Sunsettommy
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- Mar 19, 2018
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The Daily Chrenk
October 22, 2018 - by Arthur Chrenkoff
Dear Resistance, listen to my lived totalitarian experience – you have no effing idea what you’re talking about
Excerpt:
In a world that the identity politics has wrought, lived experience is a trump (apologies for the use of a triggering word) card: your viewpoint or opinion on an issue is automatically deemed invalid or at least less valid and valuable if you’re not a member of a group whose plight is being discussed. Men can’t really know what it’s like to be women, white people can’t really know what it’s like to be people of colour, the straight ones can’t really know what it’s like to have other sexual orientations. Your identity is your argument; “You wouldn’t know what it’s like; you can’t tell me what I should think or feel”. You’re only allowed to walk in somebody else’s shoes to the extent you can feel the same callouses, otherwise give me my shoes back. This sort of epistemological approach rears its head nowadays in everything from most political debates to the calls that fiction authors should not write through characters of different gender, race or sexuality. Just like cultural appropriation, identity appropriation is a grave sin against minorities (or, in case of women, majorities).
As a straight, white, Christian, right-wing, middle class male of European extraction I get told to shut up a lot. As you can imagine, this does not at all stop me from speaking out. The white privilege clearly makes me both uncontrollable and insufferable.
But if lived experience is indeed the be-all-end-all that the identarian left considers it to be, there is one area where my lived experience without a doubt shit all over the lived experience of the woke folk. Unlike all those among them who have been born and/or raised in the West and have zero or almost zero experience of living under anything other than a liberal democratic government (which is 99 per cent of them at least), I have lived the first 15 years of my life under the Soviet block-style communism, or “real socialism” as the Party used to call it. I’m not going to pretend that the 1970s and the 80s in Poland were as bloody and traumatic as the Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia (as P J O’Rourke who visited Warsaw at that time noted, the communism for most part doesn’t kill you any more, it just bores you to death) but I do know a difference or twenty-two between a totalitarian or authoritarian society and a Western democracy.
LINK
October 22, 2018 - by Arthur Chrenkoff
Dear Resistance, listen to my lived totalitarian experience – you have no effing idea what you’re talking about
Excerpt:
In a world that the identity politics has wrought, lived experience is a trump (apologies for the use of a triggering word) card: your viewpoint or opinion on an issue is automatically deemed invalid or at least less valid and valuable if you’re not a member of a group whose plight is being discussed. Men can’t really know what it’s like to be women, white people can’t really know what it’s like to be people of colour, the straight ones can’t really know what it’s like to have other sexual orientations. Your identity is your argument; “You wouldn’t know what it’s like; you can’t tell me what I should think or feel”. You’re only allowed to walk in somebody else’s shoes to the extent you can feel the same callouses, otherwise give me my shoes back. This sort of epistemological approach rears its head nowadays in everything from most political debates to the calls that fiction authors should not write through characters of different gender, race or sexuality. Just like cultural appropriation, identity appropriation is a grave sin against minorities (or, in case of women, majorities).
As a straight, white, Christian, right-wing, middle class male of European extraction I get told to shut up a lot. As you can imagine, this does not at all stop me from speaking out. The white privilege clearly makes me both uncontrollable and insufferable.
But if lived experience is indeed the be-all-end-all that the identarian left considers it to be, there is one area where my lived experience without a doubt shit all over the lived experience of the woke folk. Unlike all those among them who have been born and/or raised in the West and have zero or almost zero experience of living under anything other than a liberal democratic government (which is 99 per cent of them at least), I have lived the first 15 years of my life under the Soviet block-style communism, or “real socialism” as the Party used to call it. I’m not going to pretend that the 1970s and the 80s in Poland were as bloody and traumatic as the Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia (as P J O’Rourke who visited Warsaw at that time noted, the communism for most part doesn’t kill you any more, it just bores you to death) but I do know a difference or twenty-two between a totalitarian or authoritarian society and a Western democracy.
LINK
