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2026-02-08 06:51:00 UTC

21_21_21 on Nostr: 🤦Here's one of the stupidest rituals I have ever participated in: A few years ago, ...

🤦Here's one of the stupidest rituals I have ever participated in: A few years ago, I joined a progressive political organization, the details don't matter but let's just say that the stereotype of your average progresssive/liberal would have fit very comfortably in this environment. This was an online only group, we communicated only via text. This was a place where all participants could be freed of the oppressive bias of patriarchy, sexism, racism, and ableism. Here, behind text-only monikers, each of us could be judged, as Dr Martin Luther King said, by the "content of our character" or the quality of our work.

🤔 Surely, the DEI crowd, the avowed anti-racists, the people with diversity flags in their usernames, the people who had steeped themselves in knowledge about how to combat bias and discrimination would relish this environment. Except they did not. Instead, on day one, they insisted that all of us include our pronouns in our online nicknames and let everybody know what oppressed groups we belonged to. Because as always with these people, it isn't about equality, it's about deciding which in-group we're going to put on top this time. It's about weaponizing the language of bias against everybody else. It was absolutely ludicrous.

🧠 There is undoubtedly value in understanding the world from other people's perspectives and being aware of how implicit biases in ourselves and the systems we navigate impact other people. There is nothing more human than doing the same thing and having totally different subjective experiences, and then sharing these experiences with others. But that's not what this was.

🎯 Until the "left" expels this kind of thinking from their circles, they will continue to lose elections and the faith of moderate, reasonable people. Anybody who is truly dedicated to a more egalitarian future, to a world where one's skin color or gender shouldn't impact your access to opportunity, needs to be extremely cautious of thinking where we treat people differently based on these aspects of their identity. Many political commentators have suggested that disgust with this kind of rhetoric is part of why Trump won the last election, and I think there's absolutely some truth to that.

⚠️ Competitive victimhood is a mental illness. And it is driving people away from otherwise good ideas held by progressives. We need to do better.