Intersectionality = Insanity
The lust for power overcomes allegedly shared oppression the minute it senses an opportunity.
Intersectionality is alleged to be the concept that certain socioeconomic and moral ills cut across racial, social, economic, and sexual lines. For example, it is alleged that the same oppression allegedly felt by abortion proponents is also felt by Palestinians because bans on abortion are counter to bodily autonomy the same way the lack of freedom of a Gazan’s life in the “open air prison” created by the “apartheid state” of Israel is an affront to bodily autonomy.
The same oppression felt by the LGBTQIA++ community is also felt by the fundamentalist Islamists who make homosexuality illegal and toss gays and lesbians off the tops of tall buildings.
As these two uses prove, what intersectionality is, is a logic defying rhetorical trick by which completely unrelated things can be claimed to be related to support a desired position. It’s also a way to excuse just about every belief, behavior, or action by making ridiculous ties to some alleged moral imperative.
“Well, you know, Hamas was justified in beheading and baking those Jew babies because Israel keeps them from having their own state. Under that kind of repression and oppression, such actions should be expected.”
Well, OK then.
What it also does is it makes people who do this kind of idiocy incapable of understanding who their enemy truly is. Their morality is constructed from such moral ambiguity and equivocation, they literally cannot take a legitimately principled stand on anything. This process creates people so devoid of curiosity, so ignorant of history, so paralyzed by emotional reasoning and genetic fallacies, they cannot recognize truth or facts when those things are right in front of them. Most of the time, truth and facts only serve to harden their resolve to stay their misguided course.
It is a collectivist mindset that perpetuates in the modern world with the idea that the only intersectionality that matters is oppression. The idea that the Western world is filled with oppressed masses and a small class of oppressors seems to drive a lot of contemporary radicals.
In an interesting paradox, thinking unrelated things are related also clouds the mind so thoroughly that it prevents people from seeing true relationships between related things.
Human nature has always shown that it is often the strongest motivation that wins the day, not the perceived common interest. There are always beliefs and movements that ride along, waiting for their opportunity to express themselves – the history of communism is replete with groups of people fighting the oppressors, only to fall victim to a cycle of replacing the initial “oppressor” with another oppressor from their own side.
These are the perpetual victims of every single fad and whim of a kakistocracy run by morons they believe is a technocracy run by elites.
Liberal Jews in America are getting a lesson in how fragile this belief system can be.
Typically, a solidly progressive Democrat voting bloc, this segment of the Jewish population has allied with every grievance group in the book, including those who had openly expressed the desire to kill all the Jews. American liberal Jews aligned themselves against Israel and supported Palestinian state filled with people who want to exterminate Jews worldwide.
Now they realize the “oppressed” with whom they were allied turned out not to appreciate their alliance, preferring to exterminate their “partners” the minute they sensed an opening that provided a little power and advantage.
They say politics makes for strange bedfellows.
I think intersectionality makes for even stranger bedfellows.
I am told the human brain is not fully matured until we are into our late twenties. I don’t entirely buy this explanation for why adolescence now seems to drag on into one’s 40s. Rather I believe the West has suffered from a “coddling of our youth” that delays acceptance of the burdens of maturity: in 19th century America people became full time workers and married couples before their 20th birthday and many of the letters of 14 year old soldiers in our Civil War reveal a depth of moral understanding that would put many of our junior faculty to shame. But I believe it is in this artificially extended “adolescence” that intellectual conformism and peer group pressures gave stunted our youngsters’ curiosity, critical thinking skills and work ethic: it is so easy to “go along to get along.”
Meet the new oppressor; same as the old oppressor.