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The Joys of Victimhood (1989)

nytimes.com

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Re: The Joys of Victimhood (1989)

#41

Post by kadenshep »

mazelife wrote: post #34

When I hear someone (having, by their own description, a front-row seat for these events) reduce the civil-rights movement to this: “What I saw was a number of bad laws called into question and ultimately removed by acts of courage and wise restraint on the part of the victims of those laws.” …as though the white-supremacist, apartheid state that existed in the south at the time was nothing more than a few pesky laws…

>It’s such an almost perverse misunderstanding of history that it has be deliberate, right?

It is. I'd call it being disingenuous, but that seems too forgiving. It's fundamentally dishonest, it's lying.

Re: The Joys of Victimhood (1989)

#42

Post by loorinm »

mherdeg wrote: post #10

Epstein's powerful prose captures well the New York intellectual views of a certain culture and a certain generation. It's a fascinating perspective on what people were thinking then. I was equally fascinated by the deep view of the popular psyche shown in his September 1970 essay for Harper's Magazine, featured on its cover ( https://harpers.org/archive/1970/09/homohetero/ ): > Yet if heterosexual life has come to s…

Dude is gay. No one is this tortured or obsessed unless they themselves are repressing their own - to use his revelatory and judgy phrase - “abnormal apetites”. How people can mistake this wordy tortured coming-out essay as “a credible view” is beyond strange.

Also his obsession with victim-shaming? He is a victim and won’t allow himself his victim feelings. The fact that this article was published in a major publication shows how problematic “real journalism” can be. That’s my main takeaway from the 3 paragraphs I could stomach.

Re: The Joys of Victimhood (1989)

#43

Post by lsc »

WalterBright wrote: post #40
CydeWeys wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget all of that even, there's plenty of places where the opinion piece collapses under simple faulty logic. Here's one example: > Such a situation could never have come about without certain fundamental confusions having been firmly established, and these begin with language itself. Victims have traditionally been minority groups, but in fact women, who in the United States are a slight majority, have been deemed…

> including in the United States "In the Confederacy, the population was listed as 5.5 million free and 3.5 million enslaved." https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm

http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html

It varied dramatically by state; according to that census, Mississippi and South Carolina were both majority slave.

Certainly, the CSA was majority free, but I think that 'places'... 'including in the united states' is most correctly construed to mean that there were identifiable regions of the US that had more slaves than free people; I think states fit into the previous poster's use of "places"

Re: The Joys of Victimhood (1989)

#44

Post by nl »

WalterBright wrote: post #40
CydeWeys wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget all of that even, there's plenty of places where the opinion piece collapses under simple faulty logic. Here's one example: > Such a situation could never have come about without certain fundamental confusions having been firmly established, and these begin with language itself. Victims have traditionally been minority groups, but in fact women, who in the United States are a slight majority, have been deemed…

> including in the United States "In the Confederacy, the population was listed as 5.5 million free and 3.5 million enslaved." https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm

This is true, but the numbers of people who owned slaves were vastly smaller.

Using Census data to research his book, Glatthaar calculated that 4.9 percent of people in the slaveholding states owned slaves, that 19.9 percent of family units in those states owned slaves, and that 24.9 percent of households owned slaves. (Households are a broader category than families.)

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/aug/24/...

Re: The Joys of Victimhood (1989)

#45

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #40
CydeWeys wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget all of that even, there's plenty of places where the opinion piece collapses under simple faulty logic. Here's one example: > Such a situation could never have come about without certain fundamental confusions having been firmly established, and these begin with language itself. Victims have traditionally been minority groups, but in fact women, who in the United States are a slight majority, have been deemed…

> including in the United States "In the Confederacy, the population was listed as 5.5 million free and 3.5 million enslaved." https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm

[deleted]

Re: The Joys of Victimhood (1989)

#46

Post by [deleted] »

nl wrote: post #21
alexandercrohde wrote: post #13

> Such a situation could never have come about without certain fundamental confusions having been firmly established, and these begin with language itself. Victims have traditionally been minority groups, but in fact women, who in the United States are a slight majority, have been deemed victims, whereas the Jews and the Chinese in America, though clearly minorities (and vastly less numerous than blacks or Hispanic p…

Minority status does not define victims, and instead it is about power. There were a lot less British in India during the Raj than there were Indians. It is pretty clear who the victim was then.

[deleted]

Re: The Joys of Victimhood (1989)

#47

Post by averagewall »

owenversteeg wrote: post #29

Look, I see that it's a relevant article today. But I don't think it's saying much, and it has a weird homophobic/racist current running through it. For example, Epstein mocks the idea that the US government exacerbated the AIDS crisis (which it clearly did.) He says slavery ended "more than a century" ago - slavery effectively continued several decades after the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. Now, I don't like the…

It was more acceptable to be homophobic back then so you have to cut him a little slack. They wouldn't publish a new article like that today. There isn't some fundamental truth about good and bad things to write - it depends on how people judge you, which depends on the arbitrary changes in culture.

Re: The Joys of Victimhood (1989)

#48

Post by chickenfries »

loorinm wrote: post #42
mherdeg wrote: post #10

Epstein's powerful prose captures well the New York intellectual views of a certain culture and a certain generation. It's a fascinating perspective on what people were thinking then. I was equally fascinated by the deep view of the popular psyche shown in his September 1970 essay for Harper's Magazine, featured on its cover ( https://harpers.org/archive/1970/09/homohetero/ ): > Yet if heterosexual life has come to s…

Dude is gay. No one is this tortured or obsessed unless they themselves are repressing their own - to use his revelatory and judgy phrase - “abnormal apetites”. How people can mistake this wordy tortured coming-out essay as “a credible view” is beyond strange. Also his obsession with victim-shaming? He is a victim and won’t allow himself his victim feelings. The fact that this article was published in a major publica…

So much projecting about how miserable it must be to be gay. Truly the thoughts of someone who cannot admit it to themselves.

Re: The Joys of Victimhood (1989)

#49

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #37
shawndumas wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Arabs like to say that there are two conflicting narratives of the conflict. The facts are far simpler. It starts in the end of the 19th century. At the time millions of Jews were fleeing Russia and flooding Europe with refugees because of Czar Alexander III "Russia for Russians" program which sanctioned pogroms in order to evict the Jews from the country. This was only the latest in a long history of expulsions of…

> Arabs like to say that there are two conflicting narratives of the conflict. The facts are far simpler. I'm aware that the conflict is old and complicated and there are good and bad people on both sides, but by your own account, the basis of it is that Brits decided that a group of people scattered across the world all had a natural right to live in roughly the same place their ancestors came from 2000 years previo…

Heh, you're lucky. My ancestry goes back to Ireland.

Re: The Joys of Victimhood (1989)

#50

Post by fenomas »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #23
nl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minority status does not define victims, and instead it is about power. There were a lot less British in India during the Raj than there were Indians. It is pretty clear who the victim was then.

I'm not sure that explains why Chinese immigrants would be portrayed as victims less than hispanic immigrants, as just one example off the top of my head.

> I'm not sure that explains why Chinese immigrants would be portrayed as victims less than hispanic immigrants

The question makes no sense - why expect all minority groups to be portrayed equally as victims in the first place?

Just because many victims are minorities doesn't mean that the latter implies the former. You might as well ask why Swedish immigrants aren't seen as victims - the obvious answer is, because being a minority isn't what makes someone be seen as a victim.

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