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Notes -
I mean I’m no progressive, so I’m not surprised I’m failing to explain it well.
But yeah, if you’re a group of one and compared to a group of a million, and you, by your nature, have about the same amount of power as one of those million people, then the progressive project requires giving you massively increased opportunities, respect, and voice. In reality it’s not going to go for a 1,000,000X boost, but the point is leveling things to the extent practicable. However, progressivism doesn’t really acknowledge the “minority of one” that libertarians do, so it’s a nonsense example. But yeah, if you’re part of an otherwise equal really small group, progressivism will probably try to give you a hand up relative to the big group. That seems obvious if you look around, given the prevailing idea of assisting “minorities”. Once you factor in that both power and number is considered it ends up being basically exactly the expected order of priority.
And yeah people belong to a lot of groups, and yes it is beneficial under progressivism to slot yourself into increasingly niche and powerless groups.
Your police comments don’t make much sense frankly. The point isn’t that no person should have power over another, it’s that no group (and there are a set number of defined groups that qualify here, not just drawing random lines) has any more power in society broadly than any other.
Doing that necessarily requires some people to have power over other people. It requires those who would naturally be on the bottom of society (or near it) to band together to exert power over those who would otherwise be more powerful. It is attempting to neutralize the dog-eat-dog state of nature where the most capable win and the least capable die.
It’s not a freedom-maximizing ideology obviously. The crime and such are certainly problems but that’s what happens when you advantage a small, weak group (mentally ill homeless) relative to a large powerful one (urban professionals).
Well, you literally said this: "that no person or demographic should have power over another." But if you admit it doesn't make sense, we can move on to this:
Where those groups come from? Why those groups and not others? Why shouldn't they have more power? If one group is a single man, and another group is a million women, why the latter shouldn't have more power? I don't think there is any sensical definition of "groups" and "power" that can make this not crazy. Even if we go just numerically - why 100 highly virtuous people, who had broad knowledge, exemplary behavior and excellent morals, should not have more power than 100 crazy drug addicted rapists with IQ of 72? I don't think anybody who is not hardcore anarchist, whatever party he is voting now, would sign up under them having the same power.
This is completely vacuous statement though. Of course if some people band together and exert power, the other people would be less powerful than if they didn't. That's just how "power" works, you don't need any ideology to realize that - just as you don't need any ideology to realize gravity exists.
In what way? What you described is just "we want to eat dog to, let's eat dog". I mean, fine, if it's about banding together to seize more power - that's natural, but then be open about it. And, incidentally, that's exactly how I described it initially.
Oh yeah my bad on the first point, typing on a phone leads to speaking loosely.
Yeah, defining groups is difficult, but not impossible. Cleave reality at the joints and all that. Race+gender+class+sexual orientation gets you most of the way there.
Power is just the answer to the question of who, in a contested matter, gets what they want. Given that progressives continually make efforts to allow the 72 IQ drug addled rapists what they want, and progressive politicians and prosecutors continue to get elected, I’d say you’re just factually wrong.
As to the banding together stuff: that’s not the main point here. Yes lots of ideologies band together to gain power. My point is that the progressive system makes it a moral imperative to do so specifically in the direction of lower power groups taking down those with more power.
Either way, I’m not sure this is really the place to answer all of the questions you listed. The literature on this topic is frankly more fleshed out than it should be, and it’s not all just gobbledygook. The only point I was trying to make is that progressivism, the ideology that has taken the world by storm and has millions of supporters who have restructured society in order to further its mission, is not nonsensical. Has some inaccuracies sure, like all ideologies do, but it would be insane to write off such a set of beliefs as incoherent without a serious attempt to understand.
So if I am a demi-quasi-three-spirit-furro-gnostic-quiddich-alloromantic-onmisexual (a sexual orientation that belongs to me and me alone), I should have exactly the same power as 7 billion or so straight people? I never knew I deserve so much power!
Nah, they don't even ask those what they want (not if they did they could have gotten any coherent answer anyway). They instead let them roam free and hurt other people if they like to, and then claim power for themselves in their name. Excluding Hunter, there aren't too many drug addicted derelicts in the corridors of power, at least not the open ones (and even Hunter mostly had the power as his dad's proxy). The progressives rule in their name. If you think that billions of dollars allocated for "homeless support NGOs" actually are distributed to the homeless, or the homeless have any say whatsoever in where and how much of that money is going, man I have news for you.
Again, close but wrong. The direction is progressive-aligned groups taking power from groups that are not progressive-aligned. It absolutely does not matter who had more or less power before. Did you see some progressive complain about women underrepresented in academia? Sure you did. Did you know that women are actually getting significantly more academic degrees than men, and it's not even close? Now, did you ever hear any progressive complain about that or do anything to fix it? Of course not. Because the direction is not towards equality, but towards more power to progressives. If it turns out that certain minority demographic tends to predominantly hold conservative views - the progressives instantly lose any interest in this group being represented or holding any power.
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My kids are mixed race. Do they count as my race for purposes of power, or their mom's, or "mixed race", or the particular combination of races? Does it matter whether they're half-and-half or 1/32 and 31/32?
How do we define race objectively to begin with? Cluster analysis at least sounds like a good idea, if we could do it without any subjective or arbitrary assumptions, except that that turns out to be mathematically impossible.
Do all 72 genders get equal representation? That page seems like it'd have to be a parody, but it was the top 1 Google result for "how many genders are there"! This is a bit of a political hot topic already; imagine how much hotter it would be if a determination of "you folks are all the same gender" gives the subjects a tenth as much political power as "you folks can be divided into these ten genders".
In my country (and, I thought, most of them) we haven't had any titular nobility or legal castes for quite a while if ever, and right now our best definition of "class" is a set of arbitrary numbers that vary from location to location and from time period to time period, a subjective partitioning of continuous data into discrete subsets, each of which necessarily end up with members which are much more similar to members of neighboring sets than to their own sets' medians. There are no joints here to cleave at!
Sexual orientation has the same problem as gender in terms of definition (if I'm attracted to ciswomen but not transwomen, is that the same orientation as someone attracted to both? as someone attracted to only particular subsets of ciswomen?) and most of the same problems of verification (my wife is pretty good evidence I'm not gay, but am I bi? Root through my history long enough and you'll find I've never dated a man, but that's just evidence, not proof).
And how many angels do fit on the head of a pin anyway?
You’re asking for incredibly detailed objective answers to questions that largely don’t have answers yet at too fine grained a level of detail. Race for instance is difficult to define, but very clearly exists. Class is very different than money, and your average joe can tell a low-class lottery winner from an old-money upper class fellow at a glance. There are many more joints in between.
I get your point about gender divisions. Yes, you can sort of gerrymander groups here, but because power is zero-sum it doesn’t make the 10 people more powerful. It does, on a personal level, incentivize maximizing the number of low-power groups you personally are considered a member of. This is what creates the “oppression Olympics” and is a well-recognized issue by the Progs.
The answer to all of these is roughly “based on who they consider their group, and whether that group considers them a member.” We don’t have to hash any of these out mathematically because we already do so socially quite effectively.
I mean could you actually pass as an Amerindian gay underclass transman? Maybe. Are you going to? Probably not. It’s just not that serious of an issue.
We aren’t organizing members of society in a lab here. It can be worked out heuristically like every other part of society and system of societal ranking.
Again, I’m anti-prog but these just aren’t good points of opposition.
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