Human identity specialization services are available on this topic. It's called get to know your neighbors past your own brain and the brains of some suave dudes and mad grandpas.

I couldn't reply at work on my phone, but this was my immediate thought upon reading this thread. It seems to me that this is a weak attempt at saying "I don't see color." It might fool those that can't obviously see it, but it's very disingenuous. Good read, spank.

This is the point at which the world has gone truly loopy. Now you lay down the rules of reason without some weird accusation?

This is a serious problem and one day you guys might come to understand why.

The absence of clear reason for A to argue with B about A's identity is the tell.

Sure, B can rationalize and do stuff make claims about A's logic, and that is also telling.

You wanna vote on A's identity?

There are reasons that can boil down to not being part of a collective (which is not a good reason really, because it suggests contingency).

1. I believe that mass killing based on race is evil.
2. When the Nazis perpetrated the holocaust it was mass killing based on race (in this case, the Jewish race).
3. Therefore I think the holocaust is evil.

You don't need to know a thing about me beyond what I've argued.

I don't think you ever really responded to the argument I made about this in the POG politics thread.

On a different note, I somewhat randomly picked up a copy of Social Theory and the Politics of Identity yesterday and I think Calhoun makes some interesting points about identity politics in general.

On the rise of identity politics as a consequence of democracy:

On the link between identity and political representation:

I think the last sentence is one you might agree with, and is similar to the beginning of Harris' criticism which you quotes, but I think Calhoun makes the point that these concerns are inextricable and inevitable. Beyond that though, I think Harris misses the point that movements which hinge in part on collective identity are nevertheless effective. For example, maybe we could argue that BLM's framings or presentations of the issues could be improved by emphasizing specific issues and solutions over matters of identity, but it's hard to imagine the DOJ reports on Baltimore, Ferguson, and Chicago, or the independent efforts by The Guardian and others to document police shootings, or The FBI's decision to improve tracking of police shootings (whether it survives Trump or not...) happening without BLM. And it's completely obvious why the political issues hew so closely to matters of identity for black Americans.

I agree that identity means nothing to pure logic. But identity is important to how arguments are received, and as long as identity isn't used to twist the logic of an argument via logical fallacy, then it really doesn't matter one way or the other.

So if someone uses the genetic fallacy to support their claim, have at them. But if they simply provide their identity as a context, it can be safely ignored when judging the validity of their logic.

If what yall are getting at that identity is important to politics, and tribalism will always be with us in one form or another, that is a given. Recognizing how the facts don't change regardless of the identity of those who utter them, and neither do the validity of any arguments which rely on those facts, and that identity politics is too often abused to obscure that simple truism, in fact it's even denied by far too many these days is the point of Harris' quote, I think.

The late philosopher, Richard Rorty, made a critique of the left couple decades ago that's been making the rounds on social media due to this telling passage:

The article goes on the describe his thoughts critical of the left's turn away from reform and toward identity politics:

Which he thought was understandable, even good in many ways:

Pretty interesting article. That guy had some scary prognostications about the direction we're headed.

Surprise!

People's identities which were quiet, new, oppressed or suppressed escaped into the open free and yaint making none of them come back "under" without all of them resisting.

Exceptional post Foldndark, exceptional.

He was right of course. Although I don't not think the N word will make a comeback.

He was right about the strongman, but wrong about the reason. The left is nothing but pragmatic--in fact too much pragmatism is one of the main criticisms of the left. Identity politics is being used to reform institutions (gay marriage, black lives matter)--not to abandon them.

And he gets the causal relationship backwards. Republicans seized on identity politics with the Southern Strategy. The right has been the ones who have ignored the economic needs of the middle and lower classes. The right weakened unions. It seems weird that the right would be tapped with cleaning up its own mess, but that's how good their propaganda machine has been.

The future is Trump ****ing up big time and the Republicans splitting or being ineffective and losing power. They started to believe their own bull****. Many of them actually think the health care situation in this country will be better if they repeal Obamacare. Democrats are daring them to do it. I doubt the propaganda can make a winner out of the hand they hold now.

But, yeah, the left could **** it up, of course. No guarantees.

You are ignoring the situation across Europe 13ball.

What is the situation across Europe?

Far-right sentiment is on the rise everywhere.

not true in spain, italy and germany currently.

AfD in germany is polling lower than 6 months ago. Hofer lost in austria when re-polled with a higher margin after trump won. Far right is around 20% in italy and it has often been higher. And spain has no far right whatsoever.

Not sure why you equate france to europe.

What's currently going on in europe is.a steady erosion of classical political parties grasp on power. Far right is only one of the beneficiaries of that.

Podemos, movimento 5 stelle, AfD, en marche, ciudadanos, pirate party and whatnot have only one thing in common: they are new.

It's not on the rise in Italy? I heard differently.

My bernie bro/stein gf came back from living in Spain for ten years in 2015. She said the govt has turned pretty far to the right since the 2008 economic collapse, and has only gotten worse. She thought was Hillary right wing so who knows.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...o-sanchez-psoe

Merkel sees the writing on the wall and has flipped a lot of her positions regarding mass immigration. I assume it's to help stop leaking support to rw parties.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn...?client=safari

They won't go towards fascism though. The countries that were previously under fascist rule seem immune to the more robust fascist tendencies showing up elsewhere.

So someone can't say "As a Jewish person who grew up with no extended family due to the holocaust, I can tell you that the effects of Nazism reverberate through generations loudly."?

Your argument parallels appeals from the upper class to hush up all the inequality and class warfare talk because the mention of it (not the inequality itself) is so divisive. Of course, class warfare is secretly all the upper class ever talks about. I suspect that, analogously, those who bleat about "identity politics" are the ones who self images are most critically dependent on the white male identity.

Identity politics sometimes form out of the struggle to articulate a grievance. So American Indians (who didn't know they were Indians before white settlers told them they were) might refer to themselves, and the grievances specific to their group, in a collective reference used in the discourse with the larger society. To do anything else would be to voluntarily blind the discourse to the shared perspective of all involved, a perspective which sees them as Indians. This would of course render the nature of the offense invisible, which I guess is your goal.

Just stop. It's way to ambitious to, at this point, request people in various minority groups indulge your identity group in its obscurantist fantasies.

Be careful not to confuse the opting for the only current alternative to the neo liberal disaster as sincere right-wing sentiment. You might be setting yourself up for quite a disappointment.

Jesus Deuce, stop acting like such a douche. Nobody here is cheering the far right. We're lamenting that the practically inevitable outcome of identity politics is tribalism; and it's doing just that, giving people few alternatives but to join their respective teams, and the far right loves that.

I disagree, you're making people lose faith in democracy.

What?