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Home » The bigger picture: the ascendance of the post-modern left and the glorification of the “oppressed”

The bigger picture: the ascendance of the post-modern left and the glorification of the “oppressed”

The New Neo Posted on by

When I first became very active online, the search engine Google was rather new. I noticed quite early that, when I would be doing a search for content on Israel or Jews, the first page or two of results were viciously anti-Semitic and contained content that was based on Protocols-type lies as well as misrepresentations of the history of Israel and Palestine, or about hateful things Jews allegedly believed.

It was quite eye-opening. Apparently, anti-Semitic internet warriors were adept at gaming the early Google algorithm in order to flood the results lists. Google actually managed to change its algorithm and some of that volume of anti-Semitic content was damped down. But it was one of many lessons I learned about the power of the internet to spread hatred and lies of all kinds, not just anti-Jewish ones.

The internet has always been a double-edged sword. But the internet combined with the left’s ascendance in academia has created a fertile ground in which lies of all kinds can grow, and belief in such lies can become most common among the most highly educated. Then those people go out into the world and are influential in all sorts of institutions.

One of the tenets of leftism is the idea that the world divides neatly into oppressed and oppressor. You are one or the other, and there’s no escaping it. What’s more, the oppressed are defined as good no matter what their behavior; there are no objective standards for judging them except their defined status as oppressed. That is why we see it said that black people cannot be racists, even when they obviously are expressing hatred towards other races. That is why the George Floyd riots were perfectly okay and the J6 defendants were evil. That is why Nick Sandmann had a face so many wanted to punch, and his harassers were protected by the press and the left.

And of course that is why murderous savagery by Hamas is justified by virtue-signaling college students. Hamas is oppressed and Israelis are oppressors – or “colonialists” or “settlers” or whatever the term of art. That means Hamas can literally do no wrong.

Hamas leaders are well aware of this and exploit it. For example, here’s a recent pitch-perfect statement by a Hamas leader (safe in Qatar) that caters to the refined sensibilities of the Western postmodern left (“We are victims – everything we do is justified):

All of it is of a piece, and this message would fall on deaf ears without postmodern leftism and its oppressed/oppressor measure of morality. Once the “oppressed victim” mantle is bestowed, objective measures of humane behavior fly out the window. Hamas is well aware of that and is adept at exploiting it.

ADDENDUM: The White House proves it got the memo on the proper intersectionalist hierarchy of oppressed victims: see this on “Islamophobia.”

Comments

The bigger picture: the ascendance of the post-modern left and the glorification of the “oppressed” — 60 Comments

  2. Those who say that the “oppressed” can do no wrong, no matter how depraved their actions have declared themselves to be monstrous barbarians and must be expelled from civilization. Their sex, race, ethnicity and nationality are irrelevant, superseded by what they have embraced, simply a new iteration of the genocidal Nazis.

  3. a recent horror film, patient zero, revises the understanding of the zombies, the leader of these ghouls, played by stanley tucci is perfectly rational but soul less, he is questioned by matt smith,

  4. The Israeli Palestinian conflict boils down to a very simple contrast.

    Israel deeply and truly regrets every Palestinian child orphaned or killed.

    Palestinians celebrate the death of EVERY child. If an Israeli child, the Palestinian’s attitude is… they got what they deserved. If a Palestinian child, their ‘martyrdom’ is celebrated.

    Islam dictates that attitude. ‘Moderate’ Muslims who may claim to disagree, put the lie to that claim with their silence on the anonymous Internet. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the deluge of anonymous Muslim voices condemning Hamas for the beheading of babies.

    Which makes Islam a death cult.

    “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children,” she said. “But we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.” former Israeli PM Golda Meir

  5. With this Hamas leader’s prominence on TV and internet now, we can hope the Mossad are planning how to eliminate him.

  6. I believe that what we’re seeing on college campuses is not a “woke agenda” that can be somehow eliminated. It’s the product of forty years of thought, study, degree-granting, hiring decisions, tenure decisions and policy-making.

    It’s not a blight on American higher education. It IS American higher education.

  8. More than forty, Erasmus. It was like it is now in 1968, when I was a freshman, and had been for quite some time before that. The left dominated the liberal arts at the three (yes, three) universities I attended.

  10. IDF spox:

    We are not against the people of Gaza. They are not our enemy. Unfortunately, it is Hamas time and time again that puts the people at risk…

    The fact that Hamas was voted into power in Gaza is apparently not something that can be mentioned in a war context.

  12. I’ve been conservative/libertarian since I was young, so Churchill may have said I have no heart. In college I assumed I was headed for academia. I realized I needed to prepare for battle, and it made sense to me to “know your enemy”, so I took classes like “Soviet Style Economies” (I was an economics major), and read the philosophical “elite” of post-modernism like Foucault and Derrida.

    I think even the jaded conservatives here would be shocked at how brazen the post-modern philosophers were/are. The goal is Marxist revolution. The means are whatever works, and I mean anything. Deceit and lies aren’t forgiven, they are encouraged, in fact demanded. I respect the commenters here but I sometimes worry you have no idea what you’re up against.

    When engaged in argument or debate it is our nature to strive for clarity of reason, intellectual consistency, and the greatest logic we can muster. This, we assume, will produce the most effective means of persuasion. Our enemies care nothing of this. In fact, entire chapters from the aforementioned authors, have been devoted to how to use these instincts of yours against you! When you engage with the left, remember, you are never engaged in an honest conversation.

  13. Mike Plaiss:

    Actually, I think that at this point most people here are well aware of the left’s duplicity and willingness to stop at nothing. The question is what to do about it.

  14. I like Thomas Sowell’s diagnosis in A Conflict of Visions as people having either a vision of the world that is
    1. Constrained – “human nature is essentially unchanging and that man is naturally inherently self-interested, regardless of the best intentions. Those with a constrained vision prefer the systematic processes of the rule of law and experience of tradition” or
    2. Unconstrained – “human nature is essentially good…there is an ideal solution to every problem, and that compromise is never acceptable. Collateral damage is merely the price of moving forward on the road to perfection… “the self anointed.”…believe that there exists some people who are further along the path of moral development, have overcome self-interest and are immune to the influence of power and therefore can act as surrogate decision-makers for the rest of society.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conflict_of_Visions

    No one who takes seriously what the Bible says about mankind can hold to the unconstrained vision but leftists do.

    What to do about it is to change a person’s viewpoint from unconstrained to constrained, but as you’ve said in many ways, Neo, it’s exceedingly hard to change worldviews on an individual basis, and nigh impossible en masse.

  15. And it’s said among we Christians, “If you find the perfect church, don’t join it. It won’t be perfect anymore.”
    Leftists at heart are arrogant, thinking they’re cut from better cloth than the rest of mankind.

  16. And in regards to the internet, per the Babylon Bee, “We May Never Know Exactly What Hamas Wants’ Says Reporter In Front Of Hamas Holding ‘Exterminate Jews From Existence’ Banner” 🙁

  18. Neo:

    Withdrawal of major-donor gifting may work. It’s already happening, as we’ve seen over the past three weeks or so. It has probably been bandied about by some significant number of wealthy alumni for longer than that. I hope….

  19. Erasmus:

    Yes, it seems to help, but unfortunately the Ivies have endowments so enormous it really doesn’t affect them enough.

  20. I have been trying to resist visiting here to ask an old and stale question of Neo, which she has dealt with a number of times, but which is especially topical now.

    So, with what I hope is a descent respect for some of the rawest feelings to have been come to terms with, I would like to ask the obvious question:

    1. Have you had any recent interactions with your – let’s call them – luncheon circle?

    2. And if so, have you noticed any obvious changes in their attitudes or expressions of sociopolitical opinions?

    In an earlier posting you had Bari Weiss speaking of having been “mugged by reality”. I deliberately held my piece in that instance.

    But with the lapse of some time perhaps it is not too indelicate to ask with regard to some of the social contacts you have, if they have expressed similar, if inexcusably belated (and in my view ideologically self-excusing) sentiments.

    If this is too touchy a subject or just too wearisome a question, don’t feel any need to comment.

    Regards …

  21. Have I missed something? Was there an uprising in Gaza that escaped my notice? Last I noticed Hamas had overwhelming support in Gaza.

    We carpet bombed Germany. I may be off slightly, but not by much, but we bombed Japan 99.5 percent into the stone age. Feel free to quibble.

    I’m thinking some Muslims need a lesson.

  23. neo et al,

    Regarding “what to do about it.” Good people are doing good things.

    Jordan Peterson and others are holding their inaugural Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference as I write this.

    Ron Desantis is legislating mandatory civics classes in Florida and the Florida legislature has outlawed DEI in government, including schools.

    15 states now have school voucher programs and the list is growing.

    The University of Austin has been flooded with resumes from prospective staff and interested students.

    The Mike Rowe Works foundation gives millions in scholarships to youth to pursue careers in the trades.

    Peter Thiel gives $100,000 scholarships to young people who agree to forego College and pursue entrepreneurialism.

    To your point, what is also needed is for good people to stop abetting the bad. As you know, some major University donors have announced they are halting their funding based on campus antisemitism. We need A LOT more of this. Movements by alumni are probably the best chance to raise awareness and foster change.

  24. Hamas had overwhelming support in Gaza

    Perhaps. I don’t exactly doubt it, but be at least a bit suspicious of opinions expressed in a land where expressing certain opinions will get you and your family killed. Family first, of course.

  25. DNW:

    Two people I’ve spoken to have definitely had some sort of awakening. What it will translate to politically is anyone’s guess. I’ve only spoken to those two, however.

  26. David Bernstein had a post on 10/09 that dealt with the moral disconnect of the progressives, whatever its source might be.

    https://reason.com/volokh/2023/10/09/antizionists-show-their-genocidal-colors/

    There has been too much pointless debate over whether those who call for Israel’s destruction are necessarily antisemitic. The important point is that such people know that the end of Israel most likely means genocide for 7.5 million Israeli Jews, and they are okay with that.

    Whether they are motivated by Islamism, leftist bs “anticolonialism,” hostility to the West with Israel as their first target, or pure hatred of Jews is immaterial, it’s much worse than mere antisemitism. Most antisemites aren’t full-on Nazis, and as much as they dislike Jews would object to mass murder (just like most people who have racist opinions of black people would object to mass murder). The so-called antizionists do not, and therefore are much worse.

    It’s a weird tic of American progressivism to worry more about people’s expressed moral intentions than their actions, which explains why, for example, moderate liberals are more likely to ally with radical anti-liberal leftists than with moderate conservatives–they think the former but not the latter are “well-meaning.”) I really don’t care if someone doesn’t like Jews. But someone who claims and may sincerely think that they have nothing against Jews, but is content to see my friends and relatives in Israel murdered in the name of some idiotic ideology, that’s a real problem.

    Here’s a test, which in my experience almost all leftist “antizionists” fail. Most of them will claim that they have some solution in mind to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that will protect the rights of what would become the Jewish minority in an imagined future “Palestine.” So you ask them, “well, what if it turns out as a practical matter that your one-state solution, if implemented, will likely result in the murder/ expulsion/oppression of the 7.5 million Jews in Israel. Would you still support it?” This should be an easy question to answer, especially given that it’s a pure hypothetical, the answer to which could not be binding. I’ve asked this many times to “antizionists,” and I’ve never received an unequivocal “no.” They are ok with genocide.

  27. Dennis Prager goes for a simpler explanation of why young people can express so much hatred without any qualms; although post-modernism may be a small factor, the Left has a much more pragmatic purpose.

    https://jewishworldreview.com/0823/prager082923.php3

    Why Young Americans Are Not Taught about Evil
    Published August 29, 2023
    …
    When it comes to evil, the ignorance is enormous, often almost total. For example, according to Pew, about half of Americans ages 18-39 cannot identify Auschwitz or any other Nazi death camp. And there is every reason to assume that much fewer than half could identify the Gulag Archipelago (20 million-plus murdered); the Ukrainian forced famine (5 to 6 million murdered in a little over a year); Mao’s Great Leap Forward (about 60 million murdered); or Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (about one in every four Cambodians murdered).

    As noted, almost no one outside of Russia has ever heard of the Russian Civil War, let alone knows anything about it. One reason is that the winners, the communists, had no desire that people know about it. Yet, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, about 10 million people, the great majority noncombatants, were killed.

    Why don’t students know about evil?

    The first reason is that nearly all the genocides of the 20th century were committed by communists, and the Left, which runs virtually all educational institutions, has always had a soft spot for communism. If people were to recognize that communism has been the greatest source of evil in the modern age in terms of numbers murdered, number of lives destroyed, liberty stolen, and the sheer amount of human suffering inflicted (greater by those metrics than those of the Nazis before they were forcibly stopped), the Left would lose much of its appeal.

    Another reason is the foolish notion that people are basically good. This has been a left-wing belief since the French Enlightenment leader Jean-Jacques Rousseau came up with the idea. As he wrote in his book, “On Philosophy, Morality, and Religion,” “Man is a naturally good being, loving justice and order; there is no natural perversity in the human heart… All the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it.”
    …
    A third reason follows from the second. With the exception of the mass murder of the Armenians (which was committed by Muslim Turks), the genocides and the other horrors of the 20th century were committed by secular regimes. Given the centrality of secularism to leftism, this fact has been kept from young people. Likewise, the fact that all these genocides were committed by big governments is not taught to young people because big government is also central to left-wing ideology. In other words, a true depiction of the evils of the 20th century would mean the end of the two pillars of left-wing ideology: secularism and big government.
    …
    This is why young people know almost nothing about evil. The Left doesn’t want them to know about it. Because knowledge of evil inevitably leads directly to rejection of the Left.

    He should have addressed the genocides conducted in the name of Islam outside of Israel, which are religious, but almost nobody talks about those anyway.
    However, the Hamas attack has shown that his conclusion may be operating on many disillusioned leftist Jews. I do wonder, though, how many of them knew about the evils Prager lists and ignored those deaths up to now?

  28. More directly to Neo’s point:
    https://jewishworldreview.com/jeff/jacoby103023.php

    The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is intensely controversial and generates great emotion on both sides. But these assaults on the “Kidnapped” posters have nothing to do with the merits of the dispute. The sole purpose of the fliers is to emphasize the humanity of the innocent hostages seized by Hamas (many of whom, as it happens, were peace activists deeply committed to Arab-Israeli coexistence). What drives the people ripping down the posters or adding Hitler mustaches to the pictures is a pathological need to deny the humanity of those kidnapped Jews.

    A core principle of antisemites in all times and places is that Jews are not fully human and are never innocent. A thousand years ago, Jews were slaughtered by Crusaders for being satanic Christ-killers who consumed the blood of children; a century ago Hitler preached that they were subhumans who polluted the racial purity of Aryan Europe. Today the Jewish state is accused of committing the demonic crimes of genocide and apartheid. The poison never changes, only the vial it comes in.

    The “Kidnapped” fliers are intolerable to the haters because they so urgently challenge the antisemitic paradigm. They make it vividly clear that in the war between barbarism and civilization, between oppressor and oppressed, it is Jews who are under attack. That infuriates those whose worldview revolves around the certainty that Israel and its supporters are the victimizers. The outpouring of sympathy for Jews kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists — and the moral force of that sympathy — is anathema to them.

    That explains as well why the atrocities committed on Oct. 7 immediately triggered so many vehement public demonstrations in support of the Palestinians. Precisely because the massacre and abductions had been so unspeakably horrific, it was necessary to reinforce the narrative of Jewish villainy.

  29. Democrats?
    You can ALWAYS COUNT ON ‘EM….
    to lie and subvert, destroy and pervert…ALL THE TIME.
    ‘ Limousine Liberals: Many Dem Tax Policies That “Fight Inequality” Actually Help The Left’s Wealthy Voter Base”‘ —
    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/limousine-liberals-many-dem-tax-policies-fight-inequality-actually-help-lefts-wealthy-voter

    “Feds black out nearly all emails on who influenced proposal to ‘gut’ charter school program”—
    https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/feds-black-out-nearly-all-emails-who-influenced-proposal-gut-charter

  31. Should be mentioned—though the point already MUST HAVE BEEN MADE elsewhere—that the Nazis, with aspiring artist Herr Schicklgruber at their leading edge—were absolutely convinced that Germany was chiefly THE VICTIM, par excellence, of International Jewry (assisted by the Allied governments of WWI)….

    File under: Proud—and determined—victims!

  32. The article on islamophobia is amusing. A phobia is an irrational fear. If you have so called islamophobia, you are not irrational, you are just observant and reaching logical, rational conclusions.

  33. Pingback:Instapundit » Blog Archive » NEO: The bigger picture: the ascendance of the post-modern left and the glorification of the “oppr

  34. Anecdotes on leftist friends’ reactions: in my circles of leftist friends and family, my Jewish ones are severely shaken: you can hear it in their voices and see it in their faces. The shock that the IDF could have failed so massively, so that even the most Israel critical of them have felt a personal sense of violation, vulnerability. And I think they are also quite scared by the scale of the pro-Hamas demonstrations.

    I’m sure that they aren’t having a sudden political turn around — on my husband’s family’s Zoom call with Israeli members, there were “It’s Trump’s fault” comments by some of the Americans, although they didn’t abort the conversation: I think people of a certain age know this is serious.

    My husband was quite upset that his 20s niece, a recent graduate of an elite college, who hardly uses Facebook, duly posted a “Genocide in Gaza” screed, dressing it up in credentials as by a Holocaust survivor’s descendent. Her friends duly commended her “bravery.” (She also misspelled “boarder” for “border” and “decedent” for “descendent” so so much for her education). So I’m not sure there’s any awakening at all for the younger generation. Indeed, I would guess an Overton window shift is being pushed here by the PTB.

    We’ve generally lost friends and relatives by our politics over the years, a process that greatly accelerated with Trump’s election. And then the summer of Floyd peeled off most of our supposedly “moderate” friends. However, there has been a definite thaw since October 7.

    Whether the storm will pass and all will return to the awful status quo ante, we shall see.

  36. The universities cannot be saved or reformed. The rot is too extensive. And the funding from donors is only the icing on the cake of government money (federal and state) that funds the rot. The only way forward is to withdraw all government funding (federal, state, student loans and research) from the university system in this country. We can call it ‘Make Hillsdale the Standard Again’. At that point the market will sort it out.

  37. John Fischer, I share your pessimism. When I retired in 2019 the sciences were the last holdout in terms of doing actual academic work. However, they were under attack from all the other areas as being racist, etc. Biology was quickly succumbing to wokeness, especially as it became dominated through hiring with radical women. Note that the Cornell student arrested was in engineering.

    I have no solution, and as we all watch the rot in higher ed make its way into the K-12 area, it exposes how lost our country has become. Lose the education of the next generation and lose the country. A brilliant strategy by the left.

    Removal of government funding of higher ed will never happen, so your solution is moot.

  39. This correction may seem too trivial to justify the effort … but in place of “held my peace”, which is a phrase familiar to all of us who listened to old relatives actually using it, I earlier wrote “piece”.

    No guilt reducing explanation, other than the fact that I recall some vague passing thought referencing the “comment[ary]” I refrained from offering.

    Sorry.

  41. One last comment.

    I happen to agree with Plaiss more or less across the board with regard to his post modernist observation; and even going possibly further to what I would assert is the almost supernaturally profound moral depravity of their ne plus ultra moral nihilism.

    But with regard to Muslims and Jews specifically, as we all know it aint just about the plot of land wherein Israel has been situated since 1948.

    A short review. Know before you look, that this is David Wood.

    First 10 minutes should do.
    “The REAL Reason Muhammad Hated Jews and Preached Genocide”

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3NX4VnNuV8

  42. Barry: The “Trump’s fault” comment was met with my husband’s “how so?” and the response “I don’t want to get into it.” It did fail to turn the conversation into a Trump hate fest, thankfully.

  44. The universities cannot be saved or reformed.
    ==
    Higher education can be repaired. You do have to let the judiciary in your state know that running interference for higher education will mean they the judges lose things which are valuable to them. And you have to get the legislatures off their duffs.

  45. Biden and the people running him are untrustworthy. Obama still dictates policy to them. Why he has fixated on Iran is a mystery but he cannot be trusted.

  46. Arnold Kling, by way of Russ Roberts, offers his insights on the oppressor vs oppressed:

    The deepest insight for understanding the lenses people use to understand the world comes from @KlingBlog in his superb, concise book, The Three Languages of Politics. Simple idea. Liberals see the world as a struggle between oppressor and oppressed. Conservatives see the 1/

    world as a struggle between civilization and barbarism. Libertarians see the world as a struggle between government coercion and personal liberty. Kling’s insight helps makes sense of what is going on right now in Israel and Gaza. Before October 7, liberals sympathized with 2/

    Palestinians as the oppressed and Israel as the oppressor. Conservatives sympathized with Israel as the standard bearer of democracy and decency against the barbarism of its neighbors. (Libertarianism isn’t so relevant on this issue–so I’ll stick with liberals and 3/ …

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1714955116296503398.html

  47. in inside the kingdom, the follow up to the masterful history of Arabia, which we realize now was ghosted by khashoggi fils, there is a discussion of anonymous saudi officials thinking they saw Obama as moldable to their way of thinking,

    it turns out only the Sepah (the Revolutionary Guards) run Iran more than the Mullahs, have the requisite antiwestern orientation,

  48. “…Trump’s fault…”
    OK, I’ll take a stab at it….

    Trump pushed the Abraham Accords with the caveat that if the Palestinians weren’t interested then they were welcome to stay away.
    And stay away they did. (Headscratcher that, ain’t it…)

    BUT, “Biden” scoffed at the idea that the Abraham Accords were in any way meaningful if they ignored the Palestinians (who were invited to join but who decided to stay away). IOW, the Accords, which “Biden” couldn’t even call “Accords”—What? and give Trump credit for them??? (so “he” decided to call them, um, “Understandings”)—HAD TO BE meaningless because the Palestinians, who noisily decided to stay away, weren’t included in the process.
    (And…how could one have so-called peace without the Palestinian issue being addressed? Sensible, right? Well, except for the fact that the Palestinians weren’t interested in peace. Oops, that’s not entirely accurate: they WERE/ARE very interested in “the peace of the brave”!!)

    Anyway, “Biden” gave the Palestinians scads of cash (as he did the Iranians, and Hezbullah—sensible, right?) to show them that “he” meant business….
    …and Bibi, who was having wet dreams of a breakthrough with Saudi Arabia, was told in no uncertain terms by “Biden”—the Party Pooper in Chief—“NO BREAKTHROUGH with Saudi Arabia UNLESS the Palestinian track for “peace” is ALSO made a priority. Nossir.”

    The result? Granting tens of thousands of Hamas folks all kinds of work permits to work inside Israel!…and, as Jake Sullivan so triumphantly declaimed—drum roll!—The Middle East has NOT been this quiet for over 20 years!!!! (Though that was before that weaselly weasel un-declaimed it…)

    And so…here we are!
    Ergo… Trump’s FAULT!!
    Q.E.D.

  49. Pingback:Ayaan Hirsi Ali “I am shocked but not surprised”; the New Neo on the “glorification of the oppressed” | Spin, strangeness, and charm

  50. 30,000 white girls are raped by black males every year.

    Are these people gonna side with the rapists, saying that white girls shouldn’t have collectively worn the short skirt?

  51. very droll barry,

    one is struck by the notion that netanyahu should have acted precipitously when almost a month later, they are still pressuring him to slow walk the just accounting that should have happened on point,

  54. Maybe, om, although I don’t understand how banning works. To Crazy’s claimed statistic, it is my understanding that victims of violent crimes are overwhelmingly targeted by people from their own ethnic group.

  56. Since 1987 or maybe sooner the elite/well off leftists of Seattle have taught their feminist students that they too could be an “agent of change”. This was the ideal goal for every graduate from Antioch University. Within a short time, this slogan was picked up by most other liberal universities.

    Any female who received her degree and accompanying job in government during the intervening years is convinced that any idea presented to her by the teacher’s union, or by the WEF, or NOW, etc. is ABSOLUTELY THE RIGHT WAY TO MOVE FORWARD! Any change is an improvement, and, so they will commit any act of systemic governmental sabotage or political assassination that is put in front of them by their handlers. They are obedient flunkies (flunkettes?), but there are millions of them now!

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  58. RockMeAle on November 2, 2023 at 11:45 am said:
    Arnold Kling, by way of Russ Roberts, offers his insights on the oppressor vs oppressed: …

    It turns out I had a thought experiment earlier today about this oppressor/oppressed idea. Picture major university classroom, maybe 50 to 80 students. Professors starts on oppressor/oppressed tirade, so young adult male goes to front of classroom, picking up some form of nonlethal but weapon-like implement along the way (ruler, wooden or collapsible pointer, etc.).

    Tells professor “since I am your oppressor, you must now kneel before me and bow down to me.”

    Option 1) The professor refuses, so student claims “since you won’t kneel I must not really be your oppressor, and you are not really oppressed – so STFU!!”

    Option 2) Professor actually does kneel, so student places rod or “weapon” on professor’s shoulder in the mode of a monarch knighting a knight, and says “you can get up and be totally free, I will oppress you no longer and you are thus no longer oppressed.”

    Made for a nice day dream, anyway.

  59. To Crazy’s claimed statistic, it is my understanding that victims of violent crimes are overwhelmingly targeted by people from their own ethnic group.

    I first read Crazy’s claimed statistic on various Usenet newsgroups.

    The overwhelming majority of White female rape victims were raped by White males.

    Crazy did have a point, in that some people would excuse the rape of an “oppressor” by the “oppressed”.

    Given pro-Hamas demonstrations in some American universities, there are far too many of them.

  60. Pingback:Yes, You are the “Baddies” (2) | The Reformed Sojourner

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