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Notes -
Proportional, no?
That would give power to demographics in proportion to their population, no? My understanding is the intent is equality, not proportional power.
Never heard about affirmative action for males in areas where female representation was more than male, for example, in academia: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72. One would expect that if equality really held any value.
Not equality of number, but equality of power. My apologies, I should have specified. In reality I think it works out loosely to something like
(# of people in group1)X(avg power of people in group1)=(# of people in group 2)X(avg power of people in group2)
and so on for every demographic group and subgroup of people. Mind you it's normative rather than descriptive. This naturally results in the standard intersectionality ladder (hierarchy of oppression) that you can see in implementation when combined with intersectionality theory. Black women are both small in number and low in societal power, and so need an extra boost relative to proportional representation compared to white women, who are equal in size but smaller in power compared to white men. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, but we're lifting valleys here, not individual dirt flakes. We're flattening mountains, not flattening individual rocks Harrison Bergeron style.
Frankly I think it makes a lot more internal sense than a lot here give it credit for. Of course I'm sure the average White Christian man doesn't enjoy the idea of having the same amount of power at a group level as the average Roma woman, but hey, that's kind of the point.
Sorry, this still makes no sense. You just said no human can have power over another human. So what other kind of equality you are seeking, but zero power? If that were true, every progressive candidate would call for removing every state and governmental structure, and furthermore for abolishing all property and ownership in general. Not that it would help any. If I am stronger than you or more violent than you, I'd have power over you. In our society, you'd call the police if I threatened you, but police is power of one person over another, so you abolished it. And private security would allow one to exercise power over another, so you can't have any. So how would you prevent somebody stronger from exercising power over somebody weaker?
The answer is simple - you don't. That's exactly what is happening in many progressive-run zones - anarcho-tyranny. Under the pretense of equalization of power, there is absolutely brutal oppression hiding. Oppression that is random, chaotic and total - both law-abiding citizens and criminals are suffering (criminals get robbed and murdered too, of course). Except that since this oppression is condoned by the progressive regime - because if criminals are not punished, there's no oppression, right? - you are not allowed to talk about it anymore. Or, somehow in the society of equal power, you end up in jail.
Yes you will. You are not there yet, because the society is not ready to accept it. But you are getting there. Destroying the gifted education, for example, is classic Bergeron move. There are many other "progressive" moves that are not as blatant as binding dumbbells to people's legs or disfiguring their faces, but are even more detrimental to their lives in prosperity. "Harrison Bergeron style" is literally the only equality you could have, in your model.
I am not even sure what this means. So if I am a group of one, and I am compared to a group of a million people, I should have million votes? What does it mean "for every demographic group and subgroup of people"? People can belong to dozens or hundreds of demographic groups. Some groups could be tiny, and some could be enormous. It looks like the more you explain, the more nonsensical it gets.
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.
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).
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