When I hear someone (having, by their own description, a front-row seat for these events) reduce the civil-rights movement to this:
“What I saw was a number of bad laws called into question and ultimately removed by acts of courage and wise restraint on the part of the victims of those laws.”
…as though the white-supremacist, apartheid state that existed in the south at the time was nothing more than a few pesky laws that had all gotten cleared up by 1968, I have to seriously question that person’s powers of observation. It’s such an almost perverse misunderstanding of history that it has be deliberate, right? Any time someone starts out with a premise like, “the civil rights movement, like a spiritual oil spill, left a vast residue of guilt in its wake,” and then proceeds from there, you know it’s going to be a long read.
Sure, there’s an attempt to graft some sort of philosophical backbone to the piece through this (nonsensical) distinction he makes between “appeal[s] to conscience” and ”appeal[s] to guilt,” but it’s confusingly handled and doesn’t go anywhere. Mainly what stands out for me is the relentless lack of empathy that runs throughout this article, which is really more in the way of a rant the a serious argument, anyway.
I think there’s a philosophical and moral argument to be had about victimhood, and the problematic nature of it, but you need to argue honestly. One sentence after he glibly absolves the government of responsibility for the AIDS crisis, he says, “whereas once the idea was to shake off victimhood through courage and organization, nowadays the idea seems to be to enjoy it for its emotional effects,” as though ACT UP never existed. In other words, you can make an argument, but you don’t get to rewrite or erase history that’s inconvenient to your thesis, which he does consistently. It’s disappointing this made it to the front page of HN, it’s a pretty unpleasant, dishonest piece of writing.
This anti-victim view seems to ignore the fact that the actions were actually malicious on the part of the government and various citizens. Homophobia was not not just a legal accident, it involved intentional acts of cruelty. As a society we are very reluctant to acknowledge that fact, perhaps because it goes against the authoritarian leanings that have become so prevalent. It makes people question why government's should have the right to control people in such intimate ways.
Until we acknowledge this malice it is very difficult for people to really forgive the crimes committed against them. Especially when the perpetrators shrug of their acts in such a philosophical way. We will just commit the same crimes against other groups in the future because we haven't learned the lesson. When you hurt someone you must face your own failings head on and not just give excuses. Maybe then we can ask for forgiveness.
Did you have a "front row seat" to the civil rights movement, or were you exposed to it by a university professor? I ask because from your use of words and barely restrained anger it appears that you deem that era as some sort of holy crusade against evil. It may be that (i wasn't there) but as i study it more it feels as if the the disenfranchisement of black folks was used as a political motivation to exert state control over lifestyle choices. I know that that sentence is blasphemy at my university, but the truth has a delicious way of ignoring sentiment.
> Such a situation could never have come about without certain fundamental confusions having been firmly established, and these begin with language itself. Victims have traditionally been minority groups, but in fact women, who in the United States are a slight majority, have been deemed victims, whereas the Jews and the Chinese in America, though clearly minorities (and vastly less numerous than blacks or Hispanic people), are not usually counted as victims and thus rarely get included in affirmative action or other quota favoritism programs. A victim, then, is someone who insistently declares himself a victim.
I was just wondering about this last year. I still haven't had anybody explain it to me in a logically-consistent way. I think it's a fair ask.
I'm not sure that explains why Chinese immigrants would be portrayed as victims less than hispanic immigrants, as just one example off the top of my head.
> I'm not sure that explains why Chinese immigrants would be portrayed as victims less than hispanic immigrants
The question makes no sense - why expect all minority groups to be portrayed equally as victims in the first place?
Just because many victims are minorities doesn't mean that the latter implies the former. You might as well ask why Swedish immigrants aren't seen as victims - the obvious answer is, because being a minority isn't what makes someone be seen as a victim.
Just because many victims are minorities doesn't mean that the latter implies the former.
Exactly. It's clearly not correct at all.
It's almost like he knew that bit was a weak part of his argument, so surrounded it with examples which would put people into ideological mode instead of thinking for a moment about it.
The focus on "power" in late stage cultural marxisms is nonsense.
I am white. I can gurantee you white people are not acting in concert to achieve anything. The people are the top are fking everyone below them, regardless of race or creed.
Here in the South, there is this air of hospitality. But there is an irony because everyone always rejects each others volunteer assistance out of pride for their ability to take care of themselves. I see charity directed towards me almost as an insult, or subtle attempted ownership, and there is this competitive air about needing less than others.
But I suppose in more densely populated areas, there is more victimhood at play. This is an education problem, because these people were never raised to take care of themselves. Instead, they want to be owed something. This "something" usually comes in the form of tax handouts, and when it is distributed, I'm certain it is quite mismanaged. Think of all the impulse-buy items near checkouts that are purchased with food stamps, when these people could be combining this resource to buy in bulk and get much more out of it.
My mantra is to be a provider, not a consumer. It's not about how much you make, it's about what you choose to spend it on.
It seems like these types of problems can only exist when there are too many people living in close-proximity.
"The South" is neither morally superior, nor more independent/self-reliant, etc..
Guess which states get more than twice the taxes they pay to the federal government back? Alabama, Mississippi, New Mexico, and other rural southern states are taken the handouts from California and New York: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vby1dJlsXmM/VtkJnusdGXI/AAAAAAAAJ...
Guess which teenagers are incapable of not getting pregnant at 14? The southern, rural christians. Guess which states' citizen are dropping from Opiod addiction like flies? Again, the south (plus similarly rural Appalachia). Guess where food stamps are most used, where people are unable to control their eating and are morbidly obese, which people smoke more, where drunk driving is socially accepted, etc etc: the US South, and some rural northern states, are worse than the large cities in almost any measure you can think of.
I should not have said "everyone" or "always", and I agree with your first sentence - I do not wish for my statement to be seen as a declaration of superiority.
What I do wish to convey is my personal ideals, as a native of the region. I work for a rural ISP, and while there are some homes I enter that seem to validate these values, there are plenty that embody the statistics that you have linked.
Whenever I see these broken places, with all the evidence of obesity, addiction, smoking, drinking, etc that you have mentioned, I am bothered at how this came to be. Some of these people clearly do not care about anything more than having their working internet and Netflix (as well as the aforementioned vices) - trash all over the yards, cockroaches all around their networking gear, an abundance of unfinished projects, abandoned community gardens. Scatterbrained.
I want there to be order and community where it seems to be dissolving. This article caught my attention because I want to dissolve the crusade of victimhood that is growing like a tumor.
Notice it's been 4 days and he/she has yet to reply to us. There is no debate or conversation if there is no back&forth. We are not seeking interaction or exchanges - only to be heard.
The Internet enables quantity, not quality. Belittle some strangers, sit at the keyboard with a smug look, and possibly tell someone about it (with tongue, not fingers).
Routines like this for decades on end are what cause opioid, food, alcohol addiction, "etc etc".
It's more engaging to list problems instead of performing solutions?
Bear in mind this was written in the very same year that the same guy traded on his own "victimhood" after being fired from his 20yr job for writing a homophobic rant.
When these people complain about others being special snowflakes and expecting special treatment, what they really mean is that they deserve special treatment.
I have always thought this to be true. I find it ironic when whites complain about programs like affirmative action when through laws such as Jim Crow, Red Lineing, etc... they have been receiving affirmative action for hundreds of years. What whites are really saying when they speak out against programs like that is: "We deserve to be the only protected class of people".
> I find it ironic when whites complain ... they have been receiving affirmative action for hundreds of years.
There is a part in the article explaining how "they" who benefited from Jim Crow are not necessarily the same people as "they" who complain about being discriminated against. Not necessarily even descendants thereof.
Instead, you often get ironic situations like Jewish people who barely escaped Nazism while the rest of their families died in concentration camps, only to get yelled at for being white and allegedly benefiting from Jim Crow.
The number of parallels between now and 1989 are striking: victimhood == top social currency, etc... It really is almost like we have these 20-30 year social cycles... Perhaps this is known to the sociological literature - but that's not my area. Just the same I find it fascinating.
The pleasures of victim-hood include imbuing one's life with a sense of drama. The drama of daily life is greatly heightened if one feels that society is organized against one.
This is a hateful diatribe that only serves to show that today's mocking of calls for justice as "joyful victimhood" is not as new and creative as many seem to believe.
the "victim"-narrative is lazy yet insidious: because anyone mentioning a perceived wrong can be painted with the same non-argument, mocked, and ignored.
How are people like this author, bemoaning the loss of white male supremacy, never accused of playing the victim card? They are, after all, claim to somehow be personally harmed from the mere exposure to other people just mentioning poverty, discrimination, violence, etc.
Epstein's powerful prose captures well the New York intellectual views of a certain culture and a certain generation. It's a fascinating perspective on what people were thinking then. I was equally fascinated by the deep view of the popular psyche shown in his September 1970 essay for Harper's Magazine, featured on its cover ( https://harpers.org/archive/1970/09/homohetero/ ):
> Yet if heterosexual life has come to seem impossibly difficult, homosexual life still seems more nearly impossible. For to be a homosexual is to be hostage to a passion that automatically brings terrible pressures to bear on any man who lives with it: and these pressures, which only a few rare homosexuals are able to rise above with any success, can distort a man, can twist him, and always leave him defined by his sexual condition. The same, I think, cannot be said about heterosexuals. With the possible exception of prostitutes and heterosexuals driven by abnormal appetites, the general run of heterosexuals are not defined by their sexuality at all. Although the power of sex is never to be underrated, in the main for most heterosexuals sex beyond adolescence becomes a secondary matter, a pleasure most of the time, a problem only in its absence. Homosexuality, on the other hand, is a full-time matter, a human status—and that is the tyranny of it.
> …
> I am not about to go into a liberal homily here about the need for private acceptance of homosexuality, because, truth to tell, I have not privately accepted it myself—nor, I suspect am I soon likely to. In my liberal (or Liberal's) conscience, I prefer to believe that I have never done anything to harm any single homosexual, or in any way added to his pain; and it would be nice if I could get to my grave with this record intact. Yet I do not mistake my tolerance as complete. Although I have had pleasant dealings with homosexuals professionally, also unpleasant ones, I do not have any homosexuals among my close friends. If a close friend were to reveal himself to me as being a homosexual, I am very uncertain what my reaction would be—except to say that it would not be simple. I clearly do not consider a man's homosexuality, as certain ihomosexuals would argue, merely a matter of sexual preference on his part, something vestigial to him, but instead I think it goes deep within him, that it cannot but have affected him strenuously, making him either a stronger man or a weaker, a better man or a worse—whichever, at all events, an essentially different man than he would be if he were not a For this reason, and from an absolutely personal point of view, I consider it important o know whether a man I am dealing with is a homosexual or nut. Not long ago the BBC did a retrospective on the art of Sergei Diaghilev. Every aspect of Diaghilev's illustrious career was covered from every possible angle, when the last man to be interviewed for the show, an aged Russian homosexual who was a friend of Diaghilev's from the 1920s, said: "Ze ting you must remember about Servei vas dat he vas a very aggressive homosexual." I think anyone who would ignore a fact of this kind in intellectual criticism or in life, is a fool.
> If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth. I would do so because I think that it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure to those who are forced to live with it; because I think there is no resolution for this pain in our lifetime, only, for the overwhelming majority of homosexuals, more pain and various degrees of exacerbating adjustment; and because, wholly selfishly, I find myself completely incapable of coming to turns with it.
> …
> They are different front the rest of us. Homosexuals are different, moreover, in a way that cuts deeper than other kinds of human differences—religious, class, racial—in a way that is, somehow, more fundamental. Cursed without clear cause, afflicted without apparent cure, they are an affront to our rationality, living evidence of our despair of ever finding a sensible, an explainable, design to the world. One can tolerate homosexuality, a small enough price to be asked to pay for someone else's pain, but accepting it, really accepting it, is another thing altogether. I find I can accept it least of all when I look at my children. There is much my four sons can do in their lives that might cause me anguish, that might outrage me, that might make me ashamed of them and of myself as their father. But nothing they could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual. For then I should know them condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom among men, their lives, whatever adjustment they might make to their condition, to be lived out as part of the pain of the earth.
He seems to want to simply ignore the historical context in which homosexuals were "conflicted about" or "tortured by" their homosexuality. If society makes one's sexuality the defining aspect of one's personality by railing against it and excluding/tormenting/harming people based upon it, then of course it's going to result in psychological pain for those that are the subject of such treatment. He's completely mixing up cause and effect...
Dude is gay. No one is this tortured or obsessed unless they themselves are repressing their own - to use his revelatory and judgy phrase - “abnormal apetites”. How people can mistake this wordy tortured coming-out essay as “a credible view” is beyond strange.
Also his obsession with victim-shaming? He is a victim and won’t allow himself his victim feelings. The fact that this article was published in a major publication shows how problematic “real journalism” can be. That’s my main takeaway from the 3 paragraphs I could stomach.
Sure, but replace each instance of "homosexual" in the above with "person who does not want children" or "barren person" and see if you think that's why the author is distressed.
I love how he thinks that Israel bulldozing Palestinian neighborhoods and killing civilians doesn't count as oppression because there's more Arabs than Israelis in the general area.
I don't see how this can be called the most neutral explanation when it mentions nothing about how the UN considers Israel's occupation illegal or mentions anything about illegal settlements.
This is also not even the highest ranked answer from the question you linked from Quora.
You don't gain any ground by pointing out how long or how short the other user's account has been around.
> Do you always agree with every dictate of the UN?
This is irrelevant, unless you are trying to say that one either agrees with everything the UN says, or nothing. Clearly that is not the case; plenty of UN member nations consent on some issues, and dissent from others. The same can thus obviously be said of individual people. They don't have to agree with every dictate to agree with some of the conclusions of the body.
Like it or not, the UN reflects opinions from a substantial number of member nations, and it's hard to applaud any explanation that ignores the UN on an issue where they are, and have been, a centrally relevant party.
> Does objectivity always garner the most votes?
No, but you probably have to say more to justify a lower-approval response as the right answer to a question specifically seeking the most neutral explanation, than to simply say "this is the most objective one".
"You don't gain any ground by pointing out how long or how short the other user's account has been around."
You misjudge me. That was a sincere comment.
"They don't have to agree with every dictate to agree with some of the conclusions of the body."
Agreed; but then why bring the UN's decrees up at all? It'd be better to impartially argue why it is immoral instead of making an appeal to an authority that they themselves sometimes disagree with, no?
"[Y]ou probably have to say more to justify a lower-approval response as the right answer".
I picked it because it is verifiably neutral. My supposition is that the former attack on the account's partiality fails because the UN is neither always correct (as you agreed), and is most certainly not itself impartial (as I hope you would agree).
Mentioning that a biased party calls something illegal and that the truth is unpopular is a tangential response at best. What specific facts are being disputed?
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
Another thing that will get you banned here is using HN primarily for political or ideological battle. That's not what this site is for.
Edit: it turns out you've broken the guidelines so often and we've given you so many warnings that I've banned your account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
> Arabs like to say that there are two conflicting narratives of the conflict. The facts are far simpler.
I'm aware that the conflict is old and complicated and there are good and bad people on both sides, but by your own account, the basis of it is that Brits decided that a group of people scattered across the world all had a natural right to live in roughly the same place their ancestors came from 2000 years previous, regardless of the feelings of the people who were already living there.
And, granted, their neighbors could have reacted less violently. But it still doesn't make much sense to begin with. I can trace my ancestry to medieval Britain, and I might be able to figure out exactly where some of my ancestors lived, but that doesn't give me or anyone the right to evict the people living there now.
> [being given as a gift half of the country they had immigrated to] ... was a compromise that the Jews were willing to accept.
What's the "compromise" for the Jews exactly here? They had nothing, they got half of the country.
> This is the whole story in a nutshell.
Really, no. It forgets the illegal occupation of the West Bank, the ever expanding settlements, the unilateral and unrecognized annexation of Jerusalem, the de facto apartheid system in the Occupied Territories, the daily violence against Palestinians.
It does mention Israeli disengagement from Gaza though. Maybe other readers would be interested in knowing how many settlers were actually affected by the famous disengagement from Gaza: eight thousand. Increase in the settlers population in the West Bank since then: more than 150 thousand. Nice trick, huh?
Btw, for some reason on Quora I've found the most blatant and shameless pro-Israel propaganda, often presented with long historical perspectives that are strangely blind on some crucial details, like the one you pasted here. I wouldn't take my information from there on this subject (or actually, most subjects) to be fair.
You'd be aware the the Palestinian state doesn't claim the Golan Heights?
I think that Israel has lost a lot of moral authority in the years since the 1980s.
But I think in 1981 annexing the Golan was a defensible choice: the Syrians had constantly used them as place to launch artillery barrages against Israeli towns like Tiberius.
The 1980s (especially the early 80s) really were different: there were Arab states around Israel who would use their own armed forces to attack, and the PLO hadn't disavowed terrorism.
Now of course times have changes, and Israel no longer can claim that those threats, and settlements have made their problems worse. But Hamas and Hezbollah have capitalized on that, so.. there is plenty of blame to go around.
Look, I see that it's a relevant article today. But I don't think it's saying much, and it has a weird homophobic/racist current running through it. For example, Epstein mocks the idea that the US government exacerbated the AIDS crisis (which it clearly did.) He says slavery ended "more than a century" ago - slavery effectively continued several decades after the Thirteenth Amendment was passed.
Now, I don't like the idea of tearing down a good article just because the author is an asshole. But in this case, I think the article isn't very good, and the author also happens to be an asshole: this is the same guy that was "revolted" by the idea of "fags" (both his words, though he later switched to using "homosexuals".) The same guy that criticized people writing candidly about death, the same guy who constantly thought he was being hunted by "men with strange appetites, men whose minds were twisted". And the same guy who, upon learning an acquaintance was gay, was "angry at being victimized by his duplicity."
Oh, and the same guy who thought it was better for a gay man to commit suicide than act upon his unrealized gay desires. It'd be very interesting to read a good article on victimization from someone who isn't so horrible, though: it is an important topic, and there are many interesting things, which are frequently left unsaid, to be said about it.
Forget all of that even, there's plenty of places where the opinion piece collapses under simple faulty logic. Here's one example:
> Such a situation could never have come about without certain fundamental confusions having been firmly established, and these begin with language itself. Victims have traditionally been minority groups, but in fact women, who in the United States are a slight majority, have been deemed victims, whereas the Jews and the Chinese in America, though clearly minorities (and vastly less numerous than blacks or Hispanic people), are not usually counted as victims and thus rarely get included in affirmative action or other quota favoritism programs. A victim, then, is someone who insistently declares himself a victim.
There have been times and places in the history of the world where the majority of the people in certain places were outright slaves, including in the United States and especially in the Caribbean. And yet are we to believe that these powerless, enslaved people weren't victims simply because slavery was such a vast institution that there were more people suffering under if than committing it?
It varied dramatically by state; according to that census, Mississippi and South Carolina were both majority slave.
Certainly, the CSA was majority free, but I think that 'places'... 'including in the united states' is most correctly construed to mean that there were identifiable regions of the US that had more slaves than free people; I think states fit into the previous poster's use of "places"
You are correct in interpreting the use of the word "places" in my comment to refer to areas/regions that were smaller than "the entire Confederacy". It's also worth pointing out that most slaves didn't venture rather than some small number of miles from where they were born, so what was happening 1,000 miles away two states over wasn't relevant to their life in the slightest. What was happening in their county was relevant. And outside of the cities in the South, where the plantations were, most counties were majority enslaved.
This is true, but the numbers of people who owned slaves were vastly smaller.
Using Census data to research his book, Glatthaar calculated that 4.9 percent of people in the slaveholding states owned slaves, that 19.9 percent of family units in those states owned slaves, and that 24.9 percent of households owned slaves. (Households are a broader category than families.)
Mississippi and South Carolina had a population that was majority slaves, and several other states were close: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana. Everywhere outside of the cities in these states the population was majority enslaved. Source: http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html
As for the Caribbean, the % of the population that was enslaved was as high as 80% in some places.
He lost me when he lumped every non-Jewish group in the Middle East as "200 million Arabs" and equated it with the Palestinians; and tried to justify the mistreatment of Palestinian children. The organization Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence), founded by veterans from the Israeli Defense Forces, have also corroborated these accounts - not just western academics, international observers, and journalists.
It was more acceptable to be homophobic back then so you have to cut him a little slack. They wouldn't publish a new article like that today. There isn't some fundamental truth about good and bad things to write - it depends on how people judge you, which depends on the arbitrary changes in culture.
The same author in a 2015 article I linked to elsewhere in this discussion:
“In 1970, some 45 years ago, I wrote an essay in -Harper’s on the subject of homosexuality. The chief points of my essay were that no one had a true understanding of the origins of human homosexuality, that there was much false tolerance on the part of some people toward homosexuals; that for many reasons homosexuality could be a tough card to have drawn in life; and that given a choice, owing to the complications of homosexual life, most people would prefer their children to be heterosexual. Quotations from that essay today occupy the center of my Wikipedia entry. In every history of gay life in America the essay has a prominent place. When I write something controversial, this essay is brought up, usually by the same professional gay liberationists, to be used against me. That I am pleased the tolerance for homosexuality has widened in America and elsewhere, that in some respects my own aesthetic sensibility favors much homosexual artistic production (Cavafy, Proust, Auden), cuts neither ice nor slack. My only hope now is that, on my gravestone, the words Noted Homophobe aren’t carved.”
> It was more acceptable to be homophobic back then so you have to cut him a little slack.
No, I don't.
This guy was not writing from an era where homosexuality was hidden and secret and accurate information was impossible to find. By '89, the gay rights movement was in full swing. Any intelligent adult who was still ignorant about what it meant to be gay chose to be ignorant.
Maybe not, but that doesn't mean it's ok for you to make it worse. Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. That's an abuse of the site because it destroys the thing it's supposed to be for, and we ban accounts that do this, regardless of which politics they favor. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended if you want to keep commenting here.
“What I saw was a number of bad laws called into question and ultimately removed by acts of courage and wise restraint on the part of the victims of those laws.”
…as though the white-supremacist, apartheid state that existed in the south at the time was nothing more than a few pesky laws that had all gotten cleared up by 1968, I have to seriously question that person’s powers of observation. It’s such an almost perverse misunderstanding of history that it has be deliberate, right? Any time someone starts out with a premise like, “the civil rights movement, like a spiritual oil spill, left a vast residue of guilt in its wake,” and then proceeds from there, you know it’s going to be a long read.
Sure, there’s an attempt to graft some sort of philosophical backbone to the piece through this (nonsensical) distinction he makes between “appeal[s] to conscience” and ”appeal[s] to guilt,” but it’s confusingly handled and doesn’t go anywhere. Mainly what stands out for me is the relentless lack of empathy that runs throughout this article, which is really more in the way of a rant the a serious argument, anyway.
I think there’s a philosophical and moral argument to be had about victimhood, and the problematic nature of it, but you need to argue honestly. One sentence after he glibly absolves the government of responsibility for the AIDS crisis, he says, “whereas once the idea was to shake off victimhood through courage and organization, nowadays the idea seems to be to enjoy it for its emotional effects,” as though ACT UP never existed. In other words, you can make an argument, but you don’t get to rewrite or erase history that’s inconvenient to your thesis, which he does consistently. It’s disappointing this made it to the front page of HN, it’s a pretty unpleasant, dishonest piece of writing.