"Microaggression" Mania!
"Microaggressions"--yet another stupid terminological fad on the lefty-left. Have accusations of "microaggressions" gotten out of hand? Well, in certain quarters of the web, yes. Not that anybody cares about those quarters--e.g. Tumbler--except insofar as crazy lefty web crap tends to leak into academia, and thereby infect young minds.
Sadly, liberals are loathe to call bullshit on anything like this.
Of course people do throw little verbal elbows at each other with some frequency. And, of course, some of these verbal elbows are aimed at sensitive areas. And, of course, some of those have to do with people's sexuality and related matters. So it's not that the concept "microaggression" is hopelessly stupid. It makes a certain amount of sense... Annoying: yes. Nonsensical: no.
But if it's genuinely difficult to discern Smith's sex, and Jones guesses wrong and uses the wrong pronoun to refer to Smith, that is not an aggression of any kind. It's a mistake. And if, say, Smith goes out of his way to seem androgynous, or to dress and act in the way that the other sex has traditionally dressed and acted, then the responsibility for the error is Smith's not Jones's. As is typical of the lefty-left, there's a kind of overreach involved in this concept and its typical application. If it were simply used to describe small acts genuinely intended to annoy, I don't see how anyone could complain about it. But the far-ish left can't seem to resist the urge to try to categorize honest error as moral crime. Asking a middle-aged, straight-looking person whether he has a family is not an "aggression." Saying "I'm not being homophobic, you're just being too sensitive" (one of the little signs under discussion) is not inherently aggressive nor wrong. It may be true, it may be false. If the former it's fine, if the latter it's not. (In fact, accusing someone of homophobia simply because you're being too sensitive is wrong.) As always, truth matters.
Though not as dangerous as the right, the left always manages to be, well, nuttier. Right-wing stuff half this transparently silly would be slapped down by liberals without hesitation. But, of course, liberals don't like to criticize anything done by certain "communities"... Just as the right allows itself to be dragged farther into the fever swamps by its own fringe, liberalism is dragged farther into barking moonbat-dom by its own fringe. If there's a direction on the political spectrum you refuse to criticize, it's not surprising that you are dragged in that direction...
Sadly, liberals are loathe to call bullshit on anything like this.
Of course people do throw little verbal elbows at each other with some frequency. And, of course, some of these verbal elbows are aimed at sensitive areas. And, of course, some of those have to do with people's sexuality and related matters. So it's not that the concept "microaggression" is hopelessly stupid. It makes a certain amount of sense... Annoying: yes. Nonsensical: no.
But if it's genuinely difficult to discern Smith's sex, and Jones guesses wrong and uses the wrong pronoun to refer to Smith, that is not an aggression of any kind. It's a mistake. And if, say, Smith goes out of his way to seem androgynous, or to dress and act in the way that the other sex has traditionally dressed and acted, then the responsibility for the error is Smith's not Jones's. As is typical of the lefty-left, there's a kind of overreach involved in this concept and its typical application. If it were simply used to describe small acts genuinely intended to annoy, I don't see how anyone could complain about it. But the far-ish left can't seem to resist the urge to try to categorize honest error as moral crime. Asking a middle-aged, straight-looking person whether he has a family is not an "aggression." Saying "I'm not being homophobic, you're just being too sensitive" (one of the little signs under discussion) is not inherently aggressive nor wrong. It may be true, it may be false. If the former it's fine, if the latter it's not. (In fact, accusing someone of homophobia simply because you're being too sensitive is wrong.) As always, truth matters.
Though not as dangerous as the right, the left always manages to be, well, nuttier. Right-wing stuff half this transparently silly would be slapped down by liberals without hesitation. But, of course, liberals don't like to criticize anything done by certain "communities"... Just as the right allows itself to be dragged farther into the fever swamps by its own fringe, liberalism is dragged farther into barking moonbat-dom by its own fringe. If there's a direction on the political spectrum you refuse to criticize, it's not surprising that you are dragged in that direction...
posted by Winston Smith at
10:38 AM
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