Why People Feel Like Victims

They are manipulators. Their skill isn't in getting their job done, it's in manipulating other people into doing it for them.

I think for me, it's about boundaries. If someone continually pushes or crosses my boundaries, then that's the biggest red flag. If I push back and they push harder, then something is going wrong.

You giving of yourself should be an act of freewill in pursuit of something greater for all, not to avoid the negative repercussions of saying no.

When I find myself saying yes to avoid being lashed out at, threatened, extorted, coerced, insulted, etc, then it's time to go.

I'll tolerate it once or twice or even more times than that. I excuse bad behavior from others away with "I'm too sensitive" or "I know what they say isn't true" or "they don't understand what they just did."

But after too much of it, it doesn't matter. At some point, the math tips to it being worse to be around them than not, so I won't be around them anymore. In fact, I suppose, it adds up somehow, I don't know the formula.

Like... if someone does something, I let it slide, but if they do it again, then it's not just 1 + 1 = 2, it's more like 1 + 1.25 = 2.25. When it gets to 10, I'm done.

A memory multiplier, if you will.

"You've done this twice now. I laughed it off the first time, but I'm noticing a trend and I don't appreciate it."

Then the third time, it's 1 + 1.25 + 2.50 = 4.75.

Why?

1 for the first strike. 1 + 0.25 for the second strike, because it includes the memory of the first one. 2.50 for the third strike, because 2 memories, plus violating a direct ask to avoid repeating the bad behavior.

Something like that.

A lot of what we're teaching now is the opposite. It's like anti-CBT. Teach everyone they are helpless against the nefarious powers that be.

In the case of that particular individual I'd say it's less laziness and more of systemic racism being deterrent to attempt self-improvement. In the "even if I try, I won't get ahead because these systems will hold me back" sense.

The point I was trying to make is that it's a lot easier to point the blame at something than admit to yourself that you suck - even if you're capable.

I don't know what your definition of systemic racism is, so I can't make a proper argument for/against it.

In any case, your comment has given me some food for thought in how I approach this person.

For me it's 3 main things.

1. The way historical oppression can set a group behind another group even after any specific policy has been repealed.

Poverty is often a cycle that can go on indefinitely for generations especially depending on things like upward mobility which has coincidentally been getting weaker since the period of official apartheid ended in the USA. Strange that we seem to be uninterested in spending much on the uplifting of our people now that such spending would need to include all people.

2. The way that bias against a group can result in that group being disadvantaged despite there being no rules or laws in place that require that and even in spite of it being contrary to policies.

Like the way that black people are half as likely to receive a callback for a job interview as an identically qualified white applicant or that despite being less likely to be found with contraband black people are twice as likely to be searched by police.

3. Would be laws and rules that do not target racial groups, but unfairly benefit or disadvantage racial groups.

This would be local property tax based school funding resulting in poor neighborhoods getting inadequate funding for schools resulting in predominantly black schools being underfunded. This is also drastically harsher penalties for crack compared to cocaine.

There was a strongtowns article that literally had nothing to do with race, merely about getting rid of single family zoning. It didn't take long for someone in the comment section to post how building affordable housing in those places will ruin everything and everyone is naive because they haven't had to live in a ghetto.

There was an economics explained video about real estate that even implied that race was one of the factors was how far the homeowners are away from other races.

Coming from Europe this was completely unexpected for me, turns out, segregation in the USA never went away it merely became more socially acceptable.

Why "Even" ? It does not say anything about racism if you do not control for other factors, like criminal history and society inclusion. It's phrased as if it would still hold without control variable, and the author is doing a favor to potential nitpicker. It may be true, but the "Even" does not make me confident of the scientific value of the publication and the absence of confirmation bias of the author.

Is there a meta-source you got your list from?

So a normal black kid can safely pursue life without worrying that he or she has been held back by systemic racism.

Racism of course. Since it’s selecting people based on race.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Hmm, is this racism or anti-racism? Because it's literally what Harvard does.

I do.

> Respondents were asked how important their race was to their identity on a five-point scale ranging from “not at all important” to “extremely important.” They were also asked a question measuring their feelings of white solidarity: “How important is it that whites work together to change laws that are unfair to whites?” This followed the same five-point scale. Finally, we can assess survey respondents’ feelings of white victimization from their answers to the question of how much discrimination whites face in the U.S., also on a five-point scale, ranging from “none at all” to a “great deal.”

These people are opposed to affirmative action. The Biden administration is literally excluding white people from things like farm loan forgiveness and SBA loans. Cities are excluding them from things like mortgage subsidies. Companies are openly talking about quota systems. “White men” is used as a pejorative.

Maybe these people are like the “war on Christmas” folks and are blowing this stuff out of proportion. But when there is literal discrimination against white people being baked into our laws, calling them “white supremacist” for saying in a survey that white people should try to get those laws overturned is totally psychotic.

In the US economic disparities drive pretty much everything else.

> Immigration comes to mind, where profiling is rampant in enforcement (but only really for people who look Mexican, not for people who look / sound Canadian).

As a brown guy with a beard, maybe I get screened more at TSA, or maybe I don’t. (I definitely do outside the US.) At most that’s just regular racism caused by the preconceptions of TSA officers. It doesn’t lead to some systemic or persistent disadvantage.

> Or even immigration quotas -- there's the same annual green card cap per country, whether it's India or China or Iceland, thereby implicitly biasing toward smaller countries.

I’m not sure I would even call this racism.

> Or, affirmative action being used as a wedge issue for Asian Americans especially.

This is backward. It proceeds from a false premise “non-white solidarity” that’s broke by the use of wedge issues. The opposite is true: Asians have distinct interests and people trying to get them to support affirmative action measures are trying to get them to vote against their own interests. Ibram Kendi-style “equity”—where races are represented in proportion to their share of the population—would be disastrous for Asians. We would go from 20-40% in top universities to 6%. We’d go from 35% in Silicon Valley to 6%-10%. And that’s not a hypothetical thing. I went to TJHSST, where progressives voted to eliminate the admissions test. That will cut Asians from 70% to 20%. NYC is trying to do the same thing.

Asians, and to a great extent Latinos, have very little self-interest in rocking the boat. While immigrants in Europe are seeing generational poverty, Asians and Latinos enjoy similar or even higher levels of income mobility as whites. Cubans and Vietnamese came over as refugees with nothing, and achieved economic parity with white Americans within a single generation. There’s only a handful of countries (UK, Canada, Australia) where that sort of thing happens. We have very little self interest in messing with the current system.

It’s fair to argue that we should give up some of our privilege to help reduce systemic disparities. But that’s a completely different argument. But telling us that these changes are in our own self interest, because the existing system is racist against us, is just gaslighting.

> And just because some Asian populations are doing well, doesn't mean that _all_ of them are.

Yes, virtually all of them are. When you see people incoming intra-Asian disparities it’s almost invariably based on pointing to Asian groups that are recent immigrants. That’s why you suddenly started seeing articles about the plight of “Bhutanese Americans.” Virtually all of them came here during the Obama administration, as refugees. They might be poor now, but that’s to be expected at this stage.

I’m Bangladeshi. Bangladeshi Americans are one of the poorer Asian groups. But Indian Americans are one of the richest. That’s not the product of “racism”—that would be absurd, even we can’t usually tell each other apart by sight. Instead it’s because Indians started immigrating in the 1960s and Bangladeshis only did so in significant numbers since the 2000s. But even Asian groups who come here in poverty quickly move up the ladder. In 1980, Vietnamese were among the poorest ethnic groups, having come here as refugees. Today, they have reached economic parity with whites.

Immigration quotas that you speak of were created to increase diversity of immigrants. If we didn’t have them, then Chinese and Indian immigrants would get most of the visas pushing out other countries. It’s actually the opposite of systemic racism since it’s increasing racial diversity of immigrants.

If you want to understand why, I'd encourage you to read Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell.

Here's one example:

> These various facts might be summarized as examples of racism, so that the causal question is whether racism is either the cause, or one of the major causes, of poverty and other social problems among black Americans today. Many might consider the obvious answer to be "yes." Yet some incontrovertible facts undermine that conclusion. For example, despite the high poverty rate among black Americans in general, the poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10 percent every year since 1994.

> The poverty rate of married blacks is not only lower than that of blacks as a whole, but in some years has also been lower than that of whites as a whole. In 2016, for example, the poverty rate for blacks was 22 percent, for whites was 11 percent, and for black married couples was 7.5 percent.

> Do racists care whether someone black is married or unmarried? If not, then why do married blacks escape poverty so much more often than other blacks, if racism is the main reason for black poverty? If the continuing effects of past evils such as slavery play a major causal role today, were the ancestors of today's black married couples exempt from slavery and other injuries?

The problem is the language around "systemic racism" cites outcomes as proof of preexisting conditions. That is, it asserts a tautology without presenting causal links, or ruling out other factors as causes.

When you do consider other factors, the detection of systemic racism collapses into one of point-stupidities (bad policies) and fairly ordinary economic forces not subject to racial choice. This is especially so when you start examining things like South Africa during apartheid (which was an example of systemic racism), or America at the turn of the 20th century.

There are a bundle of assumptions rolled up into that term that each merit discussion. If we're going to ever seriously talk about what behaviors and policies we should adopt, we ought to at least get the causes straight rather than leaping to the conclusion that "it" exists.

The link you provided is a nice reference, but it's a very small-c conservative description and avoids the harder parts of the issue.

The notion that 'minorities face challenges that majorities will have difficulty perceiving' is not unreasonable. But CRT uses language such as 'White Supremacy' - reminiscent of Men in Pointy White Hats' to describe those 'majority systems'. Their stated objective is to 'deconstruct and destroy Whiteness', implying that the 'majority culture must be removed', and that those who do not realize this and actively participate are holding up structures of White Supremacy.

So they use 'whiteness' in kind of an abstract way, something that 'stands in contrast to blackness' - but they also mean every classical cultural trait.

Things like a 'focus on the correct answer', 'focus on literacy', 'objectivity' etc. - these are artifacts of 'whiteness and white supremacy'.

The link you provided actually is fairly decent, if that text represented CRT then I think there would be controversy, but much less so.

But CRT in practices uses the language of race war: 'Destroy Whiteness or you are a White Supremacist'. In that case 'Whiteness' is effectively an ethnicity, broadly 'Westerners' or 'White People'.

Finally, even if we can agree on what CRT is, it plays heavily into ideological victimhood: 'the student failed to learn to read at a high level because that's a racist, colonial imposition, and shouldn't have to achieve literacy to graduate high school' etc..

When we're talking about 'systematic issues' then those who have a propensity for victimhood can view racism/sexism in literally everything. The 'truck' toy with the 'boy' on the front cover? Gendered language? Your company founders are white and male? It's all oppression.

On one hand, while the notion of systematic racism has legitimacy, CRT ideology opens up an ugly pandora's box that allows people to take an activist perspective on the basis of conjecture about literally everything and it plays directly into, and validates people's worst bigotries.

This article about how 'the sidewalks are racist' is not a joke. They make completely unsubstantiated and bigoted notions about how 'White people walk on sidewalks' at Northwestern U. This is the kind of crude, fantasy racist bigotry, supported and endorsed by CRT thinking. [3]

From the University of Toronto [1]

Wikipedia [2]

[1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory

[3] https://dailynorthwestern.com/2021/04/05/opinion/allen-are-t...

https://imgur.com/a/pxz1qCS

Completely bizarre. Looks like a bunch of 0's got written into memory at random intervals. Is it flaky RAM on the HN server? Has anyone else seen HN content render like this? Reloaded the page, and now everything looks normal. Running memcheck on my laptop as a next step...

Nowadays, many people may reject POC in social and business settings because of political fears. For instance, if I hire, could I fire without being viewed as racist? Or, if I befriend someone, could they end up accusing me of racism in a devastating way?

At the end of the day we will never be color blind. Color is just too obvious of a characteristic. At best we can view the colors as equals. But we need to get rid of the systemic biases to do that.

I don't think bullies usually care about race or power, they just want to be respected by their peers - using a distorted definition of respect. Of course there's also a group that are just psychopaths, but I don't think they care about race either. For them it's just a means to an end.

And finally, yes, racists do exist, I personally think that's passed down from adults.

Omar gets “amplified” predominantly because Fox News inter al. keep dumping on her all the time, and shrieking about what an “extremist” she is (generally without any reference to specific actions – as I said it’s a pure identity politics thing for them). If you have come to think that Omar is an extremist, ask yourself who keeps telling you that.

It seems like you are upset that progressives don’t put a lot of effort into boosting the political influence of Trump supporters. But why ever would they? It’s not progressives’ fault that GOP-aligned media made Muslims the bogeyman du jour after 2001 and amped racist people up into believing that Muslim = terrorist, to the point that conservative Muslims can’t get anywhere in GOP politics.

As for CNN: CNN is a center-right pro-establishment pro-corporate media outlet that does some good journalism but like all cable news also fills hours every day with bloviating pundits and sensationalized nonsense. People should stop watching cable news so much.

Please give me some examples of these "facts that are more important" where racism and WS are concerned.

>I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about.

That final qualifier is the red flag to me, nobody teaches that "they can't do anything about it" (stating that seems purposely dishonest), the goal of these teachings is in large part about changing/fixing systems through awareness.

Side note: This history is also for white children who in many cases are negatively affected by these systems in non-obvious ways and are an important population to inform as they are potential future participants in the correction.

My intuition tells me when important and uncomfortable historical facts come up and certain people bend over backwards to make you look away, the goal is to distract, hide, and obfuscate.

US slaves were securitized and used as collateral for loans/leverage/etc (slaves were the first assets to be securitized in America). People around Europe, in countries where slavery was illegal/unpopular, and the rest of the US could invest and profit from the trade without getting blood on their hands directly.

Each slave was approximately the value of a single family home (~1kg of gold) which means the British/Americans were able to "create" the value of 10,000,000 or so single family homes worth of wealth (~$1,171,852,800,000) out of thin air using African men, women, and children's backs before cotton production (which was more valuable than all other exports combined), other labor, and other investment activity is even accounted for. (Note: I'm not even counting the slaves that were domestically produced in this calculation, this is just the number brought across the Atlantic.)

Cotton misdirection is what Jacobin is attempting, they (or their quoted 'experts') lack awareness of the financial ecosystem that operated with slavery at its foundation. The volume of money/gold involved built the first stages of a large % of early US/UK/etc cities and accounted for a much larger % of GDP and US/UK wealth than Jacobin is attempting to claim.

That fact that I need to explain this very recent history to educated US adults is yet another signal that this history is inadequately covered and should be compulsory. There is nothing more American than understanding the foundations of American Capitalism, and its evolution from the slave economy.

Final note: Speaking of India, destroying Indian and Chinese cotton production allowed the US/UK to dominate 2/3rds+ of the global cotton trade, not technical know-how or advanced intelligence... it was mostly torture,murder, and destruction (historical record has many accounts of invaders breaking/cutting off hands of poor Indian/Chinese textile laborers en masse, at the time these workers produced the finest muslin and other textiles in human history).

Ghandi's promotion of textile (yarn/khaadi) production during his protests/boycotts wasn't a fluke/random...

Oh yes the British bourgeoisie can afford to.

The west can give up it's ridiculous intellectual property regime that kills millions of people and blocks innovation. IP is nothing more than an (artificially scarce) monopoly right on a bit of knowledge. That knowledge belongs to all.

So many people rushing to use the "other countries were also horrible as well" defense. That's not really a defense.

Again, "other people did bad things" isn't a valid excuse for doing bad things.

Or was the issue invented (and lost) by conservative talking heads?

Mastering one's emotions: Feeling the emotion, understanding it, and developing skills for overcoming negative feelings. Also, the ability to choose not to act based on strong emotion.

In a crisis, or in critical or chronic situations, possession of these two related skills usually yields superior outcomes.

It isn't "wrong" to feel the feelings. It is wrong to let the feelings dominate you to the point of paralysis or drive you to harmful behavior. Children can't help going through phases as their brains develop where they're overcome with emotions. You help them by teaching them it is OK to feel sad or angry. Then you help them by teaching them how to cope through action, or focus on something else like goals.

Having negative emotions is normal. Coping with negative emotions, mastering them, is a valuable skill.

Words do not inflict physical injury. You teach that. Words can inflict emotional pain. You also teach that this is so. Words can inflict mental injury, and you teach that, too. But you start with the far simpler formulation of "sticks and stones" until metaphor and nuance are available tools.

It's like teaching children about strangers. There are exceptions to every rule, but if you value their safety when they're small, you teach them the rule "Do not talk to strangers." Young children don't have the social context to parse exceptions until they're older... when the teaching has to add resolution and detail.

It’s not the goal of monks either, so perhaps mastery of oneself shouldn’t be taken as simply being stoic?

If I'm attempting to repeat back his sensibility: It's an aspiration for people to be self-responsible. Look after self, then others. We're individuals first, and must look after ourselves, and then the collectivist-minded activities come after looking after the self.

This self=>others axis is the basis of Maslow's hierarchy. But it's the inverse of many cultures' (including the blackfoot tribes from which Maslow borrowed the model, which put community at the bottom of the pyramid of needs, oddly enough)

I respect his view (it's rather effective in some contexts, esp environments of scarcity), but I'd rather embrace the collectivist and interdependent aspects of humanity as the foundational principle.

My general impression is that both of these worldviews could save us in different contexts. Maybe the collectivist would save us from climate change, and individualist would save us in some armed conflict. I feel we need to keep both, and keep them balanced, and respecting one another. It's like keeping a seed vault -- different wisdoms for later, and part of a diversity of thought we should probably preserve for unknowable future challenges.

> I don’t think there is a serious argument that let’s say for some particularly sadistic reason I wanted to bully them and do real harm

I think you'd be surprised. I had some tough great uncles who taught rough lessons and were damn proud of it.

I'm not sure the words are the problem there.

One such mechanism is the mentality of "believing victims". Not a bad thing on the face of it, but my feeling is that we've tipped over into a world where people are incentivized to become victims. In this way the mechanism ends up becoming weaponized and wielded like a cudgel by those good at playing the victim against a new set of victims who just aren't as good at that game.

These new victims may end up even more disadvantaged due to ideological fashions which shape who we see as victims (e.g. "girls are more likely to be victims than boys") and dictate to what degree we should mete out empathy (e.g. "we have to make sure we aren't overly empathetic towards the white kids since we are biased and they are privileged").

I see you don’t go on Twitter much.

Source? even the most conservative people I know who went to school in the 80s/90s say they could never afford it now. I myself am trying to figure out how to pay for it without $40k grand in debt if I choose to go back.

Not everyone can be remarkable enough to go to CalTech.

Covid craziness aside, that's still true. You can't do it in California, or Seattle or NYC but outside of those areas it's easily obtainable.

Most of these "homes were so cheap" anecdotes neglect to mention that you might be paying 18% interest on your cheap houses. Or they are talking about a place like NYC in the 70s. Yeah you could have gotten a house for a song in a bankrupt city suffering through the crack epidemic.

I think we both agree psychological trauma can affect people immensely. However, your statement saying they can just go get help is really hand-wavy and oversimplifies the situation.

People who suffer trauma during childhood can have impaired brain development, stunted emotional development, poor executive decision making, and are way more likely to enter situations that retraumatize them -- causing more damage.

Simply saying "I will not be a victim" isn't really a thing. You adapt to the trauma by learning coping skills that are not healthy. When this happens in childhood, it is baked into your personality and then later in life you are left wondering which parts of you are really "you" and which are just maladaptive coping. Thus, the sum of you isn't due to just your decisions.

I speak from personal experience on this. I've never had a victim mentality. But now, at 35, going to therapy for cPTSD, I look at the young child I was and can truly see I was a victim. Does this mean I go around now saying I am a victim? No. But, realizing that I was in the past allows me to show more understanding and sympathy for myself.

What life lessons do you want for the parent of a child who was sexually abused for example? Are they allowed to feel like a victim? What about the child?

"‘He insulted me, hit me, beat me, robbed me’–for those who don’t brood on this, hostility is stilled.

"Hostilities aren’t stilled through hostility, regardless.

"Hostilities are stilled through non-hostility: this, an unending truth.

"Unlike those who don’t realize that we’re here on the verge of perishing, those who do: their quarrels are stilled."

--Dhammapada, ch. 1, circa 1st century common era (trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu)

https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/KN/Dhp/Ch01.html

[Villain music]

Chicago cops frisking you all the time -- wear skin tight pants.

Car accident -- use defensive driving techniques.

Being shot and killed for sleeping at a Wendy's -- don't resist arrest.

Wife divorced you, took your house and kids -- don't get married, OR, learn to discriminate.

Sexist manager won't promote you -- join a company run by females, OR, start your own company.

Pandemic -- move to the country.

On the other hand, if you prefer not to solve your problems yourself, you can say "Why should I change, when other people are the ones doing something wrong", fold your arms, and wait for a man to solve your problem for you.

Your approach to dealing with life is valid, but you push it so aggressively it makes you sound like one of those yoga evangelists who is so into their thing that they lose sight of how it's not the answer to every problem.