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It is meaningless, as nobody was ever interested in figuring out who was oppressed in the first place - they merely wanted to legitimize giving power and advantages to specific groups that they either identified with or felt sympathy for. This sympathy depends on the perceived strength and the perceived morality of the agent in question. There's little empathy when women attack men, since men are seen as stronger. There's no empathy when somebody accused of (insert social taboo) is attacked, because they're perceived as being evil. The judgement of evil is perceived as the lack of innocence, and the lack of innocence is proportional to the perceived free will of the doer (and to the extent to which they understand what they are doing). This is why we punish accidents and mentally unwell people less harshly. It also depends on the perceiver, as it gets harder to hate people and judge them as evil as you grow wiser and realize that we're just products of our circumstances (because this understanding of ours results in attributing less free will to others).
Some day I'd like to put human nature into equations, just simple, imperfect ones.
I personally just thought of it as (actual, not apparent) hostility. Actions and words are both downstream of that.
Yes, but again, situations like this arise because it's all a sham. A thing I've noticed is that most people who complained that X group is oppressing Y group hates group X more than they like group Y. So if somebody hurts a child, it envokes aggression towards the person who hurt the child, much more than it envokes the desire to protect the child. People rarely differentiate between the two when they think about such situations.
Many people also just want a socially acceptable victim to went their negative emotions at. Others want to think of themselves as being "good people". Others still want to show other people their values, and signal virtue or in-group membership. These selfish desires pretend to be altruistic, and the vast majority of people do not have enough self-awareness to notice themselves doing this.
So by "public sentiment" is mean the true sentiment, not the apparent one (which is misleading, which is why I find joy in exposing it like this)
People do not want this problem solved in general. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be pro-freedom when it's to their advantage, but also to decrease the freedom of those who have different values. The public support for "colorblindness" on the political left disappeared because it was true neutrality, and that's not what they want, for that would disallow them from fighting racism with racism. They're opposed to freedom of expression too, also because it's neutral. If 90% of people hate the KKK, they will say "The will of the people have spoken, this is democracy, the majority is right". It was probably the same when a majority oppressed homosexuals in the past, it's just viewed differently in retrospect because, and only because, the majority is against it now. The majority can only disagree with the majority across time. The public could only start to agree that discrimination against homosexuals was bad when it stopped being much of an actual problem - for the two are one and the same thing. This is also why feminism is the most popular in the countries which need it the least - the more feminist a country is, the more power woman have, and the less women will be oppressed.
I think it's only possible in the map (the political consensus based on nonsense). In the territory, all of this is nonsense (meaning that it cannot be true in reality. My map of our social reality shows that our social reality is dishonest, and the "real" version which I claim to be true has a lot of tautologies, but I believe that speaks in its favor. Tautologies eat themselves, right? Like circular logic, I think they evaluate to nothing)
We have rules like "You're not allowed to discriminate against inherent traits" and yet we don't treat health, beauty, and intelligence like they're protected traits at all (which is why attacking these traits in opposing ideologies is so common). In fact, our set of "protected traits" is politically biased, and our enforcement of our own rules is biased as well. I'm curious what would happen if we made ideologies protected as well - they're not really different from cultures and religions anyway, they're all just worldviews with a set of values embedded in them. We didn't really improve anything when we changed from religious wars to culture wars, I don't even think the irrationality decreased much. Hell, to be against biases is impossible, as it's a bias in itself. One cannot have a strong preference for the equality of preferences.
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