Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why People Feel Like Victims

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 510 posts

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#121

Post by shirakawasuna »

gelert wrote: post #13

An interesting article, though note the easy conflation of Jewishness with Israelis. Being Jewish ≠ being Israeli and for many people they are quite distinct identities. Indeed, Israeli identity can be quite anti victimhood. While I would hesitate to call the conflation anti-semitic it is at minimum quite misleading - and also a gross overgeneralisation of Jewish identity.

The conflation tends to come from an angle that is either anti-semitic or Zionist and hyper-nationalist. Or was informed by one of those camps and picked it up by osmosis. I would guess this falls closer to the Zionist/hyper-nationalist camp.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#122

Post by exporectomy »

ne0flex wrote: post #115
breakyerself wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can debate all day long about the merits of explaining systemic racism to young black kids vs keeping them ignorant about it. However the people ignoring the facts are the ones who deny systemic racism exists. It may be better for children of color to be ignorant about it, but certainly not adults of any racial background.

I'd argue there's a lot more nuances to system racism than the general narrative that is currently being perpettuated. Looking into those nuances would be frowned upon because certain groups differ from other groups for reasons that are not truly understood but would cause us to ask questions we're not comfortable with. Though anecdotal, I know several adults who have fallen into the "it's because systemic racism tha…

I think American culture has potentially gone down an ever-worsening path that comes from assuming blacks and whites are inherently identical. That leads to the belief that the persistent differences in life outcomes must be caused by oppression. That means there's an oppressor who is evil and deserves punishment. What if the fundamental assumption isn't true? How long do you keep punishing the oppressor for?

Not to get all Godwinny but that's also how 1930's Germans saw Jews. They were the greedy bankers taking that reparations money and oppressing the native Germans. so they deserved punishment.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#123

Post by shirakawasuna »

WalterBright wrote: post #18
WalterBright wrote: post #5

I'll be more brazen. I don't know about other countries, but if you live in the US and am an adult of sound mind and body, you're not a victim. If your life isn't working for you, reassess your situation, develop a plan, and get busy!

The trouble with being a victim is there's nothing to be done about it. Deciding to not being a victim is empowering, as it means you can do something about it.

This makes no sense at all. If you have been or are being victimized, recognizing it is the first step to taking an action to counter it.

If someone steals from your car, nobody plays philosophical games about whether you were victimized and understanding that you were is the very first step to even understanding the situation and then adopting habits of not leaving expensive stuff in your car, investing in locks, taking a focus to the causes of crime, etc...

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#124

Post by armenarmen »

heymijo wrote: post #86
armenarmen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who were the people that put forward the “say happy holidays not merry Christmas” issue? Or was the issue invented (and lost) by conservative talking heads?

Roger Ailes, the man who made Fox News, generated the controversy around this when it was a non-issue and drove it into the public spotlight. You can read the book The Loudest Voice in the Room or watch the mini-series based on it to learn more.

Cool, will do. Thanks for an actual answer

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#125

Post by neartheplain »

tstrimple wrote: post #82
xupybd wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main problem with White privilege is that is drawing a big line between white people and people of color. IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide. To start seeing people as individuals of equal value, based on their character not group identity. I'm white, my wife is not. I fear where my kids will land in all of this. If we are drawing hard lines between people how will half whit…

> IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide. This never happened. You can't just eliminate explicitly racist laws from your books and expect all the racism and bigotry which led to those laws in the first place to disappear by magic. Pretending like there aren't different outcomes and general experiences between races also doesn't magically eliminate those differences. If you can’t me…

>>IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide.

>This never happened.

Speaking as an American raised in the 1990s, the cultural programming of my childhood at least made progress in that direction. I was raised on popular TV shows like Sesame Street, Captain Planet, and Power Rangers, which showed people of all races coexisting in settings where race did not divide them. When the issue of racial prejudice did surface, it was clearly marked as a backwards and wrong-headed way of thinking.

These TV shows (and movies, books, etc.) were fiction, and did not change the reality of racial prejudice or de-facto segregated communities on the ground. However, they did set my and many childrens' expectations for how the world should be, and how people of different races should treat each other (i.e. as equals and as they would want to be treated). I see the then-mainstream prevalence of such messages, and absence of countervailing messages, as a tangible victory of the Civil Rights Movement.

I worry that today's mainstream cultural programming will have an opposite effect. Teaching children to focus on racial differences, and constantly drawing attention to race more generally, only teaches them to divide each other along racial lines. I believe a happy medium exists where concrete examples of racial prejudice get called out, but race is not otherwise constantly in focus.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#126

Post by shirakawasuna »

WalterBright wrote: post #5

I'll be more brazen. I don't know about other countries, but if you live in the US and am an adult of sound mind and body, you're not a victim. If your life isn't working for you, reassess your situation, develop a plan, and get busy!

It's tough to know where to begin with something so obviously false and trivializing.

What amount of violence would you need to experience before you would acknowledge victimization? There's plenty that goes around that you apparently don't know about.

Let's say you are poor, went to a protest, and got arrested. You can't make bail (you're poor) and are fired from your job because you are in in jail. You easily win your case and see no prison time, but your life has been massively impacted in the negative by others unjustly.

This person was a victim of policing and likely the system in general that creates these trade-offs and punishes a lack of material wealth. You cannot begin to even understand the situation without acknowledging the fault and the injustice.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#127

Post by ungrateful-dead »

XorNot wrote: post #85
armenarmen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who were the people that put forward the “say happy holidays not merry Christmas” issue? Or was the issue invented (and lost) by conservative talking heads?

I like how at no point it's occurred to you that maybe people are just being polite or considerate towards the beliefs of others...or that a business might not want to stipulate a specific theological belief it's employees must put forward. That just can't be it for some reason, it's got to be a conspiracy against christianity! Talk about victimhood...

When a society built for Christians (or for “Christian ideals” which this country was founded upon) starts to acknowledge and accept others, the folks against these changes think everyone else is being too sensitive.

When a society built with slaves and r*ping and pillaging indigenous populations starts to acknowledge that there’s issues that stemmed from that, the folks against these changes and dialogue think everyone else is being too sensitive.

Is there a pattern here? There’s a lot of talk here about “victim mentality” here and how “everyone else is so sensitive, I figured it out!”

It’s like the classic looking at bullet patterns on the planes that returned and not analyzing the planes that were taken down.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#128

Post by shirakawasuna »

pasabagi wrote: post #10
WalterBright wrote: post #5

I'll be more brazen. I don't know about other countries, but if you live in the US and am an adult of sound mind and body, you're not a victim. If your life isn't working for you, reassess your situation, develop a plan, and get busy!

Is this a moral or a factual statement? I guess I'd reject the whole victim/perpetrator dichotomy and say that people's conditions are contingent on forces largely out of their control. That's a factual statement. Lots of people and societies find this very uncomfortable - we generally like the cosmos to be largely about us, down to our decisions, both for the better and for the worse.

To be honest, this comment section is full of blanket dismissals that speak to living in a bubble away from people with very real grievances. I would say it is not particularly philosophical or moral or factual - it is a reflection of personal material status.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#129

Post by nmfisher »

rejectedandsad wrote: post #93
WalterBright wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never been easier and cheaper to get an education in the US, start a business, reach a global marketplace, learn how to do anything you want to do, etc. When I was young it was pretty much unheard of for people to get wealthy before 25. Now it's commonplace and unremarkable.

How do you define wealthy Walter? I’m 25 and “unremarkable” and my net worth is only a quarter million. I make about $200k at a company you’d probably consider unimpressive. Not everyone can be remarkable enough to go to CalTech.

The fact that you think a net worth of a quarter of a million dollars at 25 is unremarkable goes to show how completely out of touch you are.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#130

Post by sakopov »

zxzax wrote: post #31
WalterBright wrote: post #5

I'll be more brazen. I don't know about other countries, but if you live in the US and am an adult of sound mind and body, you're not a victim. If your life isn't working for you, reassess your situation, develop a plan, and get busy!

Walter, please don't say these things. I get what you're trying to communicate but there is such thing as a victim. You can be doing everything right and still have harm brought to you and your loved ones by circumstances beyond your control. People who lost their families in 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina didn't end up that way because they didn't have a plan or weren't busy.

This isn't how I read OP's post. The OP isn't talking about a catastrophic or life-altering event which makes one a victim. Rather, being faced with difficult circumstances and life choices which can be altered and addressed with effort and plain hard work instead of blaming others and falling into victimhood.
Post reply on HN