This article might be the single most vapid thing I've read all day, and I just read a Bari Weiss article for context.
Author leans in quite heavily to his own bonafides... somehow able to rise from foster homes to the military to graduate from Yale.
Neato.
And then he gets REALLY basic shit wrong.
"Working class" does not mean "lower middle class white folks." Go ask 10 "working class" black folks whether this country is racist. Then ask them whether it occurs at all levels of the country. They don't even need to know what the term "systemic racism" is to be able to describe it to you.
"Defund the police" had a pretty fucking specific meaning. It meant removing all the military surplus gear from police organizations in an attempt to reduce the amount of machismo and brutality from LEOs. Nobody should ever feel safe around a person who barely graduated from high school and yet has the authority to brutalize you and legally steal your shit. Go ask people if they think body cams on cops are important.
Is it now a "luxury belief" for women to be afraid that they live in a state that might attempt to jail them for the crime of having a failed pregnancy, or is that an actual valid concern? Don't want to do that? Okay, then let's look at the number of OBGYNs who are choosing to leave states with oppressive anti-female laws because THEY don't want to be prosecuted for the crime of providing healthcare, and follow that up by examining the cities in places like Texas that want to prosecute women for using state highways to LEAVE the state in order to receive proper reproductive healthcare.
Luxury beliefs my ass. It's only a luxury in his mind because these things don't impact him.
Painting your ideological opponents as "elite" and "out of touch" is a political trick as old as time, it encourages the listener not to engage the subject purportedly supported by the elite, but instead dismiss it out of hand as something no regular man should even bother themselves with.
Bonus points for making them elites in academia who apparently do not know how the "real word" works.
It is actually a means of pivoting to a different subject, and the next step is to make the subject the person doing the pivoting, and from there to change the entire scope of the discussion to the interpersonal dynamics of the parties involved in the discussion.
On the left (whom I would count myself among, even if I would hardly pass a purity test) there are many ways to do this, the key to all of them being that there's not a serious attempt to engage with the substance of the matter but simply to use an intersecting contextual facet as a means to collect the focus away from the topic and toward the discussant. Racism is probably the most straightforward path, or at least the most well-traveled (of the two mentioned in this thread, it would outrank abortion by being more generally applicable across age groups sexes religions etc) it goes "this isn't about x, x is really about racism. Your position on x implies you might be a racist. That position is personally offensive to me, who is directly or indirectly affected by racism." Done. conversation is now about people, and specifically two individual people, and specifically about the unfalsifiable statements about the feelings of one or both, and this is where it ends.
The right wing version of this trick, at least in the US, is much clumsier and ham-fisted but follows from the same motivation to replace the confrontation with an idea with a personal confrontation, though unlike the progressives they have only managed to devise one or two lasting variations of this same discussion-jamming measure: the pedophilia track and the socialist / communist sympathizer track.
I'm at a loss as to how to even attempt to have conversations in public about anything that matters due to the ever-present danger of one of these tactics surfacing and rendering the entire effort pointless. Perhaps we need to revive IRL coffee shop culture of small close circle debate from the 1800s, or import something like it from wherever a form of it still exists, maybe morocco or turkey.
Exactly. They certainly are not luxuries, and to some extent they’re not even beliefs - they’re acknowledgments about the way the world works, about modern systemic factors that impact the lives of historically oppressed populations.
Just because someone doesn’t recognize a word, doesn’t mean it’s some rarified hoity toity elitist folly - it’s ignorance; a lack of education or opportunity, nothing more.
There is not a state that will jail women for a failed pregnancy. Thank you for contributing to the ever-fucked up and misinformed conversation about abortion.
none of your links give any cases where a woman was prosecuted or jailed for a failed pregnancy.
The links did cite cases where medical practitioners did not do their job because they were worried about the government.
Texas law specifically states that abortions in the case of risk to the mother are ok and the medical practitioners felt the language wasnt clear enough.
Author leans in quite heavily to his own bonafides... somehow able to rise from foster homes to the military to graduate from Yale.
Neato.
And then he gets REALLY basic shit wrong.
"Working class" does not mean "lower middle class white folks." Go ask 10 "working class" black folks whether this country is racist. Then ask them whether it occurs at all levels of the country. They don't even need to know what the term "systemic racism" is to be able to describe it to you.
"Defund the police" had a pretty fucking specific meaning. It meant removing all the military surplus gear from police organizations in an attempt to reduce the amount of machismo and brutality from LEOs. Nobody should ever feel safe around a person who barely graduated from high school and yet has the authority to brutalize you and legally steal your shit. Go ask people if they think body cams on cops are important.
Is it now a "luxury belief" for women to be afraid that they live in a state that might attempt to jail them for the crime of having a failed pregnancy, or is that an actual valid concern? Don't want to do that? Okay, then let's look at the number of OBGYNs who are choosing to leave states with oppressive anti-female laws because THEY don't want to be prosecuted for the crime of providing healthcare, and follow that up by examining the cities in places like Texas that want to prosecute women for using state highways to LEAVE the state in order to receive proper reproductive healthcare.
Luxury beliefs my ass. It's only a luxury in his mind because these things don't impact him.