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Comment by NoGravitas | Hacker News Reader

As a leftist, one of the things that gives me pause about identity politics and the language of identity divorced from class struggle is how easily it is repurposed by reactionaries:

> But Google employees began spreading disinformation, calling her “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu” in emails to the company’s leaders, documents posted on Google’s intranet and mailing lists with thousands of employees.

I don't have a solution, just a depressing observation.

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It's definitely frustrating. Culture, religion, sexual orientation, skin color, and politics often get combined into one, so it becomes impossible to criticize particular cultural or religious practices and beliefs without getting jumped on as racist or ignorant. This strategy of calling someone anti-X is a great way to end actual discussion about specific issues.

You see weird reaction in debates about feminism. People go along with the belief that men and women are the same. And then use that to justify male anger about unfairness by just parotting the same talking points. When actually feminist could always accept that there were differences and that was the point. But the argument changes at different levels of abstraction. It's confusing. Individuals should be treated the same, but are different statistically and in aggregate.

People see that "men and women are different" is used as justification for prejudice (like a person not getting a chance because people of the same sex did rarely have success previously). Which sucks and people feel its unfair. And when trying to conceptualize that unfairness into words, their contra opinion sometimes ends up being "so man and women must be equal" instead of "a persons sex does not justify prejudice".

Peoples feelings about fairness and justice are always valid, but hell, many people suck so hard at putting it into words.

People can be equal before the law without being equal before a pole vault.

What wasn't clear to me was whether they were claiming that her ideas about caste equality were specificall anti-hindu, or if it's just an ad hominem attack to try to shut her down.

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