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Identity politics serves to corrupt the notions of morality, common sense, and what it means to live in a society under the rule of law. This is a brief examination of a twitter thread I stumbled across about the recent cases of Catholic Churches being burnt down as misguided retaliation for the residential school system that was in place in Canada.
” SASKATOON — A former Polish Roman Catholic church in rural Saskatchewan was destroyed by fire Thursday.
The church was located near Redberry Lake, which is about 80 kilometres northwest of Saskatoon.
Lynn Swystun, who lives about a mile and a half west of the church, says she noticed smoke from her yard around 12:15 p.m. then drove to the area and discovered the church engulfed in flames.”
Now here is where it gets interesting, this is a response to the story.
Wait, what? Where exactly is the conflation happening? Damage to places of worship, in my books, is damage to places of worship. But apparently, in Nora’s world, your identity is also somehow a factor that should be used to categorize the level of violence, determining whether the violence is ‘valid’ or not.
If you’ve been with us here DWR you know that I’m not exactly the biggest supporter of organized religion and all the tomfoolery it is responsible for. But, even being the anti-religious soul that I am, I wouldn’t attempt to order and rank attacks on places of worship into ‘worthy’ and ‘less worthy’ categories.
What kind of internal moral compass is Nora going by here?
The hell? It isn’t a hate crime to burn down a place of worship because of a political/ideological motivation? And, yes the actions of the Catholic Church are indeed pretty horrible, but burning down a church is not how we express our displeasure in a nominally civilized society that values the rule of law.
Just in case if you missed it. This is the moral wasteland that much of identity politics leads to. The level of oppression Catholics face in our society is irrelevant the crime that has been committed. Burning down a church is arson. Arson is against the law, for good reason, in our society. There is no “good” or “valid” arson permissible if one wants to live in a reasonable law abiding society.
Do you see it there? The bullshit notion that there are differing levels of ‘arsonability’ based on your identity in society (of course it comes from a pronouns bio *smh*). Err no. There is no fucking way this paradigm can work if we want society as we know it to work. Past oppression does not mean a free pass when you break the law.
Is protest a part of a democratic society, absolutely. It is our civic duty to keep our political class in check and in tune with needs of the people. Arson, however, is not one of those methods that should not be considered acceptable in society as a path to change.
The bullshit has finally start to overflow the gunwales. Lefty dudes that are not directly part of the high trans-inquisition are feeling – all at once – perturbed and miffed that they are not being heard and even villified for believing in what was once considered the ideals of the Left. One can tell when it really bad when it finally starts affecting the men. (???)
Such dark times. And so suddenly, seemingly out of NOWHERE…
Movement toward excising the cancer that is identity politics might start gaining some traction, as the class of people who matter(!) are now being effected.
I may have to pick up Murray’s book as it appears to have shed some light onto the nebulous core of identity politics. I chose this excerpt because I like how Scruton frames some of the tenets of identity politics i.e. the hardware/software analogy is particularly insightful.
Id-pol may seem unreal and far away, but let me assure you it exists and people have really invested themselves into it. Several boots on the ground encounters with zealots on twitter have left me with a new appreciation of how deeply ingrained this way of thinking has become for certain people. It is frustrating and exasperating to argue with people who somehow have come to believe that they are the purveyors of the common shared reality we experience.
For instance, in dealing with the gender-self-id crowd, getting them to define anything is almost always impossible. They seem to think that being a woman is merely the male interpretation of what what being a woman is, in other words a set of personal subjective feelings that, as long as one holds them, *makes them* a woman. (wtaf, I know, I know…)
Back in material reality the place where, rightly, the term woman is coherently defined as an adult human female is somehow contentious. The argument then always goes into insults and hurt feelings, even the threat of suicide (see abusive male controlling behaviours) for not complying with the notion that men, if they feel strongly enough, can be women. It’s ludicrous.
Anyhow, folks, please continue to speak the truth and do not bow to the ideologues that would have you change your reality to meet the needs of their fantasy.
“More important, from the intellectual point of view, is the attempt to rewrite hardware as software. As Murray shows, identity politics, which insists that everything relevant to our sense of self lies within our power, so that nothing can be imposed on us without our consent, is at odds with the facts of biology. To get round this problem, sex has been re-written as gender, and gender defined as a social construct. In this way, hardware becomes software, and fate becomes choice.
And the result is the “trans” lobby, determined to make all those areas where one sex was hitherto privileged (for example, female sports or female bathrooms) available to whoever wishes to appropriate that sex as his own. The hardware/software confusion has now penetrated the culture, and Murray shows the devastating effect that it has had on our understanding of human difference.
Finally there is the new scourge of “intersectionality”, which encourages people to explore all the ways in which they have lost out in the pursuit of advantage, and to construct their identity accordingly. A kind of reverse hierarchy of privilege emerges, as you come to see that you are disadvantaged as gay man, and then as a black man, and then as a Muslim man, and so on. The result of this scramble for “virtuous disadvantages” occupies Murray over many partly amusing, partly distressing pages.
As he abundantly shows, the attempt to derive a positive philosophy from this assemblage of negatives leads to absurdity and contradiction at every turn.”
This all goes away once you accept the factual nature of biological reality. For instance the term woman does, in fact, equal adult human female. When your faux-progressive ideology takes a left turn away from material reality then you get bullshit laden threads like this one.
What is wrong with the whole barrel of hoopla that is identity politics. Love the Marx reference to weaving flowers/chains reference.
This from a review on the Feminist Current by Jen Izaakson:
“What unites these men’s rights groups with the alt-right is that they believe white, straight, males have been left behind and now exist at the bottom of the social and sexual hierarchy. They believe that while the world once belonged (rightfully) to them, now women, people of colour, and sexual minorities rule. Indeed, their insult of choice, “cuck,” is acute projection — they feel usurped and humiliated by these groups, and believe they have been robbed of the privilege they are entitled to. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the phenomena of what 4chaners refer to as “incels” (men who conceive of themselves as “involuntary celibates”), lamenting that women refuse sex with them, rendering them modern victims of their self-conceived “sexual hierarchy”.
When Nagle writes of “online culture wars,” we must recognize that the main battle is over truth. While Nagle does not explore the feminist dimension of these online street fights, specifically, the implications are evident. Both the alt-right and the anti-materialist, regressive left believe that prostitution is not about women’s position under patriarchy as a resource for men, but sexual liberation and the free market. Both consider the sex trade to be a situation where women come out on top — with autonomy, empowered through profit and/or sexual freedom. Rather than overturning the system of prostitution, both groups believe we need to offer more rights to pimps and johns, in order to allow prostituted women to benefit from an unregulated free market. (So far, so Marxist!) Most significantly for feminism, both these tendencies wish to block certain feminist analysis and activism — specifically, the kind that challenges the system of patriarchy at its root.”
And there you have it folks, your handy guide for knowing that you’re doing effective feminism – if you are pissing off the dudes on the right, and the left, you’re doing work.
I may have to check out this book, as it seems to address the growing problem on the left of getting away from material analysis of societal problems.
bleatmop
The Intransigent One
Mystro
The Arbourist
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