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I've been to one of such trainings that demonstrated what we would call "a struggle session" (using the Mao's terminology). Basically, a few professional "victims" told sorrow stories and explained how they could improve their behavior in the future. The stories were bs and the "victims" were millionaires, but what impressed me was the sad and twisted expressions on their faces. The face expressions were genuine. While watching the show, I was thinking that they looked like "inversed saints": instead of teaching compassion and how attachment to emotions and material things causes misery, they teach to fixate on low-type emotions and minor physical traits and while doing so they demonstrate the mysereble psychological state they've inflicted on themselves.

> I've been to one of such trainings that demonstrated what we would call "a struggle session" (using the Mao's terminology).

Did you have to take part in this in any way or just observe?

I've had to take training sessions that left me feeling ...hateful, to be honest.

In the Chinese-Maoist sense, a struggle session is where you are essentially forced to take part in some ritual denunciations of self or of your friends/family with the threat of violence or violence applied or looming in the background.

In the American version of this today the threat of violence isn't there but firing and shaming by coworkers/friends; And therein career/social death.

Your session doesn't sound like a struggle session per se (unless you had to take part), it sounds like a "training" where the professional victims shared their stories. But yes, it's a growing industry and they're paid handsomely to embellish their stories.

> I've had to take training sessions that left me feeling ...hateful, to be honest.

And that, right there, is how the history books end up filled with horrors like the gassing of Jews. Couldn't happen again? Well, that's the mechanism as to how such things occur. Probably not Jews next time, but some Other; like white men.

I heard an anecdote from a monk once. He knew someone into activism, trying to save something-or-other, I don't remember what. Then, one day, the monk opened a book, and to his utter astonishment there was a picture of the guy. He was in charge of executions.

Great atrocities are perpetrated in the name of righteous anger.

To quote Nietzsche: if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.

One of the problems is in the framing you gave. Intersectionality is supposed to be a framework of understanding power amongst different groups but often gets applied to an individual basis which is ironically a very much against a sociological way of thinking. One of the prominent ideas in the now controversial (for silly reasons) critical race theory is to emphasize not individual actions or traits but to recognize systems and reckon with those hopefully through policy.

The individualization of racism for example feels like a failure both in how it offends people and also how it leads to policy prescriptions that don't really solve the underlying power relations.

> Intersectionality is supposed to be a framework of understanding power amongst different groups but often gets applied to an individual basis

Intersectionality is about the experience of privilege/disadvantage/discrimination differing, on a way that is not a simple linear combination of effects, by combinations (“intersections”) of group memberships. While it applies to groups, there's no magical lower bound on size for its applicability, and when you consider more axes of differentiation, the size of the groups represented by distinct intersections approaches one.

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

What I'll say is if your goal is to change society's power relations to make society more egalitarian, then dealing with individuals only is expressly impotent to bring about change because atomized individuals, disconnected from each other, cannot bring about change.

>Intersectionality is supposed to be a framework of understanding power amongst different groups but often gets applied to an individual basis which is ironically a very much against a sociological way of thinking.

Marx subscribed to this way of seeing individuals as mouthpieces for the collective. So did people like Marcuse. You know, one of the influential thinkers from "Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School of Marxism". Name sound familiar? You are giving these people more credit then they deserve.

That's actually a very non-Marxist way of viewing society and kind of a poor reading of people from the frankfurt school actually.

CRT as it's applied is very much a performative extension of how people are reading Frankfurt thinkers. Your reading is out of sync with the orthodoxy not mine.

One solution to this dilemma is to refuse to consider oneself to be a victim, while simultaneously completely ignoring whether other people make the same refusal.

"Our Culture"? Your posting on an internationally available forum, available to many different cultures, countries, and even different cultures within countries. I have no idea what "your" culture is? If you're going to talk about "our culture", please have a bit more specificity.

Out of curiosity: did they actually prefixed 'privilege' with 'white' during the training just like online activists do? Because this one of these imposing Americanisms which has no relation to reality whatsoever in some other parts of the world, like in Russia, for example.

To their credit they did not.

> the majority of it was common sense

Common sense is surprisingly uncommon. Some people need to be taught the basics.

> The main problem with it as mentioned in the article is the incessant fixation on victimhood. I feel that our culture's relationship to victimhood is no better than the ancients but just in the opposite extreme. Before there were precious few 'celebrated' victims (victims lifted up and supported by society) - they mostly lived and died in obscurity perhaps not even knowing the nature of their victimhood.

One of the problems with the discourse right now is that white liberals amplify those who wallow the most in their own victim hood. The vast majority of Hispanics and Asians, for example (70-80% according to a study linked in this article) say they “never” or “rarely” experience discrimination.

But all the XYZ studies professors and activists marinate in feeling discriminated against. You can’t get tenure in an American university saying “yeah racism sucks but it’s actually quite rare.”

It's weird, the way you wrote this. The vast majority of Hispanics and Asians say they rarely experience discrimination. Yes... go on...

For what it's worth, Pew says that roughly half of Latinos have reported experiences of discrimination. But that's not the point. The most polarizing political slogan of the last several years wasn't "Latino lives matter". In the airless vacuum of a message board, I guess it makes a sort of sense to appeal to the experience of Asians and Latinos as summative of the experience of non-white people in general. But obviously, that's not how the world actually works.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/...

> For all racial and ethnic groups represented in the data, the majority reported experiencing either none or infrequent discrimination.

The majority of non-white people are Latinos and Asians. The discourse has recently pitted whites versus non-whites.

Over the last few years, I’ve seen media outlets and academic institutions amplify the most aggrieved (and frankly weird) Asians as part of the general “people of color” discourse. Hence my comment above.

>”For what it’s worth, Pew says that roughly half of Latinos have reported experiences of discrimination.”

It’s likely the half that votes left and is told on a daily basis they are being discriminated against.

Oddly, this reminds me of the trope in a lot of fiction where the main protagonist has a super twisted back story.

It is super tiring and doesn't seem to actually be necessary or informative.

You must not be a DC Comics fan? It's often useful to the plot for the protagonist to be separated completely from normal concerns (and support systems). In our crowded modern world, the hero's journey can't really be into the wild. Of course we'd all like less hackneyed plots, but it's not a perfect world...

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkAndTroubledP...

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeceasedParentsA...

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RapeAsBackstory

I have grown rather bored with the plots.

Granted... Comic plots, in general, are way to dependent on exceptionalism for my tastes nowadays.

> The main problem with it as mentioned in the article is the incessant fixation on victimhood.

Could you give examples? It's hard to understand what you mean. Everyone objects to 'victimhood'; the significance is in the actual events.

>Everyone objects to 'victimhood'

Um, what? Victimhood has become THE status symbol of the left. If you aren't a victim you're an abuser, so anyone looking for status reaches for whatever victimhood they can get.

Victimhood is also a potent weapon - if anyone disagrees with you, you can claim they are oppressing you, denying your victimhood, gaslighting you, and so on.

Victimhood is the ultimate passive aggressive weapon in a culture that has seemingly forgotten that everyone lies.

Is it the left that endlessly wines about cancel culture, and social media taking away their platform? I could have sworn it was a different group...

I’d say the left was pretty damn vocal about cancel culture between the mid-60s to the mid-aughts. Of course it wasn’t called “cancel culture” but it was very much the same thing, without a social media component.

What are you basing this off of? The "left" in the United States has never held any real political power.

You can't just claim a political movement controlled the public zeitgeist for 50 years without some serious citations.

You obviously misunderstood what I said. The left wasn’t doing the canceling, the “moral” and religious right was…and the left was vocal and griping about being the ones canceled.

When I started my career in the ‘80s, I worked at a large metro daily newspaper. There were certainly gays and lesbians who worked there (probably a hundred or more), but you wouldn’t know it because not a single person that I recall out of nearly a thousand people was “out”. Why do you suppose that was? It was because people were afraid of ostracism and losing their jobs and livelihoods. If that wasn’t the equivalent of being cancelled…tell me what the hell was it?

Also, fast forward 40 years—do you think you could find a news organization in the US today with no one out? Attitudes have changed and they have changed because the left was vocal and had political power enough to change culture.

Perhaps you don’t believe that, or you wish it happened faster. But don’t denigrate the progress that liberals made over the last 50 years, while it may be slow progress it’s progress that will stick.

Yeah I misunderstood then, thanks for clarifying.

The new host of Jeopardy was cancelled just today over nothing.

A few weeks ago, the brilliant young lady Alexi Mcammond was cancelled as the new editor of Teen Vogue due to some arbitrary Tweets she made while she was 16 years old (She's now 27). Career ruined, age 16.

A few months ago we saw Harry and Meghan make unspecific claims of behaviour that caused her to have 'suicidal thoughts' (while living possibly the most privileged life imaginable) - while at the same time her own staff and entourage had accused her of bullying, and a lot of information coming out didn't maker her look very good.

The next day, a popular television presenter in the UK essentially disputed some of her claims in slightly terse, but nevertheless polite terms.

The presenter lost is job immediately - which should be very distressing.

If a person claims victimhood - the emotionality of the situation creates a hyper sensitivity such that their story must be in and of itself treated as absolute moral authority.

Tears = Truth.

Merely to disagree publicly with someone's claim is now 'cancel worthy' in polite culture, that's how far we've come.

This is weaponized by individuals, and amplified by some sectors of the press for various reasons, some ideological, some commercial, and then of course the 'reaction' of the 'other side' is weaponized as well ... ad nauseaum.

I feel sorry for Lizzo, the American entertainer, because almost everything ever written about her concerns highly defensive and aggressive posturing by generally leftist press, declaring her victimhood.

I'm not cherry-picking here - this is the most recent article about here in The Guardian (i.e. left wing press) [1]

" They made her into a global star – but also opened her up to extreme and often conflicting attacks beyond anything that Eilish or Lorde might experience owing to being a visible, confident, Black, fat woman: subject to racism as well as arguments that she panders to a white gaze; fat-shamed but also criticised for sharing her experiences of a juice cleanse."

It's always about her victimhood and never about her music. It's predictably comedic, a little sad.

Why does this happen?

I think that some people believe there's too much at stake in the grander scheme i.e. 'racism and police aggression do exist' - ergo - 'this story must presented as evidence of this fact irrespective of the actual nuances and facts'.

In an age where everything is politicized in an ugly way (i.e. climate change, vaccines), I believe that the emotionality of gender and racial issues elevates such things to the level of 'national urgency' and we end up in useless wars over it.

Nobody is arguing over Epstein and Weinstein ... that's not the issue.

But the issue is the perpetual fodder of these issues creeping into our media, culture and institutions without objective thought, dispassion etc. with which they should be approached.

I always believe that 80% of people are quite willing to hear issues of legitimate grievance and 'things they can do to help' but that this goodwill is ruined pretty quickly by irresponsible claims and heavy-handed activism.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/aug/20/billie-eilish-...

> Victimhood has become THE status symbol of the left.

Oh, good grief. Consider the things you say. You make a ridiculous claim.

I’m not trying to write an essay tonight but I don’t think they’re wrong about there being a victim/abuser dichotomy. Have you been in lefty spaces? Room is always made for the most oppressed to speak. Which isn’t a bad approach but it does make victimhood a status thing.

Sure, but you often hear it being talked about in terms of a victimhood hierarchy or “oppression Olympics” which is a mischaracterisation that is used to stake out a position against listening to people who are being marginalised.

In my experience, it’s an effort made to listen to people whose needs aren’t being met, because whatever policy or design is being discussed either forgot them entirely or designed something inappropriately. Easiest non-political example I can think of is an office bike locker where I worked which had hanging bike racks — as people started using e-bikes, that worked out badly, because e-bikes are heavy and the people using them didn’t all have the strength to hoist them. They weren’t the majority of cyclists, but they were causing the majority the problems of bikes being left in awkward or unsafe places. Turns out some regular cyclists struggled to lift their bikes too, so we installed floor racks (and power outlets) - clutter solved and back injuries hopefully avoided.

That effort to listen is definitely misused by some people who (in my respectful opinion) thrive on attention, but I think you’d find lefties talking about the project in terms of equality and inclusion.

It is wrong to entirely discount a tale of woe, just as it is to entirely credit it. The right dismisses and demeans, and the left is credulous and unquestioningly supports. Both are wrong, and there's a wide swath of reaction possible between these two extremes, which is where I try to be.

And in addition, both the left and right extremists like to misrepresent the other, and demean them, which is also wrong. The problem here is that someone in the middle, like me, is happily pigeon-holed as an extremist by either side, as you do in your comment. I did not, and have never, demeaned the leftist error as "oppression Olympics" because this throws the baby out with the bathwater. Racist policy has momentum and it's foolish to deny it. What I stand firmly against is the credulity with which every allegation of misconduct is accepted from anyone that has certain characteristics. Privilege is real, but that doesn't imply that everything the underprivileged say is true, or that they would never be tempted to use the power of allegation to achieve personal ends.

> Victimhood has become THE status symbol of the left.

This is a ridiculously broad statement. It is not an argument in good faith. It does not contribute beneficially to the discussion. GP needs to do better.

There's nothing wrong with fixation on victimhood that actually exists: one person wronging another begets an oppressor and a victim. However, a fixation on victimhood to the extreme can lead to error with negative consequences.

For example, many forms of microaggressions mentioned in the article do not (in my opinion) lead to victimhood. To say otherwise runs the risk of making victims that don't exist. Being offended for example does not _necessarily_ make you into a victim.

It's pretty harmful psychologically to see yourself as a victim, no matter how much you really are or not. There is something wrong with fixation on it, it's self-destructive. It also destroys relationships because the victim sees their partner as an oppressor and finds a way to blame them for everything they don't like.

> My employer recently required me

Did everyone at the company take it?

As far as I know, it is part of a long-term D&I initiative which has much more aspects to it. For example, your review weights your D&I performance as important as your technical performance.

To me, this screams that you are in an organization where technical performance is not critical to the success of the organization.

I mean, look, I don't want to return to the days where if you were technically good, you could be a sexist jerk or a racist jerk or just generally a jerk. I don't want to work in that kind of an organization. But... equal weighting? Your organization isn't fighting for its life on technical merit, I suspect...

So what? I would argue that most companies don't live and die on their technical merit. I don't think that Toyota cares if they're using the latest JS framework or if their devs are 10% slower than the SV ideal. I for one struggle to think of a single company that is where it is only because of it's technical superiority, and not because they also knew how to sell that technology, how to talk about it, how to relate with people who should use it.

That's a different argument.

The person working on the engine should be the best qualified person to do so. And similarly for the other technical areas.

Nobody said anything disparaging about the need for sales, communication, or relationships. Only that in those respective fields you would also probably want the person who is most qualified, no?

What the hell is D&I performance?

Diversity and inclusion. So probably something about % of under-represented groups vs the majority (usually white males in the US tech sector).