April 15, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
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| I found an article written by an intersectional feminist that explains the authors and presumably other intersectional feminists reasoning for why they are supporters of Black Lives Matter instead of All Lives Matter, and then tied it to the difference between humanism and feminism, and why they think people should be feminists and not humanists. | |
| The article begins with the following fictional dialogue between a humanist and a feminist, which the feminist begins. | |
| Hashtag Black Lives Matter. | |
| Wait, don't all lives matter? | |
| They sure do. | |
| Then hashtag all lives matter. | |
| Nope, hashtag Black Lives Matter. | |
| This is a beautifully clear way of not only laying out her argument, but demonstrating why it's wrong. | |
| Most intersectional feminists will usually make liberal use of unnecessary language in what I will assume is not a deliberate attempt to obfuscate their meaning. | |
| Hashtag Black Lives Matter is a statement of support for a specific social movement, to which the reply, wait, don't all lives matter, is a query about principle. | |
| The reply, hashtag all lives matter, is not a statement of support for a social movement, but a public statement of principle in response to the perceived usage of hashtag black lives matter as a statement of principle in and of itself and not a social movement. | |
| They are misconstruing the name as a declaration, which it was to start with, before it coalesced into a coherent movement. | |
| The humanist then replies with a statement of principle of their own, then all lives matter, to which the feminist then replies with nope. | |
| This becomes a categoric denial of the humanist position that all lives have value, which is what's being said when someone says all lives matter. | |
| The very framing of the article is a conversation between two individuals who are not talking about the same subject. | |
| Then we come to the conclusion of this hypothetical. | |
| So only black lives matter? | |
| No, all lives matter. | |
| But black people are not included in the term all lives due to deeply ingrained institutional racism that has existed in this country since the establishment of slavery and has never left because it's just not that easy to get rid of racism. | |
| Of course, this is the author's position and she does not believe only Black Lives Matter in principle. | |
| But as we established, we are not discussing principle, we are discussing a social movement. | |
| And then this person gives us the rationale for why the social movement needs to exist. | |
| Black people are not included in the principle of all lives matter due to ingrained institutional racism that didn't end with slavery because it's just not that easy. | |
| The key word here is institutional. | |
| First, this introduces a temporal context to the explanation, demonstrating that if the context was different, the speaker wouldn't support hashtag Black Lives Matter as a movement or a principle. | |
| As this is a dialogue between two individuals, neither one representing any organizations, it appears to the humanist that it is a discussion about principle which exists independent of context. | |
| Suddenly bringing institutional racism into the conversation, an incidentally tautological phrase, as the author's use of racism is defined as institutional oppression, is not relevant from the perspective of the humanist because they are not discussing events, they are discussing ideas. | |
| The absurdity of the author's argument is not even relevant to the hypothetical feminists' non-sequitur response. | |
| It's almost impossible to believe that the author believes that black people are literally excluded from being considered as human beings with lives that have value to the American system because it is so thoroughly racist against them 150 years since the abolition of slavery, just because it's not that easy to get rid of racism. | |
| There would at least not be an immediate and obvious refutation of systemic racism in the United States if the current two-term president wasn't black. | |
| After this intellectual debacle, the author decides to discuss humanism. | |
| Let's start with humanism. | |
| Humanism is a secular philosophy based on the placement of greater value on logic and human potential rather than faith and religion. | |
| This is a perfectly adequate short definition of humanism, but we can look to the British Humanists Association for an expanded definition. | |
| Roughly speaking, the word humanist has come to mean someone who trusts to the scientific method when it comes to understanding how the universe works and rejects the idea of the supernatural and is therefore an atheist or agnostic, makes their ethical decisions based on reason, | |
| empathy and a concern for human beings and other sentient animals, believes that in the absence of an afterlife and any discernible purpose to the universe, human beings can act to give their own lives meaning by seeking happiness in this life and helping others to do the same. | |
| They also include several definitions from other sources, such as this one from the Rutledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. | |
| A commitment to the perspective, interests and centrality of human persons, a belief in reason and autonomy as foundational aspects of human existence, a belief that reason, skepticism, and the scientific method are the only appropriate instruments for discovering truth and structuring the human community. | |
| A belief that the foundations for ethics and society are found in autonomy and moral equality. | |
| These definitions do not refute the definition given by our author, but expand upon it, to include a specific facet of humanism that intersectional feminists seem to want to overlook. | |
| Reason. | |
| To claim that the lives of black people are not considered to have value in the United States does not stand up to scrutiny. | |
| The best place to look would be the very reason Black Lives Matter began. | |
| Perceived police brutality disproportionately targeting black people. | |
| A Washington Post investigation into police shootings for 2015 reveals the following information. | |
| Out of 990 people shot dead by police, 783 of them carried a deadly weapon, and only 93 were unarmed. | |
| These statistics are of course grim, but a lot less alarming than one might originally think. | |
| It's not unreasonable to presume that the police in question who killed armed perpetrators did fear for their lives. | |
| Half of the murdered people were white and 26% were black. | |
| Black people comprise approximately 13% of the US population, so black people are killed by American police at twice the rate one would expect to see. | |
| But is this the result of racism? | |
| The answer is, probably not. | |
| It's much more likely to be the result of black people committing a disproportionate amount of crime. | |
| The most recent statistics I could find on offenders comes from the Department of Justice's 2012-2013 report. | |
| The rates of violent crime committed by black people are also disproportionate. | |
| 13% of the population is committing 22% of the violent crime. | |
| This is nearly the same percent as the number of black people shot and killed by the police during attempted arrests for committing a violent crime. | |
| Is the black community more heavily policed than white communities? | |
| Probably, and with good reason. | |
| Are there police officers who are racist? | |
| Without a doubt. | |
| Does this translate into systemic oppression and devaluation of black people by the police force disproportionate to the number of crimes they commit? | |
| Not according to the data. | |
| So why is this happening? | |
| Well, there are doubtless many causative factors, but let's examine a major one. | |
| In the United States, 33% of children are raised in a household without their father. | |
| In black households, this number rises to an alarming 57%. | |
| There is simply no doubt about the effect that a missing father will have on a child. | |
| Numerous studies have shown that a fatherless family has a severely deleterious effect on a child's emotional well-being, future career prospects, and a family's financial stability. | |
| As Linda Chavez, the former head of the US Civil Rights Commission says, The chief cause of poverty today among blacks is no longer racism. | |
| It is the breakdown of the traditional family. | |
| Put simply, all children need their fathers to be actively involved in their upbringing. | |
| Without a father, the child does not start on a level playing field against children who are in a stable household. | |
| Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime. | |
| They are nine times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. | |
| We don't need to resort to the boogeyman of institutional racial oppression or pseudo-scientific racial conjecture to explain why black people are committing more violent crime, and therefore being killed disproportionately by police. | |
| It's a simplistic answer that presupposes that we can establish the motives in each case for every individual officer by looking at the data instead of interviewing a man, which is of course absurd. | |
| In 2003, the National Center for Policy Analysis released a study called How Not to Be Poor. | |
| They determined that if people made three distinct choices in their lives, it would dramatically affect the chances of them living in poverty or not. | |
| These choices were, stay in school, get married, don't have children out of wedlock. | |
| I'm sure you've already noticed that these are the three cardinal social sins of the black community, and why it remains in poverty. | |
| Most black people are not married. | |
| Most black children are born out of wedlock, and they are nine times more likely to drop out of school. | |
| What other result would one expect to see other than increased violent crime rates and severe poverty in black communities? | |
| How could we expect a different result if we do indeed consider black people to just be regular folks like the rest of us? | |
| And consider the culture that's rushed in to fill the void, left by the dearth of strong male figures in the lives of young men. | |
| There are many black bloggers who completely understand that such a hostile culture is eminently negative for the people who indulge in it. | |
| Ironically, it becomes obvious to any that look that thug culture is a byproduct of deep insecurity. | |
| Self-confident, self-actualized, upwardly mobile people do not act in such an aggressive way. | |
| I would personally expect a community that lacks fathers but not sons to produce a hyper-masculine, hyper-violent, territorial and crime-ridden culture of power and opulence designed to demonstrate individual prowess for their own emotional security. | |
| It isn't conducive to producing well-educated, successful children, but why would it be? | |
| And don't get me wrong, I don't think that the return of fathers to black households would be a panacea for all the problems of the black community, but we can be certain that it is the cause of many of them. | |
| By tackling the issues one step at a time, we slowly climb the mountain. | |
| I know I've gone into apparently unnecessary depth on this, but it's important to understand if we go back to our author's dialogue. | |
| We can see that she has vastly oversimplified the problem to institutional racism. | |
| She doesn't consider the agency of black people to be a factor in their own social problems. | |
| It's taken for granted that the results of the system must demonstrate the intent of the system, despite the fact that people make choices every day that affect their involvement within the system. | |
| It's not a monolithic totalitarian machine that allows no room to maneuver, but a complex web of individuals making decisions of their own. | |
| It isn't perfect, and there are doubtless people within the system who do hold racist beliefs, but since the system is capable of selecting for itself a black man to hold the highest office in the land, to call it a racist system is simply not true. | |
| It must be other factors that lead to the poverty and crime trap in which black communities have found themselves. | |
| Our author has decided to abandon reason, to join a cause they find emotionally gratifying, and have simplified or outright ignored the evidence to come to a contradictory conclusion fit for idiots. | |
| A system headed by a black president is institutionally racist. | |
| This is one of the fundamental differences between intersectional feminists and humanists. | |
| Intersectional feminists are simply not concerned with reason. | |
| If anything, it is a barrier to them achieving their emotional gratification of fighting for the oppressed against the oppressor. | |
| To return to the article, this definition of humanism is the underlying philosophy of the argument, all lives matter. | |
| Because if the focus is humanity and we are listening to reason, god forbid, the obvious conclusion is that we are all equal. | |
| Therefore, all lives should matter, the important word being should. | |
| And they do. | |
| There are no laws that institutionalise discrimination against black people. | |
| There are, in fact, almost 30 anti-discrimination laws in the United States. | |
| She continues, unfortunately, racism has become so ingrained in our society that a philosophy like humanism is far more promising than the actual world in which we live. | |
| Humanism, while a nice idea, simply isn't working for everyone. | |
| By focusing on all lives, we focus on universal issues that affect everyone. | |
| This leaves no room for the issues that are unique to specific groups of people. | |
| Instead of focusing on racially charged police brutality against black Americans, we focus only on issues that everyone can relate to. | |
| Racism certainly is ingrained in many people in American society, most publicly with prominent Black Lives Matter activists, who seem to have decided that it's alright when they do it. | |
| However, to a humanist, it is not alright when anyone does it, because opposition to racism is a point of principle that is not modified by context. | |
| Humanism is a fundamental belief in the value and power of human agency. | |
| If you say humanism isn't working for black people, then you are saying black people do not have agency equivalent to white people, which appears to be the platform by which white progressives are proselytizing to black people in what appears to be a deliberate attempt to instill within them learned helplessness. | |
| Again, I must refer you back to your own president as a concrete refutation of this point. | |
| Black people do have agency and they can exercise it. | |
| The problem is they tend to exercise it in ways that are self-destructive and trap them in a cycle of poverty and violence. | |
| The first step to a solution is education on these issues, not to pretend that black people have the mental capacity of children and are incapable of making informed decisions as a power grab for those looking for a way to pay off the student debts of their social justice degrees. | |
| Our author then continues to build on her ridiculous premise. | |
| Everyone being the majority. | |
| Everyone being white Americans. | |
| Basically, if a white American has not experienced the issue, it doesn't even exist. | |
| Nobody thinks everyone refers to white people. | |
| This is a straw man derived directly from the sophistry involved in fallaciously establishing that everyone is racist and black people cannot do anything for themselves. | |
| So when someone says all lives matter, they are not promoting equality. | |
| They are assuming equality has already been established. | |
| But sadly, equality has not been established yet, and therefore the term all lives still does not include everyone. | |
| This is obviously incorrect. | |
| Saying all lives matter is a declaration of intent, a statement of principle, a goal to be achieved. | |
| It is not a description of the current state of affairs. | |
| They are actively promoting a vision of the world that they would like to see, and intersectional feminists and racist Black Lives Matter activists are promoting the opposite. | |
| Also, let's not forget that most of the people claim all lives matter do so in protest against the Black Lives Matter movement. | |
| Let's face it, if you can't even agree that Black Lives Matter, then you really don't even believe that all lives matter. | |
| Of course they do. | |
| They perceive that you are declaring only Black Lives Matter, because that appears to be your statement of principle. | |
| Why wouldn't they respond with no, all lives matter? | |
| When they say all lives matter, they are also including black people in this statement, despite our author's attempt at convincing us that she can read the hearts and minds of others. | |
| If they say all lives matter, there is no reason to think they do not think black people are included in this statement. | |
| If you really believe that all lives matter, then you should have no problem accepting the Black Lives Matter movement because black lives should be included in your value for all lives, right? | |
| Nope. | |
| Because you don't really value black lives. | |
| You value your own faulty definition of all lives, which is really your way of saying white lives. | |
| If Black Lives Matter was simply a declaration of principle, then nobody would have an issue with it. | |
| The problem is it has become a social movement for really awful people. | |
| People who do not wish to accept responsibility for their own actions, people who don't understand causality, international black supremacist communists, and intersectional racists. | |
| An article by Think Progress quotes Obama's perfect explanation of this controversial issue at a criminal justice discussion panel. | |
| I think the reason that the organizers used the phrase Black Lives Matter was not because they were suggesting that nobody else's lives matter. | |
| What they were suggesting was, is that there is a specific problem that is happening in the African-American community that is not happening in other communities, and that is a legitimate issue we've got to address. | |
| He's absolutely right. | |
| The confusion is over what the problem is and how to address it. | |
| I've given the starting point of a logical, sensible, fact-driven solution that is designed to empower black people by relying on their agency to enable them to make good choices to pull themselves out of poverty using a system calibrated to achieve these ends. | |
| The end product of this would be a happier, healthier black community full of prosperous people with high self-esteem and community cohesion. | |
| However, the Black Lives Matter solution is that because the system isn't working for a small minority of people, the entire system must be uprooted and destroyed and replaced with something unspecified but apparently better. | |
| Frankly, it's not a risk I would be willing to take. | |
| The concept of humanism has also been used against and in place of feminism. | |
| Many men and women prefer to refer to themselves as humanists instead of feminists, using the same logic used for the All Lives Matter argument. | |
| The argument here is that if women are equal to men, then why is it called feminism? | |
| Why should we focus on women's issues when we should just focus on gender neutral issues? | |
| And these are perfectly cogent arguments that feminists still have no answer for. | |
| Feminism has demonstrated itself not only to be pathologically opposed to masculinity, but primarily derives the problems of the world from this concept. | |
| Again, this is a worldview for idiots. | |
| Nothing is this simple, in the same way that black supremacists blame white people, white nationalists blame Jews, or David Icke blames lizard aliens. | |
| We wish the problems came from one source. | |
| As I said about fathers in the black community, it's one aspect of the problem, but one that is within the power of black people to solve. | |
| They just have to start by changing their own minds. | |
| Our author continues with, and we can use the same reasoning to refute this argument. | |
| By focusing on gender-neutral issues, we only focus on issues faced by both men and women, completely disregarding the issues faced solely by women or solely by men. | |
| We don't focus on rampant sexual assault against women, or reproductive rights or everyday sexism. | |
| We don't focus on socially constructed and false concepts of masculinity that men struggle with. | |
| Of course, the author doesn't give any examples of issues faced only by women that humanism does not or could not address, and they just demonstrate their own bigotry. | |
| We focus on sexual assault, regardless of the gender of the victim, because the important aspect of the issue is not that the victim was a woman or a man, but that they are a victim. | |
| The author's sexism is on full display. | |
| Sexual assault is not a gendered issue. | |
| It happens to men and women, boys and girls of all ages. | |
| The same is true with domestic violence. | |
| However, the reason intersectional feminists so readily identify with Black Lives Matter is because they are built on the same basic premises adopted from Marxist schools of thought. | |
| Demographic A is being oppressed by demographic B. Therefore, demographic A has a right to hate their oppressor and monopolize any resources or space concerning an issue despite the fact that the issue under which demographic A is claiming oppression also happened to demographic B. | |
| This decision to reduce all individuals in a demographic to a class and then apply Marxist axioms to interpret the results is a reductive misrepresentation of reality. | |
| You cannot declare that there is a problem with sexual assault or domestic violence against women caused by men when men also receive assault or abuse from women. | |
| It is not a class issue, because men and women are not separate classes with distinct rules and behaviours that govern each with no overlap. | |
| To suggest this as the case is to fail to model reality accurately in your hypotheses. | |
| This is not to say that you have to call yourself a feminist. | |
| This is only to refute the use of the term humanist. | |
| Humanism is a great philosophy, and one we can be really inspired by. | |
| But as mentioned in an article by Everyday Feminism, humanism is not a word for a social change or political movement as feminism is. | |
| Aligning yourself with feminism is a much more powerful stance than simply believing in humanist principles. | |
| Our author makes a distinction of which we should be palpably aware. | |
| Humanism is failing as a social movement. | |
| Humanist societies are navel-gazing after the defeat of Christian fundamentalist social movements, idling in their victory lap and quoting Hitchens as he demolished Christian apologist arguments when they should be looking at the modern challenges for humanism, such as intersectional Marxist ideologies, black and white supremacist movements, and militant Islam. | |
| This is the statement of values from the British Humanist Association. | |
| In all our work, we strive to embody our values by engaging in dialogue and debate rationally, intelligently, and with attention to evidence, by recognizing the dignity of individuals and treating them with fairness and respect, respecting and promoting freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, cooperating with others for the common good, including with those of different beliefs, celebrating human achievement, progress and potential. | |
| Can anyone tell me that there is a single one of these values that isn't under direct attack in Western society? | |
| The forces arrayed against humanist values are widespread and disorganized, which is why they have not yet won the ideological war. | |
| They are too wrapped up in their own solipsism to gather en masse and so chip away at each individual pillar of Western civilization independently from the rest. | |
| Humanism does not carry with it the weight that it could in a world in which equality has been established, but we haven't achieved that status as a country and therefore humanism is not the ideology we need right now. | |
| We don't need an ideology that asserts the inherent equality of all people. | |
| We need an ideology that is going to achieve the tangibility of this inherent equality. | |
| We need Black Lives Matter. | |
| We need feminism. | |
| Misspelled. | |
| Feminism is a much more powerful movement than humanism, because the humanists simply are not paying attention. | |
| There is little about feminism that is accurate or honest. | |
| However, there is nothing about humanism that cannot solve the problems the West is currently facing. | |
| Humanists need to wake up and understand that their values are under attack, and now is the time to fight for them, while they are still understood by the general public to be the best system of values. | |
| Humanism is the ideology we need right now, and we need humanists to stand up and be counted. | |
| We need humanist organizations to put their people in the public eye to debate on behalf of these values. |
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