Quillette: Placido Domingo’s accusers are too unimportant to be allowed to sully the reputation of a star

@Cyborgette
I’ll try that. Thank you for the suggestion. He might still try to spin that into “class, class, class” but it’s definitely worth a try.

@Naglfar,

For me, class-first analysis simply can’t explain the American experience, where immigrants (eg Irish, Poles, Greeks) arrived with basically nothing and within a century were accepted as potential members of the status-quo-favoring political elite.

For black folk, the equivalent time would be from 1865, yet they still are not generally acceptable. The US wasn’t even pretending to try until about the 1960s, a time period longer than it took immigrants to be fully accepted.

Class-first analysis can explain the immigrant experience. It can explain the black experience. It cannot explain how those two experiences happened basically next to each other. There are essentially no immigrant equivalents of the burning of Black Wall Street in the 1910s, yet the black community suffered some similar kind of deliberate setback essentially every decade (up until at least the 1980s if you count red lining, or the 1990s if you count the crack epidemic).

YMMV, but that history is what pushed my out of my privileged, class-first, noblesse oblige style leftism.

W00t!

Scheer lost.

And the fascist-adjacent PPC came out of it with zip. Bupkis. Nada.

Nice,so who did win?

@Naglfar
I’ve got a good citation for you, might have to wait til tomorrow to find it.

@tim gueguen

Any status updates on what’s happening with the NDP at this time, if anything?

@Buttercup:

“Women’s brains absorb information like pancakes soak up syrup so it’s hard for them to focus, the attendees were told. Men’s brains are more like waffles. They’re better able to focus because the information collects in each little waffle square.”

Good grief, it’s like someone watched that Harry Enfield “women: know your limits” sketch for research.

These sorts of workshops are bought in from external consultants, and in my experience HR departments have rather poor bullshit filters, so it’s easy to sell them any old crap in a training package.

In unrelated news, I’ve just been made redundant from my job, so I suppose I should be looking for a grift!

Thank you to everyone for the suggestions. I’ll try to talk about those next time I see him.

Class undoubtably is part of oppression, but to say it’s the main focus is ridiculous.

CONTENT WARNING: Discussions of institutionalised violence, kidnapping of children, ignored missing and murdered women, and forced sterilisation. All of Indigenous people in Canada.

Here’s a concrete example. In Canada, indigenous women make up 4% of the population in Canada. (Source)

Yet they make up 10% of the Missing and Murdered women. (Source)

But wait! I can imagine him crying. They are in a lower class!

Here’s an excerpt from an article

In general, the employment rate for Aboriginal people is much lower than for the general population of Canada, while the unemployment rate for Aboriginal people is much higher than their non-Aboriginal counterparts. According to the 1991 Aboriginal People’s Survey, which looked at the labour force activity of Aboriginal people aged 15 (and over living both on and off reserves), only 43 per cent of Aboriginal people were working for a monetary income, compared to 61 per cent of the total Canadian population over 15. Fifteen years later, data from the 2006 Census shows the employment rate for Aboriginal people of core working age (25 to 54) increased to 65.8 per cent. Despite this increase, the employment rate for Aboriginal people is still far less than the general population (81.6 per cent). In addition, Aboriginal people are twice as likely to be unemployed than non-Aboriginal people.

(Source.)

If it was solely class, why is this particular group of people affected like this? What isnthe unifying theme, besides their ethnicity? (There is a LARGE number of seperate cultures being lumped in here, btw)

Simplifying it all down to ‘class’ ignores so much. It oppression were class based, it wouldn’t have been just indigenous kids who were kidnapped and put in abusive schools. Indigenous communities wouldn’t be the ones suffering from intergenerational trauma of the 60s scoop and residential schools etc. Indigenous women wouldn’t make up such a large number of missing and murdered people.

Here’s a final point. I want your friend to find a *solely class based explanation* for the fact that indigenous women are *still being forcebly sterilized*.

In North America, forced and coerced sterilization of Indigenous women is usually described as something of the past, a dark blemish in American history and a symptom of colonization and the 20th century eugenics movement. The data is sparse but significant: Anywhere from 25 to 50 percent of the Indigenous women of reproductive age in the U.S. were sterilized between 1970 and 1976. In Canada, 1,200 Indigenous women were sterilized between 1970 and 1975, according to Karen Stote, researcher and author of An Act of Genocide, one of the only books on the history of forced sterilization in Canada.

Now more than 100 Indigenous women from various First Nations in the region have come forward to say they were coerced or forced into a sterilization procedure as recently as 2018. Many are part of a class-action lawsuit led by Indigenous rights attorney Alisa Lombard, which has been developing since 2017. The women are calling for sweeping reform to the health system, and $7 million (CAD) each in damages.

But most importantly, perhaps, they are calling for a recognition of colonization and genocidal practices that never ended.

(Source.)

Here’s the wikipedia article on it. How does a ‘class’ based understanding of oppression deal with eugenics?

Eugenics movements bounced up in many European and American jurisdictions in response to historical, social, scientific, economic, and political processes occurring at the time.[2] Francis Galton invented the term “eugenics” in 1883, building it from its Latin roots meaning “good in birth” or “noble in heredity”.[3] “The science of eugenics was concerned with the improvement of the human standard and focused on the influence that would give ‘the more suitable races or strain of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable'”.[attribution needed][4] Eugenicists were concerned with managing the direction human evolution would take: natural selection, about which Galton’s cousin Charles Darwin wrote, was insufficient to deal with the needs of modern society.[5] If left solely to nature, eugenicists argued, the dangerous classes who were thought to have a high-volume reproductive rate would take over; ideas, promoted abroad, were quick to gain popularity in Canada in the early 1900s.[6]

Tl;dr – yes, class plays *a part*. But there are other factors as well.

And if anyone wants yet another perfect example of what we’ve been discussing.

This thread is a fucking doozy

https://twitter.com/aishaismad/status/1186062407258562560?s=19

Historically in the US race has been much more important than class in terms of legally structuralised oppression, and significantly more so in economically structured oppression. There’s a wonderful book that perfectly describes it with citations, but apparently copies go for $1000 and up. IIRC I got it from interlibrary loan, the title is “Labor’s Untold Story”, the 1955 one, not the 2018 one.

@Rhuu

Boom. Mike drop. That’s always what I keep in the back of my mind whenever class reductionists rear their ugly heads.

In case folks missed it, a pair of New York Proud Boys were sentenced to four years in prison today.

@Katamount

In case folks missed it, a pair of New York Proud Boys were sentenced to four years in prison today.

Hopefully the rest of the Proud Boys and their fascist ilk join them there soon. Maybe Gavin McInnes can share a cell with Jacob Wohl if they both get arrested. The “Godfather of hipsterdom” and the denizen of hipster coffee shops.