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Notes -
Amusing to me that magicalkittycat got mass downvoted without substantial rebuttal to his post for expressing what I thought were very reasonable points, but also got an AAQC on the very same post. Not sure what so many people found so objectionable with the original post.
I generally don't downvote and don't like the downvote brigade, but it's not a very good post, and one of a pretty long series of not-very-good post of a similar type magicalkittycat makes. The "victimization crisis" is just unfounded Bulverism, the "presumably there should be mass desire for movement somewhere if we're fucking something up in a significant way and we just don't see it" is one in a long series of actively refusing to see the evidence in front of his own face, and it doesn't actually interact with the claims of the post it's reacting to so much as just pretend that they didn't real to start with.
Which is why he didn't get responses: there's not much point in trying to debate with someone who's just going to deny the potential relevance of any evidence (this is, afaict, the last time I did downvote him) or going to duck out the second his point is demonstrated as vacant.
Is it, though?
Peggy McIntosh's 1989 essay "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" is one of the most culturally influential reframings of victimhood in history. That same, year, Kimberle Crenshaw coined the use of "intersectionality" in a law review article (PDF warning) to make claims like
By 1993, the phrase "oppression Olympics" was in sufficiently wide use that it was referenced by feminists in terms of something to be avoided in favor of coalition building:
And that same year (1993), black Jewish philosopher Laurence Mordekhai Thomas published Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust, in which he (from the publisher's description) "denounces efforts to place the suffering of one group above the other." So it seems like people have definitely been noticing this approach to "victimization" for a while now.
I have written often and extensively on leftist identitarianism, and one of the things I've written on most frequently in this space is the emergence of right-wing identitarianism as a mistake made by ostensibly conservative people trying to use the weapons of the enemy and thus becoming the very thing they swore to destroy.
I would actually argue that there are some interesting features of normative ethical reasoning that explain "victim mentality," namely that we often do have genuinely good reason to prioritize those who are "worst off" (see Rawls or, you know, any medical triage process) and this incentivizes people to either disingenuously cast themselves as the "worst off," or to genuinely come to see themselves as the "worst off" even when that's not really a reasonable position to hold. So I don't think it's a new attitude, but I do think that in the last three or four decades we have granted a shocking degree of deference and, through it, political power to irrational individual claims concerning just how badly-off people actually are.
I think you can draw a direct causal line from there to, for example, here: "Universities from Harvard to Hampshire have admitted significantly more students with disabilities over the last decade, as diagnoses for A.D.H.D. and anxiety increase." "I did poorly because I didn't get the right accommodations, not becuase I never do the reading" has become the bane of many a college professor's pedagogical efforts, and it is just one small example of an observable trend.
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