The grievance industry, academia and the current Idée fixe - race

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Idée fixe???  Definition     A great quote from Jeff Goldstein at protein wisdom (December 2005):

DEFINING THE TERMS:  RACISM, FEMINISM, AND THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITY POLITICS
An obvious problem with the grievance aspect of identity politics is that the grievance needs to be perpetually maintained in order to justify the identity aspect of the politics.  And in an era of academic specialization wherein just about every individual identity group has its own set of researchers and theoretical champions—as well as a widely accepted generic narrative of grievance—the observation that continued relevance (which translates into political power) is contingent upon the nursing and care of the grievance is something that too often goes unexamined by a society that, at base, really does wish to understand and fix the problems and frustrations expressed by individual identity groups.

So true - the groups suffer from the same problem that all bureaucracies have.  If they fixed the problem that they were created to address, they would be out of a job and on the streets trying to come up with a new hustle. It is not in their interest to fix problems - War on Poverty? War on Drugs? Environmental Protection Agency? Department of Education?

Milch cows each and every one of them.  Same thing as we are seeing with Black Lives Matter - the founders are getting rich and the supporters on the street are getting squat.

More at David Thompson's site (December 4th, 2013):

Because Lying and Resenting is What Angels Do
Many moons ago, in a post on classroom radicalism and the grooming of students, I wrote,

The problem is that adversarial role-play, like that of leftist academics Grover Furr and Rhonda Garelick, has little to do with reason, refutation or how the world actually is. It does, however, have a great deal to do with how those concerned wish to seem. In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism - and in order to justify funding, influence and status - great leaps of imagination or paranoia may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of exploitation and injustice have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untutored eye. Thus, the rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t. As mainstream society becomes less fixated by race, gender, sexuality, etc., so peddlers of grievance and victimhood must search out - or invent - something to oppose. Overstatement and escalation are all but inevitable.

Much more at both sites - some insightful comments too.  Quite the trip down memory lane.  These are from around ten years ago and people are still pulling this shit.  Nobody has called them on it so they are getting away with it and making some very serious bank. Sometimes, I wish I did not have scruples.  I would be a lot better off financially.

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