Identity Politics

[Yonadav]

Yeah, that does seem to be the prevailing mood of the left.  Tired of what's become a nearly ancient patriarchal hegemony that asserts a particular american identity which is no longer representative of the country.  I have to wonder..so what?  So what if the mood has become sick of old white guys?  They aren't going anywhere.  For now and the forseable future the table of our institutions is set firmly in their favor.  

Though, being "sick of old white guys" doesn't seem to be the sort of identity politics being waged inside the left.  That boils down, to hear it told, more to personal grievances than any disagreement on the issue of being tired of old white men running everything.  To people being made to feel that they aren't "real" liberals if they don't properly virtue signal on an issue that matters little to them.  I can certainly understand that.  

As I can understand the people on the other side who have a tenuous relationship with the only part of our political spectrum that is willing to so much as accept their existence.  Dems have not been consistent in their support, even if they've been consistent in word.  So, when those people hear the rhetoric that was used on the right to delegitimize not only their political position..but their very identity..yet now coming from the left...they get a little leary.

It has the unfortunate distinction of being both valid and offensive as criticism.  This has been exploited..and even that I understand.  The opposing identity here very literally -is- "old white guys".  They clearly feel as though the pitchforks and torches are about to come out (or already are, lol..tune in on the right night and you'll be informed that a literal white genocide is currently under way), even if a sober assessment of facts would tell them, just as the other examples of white grievance do, that this is an irrational fear.

The political motivation, on the left, to assume rightwing rhetoric is difficult to describe as anything other than fear that they will lose some coalition, or lose momentum..in sum, lose an election.  This is, after all, what the right has been telling them for so long.  They don't want to be, or be seen as, the kind of radical extremists that lose elections.  I'm not sure that this fear is any more rational than the fear of the anti-white mob above.  The reason that the right is bitching to high heaven about identity politics is because it scares the shit out of them.  That should be instructive.  The right is telegraphing the thing that they know will tank them by brute force of demographics as the identity politics party of a group soon to be relegated to a status less than their traditional majority - with all the privileges that this confers.

Well, identity politics is doing a really good job of knocking off the best socialist leader who has come along in quite awhile.  Identity politics exists for one purpose only. To divide the left. And its working really well.

[The Grand Nudger]

Who do you reckon identity politics knocked off, and how? Bernie? Last I checked he still had a seat. He's pretty good at identity politics, even though he confuses identity politics for tokenism. The us/them billionaires/poor man stuff did seem to spook the dem establishment into voting for milketoast hitlery, but I don't know that this was ultimately why he couldn't secure the nom. She did the centrist thing, that won, then it won the pop but lost the election.

[Pat Mustard]

[quote='Sal' pid='1883424' dateline='1549680967']

The gender wage gap has been explained to death, and it's still brought up as relevant. Men. Work. Longer. Hours.

Bullshit. The wage gap is measured in hourly pay. And ever hour worked over 48 in a week isva wasted hour anyway, you're getting paid for working at a low level.

[GrandizerII]

The gender wage gap has been explained to death, and it's still brought up as relevant. Men. Work. Longer. Hours.

What do you have to support your position?

Multitudes of academic studies disagree with you. It's relevant as fuck, and it remains a problem (albeit somewhat improving).

[bennyboy]

The gender wage gap has been explained to death, and it's still brought up as relevant. Men. Work. Longer. Hours.

Bullshit. The wage gap is measured in hourly pay.  And ever hour worked over 48 in a week isva wasted hour anyway, you're getting paid for working at a low level.

I call bullshit on bullshit.
The wage gap is not normalized to control important factors-- career resets due to having a child, for example, or for the much longer hours some men work, and also for choosing careers which pay dividends other than pure $$$.
The latter is pretty important.  Ask how HAPPY men are in their jobs relative to women, at any salary amount, and I think you'll find that women overall report greater job satisfaction.  It fucking sucks being a man, and having to bring in money-- it's not a privilege, a joy, or a pleasure.
But for at least some women, working is an option.  It's an act of freedom-- rebooting a missed career, or finding something more interesting than making sandwiches for your teenagers.

---

The gender wage gap has been explained to death, and it's still brought up as relevant. Men. Work. Longer. Hours.

What do you have to support your position?

Multitudes of academic studies disagree with you. It's relevant as fuck, and it remains a problem (albeit somewhat improving).

Appeal to numbers doesn't mean much, unless you can say exactly what the studies are examining.  If you're looking for a pay gap, it's there.  If you are looking to really explain the pay gap, there are some very clear contributors which have nothing to do with unfair pay for the same work.  Let's hear a woman explain it in terms simple enough for anyone to understand.

[Yonadav]

I call bullshit on bullshit.
The wage gap is not normalized to control important factors-- career resets due to having a child, for example, or for the much longer hours some men work, and also for choosing careers which pay dividends other than pure $$$.
The latter is pretty important.  Ask how HAPPY men are in their jobs relative to women, at any salary amount, and I think you'll find that women overall report greater job satisfaction.  It fucking sucks being a man, and having to bring in money-- it's not a privilege, a joy, or a pleasure.
But for at least some women, working is an option.  It's an act of freedom-- rebooting a missed career, or finding something more interesting than making sandwiches for your teenagers.

---

What do you have to support your position?

Multitudes of academic studies disagree with you. It's relevant as fuck, and it remains a problem (albeit somewhat improving).

Appeal to numbers doesn't mean much, unless you can say exactly what the studies are examining.  If you're looking for a pay gap, it's there.  If you are looking to really explain the pay gap, there are some very clear contributors which have nothing to do with unfair pay for the same work.  Let's hear a woman explain it in terms simple enough for anyone to understand.

That's a good video, Benny. It is one of many, many videos that straighten out misconceptions about the wage gap, and yet people who keep bitching about the wage gap completely ignore them. They aren't interested in facts; they are only interested in their prejudices. And that is exactly why identity politics are ultimately toxic. Rather than dealing with real problems, the identity voter just votes their prejudice and won't be happy until all of society overtly discriminates in favor of their prejudice. The feminist identity voter will keep insisting that women are paid less than men, despite evidence to the contrary, and push for higher pay for women until it becomes undeniable that women are being paid more than men. Identity politics is not about equality. 

I had a nice little reminder about the difference between men and women the night before last night. My sister called me at 3 in the morning. Her german sheppard had what seemed like a heart attack at 2 AM and died. She didn't want to wait until morning, and wanted the dog to be buried immediately. Her husband was digging a hole in the snow and mud at 3 AM, and she wanted me to come help him. I went over and helped my brother in law dig a deep hole in the dark while stumbling around in the snow and mud. My sister's contribution was to make coffee. She is one of those who makes frequent quips about men being paid more than women, but she absolutely wasn't going to dig in the snow and mud with us. Immediately after the dog was buried, it appeared that she was completely oblivious to the fact that we had done all of the work under miserable conditions. She called her 24 year old daughter later that morning, and told her that "We were up all night, burying the dog." You know, as if she has somehow made a significant contribution to burying the dog.

[The Grand Nudger]

Much like white grievance, there's a market for male grievance fan fic.  People who repeat these talking points commonly think that they've committed the sin of failing to properly virtue signal - that this explains other's reactions to it.  Then they blame "identity politics"  for others understandable leariness towards them as unwitting rightwing nutjobs.

Not for nothing, it's just as true and true in the same way as before....but not in the way that they think it is. They have properly virtue signaled, for the opposing identity party. So we could say that identity politics is dividing the left, if we wanted to stretch it. The success of the right here is framing and messaging. They've framed a broad swath of racist, homophobic, and misogynist rhetoric as "skepticism" of some type or another - as they did with climate science. It works. They propogate that message through friendly or "allied" sources to launder it. Often enough, the left does the lift for them.

In this case, though, it's a bit more transparent. AEI is a consistent rightwing identity politics front.

[GrandizerII]

I call bullshit on bullshit.
The wage gap is not normalized to control important factors-- career resets due to having a child, for example, or for the much longer hours some men work, and also for choosing careers which pay dividends other than pure $$$.
The latter is pretty important.  Ask how HAPPY men are in their jobs relative to women, at any salary amount, and I think you'll find that women overall report greater job satisfaction.  It fucking sucks being a man, and having to bring in money-- it's not a privilege, a joy, or a pleasure.
But for at least some women, working is an option.  It's an act of freedom-- rebooting a missed career, or finding something more interesting than making sandwiches for your teenagers.

---

What do you have to support your position?

Multitudes of academic studies disagree with you. It's relevant as fuck, and it remains a problem (albeit somewhat improving).

Appeal to numbers doesn't mean much, unless you can say exactly what the studies are examining.  If you're looking for a pay gap, it's there.  If you are looking to really explain the pay gap, there are some very clear contributors which have nothing to do with unfair pay for the same work.  Let's hear a woman explain it in terms simple enough for anyone to understand.

What you guys don't seem to understand is that even after you account for all those "non-sexist" factors that may contribute to the pay gap, there is still a gap that is unaccounted for by anything other than discrimination. It's not necessarily blatant discrimination (often times, it's due to subconscious biases), and we're not simply talking about direct pay itself. Even if women get paid the same as men for the same job, differences in circumstances due to sexist expectations still play a role, and as such women are less likely to be hired (for jobs that are stereotypically high status male jobs, that is) and less likely to have their salaries raised or be promoted to high positions. Perceptions of personalities due to sexist expectations matter as well as agreeable women still get paid less than men who score the same on agreeableness.

That video you posted just shows how ignorant "alt-righters" are when it comes to this topic. The reason women don't get hired more is because of this thing called sexist bias. Again, it's not necessarily conscious and intentional, but as social psychological studies, people do have these biases that affect how they behave and treat others "subconsciously" and even the best intentions can therefore end up being sexist.

[Yonadav]

LOL! If you're not virtue signaling for women and minorities, then you you're virtue signaling for straight white men. That's just beautiful. Sometimes I think that the best way to deal with a self loathing straight white male libtard is to tell them that they obviously don't know what they are talking about because they are straight white men. They should totally buy that.

[The Grand Nudger]

You spent an entire paragraph bemoaning the rough spot that we dudes are in, by reference to your sister, Yon.  It has nothing to do with your failing to virtue signal for women and minorities. Benny for his part, put it more succinctly. Sucks to be a man. Women have it better. This is identity politics.

Can you see why, as a response to the subject of the wage gap - no less.. that might cause some people to wonder whether you've been recruited to the dark side, lol? Just ignore whichever side of this you think has it right. It honestly doesn't matter to the issue of contention ala identity politics. I'm only trying to give you an outsiders view of how you (and they) find yourself in this predicament - not litigate your dodgy points of view with respect to reality, and I mean that very broadly, your as in "liberals at large". I'm just as certain in my differences of position with the liberal establishment as you are - even if they aren't any more factual than one or another side of this particular issue...so I can understand that. I'm not a real liberal any more than I'm a real conservative. For my part, I lean into that - it's not like the liberals and conservatives are just nuts and have me all wrong...they're pointing out valid and present differences between their platforms and my own opinions.