How to Waste 10 Minutes on Victimization


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How to Waste 10 Minutes on Victimization

Got some time to kill?

Here's a 10 minute time waster from CNN:

http://youtu.be/JhW2LMcgw5M

The issue is a lady complained (in Time at that!) that white gay men were acting too much like black women who are victims. The white gay men are culture thieves and they should stop it.

Dear White Gays: Stop Stealing Black Female Culture by Sierra Mannie

And a white gay man responded black females don't get a monopoly on being a victim. Not to this white gay man.

Dear White Gays: Don’t Listen To Time Magazine by H. Alan Scott

Well, they finally did it. They showed the full circle of the collectivist argument when "the oppressed" embraces it literally. Mannie's claim about owning a slice of the culture and excluding others from participating in it sounds an awful lot like KKK arguments. Just switch around the black and white and that's what you get.

And Scott's argument shows how much a person claiming victimhood needs a vision with a horizon instead of bickering over who is the worse victim. His words sound more reasonable than Mannie's on the surface, but if you look deeper you see it's the same schtick Mannie is doing. He doesn't think the issue of mannerisms is a big deal, but he will defend his stake in victimhood to the death. He is not an oppressor and a thief, goddammit. He is the true victim!

The horizon insinuates the future. Victimization is always about the past. One can use the victimization story to destroy power and take goodies from the powerful, or one can use it to contrast against a beautiful vision on the horizon--to get people moving in that direction, so to speak.

So a victimization story is not bad per se. If used in conjunction with an attack or a vision, it is a mighty weapon. But victimization qua victimization?

That starts to sound like begging. And bickering.

The truth is misery may love company while the misery persists and is really bad, but when things start getting better, members of different victimized collectives do not become friends. They eat each other. They start scrambling and scratching and fighting over the goodies they didn't have when their respective classes were worse off.

God, that sounds terrible, but that's what I see. And I see worse.

To people like Mannie and Scott, their badge of victimhood is their claim to some of those goodies. That's why they need to protect their "property rights" to it in the culture. Of course, I use "property rights" metaphorically here.

Try to put Mannie and Scott alone together in a room for three hours and see what happens. At the end they would be at each other's throats like angry dogs. I have no doubt violence would take place, or maybe a food fight. :smile:

The world is seeing this and mocking. Here's a Twitchy curated Twitter feed talking about Don Lemon's hard-hitting journalism: ‘I’m not drunk enough’: ‘Hard hitting news’? This is CNN in one photo.

Someone should whisper the word individualism in their ears and tell them they can get a whole lot more goodies that way in addition to making more for everyone else...

Michael

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Someone should whisper the word individualism in their ears and tell them they can get a whole lot more goodies that way in addition to making more for everyone else...

But being an individual and working requires, well, work. Why work when you can bitch? You may argue that working provides more worthwhile rewards, but it's still work, and professional victims are averse to work.

This is what happens when being a victim becomes too profitable or, at least, not so bad.

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“If a small group of men were always regarded as guilty, in any clash with any other group, regardless of the issues or circumstances involved, would you call it persecution? If this group were always made to pay for the sins, errors, or failures of any other group, would you call that persecution? If this group had to live under a silent reign of terror, under special laws, from which all other groups were immune, laws which the accused could not grasp or define in advance and which the accuser could interpret in any way he pleased—would you call that persecution? If this group were penalized, not for its faults, but for its virtues, not for its incompetence, but for its ability, not for its failure, but for its achievements—would you call that persecution?

If your answer is “yes”—then ask yourself what sort of monstrous injustice you are condoning, supporting, or perpetrating. That group is the American businessman.

If you really want to be entertained, enter "persecuted minority" in your search engine.

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This kind of discussion is neither new nor surprising. Its basically the kind of crap which should've been made eternally unacceptable during the Sokal Affair, but unfortunately has experienced a resurgence now thanks to tons of "Social Justice" blogs on places like Tumblr (seriously, complaints about "cultural appropriation" from them ring rather hollow, since they APPROPRIATED the phrase "Social Justice" from the Old Left and now use it as the rebranding for what would have formerly been called "Political Correctness" - SJ is the new PC).

I think at one point in Galt's Speech, Rand said something about one's victimization becoming one's source of value in a world that adopted collectivism. The incentive is thus to be as oppressed and downtrodden as possible, to trade off one's wounds and one's victimhood. This practice is commonplace in "SJ" discussions, and when two people with different sets of victim-group identities conflict they will have huge spats (like the one MSK discusses here) over who has it worse. This practice is so prevalent that it even has a catchy nickname: "the Oppression Olympics."

The influx of "SJ" onto social media is IMO the perfect reason to avoid social media accounts entirely.

That said, in the context of this debate, Mr. Scott is clearly the more reasonable one.

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Andrew:

I maintain, and we have discussed this, that one of Ayn's top three impacting concepts for me, is the concept of the sanction of the victim.

That subtle consent that eats away at a persons integrity. Hank being the perfect example, as well as Cheryl.

Eddie is the peculiar character in Atlas and I am still unresolved about his character.

I think Eddie is representative of a lot of big "O" objectivists.

A...

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