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RedEmmaSpeaks wrote

Uh, another White Boy smugly lecturing us about how we should ignore Identity Politics. I'm reminded of a cartoon I posted in another thread on this board:

https://coinsh.red/p/Liberal_Intellectual_On_Why_We_Should_Ignore_Identity_Politics.png

It's easy to do so as a White Boy, especially since they mostly benefit from Identity Politics, but women and PoC, do not have that luxury. Like it or not, we're pretty much drafted into the fight as soon as we're born. We can't ignore Identity Politics; we're up to our eyes in it.

In fact, Identity Politics is the fundamental core of Leftist politics. The Left is based around the idea that all people should be free to live their lives and express themselves as they see fight, so long as it harms no one else in the process. It is the core ideal regarding the fight for human rights, so we simply can't abandon it.

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anarchist_critic OP wrote

Nice ad hominem. Actually you've no idea what colour or gender I am, you're just jumping to conclusions based on your racist/sexist presuppositions.

women and PoC, do not have that luxury

I'm afraid they do. Millions of women voted for Trump. Millions of black Africans and other PoC in the global South vote for conservatives, democrats, nationalists, Islamists, etc. The majority of anti-abortion protesters are women. There's PoC in the US police, the US military, the UN peacekeeping forces, all the forces of structural power which you'd call "white male". Just goes to show that you can't read off someone's politics from their structural positions or vice-versa. Even stupid Stalinists realise that, but idpols actually imagine they can somehow speak for what all women or PoC already realise based on their "experience"... even though most women and most PoC never "realise" it.

the core ideal regarding the fight for human rights

Human rights is equality-based; women or PoC have the same universal rights as everyone else. Very different from idpol. You know damn well I'm not arguing in favour of segregation or lynching or police or racial profiling or immigration control or death camps. I'm not saying men should rape or hit women or that women should be expelled from the workforce. I'm arguing for basic human rights like free speech, free expression, right to access services, right to live one's own way without state or "community" repression - radicalised into the anarchist demand for autonomous spaces which aren't run on behaviourist, police-style principles. You want these basic rights taken away because muh appropriation or muh not centering certain voices or muh not enabling abuse or muh culture change and behaviour change. You can claim this benefits human rights at some future time but here and now it's taking away human rights, and the best excuse the idpols can ever make for this is to pretend it's redistributing rights from the privileged to the oppressed (which it isn't, it's just levelling-down). In some ways it's the old negative freedom vs positive freedom (liberalism vs Stalinism) debate.

so long as it harms no one else in the process

The trouble is:

  1. idpols have expanded "harm" so broad that the residual liberal sphere of negative freedom amounts to pretty much nothing, and
  2. idpols have expanded "harm" to include indirect harm to such an extent that not implementing totalitarian zero tolerance regimes amounts to a "harm" such as "enabling".

Which is also exactly how Reaganites/Thatcherites, neocons and the Third Way have gutted/twisted liberalism to turn it into a basis for totalitarianism.

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