistance. The [endpoints] represent maximum privilege or extreme oppression with respect to a particular axis.”[2]

If this looks like a particularly lunatic version of a magazine quiz (“10 Questions to Reveal How You’ve Been Victimised By Reality” or "7 Questions to Expose Your Privilege") or a particularly disrespectful parlour game (just how insulted should, say, a non-white disabled female feel at being told they’re a victim of nature?) then you’d be right.[3] It is precisely what Washington Post journalist Michael Gerson once described as “the soft bigotry of low expectations,”[4] performed as a pseudo-scientific dance.

According to Morgan’s view however, any young, white, attractive, euro, anglophone who is a gentile, heterosexual, able-bodied, rich, credentialed, cis-gendered, fertile male is ipso facto an oppressor to some degree. Whatever they’ve done, or haven’t done themselves. [Shout this loud enough, and Marama Davidson will show up soon enough to applaud.]

Quite how you are responsible for someone else’s alleged infirmity is another matter never fully addressed: what nature has rent asunder in the poor, infertile, disabled, non-white, lesbian, politics will (somehow) be able to make whole again. And note that however much the politicians screw the scrum in favour of these alleged victims, they still remain victims by virtue of their underlying power differential. (So as the Hobson’s Pledge organisation has discovered, whatever happens in law to “redress the power imbalances” to favour minorities, middle-aged straight white males will always remain their oppressors.)

And it matters not at all how tolerant you yourself are; in this world of power-driven adjectives if any one of those privileged adjectives describes you (able-bodied, fertile, swinging a penis) then you are one of the oppressing class and, in the views of Marcuse and his followers and fellow travellers, people like you must be silenced as a matter of social justice. After all, “the end goal of a Marcusean revolution is not equality but a reversal of power.”

Marcuse offered this vision in 1965:

It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise [i.e., the allegedly 'privileged'], and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth [i.e., the alleged victims of reality] presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.’[5]

There have been millions willing  and eager to undertake that suppression. Often violently.

NOW REMEMBER, THIS IS what your children are being taught on every campus.

Imagine an entire entering class of college freshmen whose orientation program includes training in the kind of "intersectional thinking" described above, along with training in spotting so-called micro-aggressions, [i..e, what we used to call an unintentional slight, but can now be "weaponised" by the would-be power-luster. More on this here and here.] By the end of their first week on campus, students have learned to score their own and others’ levels of privilege, to identify more distinct identity groups, and to see more differences between people. They have learned to interpret more words and social behaviors as acts of aggression. They have learned to associate aggression, domination, and oppression with privileged groups. They have learned to focus only on perceived impact and to ignore intent … [and they'll have forgotten what they went to university to learn, and have no time in the curriculum for it anyway.]

This combination of common-enemy identity politics and micro-aggression training [see Chapter 6] creates an environment highly conducive to the development of a “call-out culture,” in which students gain prestige for identifying small offences committed by members of their community, and then publicly “calling out” the offenders. One gets no points, no credit, for speaking privately and gently with an offender—in fact, that could be interpreted as colluding with the enemy.[6]

How will students fare who have been taught this bile? We don’t even need to guess, just observe:

Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and to cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people below the line are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Furthermore, there is no escaping the conclusion as to who the evil people are. The main axes of oppression usually point to one intersectional address: straight white males.

You've wondered why the "woke" can so easily label straight white folk as "Nazis"? Here's a clue right here. But even a non-straight can be in danger if they're part of the "power structure":

An illustration of this way of thinking happened at Brown University in November of 2015, when students stormed the president’s office and presented their list of demands to her and the provost (the chief academic officer, generally considered the second-highest post). At one point in the video of the confrontation, the provost, a white man, says, “Can we just have a conversation about—?” but he is interrupted by shouts of “No!” and students’ finger snaps. One protester offers this explanation for cutting him off: “The problem they are having is that heterosexual white males have always dominated the space.” The provost then points out that he himself is gay. The student stutters a bit but continues on, undeterred by the fact that Brown University was led by a woman and a gay man: “Well, homosexual … it doesn’t matter … white males are at the top of the hierarchy.”[7]

OBSERVE AGAIN THAT ALL the qualities chosen by the intersectionalists are, almost each and every one of them, something you have at birth, something about which you can do nothing, something which (in their own eyes) is considered to be a negative. There is not a single quality about which one can do anything, and almost none that have real existential import. In a very real sense, these identitarians are not just in revolt against reality, they are blind to genuine human values.

[T]he tribalists keep proclaiming that morality is an exclusively social phenomenon and that adherence to a tribe—any tribe—is the only way to keep men moral … [Yet their only moral] standard is “We’re good because it’s us.”[8]

For centuries, philosophers have identified morality as a science based on free will -- a field of study based on our ability to make choices, and to judge those choices against a given moral standard. But by this intellectual sleight of hand, your ability to make choices is considered irrelevant to whether your are good or bad. Your birth made you that way -- and the intersectional diagram will show you how.

The intersectionalists have chosen qualities, of course, that you cannot change -- and that, since only the un-privileged few who are victims are able to ever acquire -- are necessarily divisive. But one could just as easily, and with much more coherence, draw up a diagram of life-giving virtues which anyone (even the alleged victims) could choose; actions and behaviour that one could follow as a means to shake off their poor start in life, perhaps, and to pursue real, meaningful life-enhancing values – like those shown in Figure 4 below. But benevolent outcomes like individual growth, prosperity, success and happiness take individual effort, not group whinging – “his own happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it”[i] – and would hardly fuel the social unrest Marcuse and his followers are after. Indeed (if you recall) their system is designed to mitigate against these very things!

Happy, successful people don’t follow dictators. Victims do. And it is victims that these power-lusters hope to harvest.

Commenting on this phenomenon at its birth, many years ago, Ayn Rand observed that it marked an important transition in human affairs: the explicit emergence of what she called “the hatred of the good for being the good,” and the arrival on the scene of creatures dedicated only to destruction. She marked the 

virulent cases of hatred, masked as envy, for those who possess personal values or virtues: hatred for a man or woman because he or she is beautiful or intelligent or successful or honest or happy. In these cases, the creature has no desire and makes no effort to improve its appearance, to develop or use its intelligence, to struggle for success, to practice honesty, to be happy (nothing can make it happy). It knows that the disfigurement or mental collapse or the failure or the immorality or the misery of its victim would not endow it with his or her value. It does not desire the value: it desires the value’s destruction. (Emphasis in the original.) [9]

It represents not just a revolt against values, but against reality itself.

Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the “unfairness” of nature and volition, and to establish universal equality in fact—in defiance of facts. Since the Law of Identity[10] is impervious to human manipulation, it is the Law of Causality that they struggle to abrogate. Since personal attributes or virtues cannot be “redistributed,” they seek to deprive men of their consequences—of the rewards, the benefits, the achievements created by personal attributes and virtues.[11]

NOW, I BET MANY of you on the so-called "right' are reading all this while thinking smugly to yourself things like "those stupid Lefties," and  "at least I'm too smart to have fallen for all that crap." Well, tomorrow I'll explain to you why you're probably very wrong about that.

More on that tomorrow...

CONTINUED IN PART 6: 'The Right Adopts the Left's Love Child'

PART 3 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'

NOTES
[1] Haidt, Jonathan. The Coddling of the American Mind (pp. 67-68). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid (pp. 68-69). 

[3] As Hicks and others have noted, this form of measurement raises suffering and victimhood to a kind of moral high ground. It’s underlying ethic sets others above self, the weak above the strong, and elevates those who suffer most over those who avoid or diminish suffering. Indeed, it sets a group’s victim status as central to social virtue, and sets all rules in relation to their alleged suffering. The connection to so-called hate speech should be obvious. See on this the discussion between Yaron Brook, Onkhar Ghate and Greg Salmieri on Free Speech & Patreon, December 2018, https://www.blogtalkradio.com/yaronbrook/2018/12/23/yaron-brook-onkar-ghate-greg-salmieri-free-speech-patreon

[4] Gerson coined it for a 2002 George W. Bush speech to the NAACP, which concluded “No child in America should be segregated by low expectations, imprisoned by illiteracy, abandoned to frustration and the darkness of self-doubt."

[5] Haidt, Jonathan. The Coddling of the American Mind (p. 66). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[6] Ibid (p. 71).

[7] Ibid  (p. 70)

[8] Ayn Rand, ‘Selfishness Without a Self,’ collected in the book Philosophy: Who Needs it

[9] Ayn Rand, ‘The Age of Envy,’ (1971) collected in the book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 1971

[10] The ‘Law of Identity’ to which she refers is Aristotle’s philosophical law, not to be confused with the laws created by identity politics. It can be quickly summarised as: things are what they are.

[11] Ibid.

[i] Ayn Rand, on whose virtue schema this diagram is based, from ‘Galt’s Speech,’ collected in For the New Intellectual

IDENTITY POLITICS: PART 1 - By your ‘azza’ group shall ye be known.

Good to see one of the Blue Team explicitly pushing back against identity politics. A rare thing, but necessary -- and especially good, because he clearly states the cure: individualism.

What is identity politics [writes National's Simon O'Connor], and why does it matter to you?
Well, the first thing to understand about identity politics is that you don’t matter. All that matters is what group, or tribe, are you are part of:
Are you black or white, Māori or Pākehā; are you gay or straight, young or old – in the fact, there are so many various and possible group identities are almost endless.
What isn’t included is you – your life, your experiences, your thoughts, desires, or ambitions.
To embrace identity politics is to say that the group is always more important than the individual. And so, all that matters is that you fit into some sort of group, usually based on your race, or gender, or ethnicity....
At the heart of identity politics is the rejection of you as an individual. You are no more than the groups you are assigned to. And once in these groups, there is no hope, there is no redemption. Just perpetual victimhood and oppression.
We should reject identity politics and intersectionality and instead celebrate everyone for who they are in their own right. Martin Luther King’s words are truer than ever – let us judge people by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin. 

Right on!

So, since Labour-Lite are finally realising they're little more than just Labour-Without-the-Identity Politics -- and pushing back on it -- and we're entering an election year in which identity politics is already front and centre -- as many "adult human females" and "middle-class cis white boomer males" might already appreciate -- it seems like a good time to repost (in several parts) an excerpt from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

Today: What is Identity Politics?

“Cultural relativism began as an intellectual critique of Western thought but has now 

become an influential justification for one of the contemporary era’s most potent 

political forces. This is the revival of tribalism in thinking and politics.” 

~ Keith Windschuttle 

"If the west resorts to tribalism to defend civilisation, then 

civilisation is already irredeemably lost." 

~ Yaron Brook

[...]
This particular brand of nonsense comes under the bigger heading of “identity politics,” but it could just as easily, and more simply, be identified as the modern-day tribalism that it represents. It is a politics that identifies people by their group identity in order to effectively silence them – the Christchurch killings being a particularly gruesomely extreme example of what that can mean. Yet it's dangerous whichever side of the alleged political spectrum from which it emerges.

I’m going to start by talking about what this thing called identity politics is, where it came from, how it has morphed since – how identity politics has been used to shut down speech -- and what you can do to counter it.

PART 1: What is Identity Politics?

“We hear, since emancipation, much said by our modern coloured leaders 

in commendation of race pride, race love, race effort, race superiority, 

race men, and the like. One man is praised for being a race man and 

another is condemned for not being a race man. In all this talk of race, 

the motive may be good, but the method is bad. 

It is an effort to cast out Satan by Beelzebub.”

~ Frederick Douglass

I write this here today as a cisgendered, heterosexual white male[1]. So as everybody imbued with this notion would “know,” what I say here should only be taken seriously by other folk who share that identity. Because as “everybody knows,” your identity – your gender, your sexuality, your race, your class – these are the things that truly define you.

You speak “as a woman of colour.”

You speak “as a disabled lesbian.”

I speak, Galt forbid, “as a white man.”

In more-and-more meetings and debates in recent years, these words “as a/azza” have become not just the accepted way to begin speaking – like a reflexive cough at the start of every speech -- like some natty politically-correct version of reciting your whakapapa – but an implicit admission that one’s views will be irretrievably coloured (ahem), either positively or negatively, by the group of which one is an unchosen member.

American politician Ayanna Presley put it bluntly at progressive activists’ 2019 Netroots Convention, warning folk that only those raising the right voices, coming to the table “as a something,” were welcome there:

If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice. If you’re worried about being marginalised and stereotyped, please don’t even show up because we need you to represent that voice!

Ayanna Presley is black. Her call – “brown face, brown voice; black face, black voice” – is “the very essence of identity politics.” Yet only five decades before, in the vanguard of change (or so he hoped) Martin Luther King declared on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

"One day"? King’s day has still not come. Judged by contemporary cultural affairs, that blessed day may have to wait a few more decades yet.

The morality of identity politics can seem benign, when for instance the new Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle guest-edits Vogue [as she did back in 2019], choosing for its famous cover not the usual stylishly sleek model but instead a rainbow coalition of appropriately figured stars (Fig. 2).

The message behind her choice of cover stars was clear enough [argues the Spectator's Joanna Rossiter]: you are moral not because of what you do but because of who you are – be it female, transgender, black or freckled.

Yet that, right there, is the identitarian message: “you are moral not because of what you do but because of who you are.” Because of the group into which you fell accidentally at birth.

The group into which one falls may be defined by race. Or it may be by class, by ethnicity, by disability – by freckles – by hair colour (if you’re a ginger[2]) -- or by geographical area. The important thing here however is that while you may choose your ideas and your values, you did not choose your group.

(And everyone is treated in this ‘lowest-common-denominator’ way; as if this is all about you that really matters.)

And also, as you will no doubt have noticed by now, while all groups are allegedly equal, there will be implied a clear sense of victimhood making some groups more equal than others.

There are some groups, we see, whose speech should not be set free. ["Cis white males" and "adult human females" increasingly prominent among them.]

We’ll discuss this galloping inequality shortly. But the fact your defining group (or groups) is unchosen is important here. It’s important because it ignores, and makes un-important, every human being’s defining attribute: which is their reasoning power. This modern tribalism serves to remove reason from modern debate, and to elevate instead the trivial, the accidental, the irrational.

Philosopher Tara Smith insists that “it's not irrational by mistake …. It's brazenly irrational. It's irrational on principle. It is anti rational.”

Its view is: we don't need reason. I don’t respect it. I don't go by reason. I go by race, ethnicity, geography, et cetera. Solidarity with my group is more important than evidence or logic. Tribe over truth.
    It erases the individual. You personally do not matter. [What’s important is] you “as a woman.” Now, you’ve always got to be on the lookout for the “azzas” – “as a woman,” “as a gay woman,” “as a white male” … “Azza.” But notice that you, the individual, Thomas, Maria, … You're a token. You're one of them – of your “azza” group.

By your ‘azza’ group shall ye be known.

This in a nutshell is “identity politics.” It’s as if they think your gender, your sexuality, your race, your class are what determines your thought. And in fact, yes, this is precisely what “they” do think. Determinism is not dead, it has just shrivelled up and morphed its way into what’s now called “identity politics.”

CONTINUED IN PART 2: 'Determinism is not dead, it just smells that way'

[1] For those unaware of this nomenclature, “cisgendered” means “denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.”
[2] Tim Minchin, “Only a ginger can call a ginger ‘ginger’” – excerpt from ‘Prejudice’ (2009)

"Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths"

"There are at least two ways to explain why liberal girls became depressed faster than other groups at the exact time (around 2012) when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones and the girls joined Instagram en masse. The first and simplest explanation is that liberal girls simply used social media more than any other group.... But I think there’s more going on here ... there’s something about the messages liberal girls consume that is more damaging to mental health than those consumed by other groups.
 

   ""[T]een mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue... [but we can't ignore that] 'progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophising is a good way to get what they want'.... on the other side of the political spectrum, there was 'the most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of 4chan.' The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men ... The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred ...
    "The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence, while the young men on 4chan moved in the opposite direction: they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy..

 

   "... I think the messages young, liberal women are hearing (every day, around the clock) are doing them no good.
    "Seemingly learning to view every single interaction through an intersectionalist lens, while searching for the ways in which you're being victimised by everyone on the planet who disagrees with you, makes you depressed. Crazy.
    "The 4Chan backlash was always inevitable (and is equally self-pitying and responsibility-denying).
I really feel for kids today. Instinctively I know the answer is to retreat from it all and engage with the world in a more physical, productive way, but opportunities to do that are dwindling'....

    "Thinking of ourselves as oppressed or infirm may inadvertently cultivate what psychologists call an external locus of control. Locus of control is a psychological concept articulated in the 1950s by Julian Rotter. Those with an internal locus of control experience themselves as able to influence outcomes that affect them. Those with an external locus of control feel that most of what happens to them is beyond their ability to affect.

    "Though both external and internal loci of control confer advantages and disadvantages, research has shown that having an internal locus of control is associated with less stress and better health, whereas having an external locus of control is correlated with anxiety disorders. Importantly, an internal locus of control appears to be a decisive factor in determining whether one will be psychologically resilient. As a society, therefore, it is in our interest to cultivate an internal locus of control, and indeed, the popular notions of grit and mindset are undergirded by locus of control theory. However, some [online and educational] environments [have been] fostering its opposite.....

    "In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:
    "They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).
    "They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).
    "They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3)....

     "[And yet c]reating a society in which we are encouraged to confront anxiety and face difficult realities matters not just for the mental health of individuals, but also for our collective well-being. In the world that soon awaits us, humankind will desperately need those individuals willing to rise from their beds. The challenges that loom ahead will require us to set aside timidity, weakness, and victimhood and claim instead agency and boldness, no matter how grim the odds."

~ composite quote from Lisa Marchiano and her article 'Collision with Reality: What Depth Psychology Can Tell us About Victimhood Culture,' Jonathan Haidt, from his article 'Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest,' and comment by Ria Parkinson [hat tip Paul Litterick and Ria Parkinson]

"STEM, objectivity, rigour and replicability are not products of the West. Postmodernism and its latest incarnation 'Critical Social Justice,' however, are.

"It is absolutely essential that we make more people aware of this aspect of the 'Decolonise movement, in particular [i.e,, 'decolonising' science by 'problematising' rigour, objectivity and replicability]. 

    "I don’t think I have ever seen anything more imperialist than claiming STEM [the study, practice and artefacts of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics] to be white & Eurocentric. Complete ahistorical nonsense that can only be written by someone who has never had to try to work with the 'maths' that existed before Europe adopted Arab numerals and maths. As a late medievalist, let me inform you that trying to do maths working in 7s over 20s in Roman numerals as Europeans did before this is a primary reason for so many calculations of anything from that period being wrong.
    "Aside from it being factually wrong to claim STEM to be white & Western, it is an insult to all the doctors, scientists & engineers the Western world needs to recruit from Africa and Asia to keep those fields running. If all the Indian, Nigerian and Pakistani Brits left for their former homelands or that of their parents and grandparents, [Britain's] National Health Service (NHS) would collapse, engineering would struggle and we’d be much diminished in output in science more broadly. As I have had to point out to anybody insisting that my critiques of fields using the approaches of Critical Social Justice are just a way to attack the work of 'people of colour,' if that were actually my motivation, it would be medicine and technology I’d have to critique, not Critical Social Justice, as this is where black and brown Brits are most represented.
   "STEM, objectivity, rigour and replicability are not products of the West. Postmodernism and its latest incarnation 'Critical Social Justice,' however, are. If you want to ‘decolonise’ Western 'ways of knowing,' start by weeding out that one, not the development of science which has been a worldwide project for millennia, although Europe was a relative latecomer to it."

~ Helen Pluckrose, from her comment on Jerry Coyne's post 'Three authors “problematise” rigour, objectivity, replicability, and yes, all the aspects of “colonising and white Eurocentric science”'

"...to do absolutely nothing in life but complain about one’s victimhood."

"Think about the kind of person who would find Harry & Meghan interesting and enlightening. It must be the kind of person who sees it as the ideal to do absolutely nothing in life but complain about one’s victimhood. It’s literally all these former royalists do. It’s not a side activity. It’s their whole reason for living.
    "They complain. They already have a huge audience because of the very thing they decry daily — the largely unearned wealth and notoriety of the royal family. They hate the very idea of the royal family, and say so regularly. Yet they complain and whine that they’re not getting more money, visibility and power from the same royal family they regularly decry.
    "It strikes me: This is the very essence of the woke mentality — not politically, but deeper: culturally and psychologically. Harry and Meghan stand for all the things that wokesters want: Something for nothing. Not just economically (though money is definitely part of it); but psychologically, in terms of the unearned and unlimited visibility snowflakes everywhere yearn for."

~ Michael Hurd, from his post 'Harry & Meghan: A Couple About NOTHING' [emphasis in the original]

"The idea that the Europeans stole some land which had belonged in perpetuity to any one tribe is ludicrous."

"The idea that the Europeans stole some land which had belonged in perpetuity to any one tribe is therefore ludicrous. The situation in most of North America was similar to northern Europe on the eve of the Germanic migrations, or western Europe as the Celts were moving across the landscape. Precisely to whom the land belonged in any given century at these periods in history was anyone’s guess. The very notion of property is a Graeco-Roman invention which most cultures found foreign until quite recently. But Europeans of the time had little chance of grasping this difference. What the Europeans did in the New World was insert themselves into a fluid power struggle which had been ongoing for millennia. Many Native American chiefs were ready to pledge allegiance to the Great ‘Chief of the English’, as a political expedient, just as various English colonies sided with this or that Native American ‘Great Chief’. Despite a few sensational cases of duplicity, most of the time, Europeans tried to buy land from Indians, just like they would buy an acre of land in England. If the local chief assented to this and liked the price, where then was the crime? Many individual Europeans believed that according to the norms of both parties, they had legal usufruct to the land they were working. To judge this as theft is therefore anachronistic...
    "During the Cold War and the Gulf Wars, liberal historians called out excessive nationalism and jingoism, based on the legitimate fear that military types might start a war for no good reason... So there is always a place for liberal critique within history. But on this issue, it’s more difficult to see the value of Pilgrim-bashing to today’s Native Americans, apart from making them bitter and resentful, and everyone else feel guilty and ashamed.
    "​The real reason to perpetuate such a disastrously one-sided view, it seems, is if one is in a tiny minority of activists who has ‘drunk the kool-aid’ of Cultural Marxism — an ideology bent on bringing maximum embarrassment to Capitalism, Democracy, Western Civilisation and Europeans in general, in the vain hope that this will somehow bring about a sort of… what? Revolution? Really? Let’s not be naive. The only reason to be this consistently, this unreasonably angry about things which happened centuries ago, is if one sees the entirety of experience through the lens of perpetual racism and victimisation, and crucially, if one does not believe in the power of democracy to correct these wrongs....
    "It is high time that historians spoke out against the dangerous misuse of history which supports the zealotry and iconoclasm currently emanating from our educational systems. This has become far too culturally dominant, far too damaging to global society, for us to ignore it any further. In the name of science, fairness, level-headedness, humanity, and democracy itself." 

~ Historian Jeff Fynn-Paul, from his article  'The myth of the ‘stolen country’ '

The modern educational science of victimology

"The primary function of teachers today is no longer to be the transmitters of knowledge but to serve as agents of social and political change. This is what they are taught to be in the teacher-training institutions....
    "['Educators' there have] invested enormous time and resources in pushing the ideology and agenda of what is often called cultural Marxism and what is more narrowly known as 'Critical Theory' ... now dominated by two offshoots of Critical Theory known as Critical Gender Theory and Critical Race Theory. Developed in America’s [teachers colleges] and law schools, Critical Gender Theory and Critical Race Theory seek to deconstruct and reinvent all traditional gender categories and racial relationships. The primary delivery mechanism for inciting this social revolution is [the] government school system...
    "The principal aim of CT was and is, first, to deconstruct the forms of domination and hierarchy (i.e., the power relations) found in traditional or bourgeois societies, and, second, to reconstruct society toward what it calls 'real' or 'true' democracy, which is a neologism for socialism. Critical theory seeks to liberate any and all 'victim' groups based on their inferior and subjugated social status in capitalist societies (e.g., non-whites, women, and LGBTQ+ persons, etc.)....
    "The overweening goal of Critical Theory was and is the theoretical and practical delegitimisation of all Western moral, social, cultural, religious, legal, political, and economic institutions. Critical Theory is less a philosophy and more of a weapon used in a never-ending critique of Western civilisation. The point, however, was not to destroy the West’s institutions through armed revolution and violence as with traditional Marxist-Leninists but rather to infiltrate, undermine, and silently reconstruct those institutions from within. Eventually, the Frankfurters broadened the universal conflict from that between proletariat and bourgeoisie to oppressors (fill in the blank) and oppressed (fill in the blank)....
    "The specific political goal is to create a new class of the 'oppressed.' From this new class of victims will come the new revolutionaries who will keep the revolution alive and move it to the next stage of development. This is the ultimate means by which capitalism is to be dismantled and the State is to become the final arbiter of the principle, 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need'."

~ C. Bradley Thompson, from his recent series on Education: 'Sex and the Schools, or, an Easy You Don't Want to Read,' and 'Critical Race Theory and the Long March Through the Institutions'