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

321–330 of 510 posts

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#321

Post by breakyerself »

toomuchredbull wrote: post #256
danShumway wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other people have linked direct stats in this thread, and I encourage looking around at them. But also, just think about your theory in the abstract for a second. Less than one full generation has passed since redlining was made illegal. It's been less than 60 years since segregation was ruled illegal across the board. Do you really believe that the entirety of society has been reshaped in that amount of time and eve…

I've never been in a room on a hiring committee where they were like, you know what? let's give this white guy a chance. I have been in the room where were like, let's give this minority an extra chance literally dozens of times. I find it very hard to believe that there is an elaborate rouse being played on me personally and that despite not knowing any single person who would actively discriminate against someone,…

Have you not seen companies with white guys in leadership promoting whoever they seem to have the best rapport with and that just happens to be mostly white guys like themselves? No racism of any kind is needed for a companies leadership to become homogeneous.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#322

Post by nec4b »

breakyerself wrote: post #144
exporectomy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of just saying systemic racism exists, why not point out examples? Then people can judge for themselves what effect it may have on them instead of feeling like there's this oppressive "other" which is the cause of anything they don't like about their life and there's no point struggling against it because it'll just crush them anyway.

This list is more tailored to highlight systemic racism in criminal justice, but the economic side is just as important. There are much higher levels of poverty in black communities and that can be directly tied to the fact that in many ways black people were systematically prevented from building wealth for most of US history while white people were provided trillions of dollars in government subsidized economic opp…

None of those are systemic causes. Those are all cases of individual prejudice or racism adding up to make a statistical significance. Calling this systemic racism is a good way of how to never solve the actual problem.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#323

Post by breakyerself »

deviladvocate11 wrote: post #289
danShumway wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Consider for a moment that you are both right. That there are in fact heritable biological differences that can aggregate to average group-wide differences like the parent comment implied, and that assuming that this is the case is harmful for the individual and society, like you argued. If that's the case, the parent comment, while embarrassing for this site, has a valid claim - that at some point blaming everything…

What if skull shape determines a person's personality? It would be best if your hypothetical scenario was something with more than a shred of long discredited science behind it.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#324

Post by breakyerself »

nec4b wrote: post #322
breakyerself wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This list is more tailored to highlight systemic racism in criminal justice, but the economic side is just as important. There are much higher levels of poverty in black communities and that can be directly tied to the fact that in many ways black people were systematically prevented from building wealth for most of US history while white people were provided trillions of dollars in government subsidized economic opp…

None of those are systemic causes. Those are all cases of individual prejudice or racism adding up to make a statistical significance. Calling this systemic racism is a good way of how to never solve the actual problem.

What? This makes no sense to me.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#325

Post by cblconfederate »

Considering the well studied links between testosterone and social behavior , and the well known precipitous drop in testosterone in recent decades, i wonder why they didn't talk about it

> testosterone seems to possess the ability to influence such processes; in particular, it appears to confer high motivational drive, low fearfulness, and high stress-resilience, either directly or via interactions with other hormones and neurotransmitter systems

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13646...

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#326

Post by yosito »

seigando wrote: post #299
yosito wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you encourage someone to believe that they don't have the power to keep themselves from being a victim, generally speaking, that's a good way to turn them into a victim. Better approach: teach people to recognize and use the power they have to avoid becoming a victim when they encounter a potential victimizer.

Obviously we’re speaking in generalities, but sometimes people reclaim that power vía speaking up about victimhood.

Generally speaking, demanding to be recognized as a victim doesn't do much to prevent or end victimhood, and in many cases, actually hurts.

I've seen far more people's lives ruined trapped in a victim mentality than I've seen ruined by saying "I refuse to see myself as a victim any longer. I have the power to do something about my situation."

Many people were a victim of an incident or circumstances beyond their control. But who benefits by continuing to define those people by the things that they were a victim of? What purpose does it serve to keep them trapped, rather than giving them the power to overcome?

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#327

Post by benplumley »

neartheplain wrote: post #141
neartheplain wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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 o…

Off-topic, but I opened the above comment in a new tab (to read replies later) and got this: https://imgur.com/a/pxz1qCS Completely bizarre. Looks like a bunch of 0's got written into memory at random intervals. Is it flaky RAM on the HN server? Has anyone else seen HN content render like this? Reloaded the page, and now everything looks normal. Running memcheck on my laptop as a next step...

I've never seen this on the web, but I get something very similar after I put my computer to sleep with an ongoing mosh session.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#328

Post by strangeattractr »

Klinky wrote: post #296
livinginfear wrote: post #243

I always considered the current culture of cultivated-victimhood to be rooted in the manner Western people fundamentally define themselves by their triumphs against adversity. In the absence of real adversity, people seek and create surrogate adversity for themselves to triumph over. From this process they can rationalise themselves as having the inner-strength to overcome such barriers.

How about the west being founded on slavery, and genocides while sustaining racism and misogyny for hundreds of years. I hear a lot of "head in the sand" thinking. If we don't talk about it, it doesn't exist and never happened.

Doesn't it feel somewhat hypocritical to accuse others of having their head in the sand whilst claiming slavery, genocide, racism and misogyny are uniquely western phenomenon?

I think the irony of the self-loathing westerner, is that in believing their history is uniquely evil, are practising a sort of white supremacy. Not only in being completely oblivious to the history of other parts of the world. But by believing that only white people are/were so powerful that the evil they wrought could never be replicated by the much less powerful other races.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#329

Post by andi999 »

Klinky wrote: post #293
rayiner wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the phenomena it describes are real, for sure, at least with respect to Black people. My Maryland county wasn’t desegregated until 1968, in my parents’ generation. That has produced statistical disparities that persist to this day.

Then what are you arguing? That it exists and doesn't exist at the same time?

I think he argues that it exists, but it is not relevant/does not deserve attention, because there are more important things (like prejudice).

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#330

Post by cbnotfromthere »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #272
rayiner wrote: post #185

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. Because “systemic racism” is a term used mostly by college educated white people for other college educated white people. Not only that, it deliberately repurposes a label that ordinarily refers to prejudi…

> Because “systemic racism” is a term used mostly by college educated white people for other college educated white people. But we can agree that it exists, right? Whatever term you’d use, the phenomenon it describes is real. And it refers to present injustices as well as historical ones.

Could you please give us 3 examples of what you consider to be "systemic racism" nowadays in the US? Since you claim the phenomenon is real, I'm sure coming up with a few examples won't be difficult.
Post reply on HN