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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37152 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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I honestly don't know how seriously to take this; I saw the Reuters article about the "White women for Kamala" call linked on /r/stupidpol and it included the following paragraph:

Hours after the announcement, more than 40,000 people joined a Zoom call for Black women supporters. One for Black men on Monday drew over 50,000 people and there have been separate calls for South Asian women, LGBTQ allies, and white men.

Are we really at the point as a society where we actually prefer having race- and gender-segregated meetings for a topic that's supposed to have broad-spectrum appeal? Or is this something everyone involved will look back on in embarrassment a year later?

My question is, where the hell are people getting these Zoom links? I haven't seen any advertising or public posting for any zoom calls, and if I did, I would probably immediately consider is a scam.

Organized by Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, a gun-safety group with about 10 million members, the video call included activists, podcasters, the singer Pink and regular voters, several who said they regretted not doing enough before the 2016 election that put Trump in the White House. [...] On Thursday's call for white women, participants discussed strategies, including reaching out to friend groups, fundraising and countering misinformation.

Are you a member in good standing of any well-connected Democrat activist groups? These calls are for loyal foot soldiers, not the general public.

Does it lead to and create societal problems that cannot be ignored by the general public, or does this kind of idpol stay "mostly harmless" until everyone pretends it never happened? My hope is that it's the latter. Society allows these kinds of people to eventually say, "oh, silly us" and we all talk about how dumb the 2010's and 2020's were. My fear is the former, which carries a risk in ending in actual ethnic conflict, racial spoils, and bloodshed.

If comfortable white people can somehow forever profit from these kinds of signals, enact laws and policies at the expense of lesser whites without paying a cost themselves, then, sure maybe this is how it all goes down. Quietly. A white nationalist's worst nightmare. If comfortable white people no longer engage in a charming guilt ritual and instead find themselves disenfranchised and destitute alongside the bad whites, they will no longer be afforded to see charm in guilt rituals.

The reason why I find that a more likely end point if we continue down the 2020 framing of race relations is that, somewhere down that road, America empowers real, Black Panther racial supremacists. If the nation empowers true believers of racial supremacy, then I'd expect eventually we see them act as racial supremacists. Along with the fact that, in my estimation, it would coincide with the empowerment of ideologically bankrupt thugs. "Well, those are the good whites, we take care of them" only goes as far as you don't actually empower people that believe whites have a debt in blood to pay, deserve all the pain they receive, are inferior beings, and so on.

I'd like to think that we did reach IdPol zenith in 2020, and stuff like this is fallout. That Kamala Harris' campaign immediately launches identity based zoom calls is gross and disheartening, but she's also a product of her time. We all are. It's a major part of how she got her job, after all. If you're worried about race relations as a risk stuff like this could be a real reason to vote against Kamala. Doubling back to reinvest in 2020'isms carries the risk it all gets worse-- more pervasive, more legal -- that seems like a sharper turn towards Race War, Now! Rd. to me.

I still expect we "get over it", or a large part of it, in the ~20 years range. Maybe we never completely dismantle all the scaffolding, because stuff like socioeconomic outcomes are hard problems to solve, but somes ways of thinking and memes may change. We might be able to start cloning Kmele Foster.

Anyway, another L for liberals like myself. FeelsBadMan.jpg.

Or is this something everyone involved will look back on in embarrassment a year later?

That's the 64,000$ question isnt it? To me this just reads as yet another example of how out of touch the Democratic Party's messaging has become. Who exactly is this sort of rhetoric supposed to attract? The hardcore idpol crowd, man-hating feminists, and the bulk of the LGBTQ comunity were going to vote Democrat anyway. The only "swing" voters i can see this swaying are accelerationists and queer-adjacent alt-righters which seems like a very fringe demographic to be courting when contrasted with the proportional risk of alienating the general population.

I don't think the average poster here really grasps just how unpopular overt identity politics is in the US outside of academia and twitter.

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