Great input- you nailed it! It’s called “Self Fullfilling Prophecy Through Sensitization.”

Ever notice how you never noticed:
1. How many pregnant women there were?
2. How many people had a receding hairline?
3. How many people drove the same kind of cool car you wanted?

etc. until you yourself were pregnant/had a pregnatnt wife, receding hairline, or bought the cool car?

Our expectations (“prism”) drive our perception of reality.

Raise a kid to *believe* they are oppressed (by race, sexual orientation, nationality, etc.etc. etc.) and the “belief” will become their “reality.”

This is so screechingly obvious that the numerous studies that prove it (over and over) no longer receive any funding . . .

And yet.

And yet we continue to want to believe that human nature doesn’t apply in “this one case;” the “one case” that we *want* to believe is true.

When a good freind of mine discovered his homosexualtiy in high school, he said something that had me flummoxed until many many years later (when I myself believed that I was an
“aggrieved minority”).

His father (a homophobic, but loving, parent) confronted him: “Why do you want to be gay?”

His answer (to his dad) was “It’s not a choice!”

After about a year of being “out,” he made the comment that puzzled me. One night he confided that “being gay,” while not a choice per se, was a “very cool” thing to be. He was now a member of an oppressed minority! He had camraderie! He had a sense of belonging! He had a strong sense of communal identity, with people he could depend on to help him, protect him, find him jobs, etc. He had a sense of purpose and belonging that being a straight white male never gave him.

I didn’t (couldn’t) understand his point at the time.

Identity politics- of any color or orientation- is a powerful, self sustaining philosophical force of human nature.

VICTIMHOOD IS POWER!

As a white male, I’ve never dealt with racism or sexism. As a Jew, I’m very familiar with the world’s history of anti-semitism, culminating in the events of WWII and continuing to this day.

No doubt, there are people in the world who hate Jews, just as certain people hate blacks, Hispancis, Asians, Muslims, Christians, athiests, women, etc. etc.

Now, I can view every comment made against a Jew as being anti-semitic. But why worry about it? Are there people in the world happy that the creator of the largest Ponzi scheme in history was Jewish? I’m sure there are. But the fact is Madoff is, to paraphrase Jimmy Cannon “an embarrassment to his race – the human race.”

Maybe I’m naive, but I just don’t see the racism in what Rep. Wilson did. Just as O’Bama may be under a greater microscope as the first black POTUS, I think all the actions and reactions to him will be equally examined. There were a lot of vicious comments made to and about Bush 43 – if he had been a minority, would we have considered those liberal commentators racist?

The irony will be if we find our country is forced to censor itself in an effort to be more PC.

Good broader issues. Of course, playing the “race card” is the modern equivalent of “one who raises his voice has just ceded the argument.”

Last month, in a separate blog [one that caters tosupposedly "educated" individuals], I was accused of being a racist . . .

. . . just because I pointed out some gaping, obvious, egregious flaws in the two main underlying premises of the current debate:

- the flaws in comparing “cost per capita” for health care when the US has a much higher percentage of “elective” health care (including firearm volence and military helath care- an interesting discussion in and of itself!); and

- the flaws in comparing “quality” of health care between systems based on benchmarks like “fairness” and “justice” (which the WHO report is heavily skewed toward; favoring “equal but dismal” over “unequal but innovative”)

So, for pointing out that the very claim that helath care in the US is *both* more expensive and of lower quality, I was accused of being a racist.

By the same people who, in the same thread, stated quite positively (with an actual “Take That!” coup de gras) that there was no evidence of vote/election fraud on the part of the left . . .

The Point Is

We used to be entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts.

With 70+ years of the “Progressive” [sic] movement dominating academia and the media, we are now apparently entitled to our own facts as well . . .

. . . and tholse who do not share the premises of our own tribes’ cherished “isms” are no longer just misinformed, but EVIL.

What, pray tell, are we to do with that?

steve