Earlier quoted context omitted.
The mere act of caring about your children's schooling, and taking measures to ensure its quality is a far more solid predictor of good outcomes than nearly anything else. At least, that's what economic data from the last fifty years says. These "narratives" are just that, fictional stories told to support a prevailing social ideology, and yes, they are dangerous, not the least because they ignore the facts.
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.
Why People Feel Like Victims
161–170 of 510 posts
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#162I'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!
"I’ve had it so good in this world, you know. The odds were fifty-to-one against me being born in the United States in 1930. I won the lottery the day I emerged from the womb by being in the United States instead of in some other country where my chances would have been way different. Imagine there are two identical twins in the womb, both equally bright and energetic. And the genie says to them, “One of you is going…
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#163> So victimhood is a learned behavior after a certain age. As a brown guy with kids in the school system, that's why recent trends in education alarm me. I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about. It's dangerous experimentation with kids' psychology. Growing up as one…
Same thing but I have girls. I don't want them growing up with the locus of control outside of themselves. The studies are convincing that that is the worst thing you can for a child.
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A simple example which was in the news this week due to a Supreme court case: crack sentencing disparities. You made a bad life choice and sold 50 grams of cocaine and got caught, you might go away for 2 years and then turn your life around. But if you sold 5 grams of crack and got caught, you were probably going away for 20 years. The penalties for crack were literally 100 times higher.
Now, consuming crack is really bad for you, but consider the situation of some kid without much life experience that is tempted into making a quick buck. Depending on where they happen to be and what's in front of them, the same failure of morality/judgment would have staggeringly different consequences.
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#165PTSD/trauma may be the result of being victimized, but it is not “learned” any more than a bone might “learn” to break under stress.
What happens under extreme trauma is an onslaught of electric signals and chemical reactions in the brain, essentially adrenaline (fight or flight) and cortisol (stress) responses. They help you survive when needed, but terrible for the brain and body in extreme amounts and/or prolonged exposure.
The issue is not that it is “learned” but that in some people the trauma essentially fires otherwise dormant pathways in the brain and instead of these pathways going back to a dormant state the neurons and pathways are potentially strengthened by the single acute episode and remain turned on. It creates an awful feedback loop where these neurons and pathways fire from normal/non traumatic stimulus moving forward because the connections become so strong they become a default pathway. Then regular firing of these pathways just reinforces the connections. You could point to that as “learning” I suppose, but it is involuntary. The associated behaviors are commonly avoidance in order to prevent these misfirings but unable to avoid it the responses will usually be consistent with the original response to the adrenaline and cortisol during the trauma.
Not everyone responds the same, because it really isn’t learned but something I would describe more as a physical “injury” to the brain from the natural biological response to the trauma. The 4 pillar model of the article might encapsulate a decent general framework for trauma victims, but it entirely ignores the very real biological responses and physical effects of trauma, so is on par with saying stress and fight or flight responses are learned. If it were learned we would teach soldiers not to have those responses, instead they are trained to manage their reactions to those responses, and even with training trauma can not be prevented in all individuals in all situations.
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How does being a victim imply that nothing can be done? Because if you had no role in the matter, you couldn't have prevented it.
The fact that something in the past couldn't have been prevented doesn't mean that there's nothing to be done in the present. There's also the fact that often you couldn't have prevented it.
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been pulled over many times. Here's what I do: 1. put my hands on the wheel in plain sight and keep them there 2. when the cop says "driver's license" I say "it's in my wallet in my right front pocket. I do not move. 3. cop says "ok, you can get your wallet". 4. I use one hand to get my wallet and the license. 5. cop says "registration" 6. I say "it's in the glove box" and I do not move. 7. cop says "ok you can…
Really living the dream there Walter.
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s truly hard to overstate what a ridiculous position you have staked out here with this argument. You’ve picked some arbitrary definition of what it means to be a victim based on god only knows what philosophy or life experience and then tried to state it as some kind of objective fact or enlightened wisdom.
> ridiculous position I'm well aware of how other people perceive it. It's completely contrary to the barrage of what I call "cult of the victim" that spews forth from nearly all media. I don't expect to change your mind. But give it a chance. For example, A man falls down the stairs and breaks his leg. Victim: "I'm so unlucky, my leg broke. Oh, life is so unfair." Non-Victim: "Phew, I'm so lucky! I could have broken…
[Villain music]
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same thing but I have girls. I don't want them growing up with the locus of control outside of themselves. The studies are convincing that that is the worst thing you can for a child.
I'm a woman and in some sense I had sort of a sheltered childhood. I was one of the top students in my graduating high school class and I had a lot of firsthand experience with being taken seriously, having my opinions respected and feeling just as entitled as anyone else to speak my mind, etc. And then I became an adult and life did not go how I thought it would and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what we…
This is an assertion many people make without any actual factual basis or proof. It sounds like what we think is true so we believe it is true, but that's often how many societies make their biggest blunders.
>I seem to not be the only woman who keeps trying to find some high road long after it's become obvious that the person in question is simply abusive and taking advantage.
Most people do this. In fact this is a teaching of Jesus Christ, to turn the other cheek even in extreme and dangerous circumstances. I'm not Christian, but it's the largest religion in the US, so you could presume most people would learn this trait (wrong or right as it may be). And you could assume that their religious upbringing is more influential on them than some cryptic, unable to pinpoint, way in which "people" teach girls one thing and teach boys another thing about how to be respected.
Re: Why People Feel Like Victims
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Wait, what? We went from "teaching about systemic racism might be harmful", to "systemic racism doesn't exist", to "Blacks are inherently different from other races, which will naturally lead to different outcomes" to "critical race theory might lead to nazism." This is a wild rollercoaster of a thread and I want off of it. To jump off the original commenter's point, if you're concerned that there might be harmful ou…
Because if they genuinely believe that blacks are inferior, then racism truly musn't exist from their perspective. They think that blacks will naturally be worse off and thus elevating them from there to a level where they're equal is actually unfair and racist to whites.
It's insane, I know, but it really is how people like that think.