Through my experience with Occupy, I have seen identity politics destroy a leftist movement from the inside. Within two weeks, there was a queer caucus that left the movement because people who...
Through my experience with Occupy, I have seen identity politics destroy a leftist movement from the inside. Within two weeks, there was a queer caucus that left the movement because people who presented as male were addressed with male pronouns when they did not want to be. I don't think it's reasonable to ask a group of people to throw off hundreds of years of social conditioning within a couple weekends. Despite some more socially conservative members, the group overall was radically inclusive, which resulted in its downfall when people with obvious mental illness were given a seat at the table and proceeded to disrupt any meaningful action.
On the other hand, any revolution that isn't informed by intersectionality is going to be as bad or worse than the system it replaces.
There's a tension between effectiveness and inclusiveness - the more voiced interests, the harder it is to maintain a strong coalition and clear strategy, but you always have to answer the...
There's a tension between effectiveness and inclusiveness - the more voiced interests, the harder it is to maintain a strong coalition and clear strategy, but you always have to answer the question, "effective for whom?".
Occupy didn't have clear strategy and goals to start with - that opens the gates to everyone trying to grab the wheel. If you start with a baseline economic goal, like "healthcare for all", there's less opportunity to argue about who "all" consists of.
There's also the requisite foundation of "don't be an asshole" - if you can't avoid trampling on others' rights to be heard, you don't get to keep your seat at the table until you can behave equitably.
Occupy started with 'get money out of politics' which is a very clear goal and not one most people could find cause to disagree with. If they'd have stuck to that, they might have been more effective.
Occupy started with 'get money out of politics' which is a very clear goal and not one most people could find cause to disagree with. If they'd have stuck to that, they might have been more effective.
Agreed. I think of Michael Walzer's idea of complex equality. The concept is that the world has all kinds of different people with different value systems, notions of what is good in life, and...
I'm not convinced that "capitalism" alone is the fundamental problem to be addressed.
Any concentration of power which can't be held to account and ignores human rights-based pluralism, wherever on the political and economic spectra that power is situated, is potentially dangerous.
Agreed. I think of Michael Walzer's idea of complex equality. The concept is that the world has all kinds of different people with different value systems, notions of what is good in life, and ideas about what things to prioritize where. The real problem of inequality comes not because some people have more of a thing than others, but because their control over one sphere enables them to dominate other, unrelated spheres.
The relevant bit with capitalism is that it generalizes the logic of capital (or business, if you prefer) and applies it to every context. So suddenly rich people get to control politicians because their dominance in business lets them dominate politics, even though the goals of politics are different from the goals of a profit-seeking business. They influence culture because they control the arts through funding streams, but the logic of business doesn't prioritize aesthetics and understanding the way most artistic people would like. They influence charity work because of their power as donors, and so on and so forth.
This whole problem smells like scope creep in programming. Developers start with the one goal, but keep changing and adding and refactoring so the entire project becomes a massive unmanageable,...
This whole problem smells like scope creep in programming. Developers start with the one goal, but keep changing and adding and refactoring so the entire project becomes a massive unmanageable, unfocused mess. The more people and ideas that get added, the harder it becomes to keep the project on track.
I think if a political movement is going to be successful, they need to stick to one thing at a time, and keep focused on it no matter the good intentions of all the people who want to improve and expand upon the movement. Someone has to tell those people to shut the fuck up, stay focused, and get behind the original goal for the good of the entire group. Get one thing done and only then move on to the next issue. Knock the dominoes down one at a time, and build a track record for success. The time to have the conversation about the next goal is after the first goal is accomplished - not every single day as a distraction while working towards the primary goal.
I often see people saying 'we can do both at the same time' or 'there's no reason not to try for everything' - and that's how these things end up with failure, every time. I find it depressingly hilarious. We can't do both at the same time, in fact, we can't even do one single thing well - so instead of doubling down on the original goal, let's add in ten more and spread our resources out even further while diluting the original message, whatever that was. This is insanity in the name of being 'inclusive' - so fuck inclusion. It reeks of kids with colorful toys that make them think they are special, no subject to basic lessons from history or psychology. We have better gadgets and communication, we can't lose! The invention of the internet has changed far less about the way the world works than we all like to admit.
I also find this resistance to choosing leaders we've seen to be rather hilarious. Lawmakers can't negotiate with a 'drum circle' or a zombie twitter hoard. Someone must speak for the group - that's how humans operate, and it isn't going to change no matter what technology we invent. A movement without leaders to speak for them is incomplete and will accomplish nothing. A group that is incapable of selecting worthy leaders will never be taken seriously.
Human organization does not scale well, and no existing technology has a solution to that problem. Federation has been around since day one of the internet, and yet here we are with all the same problems a half century later. This latest iteration of federated services may well succeed in decentralizing most of the common social media tools we use away from the control of large corporations (back to the way it was in the 70s-90s with nothing new/no real progress), but it will not magically solve our organizational shortcomings. The problems people blame corporations for in this context aren't caused by those corporations (except for some of the privacy issues) - they are caused because large groups of people always drift towards the worst behavior. Mobs have always done this. Digital mobs are no more intelligent or well organized or productive than their physical counterparts.
I see most of the identity politics themselves sabotaged by this behavior. Here's the simple truth: Gay people don't have rights. Women don't have rights. Black people don't have rights. Only a person has rights. That's the center. Deviate from this, and failure is guaranteed.
If I had my way I'd forbid legal text that mentioned people as anything other than a genderless pronoun, because the gender is irrelevant to the legal rights a person enjoys. A person can do anything to their body they like. A person can marry anyone they like. A person can dress and live however they like. A person has the right to equal pay. A person has the right to health care and paternity leave.
Gender and race are a distraction. Dragging the actual identity into this discussion of rights is confusing the entire issue to the detriment of every goal that identity politics is trying to accomplish. If there's a right out there that one group deserves, every other group deserves it too. Instead of spending all of our time arguing about which groups deserve which rights in which contexts, and making a mountain of confusing laws that are discriminatory by definition, we should be tallying up the rights every group deserves and making sure that every person out there gets them.
As for taking on capitalism - in the context of this discussion, it seems like cavemen talking about changing the moon's orbit. Identity politics is a fucking cakewalk compared to that ask. If it were me I'd roll up all of this madness into a 'new deal 2.0' and provide universal income, health care, and education along with the equal rights. Condense it all into one dignity/rights issue and ram it through as one proposal. That way every 'distraction' redirects back to the 'new deal' in the end.
This is a thread for continuation of an interesting off-topic discussion that sprang up here: https://tildes.net/~talk/9fs/what_will_happen_in_2019 @demifiend introduced this argument: Read the...
I expect a recession driven by the inability of corporations to continue servicing their debt. Working people will get shafted, the rich will get bailouts, and the left will still be more concerned with brown people and queers than with overthrowing capitalism.
Read the link for background on the subsequent discussion.
I'll take the soapbox for a while:
Identity politics, the focus on the personal and particular, arises when there are no common political solutions proposed for economic power imbalances by class, and gaps in human rights pluralism, that give rise to miseries (both political and economic) with impacts differentiated by social identity (race, gender, location, ethnicity, religion, etc.).
"Identity politics" has also become a media trope which distorts and obscures the solidarity interests of people opposing the problems caused by unrestrained capital.
[Full disclosure: I'm not convinced that "capitalism" alone is the fundamental problem to be addressed.
Any concentration of power which can't be held to account and ignores human rights-based pluralism, wherever on the political and economic spectra that power is situated, is potentially dangerous. It's just as unpleasant to live with a nonaccountable socialist dictatorship as feudal capitalism. Democracy and pluralism are essential, even if functional governance requires compromise on the economic front.]
My apologies for a long-winded and vague contribution; let the discussion resume.
While the data it relies on is out of date, I found this paper helpful in considering the positive role that identity politics can play. It's very U.S.-centric, but the "identity politics",...
While the data it relies on is out of date, I found this paper helpful in considering the positive role that identity politics can play. It's very U.S.-centric, but the "identity politics", "pluralist shared values", and "coalitions" framework is globally useful. I don't think anything happens in politics without coalition-building, even if there isn't a multi-party system to provide precisely labeled platforms that satisfy for what individual voters value or identify as.
I don't think it's possible to dismantle power hierarchies altogether. There are always going to be imbalances of power distribution, whether from wealth, territory, knowledge, charismatic leadership, gender, relative tribal size, colonial history, or anything else.
If you're worried about civilizational survival, justice, equity, wise resource use, minimization of unnecessary suffering, and all the other goods that can come from competent governance, you want to make sure that no imbalance is enduring and there's always a mechanism for change if the current governing hierarchies aren't functional. Democracy is one of the means for doing this, by decentralizing at least some power and using it to hold the rulers to account periodically.
That's not really how social issues work though. Most of these things are all interconnected, and accomplishing social change means getting buy in and acceptance from a broad social consensus....
Get one thing done and only then move on to the next issue.
That's not really how social issues work though. Most of these things are all interconnected, and accomplishing social change means getting buy in and acceptance from a broad social consensus. It's not like a machine that you tune, it's a variegated group of hearts and minds that need to change and learn to think/operate in a way that is new and different.
Making progress on one issue means framing it in a way that ties it to other issues. All of the positions on an issue should work in concert to form a cohesive ideology or conception of what is good.
If there's a right out there that one group deserves, every other group deserves it too. Instead of spending all of our time arguing about which groups deserve which rights in which contexts, and making a mountain of confusing laws that are discriminatory by definition, we should be tallying up the rights every group deserves and making sure that every person out there gets them.
Do men deserve the right to choose whether they can terminate their pregnancies or not? This makes no sense. We all have different social burdens and expectations put on us that derive from the bodies we inhabit. We fulfill different roles in society and our sense of rights and obligations are tuned based on the roles we play. Context matters, who you are and how you look matters. If your conception fo social progress doesn't involve creating a more just world for people along all axes I don't think you can expect anyone to really back you up. That's what solidarity is all about, standing or falling together. Not throwing allies under the bus because their concerns don't affect you.
Yes, it is. Everyone thinking social issues are some special exception to the simple vs complex dynamic is exactly why these movements get nowhere. You're never going to magically re-educate two...
That's not really how social issues work though.
Yes, it is. Everyone thinking social issues are some special exception to the simple vs complex dynamic is exactly why these movements get nowhere. You're never going to magically re-educate two hundred million voters or change their minds. You'll be lucky to get more than five minutes of their time. If you can't sell your position simply and directly in those five minutes, they'll change the channel. That's the world we live in. They won't read a ten page sermon on identity politics. They won't bother expending effort to learn about anything complex unless it's a hobby, job, or something that impacts their day to day lives.
When a movement accepts these limitations and learns to work within them, they'll have a shot at being heard and making changes. If they sit around complaining about unfairness and how complicated everything is, they'll be ignored.
Do men deserve the right to choose whether they can terminate their pregnancies or not?
Your mistake here is in phrasing the rights in any way that they mention pregnancy (or color, or gender, or age, or anything else). A person has the right to do what they like with their body, and that's that. This simple right covers all forms of pregnancy, all forms of gender reassignment, all forms of drug use, and even assisted suicide - without dragging a shitload of unimportant exceptions and details into the issue, which will only be used to tear it down by people with agendas.
You say this with no citation or even argument in support of it in spite of the fact that there are literally multiple entire academic disciplines dedicated specifically to understanding social...
Everyone thinking social issues are some special exception to the simple vs complex dynamic is exactly why these movements get nowhere.
You say this with no citation or even argument in support of it in spite of the fact that there are literally multiple entire academic disciplines dedicated specifically to understanding social issues and how they work. Your statement here is just plain wrong. What you're talking about doesn't even neatly apply to programming in all cases. In many respects, some problems actually are just irreducibly complex, deeply interlinked, and can't be broken down neatly into bite-sized tasks.
If they sit around complaining about unfairness
How exactly do you propose people fix unfairness without identifying any sources of unfairness as a problem to fix?
You're never going to magically re-educate two hundred million voters or change their minds. You'll be lucky to get more than five minutes of their time. If you can't sell your position simply and directly in those five minutes, they'll change the channel.
We're not talking about consumer product campaigns here. We're talking about social mores. You think MLK gave speeches in 5 minute increments?
A person has the right to do what they like with their body, and that's that.
Then how come prisoners are confined? How come kids are forced to go to school? How come Tyson's can force you to stand at an assembly line until your bathroom break is up?
without dragging a shitload of unimportant exceptions and details into the issue, which will only be used to tear it down by people with agendas
This line of argument you're using always boils down to the same thing. You get to decide what rules and exceptions are important or unimportant based on whatever subjective preferences or sympathies you have, and then you just decide for everyone that your intuitions about what's important is the objectively true belief while everyone else is dumb and wrong. You're not going to have much luck changing anything or building any sort of movement with that approach, and it should be very obvious, almost tautological as to why.
The Bolsheviks came with the same attitude in the Russian Revolution and basically the day their grip on power was uncontested the first thing they did was disempower the worker's councils and kill or gulag adherents of every flavor of socialism who wasn't a hardline Marxist-Leninist. People have good reason to be suspicious of class reductionism. It's just another kind of totalizing, supremacist ideology.
Funny, I thought we were talking about politics here. A warehouse full of data on social issues and dynamics still has to fit into a five minute stump speech, and still has to get people on board....
You say this with no citation or even argument in support of it in spite of the fact that there are literally multiple entire academic disciplines dedicated specifically to understanding social issues and how they work. Your statement here is just plain wrong.
Funny, I thought we were talking about politics here. A warehouse full of data on social issues and dynamics still has to fit into a five minute stump speech, and still has to get people on board. MLK could and absolutely did give five minute speeches. He was also a highly articulate charismatic person who was widely recognized as a leader. If you want to see real progress on social issues, finding a MLK for the modern identity politics movement is a fantastic way to make real progress.
Then how come prisoners are confined? How come kids are forced to go to school? How come Tyson's can force you to stand at an assembly line until your bathroom break is up?
Because you aren't the only person who has rights. Prisoners violated someone else's rights, which resulted in their own being curtailed. Kids have a limited subset of rights usually superseded by their parents, due to their natural lack of knowledge and inability to function as independent self-sufficient members of society. You're free to walk off Tyson's line at any time - just quit the job.
You get to decide what rules and exceptions are important or unimportant based on whatever subjective preferences or sympathies you have, and then you just decide for yourself that your intuitions about what's important is the objectively true belief while everyone else is dumb and wrong.
You must have missed this part of my earlier post, then.
Instead of spending all of our time arguing about which groups deserve which rights in which contexts, and making a mountain of confusing laws that are discriminatory by definition, we should be tallying up the rights every group deserves and making sure that every person out there gets them.
The correct way to do this is to get a nice big pot, get everyone out there to throw all of the rights they think they deserve in, and then boil it all down until it's simple, basic, effective, and apply it to everyone. Any other method will, as you say, just lead to one group running roughshod over another in some way. Limiting the language used to 'a person' rather than alphabet soup is just one more method to make sure that sort of thing doesn't happen.
It's not even really clear what your point is anymore. Identity politics is bad unless a charismatic person advocates for it? What's more, this take is ahistorical. Moderates in MLK's day spoke of...
Funny, I thought we were talking about politics here. A warehouse full of data on social issues and dynamics still has to fit into a five minute stump speech, and still has to get people on board. MLK could and absolutely did give five minute speeches. He was also a highly articulate charismatic person who was widely recognized as a leader. If you want to see real progress on social issues, finding a MLK for the modern identity politics movement is a fantastic way to make real progress.
It's not even really clear what your point is anymore. Identity politics is bad unless a charismatic person advocates for it?
What's more, this take is ahistorical. Moderates in MLK's day spoke of him in exactly the terms you're using for "identity politics" now. Silent Spring was a hit and the country was embroiled in the Vietnam War. You organize by getting people involved based on the issues that concern them, and then connecting their own struggles with the broader struggle for justice for everyone. Not by browbeating them with an old-man-yelling-at-cloud routine about how they're stupid for caring about the things that affect them, and they should actually care about the things you want first before their concerns get addressed.
How do you think the right wing manages to get people who come in caring about guns or abortion to suddenly coming out with really strong opinions about capital gains and the estate tax? Politics is about organizing power and building networks of solidarity.
Because you aren't the only person who has rights. Prisoners violated someone else's rights, which resulted in their own being curtailed. Kids have a limited subset of rights usually superseded by their parents, due to their natural lack of knowledge and inability to function as independent self-sufficient members of society. You're free to walk off Tyson's line at any time - just quit the job.
Sounds like a lot of special pleading you wind up having to do the minute I bring up any complexity. Good luck fitting this manifesto into a 5 minute stump speech. It turns out, when you can beg the question and ignore all the nuance and complexities of an issue you get to be pithy. But that's not how the world actually works.
You must have missed this part of my earlier post, then.
The correct way to do this is to get a nice big pot, get everyone out there to throw all of the rights they think they deserve in, and then boil it all down until it's simple, basic, effective, and apply it to everyone.
No I didn't miss it, this is just a subjective, aesthetic preference pretending to be objective.
If you want programmer analogies, this is equivalent to a PM coming into a project late and saying "It's just a simple ____ how hard could it be?"
Deciding on the reasonable balance between rights, entitlements, and obligations for everyone is literally the central concern of politics in a democratic system. You can't just wish away all the political matters from the political discourse. That's just magical thinking/utopianism.
I thought my take was pretty clear - I find the identity politics movement to be a noisy, confused, and largely disorganized mess - just like every 'online' campaign, and mostly done in by their...
I thought my take was pretty clear - I find the identity politics movement to be a noisy, confused, and largely disorganized mess - just like every 'online' campaign, and mostly done in by their own infighting, like the endless arguments about the correct five letter acronyms. At least we've elected a few members of congress and governors now, so it's making some progress and gaining voices. I chalk that up more to republicans tripling down on hate and crazy than I do to any grand strategy, though.
No I didn't miss it, this is just a subjective, aesthetic preference pretending to be objective.
Really? Asking everyone and then discovering the consensus we can agree to live by based on those results is subjective to you? I'd love to hear your more objective methodology.
I think giving everyone 'the right to do as they want with their bodies' is a better way to get there than demanding three or more bathrooms in every establishment. Everyone can get behind that right, not just certain groups, and it solves many other issues as well, which will build a much larger coalition and bring far more people on board. You seem to take issue with that right - is it just because the language isn't phrased to give special consideration to certain groups?
That's all politics, of any kind, anywhere. This is the reality of mass movements. There isn't one. You're dealing with people and their wants and desires, which is inherently subjective. This is...
I find the identity politics movement to be a noisy, confused, and largely disorganized mess
That's all politics, of any kind, anywhere. This is the reality of mass movements.
Really? Asking everyone and then discovering the consensus we can agree to live by based on those results is subjective to you? I'd love to hear your more objective methodology.
There isn't one. You're dealing with people and their wants and desires, which is inherently subjective. This is why it makes no sense to just pretend you can pull out an objectively true methodology to apply on behalf of everyone. That's exactly why totalizing ideologies always degenerate into barbarism.
I think giving everyone 'the right to do as they want with their bodies' is a better way to get there than demanding three or more bathrooms in every establishment.
Rights don't mean anything without practical enforcement and support. Everyone can get behind everything if you promise benefits and no actual work. That's not how the real world works though. Sometimes some people need to give things up.
Whilst I generally agree with your stance in this topic I think you are rather glossing over the fact that there are hard problems. Some situations where different identities (especially...
Whilst I generally agree with your stance in this topic I think you are rather glossing over the fact that there are hard problems. Some situations where different identities (especially biological gender identities) will be treated differently by the law and exactly where lines are drawn will be contentious.
For example child support, it seems uncontentious that a partner who enthusiastically has children and then later changes their mind, abandons their family and forces their ex-partner to raise the children alone should pay to help financially support these children.
It also seems uncontentious that a rape victim (perhaps a minor) who's rapist ends up with custody not be expected to financially support the children.
So clearly between these two somewhat contrived examples there is a line, on one side child support must be paid on the other it must not. Where is the line drawn? This is clearly going to be contentious. Any trite gender neutral rule you can invent will outrage some section of the population who will fill in their genders as the victim in the above scenarios and then feel their treatment is unfair.
As a result of these sorts of issues I can understand that people view identity politics as necessary. Although I personally view it as misguided. Perhaps even maliciously guided since it looks very much what I'd expect COINTELPRO to look like in the modern age.
I'll also note that in politics, nothing is ever "done". The current attempts in the U.S. to legislatively and judicially roll back 150+ years of progress (federalism, labor law, social welfare,...
I'll also note that in politics, nothing is ever "done". The current attempts in the U.S. to legislatively and judicially roll back 150+ years of progress (federalism, labor law, social welfare, voting rights, regulated commerce and banking, environmental preservation, to name a few items) should be proof enough of that.
And that dirty work has been accomplished by changing the values of the electorate, through media manipulation and strategic economic stress ["disaster capitalism"] which amplify generalized fear and distrust.
Fighting back requires rebuilding the lost trust among interest groups, whether they stratify by identity or shared values. So you choose unifying issues and make sure the disadvantaged identities aren't left behind. One of the major reasons why socialism and syndicalism never succeeded in the U.S. was that racism was successfully used to sabotage solidarity. Real women's rights (e.g. the Equal Rights Amendment) lost out because of LGBTQ and racial exclusions.
Through my experience with Occupy, I have seen identity politics destroy a leftist movement from the inside. Within two weeks, there was a queer caucus that left the movement because people who presented as male were addressed with male pronouns when they did not want to be. I don't think it's reasonable to ask a group of people to throw off hundreds of years of social conditioning within a couple weekends. Despite some more socially conservative members, the group overall was radically inclusive, which resulted in its downfall when people with obvious mental illness were given a seat at the table and proceeded to disrupt any meaningful action.
On the other hand, any revolution that isn't informed by intersectionality is going to be as bad or worse than the system it replaces.
There's a tension between effectiveness and inclusiveness - the more voiced interests, the harder it is to maintain a strong coalition and clear strategy, but you always have to answer the question, "effective for whom?".
Occupy didn't have clear strategy and goals to start with - that opens the gates to everyone trying to grab the wheel. If you start with a baseline economic goal, like "healthcare for all", there's less opportunity to argue about who "all" consists of.
There's also the requisite foundation of "don't be an asshole" - if you can't avoid trampling on others' rights to be heard, you don't get to keep your seat at the table until you can behave equitably.
Occupy started with 'get money out of politics' which is a very clear goal and not one most people could find cause to disagree with. If they'd have stuck to that, they might have been more effective.
Agreed. I think of Michael Walzer's idea of complex equality. The concept is that the world has all kinds of different people with different value systems, notions of what is good in life, and ideas about what things to prioritize where. The real problem of inequality comes not because some people have more of a thing than others, but because their control over one sphere enables them to dominate other, unrelated spheres.
The relevant bit with capitalism is that it generalizes the logic of capital (or business, if you prefer) and applies it to every context. So suddenly rich people get to control politicians because their dominance in business lets them dominate politics, even though the goals of politics are different from the goals of a profit-seeking business. They influence culture because they control the arts through funding streams, but the logic of business doesn't prioritize aesthetics and understanding the way most artistic people would like. They influence charity work because of their power as donors, and so on and so forth.
This whole problem smells like scope creep in programming. Developers start with the one goal, but keep changing and adding and refactoring so the entire project becomes a massive unmanageable, unfocused mess. The more people and ideas that get added, the harder it becomes to keep the project on track.
I think if a political movement is going to be successful, they need to stick to one thing at a time, and keep focused on it no matter the good intentions of all the people who want to improve and expand upon the movement. Someone has to tell those people to shut the fuck up, stay focused, and get behind the original goal for the good of the entire group. Get one thing done and only then move on to the next issue. Knock the dominoes down one at a time, and build a track record for success. The time to have the conversation about the next goal is after the first goal is accomplished - not every single day as a distraction while working towards the primary goal.
I often see people saying 'we can do both at the same time' or 'there's no reason not to try for everything' - and that's how these things end up with failure, every time. I find it depressingly hilarious. We can't do both at the same time, in fact, we can't even do one single thing well - so instead of doubling down on the original goal, let's add in ten more and spread our resources out even further while diluting the original message, whatever that was. This is insanity in the name of being 'inclusive' - so fuck inclusion. It reeks of kids with colorful toys that make them think they are special, no subject to basic lessons from history or psychology. We have better gadgets and communication, we can't lose! The invention of the internet has changed far less about the way the world works than we all like to admit.
I also find this resistance to choosing leaders we've seen to be rather hilarious. Lawmakers can't negotiate with a 'drum circle' or a zombie twitter hoard. Someone must speak for the group - that's how humans operate, and it isn't going to change no matter what technology we invent. A movement without leaders to speak for them is incomplete and will accomplish nothing. A group that is incapable of selecting worthy leaders will never be taken seriously.
Human organization does not scale well, and no existing technology has a solution to that problem. Federation has been around since day one of the internet, and yet here we are with all the same problems a half century later. This latest iteration of federated services may well succeed in decentralizing most of the common social media tools we use away from the control of large corporations (back to the way it was in the 70s-90s with nothing new/no real progress), but it will not magically solve our organizational shortcomings. The problems people blame corporations for in this context aren't caused by those corporations (except for some of the privacy issues) - they are caused because large groups of people always drift towards the worst behavior. Mobs have always done this. Digital mobs are no more intelligent or well organized or productive than their physical counterparts.
I see most of the identity politics themselves sabotaged by this behavior. Here's the simple truth: Gay people don't have rights. Women don't have rights. Black people don't have rights. Only a person has rights. That's the center. Deviate from this, and failure is guaranteed.
If I had my way I'd forbid legal text that mentioned people as anything other than a genderless pronoun, because the gender is irrelevant to the legal rights a person enjoys. A person can do anything to their body they like. A person can marry anyone they like. A person can dress and live however they like. A person has the right to equal pay. A person has the right to health care and paternity leave.
Gender and race are a distraction. Dragging the actual identity into this discussion of rights is confusing the entire issue to the detriment of every goal that identity politics is trying to accomplish. If there's a right out there that one group deserves, every other group deserves it too. Instead of spending all of our time arguing about which groups deserve which rights in which contexts, and making a mountain of confusing laws that are discriminatory by definition, we should be tallying up the rights every group deserves and making sure that every person out there gets them.
As for taking on capitalism - in the context of this discussion, it seems like cavemen talking about changing the moon's orbit. Identity politics is a fucking cakewalk compared to that ask. If it were me I'd roll up all of this madness into a 'new deal 2.0' and provide universal income, health care, and education along with the equal rights. Condense it all into one dignity/rights issue and ram it through as one proposal. That way every 'distraction' redirects back to the 'new deal' in the end.
This is a thread for continuation of an interesting off-topic discussion that sprang up here: https://tildes.net/~talk/9fs/what_will_happen_in_2019
@demifiend introduced this argument:
Read the link for background on the subsequent discussion.
I'll take the soapbox for a while:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/polarization-tribalism-the-conservative-movement-gop-threat-to-democracy.html
Increasing income inequality increases fragmentation of the opposition to concentrated wealth, both intentionally through media distortions and differential oppression, and through the tribalism of people who've lost trust in the authenticity, representativeness, and values of the political system.
"Identity politics" has also become a media trope which distorts and obscures the solidarity interests of people opposing the problems caused by unrestrained capital.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/identity-politics-gay-rights-neoliberalism-stonewall-feminism-race
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/08/opinion/political-polarization-trump.html
In Western nations, it's not an active goal of current public political parties, whatever interests they claim to represent, to control concentrations of nonaccountable power (private wealth; police, mercenary armies, and militias; religion; NGOs; broadcast media, ISPs, etc.). In the U.S. at least, the poles of public power are defined by the interests of wealthy whites, divided by left and right identities.
This is a significant problem in addressing the imbalance of economic power.
There are legitimate critiques of erasing identity interests under the guise of solidarity, but a functional approach means you have to take power before you can redistribute it.
[Full disclosure: I'm not convinced that "capitalism" alone is the fundamental problem to be addressed.
Any concentration of power which can't be held to account and ignores human rights-based pluralism, wherever on the political and economic spectra that power is situated, is potentially dangerous. It's just as unpleasant to live with a nonaccountable socialist dictatorship as feudal capitalism. Democracy and pluralism are essential, even if functional governance requires compromise on the economic front.]
My apologies for a long-winded and vague contribution; let the discussion resume.
While the data it relies on is out of date, I found this paper helpful in considering the positive role that identity politics can play. It's very U.S.-centric, but the "identity politics", "pluralist shared values", and "coalitions" framework is globally useful. I don't think anything happens in politics without coalition-building, even if there isn't a multi-party system to provide precisely labeled platforms that satisfy for what individual voters value or identify as.
I don't think it's possible to dismantle power hierarchies altogether. There are always going to be imbalances of power distribution, whether from wealth, territory, knowledge, charismatic leadership, gender, relative tribal size, colonial history, or anything else.
If you're worried about civilizational survival, justice, equity, wise resource use, minimization of unnecessary suffering, and all the other goods that can come from competent governance, you want to make sure that no imbalance is enduring and there's always a mechanism for change if the current governing hierarchies aren't functional. Democracy is one of the means for doing this, by decentralizing at least some power and using it to hold the rulers to account periodically.
That's not really how social issues work though. Most of these things are all interconnected, and accomplishing social change means getting buy in and acceptance from a broad social consensus. It's not like a machine that you tune, it's a variegated group of hearts and minds that need to change and learn to think/operate in a way that is new and different.
Making progress on one issue means framing it in a way that ties it to other issues. All of the positions on an issue should work in concert to form a cohesive ideology or conception of what is good.
Do men deserve the right to choose whether they can terminate their pregnancies or not? This makes no sense. We all have different social burdens and expectations put on us that derive from the bodies we inhabit. We fulfill different roles in society and our sense of rights and obligations are tuned based on the roles we play. Context matters, who you are and how you look matters. If your conception fo social progress doesn't involve creating a more just world for people along all axes I don't think you can expect anyone to really back you up. That's what solidarity is all about, standing or falling together. Not throwing allies under the bus because their concerns don't affect you.
Yes, it is. Everyone thinking social issues are some special exception to the simple vs complex dynamic is exactly why these movements get nowhere. You're never going to magically re-educate two hundred million voters or change their minds. You'll be lucky to get more than five minutes of their time. If you can't sell your position simply and directly in those five minutes, they'll change the channel. That's the world we live in. They won't read a ten page sermon on identity politics. They won't bother expending effort to learn about anything complex unless it's a hobby, job, or something that impacts their day to day lives.
When a movement accepts these limitations and learns to work within them, they'll have a shot at being heard and making changes. If they sit around complaining about unfairness and how complicated everything is, they'll be ignored.
Your mistake here is in phrasing the rights in any way that they mention pregnancy (or color, or gender, or age, or anything else). A person has the right to do what they like with their body, and that's that. This simple right covers all forms of pregnancy, all forms of gender reassignment, all forms of drug use, and even assisted suicide - without dragging a shitload of unimportant exceptions and details into the issue, which will only be used to tear it down by people with agendas.
You say this with no citation or even argument in support of it in spite of the fact that there are literally multiple entire academic disciplines dedicated specifically to understanding social issues and how they work. Your statement here is just plain wrong. What you're talking about doesn't even neatly apply to programming in all cases. In many respects, some problems actually are just irreducibly complex, deeply interlinked, and can't be broken down neatly into bite-sized tasks.
How exactly do you propose people fix unfairness without identifying any sources of unfairness as a problem to fix?
We're not talking about consumer product campaigns here. We're talking about social mores. You think MLK gave speeches in 5 minute increments?
Then how come prisoners are confined? How come kids are forced to go to school? How come Tyson's can force you to stand at an assembly line until your bathroom break is up?
This line of argument you're using always boils down to the same thing. You get to decide what rules and exceptions are important or unimportant based on whatever subjective preferences or sympathies you have, and then you just decide for everyone that your intuitions about what's important is the objectively true belief while everyone else is dumb and wrong. You're not going to have much luck changing anything or building any sort of movement with that approach, and it should be very obvious, almost tautological as to why.
The Bolsheviks came with the same attitude in the Russian Revolution and basically the day their grip on power was uncontested the first thing they did was disempower the worker's councils and kill or gulag adherents of every flavor of socialism who wasn't a hardline Marxist-Leninist. People have good reason to be suspicious of class reductionism. It's just another kind of totalizing, supremacist ideology.
Funny, I thought we were talking about politics here. A warehouse full of data on social issues and dynamics still has to fit into a five minute stump speech, and still has to get people on board. MLK could and absolutely did give five minute speeches. He was also a highly articulate charismatic person who was widely recognized as a leader. If you want to see real progress on social issues, finding a MLK for the modern identity politics movement is a fantastic way to make real progress.
Because you aren't the only person who has rights. Prisoners violated someone else's rights, which resulted in their own being curtailed. Kids have a limited subset of rights usually superseded by their parents, due to their natural lack of knowledge and inability to function as independent self-sufficient members of society. You're free to walk off Tyson's line at any time - just quit the job.
You must have missed this part of my earlier post, then.
The correct way to do this is to get a nice big pot, get everyone out there to throw all of the rights they think they deserve in, and then boil it all down until it's simple, basic, effective, and apply it to everyone. Any other method will, as you say, just lead to one group running roughshod over another in some way. Limiting the language used to 'a person' rather than alphabet soup is just one more method to make sure that sort of thing doesn't happen.
It's not even really clear what your point is anymore. Identity politics is bad unless a charismatic person advocates for it?
What's more, this take is ahistorical. Moderates in MLK's day spoke of him in exactly the terms you're using for "identity politics" now. Silent Spring was a hit and the country was embroiled in the Vietnam War. You organize by getting people involved based on the issues that concern them, and then connecting their own struggles with the broader struggle for justice for everyone. Not by browbeating them with an old-man-yelling-at-cloud routine about how they're stupid for caring about the things that affect them, and they should actually care about the things you want first before their concerns get addressed.
How do you think the right wing manages to get people who come in caring about guns or abortion to suddenly coming out with really strong opinions about capital gains and the estate tax? Politics is about organizing power and building networks of solidarity.
Sounds like a lot of special pleading you wind up having to do the minute I bring up any complexity. Good luck fitting this manifesto into a 5 minute stump speech. It turns out, when you can beg the question and ignore all the nuance and complexities of an issue you get to be pithy. But that's not how the world actually works.
No I didn't miss it, this is just a subjective, aesthetic preference pretending to be objective.
If you want programmer analogies, this is equivalent to a PM coming into a project late and saying "It's just a simple ____ how hard could it be?"
Deciding on the reasonable balance between rights, entitlements, and obligations for everyone is literally the central concern of politics in a democratic system. You can't just wish away all the political matters from the political discourse. That's just magical thinking/utopianism.
I thought my take was pretty clear - I find the identity politics movement to be a noisy, confused, and largely disorganized mess - just like every 'online' campaign, and mostly done in by their own infighting, like the endless arguments about the correct five letter acronyms. At least we've elected a few members of congress and governors now, so it's making some progress and gaining voices. I chalk that up more to republicans tripling down on hate and crazy than I do to any grand strategy, though.
Really? Asking everyone and then discovering the consensus we can agree to live by based on those results is subjective to you? I'd love to hear your more objective methodology.
I think giving everyone 'the right to do as they want with their bodies' is a better way to get there than demanding three or more bathrooms in every establishment. Everyone can get behind that right, not just certain groups, and it solves many other issues as well, which will build a much larger coalition and bring far more people on board. You seem to take issue with that right - is it just because the language isn't phrased to give special consideration to certain groups?
That's all politics, of any kind, anywhere. This is the reality of mass movements.
There isn't one. You're dealing with people and their wants and desires, which is inherently subjective. This is why it makes no sense to just pretend you can pull out an objectively true methodology to apply on behalf of everyone. That's exactly why totalizing ideologies always degenerate into barbarism.
Rights don't mean anything without practical enforcement and support. Everyone can get behind everything if you promise benefits and no actual work. That's not how the real world works though. Sometimes some people need to give things up.
Whilst I generally agree with your stance in this topic I think you are rather glossing over the fact that there are hard problems. Some situations where different identities (especially biological gender identities) will be treated differently by the law and exactly where lines are drawn will be contentious.
For example child support, it seems uncontentious that a partner who enthusiastically has children and then later changes their mind, abandons their family and forces their ex-partner to raise the children alone should pay to help financially support these children.
It also seems uncontentious that a rape victim (perhaps a minor) who's rapist ends up with custody not be expected to financially support the children.
So clearly between these two somewhat contrived examples there is a line, on one side child support must be paid on the other it must not. Where is the line drawn? This is clearly going to be contentious. Any trite gender neutral rule you can invent will outrage some section of the population who will fill in their genders as the victim in the above scenarios and then feel their treatment is unfair.
As a result of these sorts of issues I can understand that people view identity politics as necessary. Although I personally view it as misguided. Perhaps even maliciously guided since it looks very much what I'd expect COINTELPRO to look like in the modern age.
I'll also note that in politics, nothing is ever "done". The current attempts in the U.S. to legislatively and judicially roll back 150+ years of progress (federalism, labor law, social welfare, voting rights, regulated commerce and banking, environmental preservation, to name a few items) should be proof enough of that.
And that dirty work has been accomplished by changing the values of the electorate, through media manipulation and strategic economic stress ["disaster capitalism"] which amplify generalized fear and distrust.
Fighting back requires rebuilding the lost trust among interest groups, whether they stratify by identity or shared values. So you choose unifying issues and make sure the disadvantaged identities aren't left behind. One of the major reasons why socialism and syndicalism never succeeded in the U.S. was that racism was successfully used to sabotage solidarity. Real women's rights (e.g. the Equal Rights Amendment) lost out because of LGBTQ and racial exclusions.