If it was really that much of a generalisation, I would've just said all men, which is why I continued the sentence to talk about specific examples like Birds of Prey, where it at least seemed to make sense that the male villains of a movie set in the criminal underworld would act sexist towards the film's heroines.
Right, but if someone depicts a stereotype about some other group (women, let's say), would you consider it a valid defense to say "enough" women exhibited that trait for it to be okay? I'm guessing no.
I mean, I'd have gladly let HollowMan explain that point himself - if that's his understanding of the "progressive worldview", then what exactly does he consider to be viable alternatives?
Probably something like the conservative worldview. But, as always, you can decide to just imagine the best/most thoughtful response and engage with that preemptively, since that idea is a challenge to your worldview and needs to be addressed even if it's not what the other person means or says.
Note that this is already veering towards the "if you reject what I suggest you support the status quo" fallacy I mentioned before, too.
Anyway, I was thinking that it was a matter of reclaiming what it meant to be arbitrarily put into a group according to individual characteristics so that it wasn't a matter of being reduced to one so much as finding solidarity in one and rejecting the idea that you were being reduced to anything
I think it's potentially zero-sum, so that the happy balance you're describing is less having it both ways than it is accepting trade-offs, but that's arguable, at least.
But sure, belonging to a group can be nice and fortifying. It can also be dehumanizing. Progressive activists
and white supremacists like to talk about minorities in group terms, after all. Modern progressivism is full of these tensions (and, in some cases, outright contradictions), but I'm not really getting the vibe they're even being noticed, let alone wrestled with.
which stood in opposition to how I read HollowMan's claim that it's actually the progressives who actively want to split society into groups of oppressor and oppressed when the whole point is to acknowledge that that split was already there.
The argument is not about whether the split exists, it's about whether it should be the primary axis along which you make judgments and inform policy.
There are a few thoughtful books about this idea, like
A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell, and
The Three Languages of Politics by Arnold Kling. The capsule version of each is that ideologies talk past each other by measuring issues along different metrics:
- Conservatives measure things based on whether they favor civilization over barbarism
- Progressives on whether they favor oppressor or oppressed, and
- Libertarians on whether they favor individual liberty or state power.
None of these are really
right or
wrong. They all matter. But it's not really accurate to say progressivism is just noticing facts and divides that already existed: it's really the choice to measure and advocate primarily along that axis instead of others.
Then there's the question of what exactly you mean by "institutions" or "principles", especially in the context of being responsible for acceptable advances. I could use some specific examples of what you're talking about (I'm guessing it's kind of a "capitalism built your iPhone" thing).
I mean that all the things you think of as the Western status quo (religion, a near absolutist belief in free speech, and the culture as a whole) correspond
overwhelmingly to massive civil rights advancements. You are free to speculate that this is a coincidence, or that one of these things is the real source of the correlation and not another, but the correspondence is so absurd that it really has to be addressed in some form, particularly from someone advocating we reform or tear down huge chunks of it.