Why Not Reparations For Women?
So there's reparations for slavery, and now there's gay reparations...but I can't see any principle by which we could stop there. Why not reparations for American Indians? We actually tried to genocide them...with fair success, I'm sorry to say... And what about reparations for women? (I suppose one must now specify: actual women.) I mean, one standard line is that women have been the most consistently oppressed group in all of history--a line I don't necessarily find wildly implausible...
I don't like to play progressive games...but...is it just me, or do women always come out last, somehow, in this sort of thing? When it was Obama v. Clinton, I remember thinking Aha! Finally we'll see who really comes out on top of the "progressive stack"! And we did... Less than a decade later, even men pretending to be women are higher in the "stack." Seriously, don't progressive women ever get sick of this shit? I mean, the whole mess on the left makes no sense anymore, so it's a bit futile to complain about any individual bit of nonsensicality, I guess...
Incidentally, I don't think reparations for slavery is a terrible idea. I wish we'd have done it when we should have. As I've said, I just don't think it'll ever happen, and I think the social, political, and financial costs are all too high. I'd rather work on poverty directly, and rely on that to have most of the practical effects we hope reparations would have. It's not that every single idea on the contemporary left is crazy--that's not it at all. It's rather that the overall pattern is of a certain relentlessly crazy type, monomaniacally moving always in the same direction. Some of the suggested ideas, taken on their own, are genuinely worthy of consideration. Rather like: your nutty neighbor may have a few interesting points about the Kennedy assassination...but his obsession, taken as a whole, adds up to thermonuclear crackpottery...
I don't like to play progressive games...but...is it just me, or do women always come out last, somehow, in this sort of thing? When it was Obama v. Clinton, I remember thinking Aha! Finally we'll see who really comes out on top of the "progressive stack"! And we did... Less than a decade later, even men pretending to be women are higher in the "stack." Seriously, don't progressive women ever get sick of this shit? I mean, the whole mess on the left makes no sense anymore, so it's a bit futile to complain about any individual bit of nonsensicality, I guess...
Incidentally, I don't think reparations for slavery is a terrible idea. I wish we'd have done it when we should have. As I've said, I just don't think it'll ever happen, and I think the social, political, and financial costs are all too high. I'd rather work on poverty directly, and rely on that to have most of the practical effects we hope reparations would have. It's not that every single idea on the contemporary left is crazy--that's not it at all. It's rather that the overall pattern is of a certain relentlessly crazy type, monomaniacally moving always in the same direction. Some of the suggested ideas, taken on their own, are genuinely worthy of consideration. Rather like: your nutty neighbor may have a few interesting points about the Kennedy assassination...but his obsession, taken as a whole, adds up to thermonuclear crackpottery...
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