Do we owe reparations to LGBT? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14997052
The LGBT community has historically been targeted for a long time. If we owe other marginalized communities reparations for their past victimization, does the same logic dictate that we owe LGBT people reparations?
Last edited by Hong Wu on 02 Apr 2019 20:49, edited 1 time in total.
#14997054
I hear collective guilt and guilt by association are very popular now with the cool kids on campus so I say yes.

I think now might be a good time to come out as a bisexual who only has sex with women due to an allergy to aftershave, that still means I get a pay off right?
#14997075
I reject collective guilt but there is a basic moral obligation to render aid and assistance to those who are in need of it. Basic decency requires that we do what we can to uplift our fellow human beings when they're struggling with adversity.
#14997078
No, no the first question we need to ask is are White Infidel people owed reparations for slavery. I would say yes on two counts. Firstly we're clearly owed reparations from Muslim countries for their twelve hundred years of slave raids against us.

But we're also due reparations for the Transatlantic slavery. Contry to the Cultural Marxist lie, White people engaged in very little enslavement. The enslavement was nearly all done by Blacks and Muslims, in many cases Black Muslims. White traders bought those slaves in good faith. They bought them on the understanding that the Africans selling the slaves were both the rightful legal and moral owners of those slaves. If as we now believe slavery was immoral and fundamentally illegal, then those African slave traders perpetrated an enormous fraud upon us.

So drenched in Cultural Marxism have we become that no one questions the absurd dominant White hating narrative. I mean one can be convicted of passing on and selling illegal goods, but in any sane legal system the full force of the law and the bulk of its resources are applied against those that steal, not the final users of stolen goods.
#14997124
Skinster why do you want to keep all of the monies you owe to historically repressed LGBT people? This may be the most oppressed group in all of history and you're making light of their need for reparations?

Image

For context, this was from a recent thing where CNN mistook a spoof ISIS flag with gay "items" on it for a real ISIS flag.
#14997157
Hong Wu wrote:Skinster why do you want to keep all of the monies you owe to historically repressed LGBT people? This may be the most oppressed group in all of history and you're making light of their need for reparations?


Citation needed.
#14997161
I think a topic meant to provoke and raise questions of consistency based on assumption of leftists and progressives as sharing the political programme of asking for reparations as opposed to rectifying problems in the present which are causally explained by slavery rather than a vague allocation of money.
To which the modern example that comes to my mind in regards to reparations is Ta-Nehisi Coates who doesn't propose repreations as much as it is thought experiment to provoke insight, but it is clear that there are disagreements to be had about even this proposal.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/cedric-johnson-brian-jones-ta-nehisi-coates-reparations
Conversely, the reparations demand has been restricted to narrowly defined legal cases, sloganeering, or the lecture circuit. Without an actionable set of proposals to organize around and a popular constituency to advance them, the reparations demand is not a real political demand, but a form of moralism that evokes past injury to address contemporary inequality.
...
In the end, Jones (and Coates) settle on the claim that at a bare minimum, another round of the reparations debate will at least have some important, and positive, pedagogical and consciousness-raising effects. According to Jones:

"The bottom line is, the very concept of reparations for people of African descent is dangerous to the American ruling class. . . . Grappling with the real legacy of white supremacy would explode the lies America tells about itself (from “meritocracy” myths to “culture of poverty” arguments). And, equally important, a serious debate over reparations would raise dangerous questions about where wealth comes from and about who is owed what in this country.hisi-coates-reparations"

Jones is right to argue that the Left should continue its war of position against racism and underclass mythology and lay bare the historical and contemporary processes of dispossession and exploitation. But how is this debate over historical injustice more dangerous to the ruling class than the actual power of a broad, multiracial alliance with the capacity to contest the demands that capital makes on living labor and the planet in our own times?
...
Life is short, and time is precious. We need to decide which fights we want to prioritize and be honest about which ones we can win. We should strive for a critical view of history and its role in shaping our own conditions. But our political task is to change this world, and the first necessary step is to find common cause — not in past grievances, but in shared predicament.

But as above states about it not being a real political demand, I'm unaware of any movement that has reparations as part of it's political platform/aims.

But it might be curious to consider what drives those who perhaps as individuals do take reparations as the means to rectify the wrongs that echo into the present in some degree.

What comes to my mind is the generalized anxiety based in economic/job insecurity in conjunction with the expansion of commodification into people's lives to which has eroded trust and older notions of personal responsibility that arised from strong subjectivity (sense of community, belonging etc). As well as the atomization resulting in a intense subjectivity that is precarious in it's isolation and finds disruption threatening.
Spoiler: show
http://www.lacan.com/freedom.htm
The obvious reproach that imposes itself here is, of course: is the basic characteristic of today's "postmodern" subject not the exact opposite of the free subject who experienced himself as ultimately responsible for his fate, namely the subject who grounds the authority of his speech on his status as a victim of circumstances beyond his control? Every contact with another human being is experienced as a potential threat - if the other smokes, if he casts a covetous glance at me, he already hurts me; this logic of victimization is today universalized, reaching well beyond the standard cases of sexual or racist harassment - recall the growing financial industry of paying damage claims, from the tobacco industry deal in the USA and the financial claims of the holocaust victims and forced laborers in Nazi Germany, up to the idea that the USA should pay the African-Americans hundreds of billions of dollars for all they were deprived of due to their past slavery... This notion of the subject as an irresponsible victim involves the extreme Narcissistic perspective from which every encounter with the Other appears as a potential threat to the subject's precarious imaginary balance; as such, it is not the opposite, but, rather, the inherent supplement of the liberal free subject: in today's predominant form of individuality, the self-centered assertion of the psychological subject paradoxically overlaps with the perception of oneself as a victim of circumstances.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/cult-safety.htm
The question is: what is underlying cause of today’s heightened generalised anxiety? I think it is above all else, the insecurity of employment and career. This insecurity at work originates in the micro-economic reform and global restructuring of capitalism beginning in the late 1980s, involving privatisation, out-sourcing, casual employment, deregulation and in short, the commodification of all human relations, economic, domestic and political, including the conception of government as a kind of business. It is commodification which is the prime source of anxiety and key to understanding the ethos of this period, affecting every aspect of life without exception, even though it is rarely the target of fear, and is frequently the chosen remedy!

These processes have undermined or destroyed the safety nets which protected people in the post-war decades, the fabric which people saw as threatened by the bogeys of that time. Increasingly, the only safety net a person has is their own bank account. This can be illustrated with the reaction to the introduction of University fees. Students tend to believe that if they have paid their fees, then they ought to be given their degree. The idea that passing their exams is their own responsibility is increasingly unacceptable to students. If they are failed, then they have been swindled.

Commodification of a relation pushes responsibility out to the supplier. When you buy a service, then you absolve yourself of personal responsibility for it. The process of corporatisation, out-sourcing and privatisation acts in exactly this way. Likewise, deregulation makes it “worth your while” to act in a certain way, rather than criminal to act otherwise. Further, we live in a period when authorities and institutions in general are not trusted. Institutions know they will be the targets of blame by people who are injured or otherwise suffer through their dealings with the institution; but they do not have the option of “closing ranks” as no scandal is more readily believed than a “cover-up.”

Consequently, all institutions now devolve responsibility outwards and downwards. Base-level supervisors are responsible for the health and safety of employees, teachers are responsible for the health and safety of students, etc.. Likewise, professionals tend to be blamed for less than satisfactory outcomes of their services: paediatricians are held responsible for birth-defects, and so on. Knowing that you will not be supported by the institution, the only rational response is to take out insurance. The cost of insurance is calculated mathematically and passed on to the customer in the price of the service.

Through these and similar processes, safety has been privatised, accumulated and distributed according to the laws of political economy, and social consciousness aligns itself to this new terrain. However, no bond other than that of mutual manipulation binds the buyer and seller; each is vulnerable to the calculation of the other. The decline in full-time employment and “standard hours” is a typical manifestation of the extension of the commodity relation and increased uncertainty and vulnerability results, even as wealth and convenience are increased.

Frank Furedi’s books (see http://www.spiked-online.co.uk) ridicule the weakness of subjectivity manifested in this culture of fear, the vacuum of personal responsibility or any sense of self-determination. The great emancipation movements of the past have given way to claims for compensation by self-help groups of invalids and drug-dependants. Furedi fails to distinguish, however, subjects struggling as best they can under adverse conditions, from “victim” claims which reinforce existing forms of domination.

The vulnerability to scare-campaigns is exasperating, but subjectivity can only emerge by drawing on the concepts of suffering which are legitimated by the dominant culture. The emancipatory claims of yesteryear are just as ineffective as out-dated scare campaigns.

The archetypal form of suffering today is to be swindled. A swindle is the failure of the customer-service provider relation; as more and more all relations are structured and understood in this way, people become vulnerable to this kind of everyday, actual suffering. In response, the victim takes out insurance, or sues the service provider, extending the commodification process, reinforcing the commercial ethos which is the root cause of the anxiety. Any scapegoat may be seized upon, however, to relieve this anxiety — the target of blame is frequently selected by displaced feelings of shame rather than any rational analysis. Commodification can solve social problems, but only by moving them into the domain of capital, with the consequent atrophy of subjectivity, and the adoption of forms of subjectivity which reinforce the domination of capital.

The problem with commodification is that it reduces self-reliance and the sense of responsibility in the subject. Ferudi says: “The process of individuation and the weakening of relations of trust contribute to an intense sense of isolation. The attempts by society to artificially compensate for this isolation by self-help groups, help-lines and professional counselling does little to resolve the problem. Such initiatives seek to reconcile people to their experience of estrangement. They represent an accommodation to powerlessness.” But this is like denouncing trade unions for not abolishing the wages system. What accommodation is achieved is a measure of the success of the emergent subject. Today’s self-help group may be tomorrow’s social movement.

The threats people fear today are generally real, and very often the blaming response is effective in dealing with specific threats — fewer children will be hit by express trains or injured in swimming holes. The overall effect though, is to heighten vulnerability and reinforce existing forms of subordination. The chief thing is to find responses to these dangers which increase social solidarity and challenge existing forms of subordination, rather than responses which extend the process of commodification, erode social solidarity and reinforce existing forms of domination.
#14997233
No. LGBT people are not a community in the sense we describe many minority groups as communities.
If we take for example African minorities in many countries around the world; If you persecute a couple of generations of that community, the effects if not resolved can be passed down through generations, like poverty for example where a generation being poor due to being deprived of opportunities and good living will pass down their poverty to their children and potentially grandchildren even if the original persecution and deprivation is no longer in application.
However, talking about things like LGBTs, those aren't a community but rather individuals who happened to have similar sexual orientation or in case of transgenders, simalar mental illnes (yes, gender dysphoria is an actual diagnosable mental illness).
#14997235
Wellsy wrote:But it might be curious to consider what drives those who perhaps as individuals do take reparations as the means to rectify the wrongs that echo into the present in some degree.

I think the purpose of such demands is not to get the reparations, but to delegitimise the current order. Also by popularising impossible demands they may increase the pressure for the kind of realisable demands such as those made by Black Lives Matter or increased non White representation in high paying leadership positions in Academia Business, politics etc.

I have said before that in practice it is often difficult to distinguish Cultural Marxists from regular "orthodox" Marxists. Trotskyist and other far left groups often spend an inordinate amounts of time campaigning on issues of race, gender, sexuality, Palestine or Cuba solidarity as opposed to intra national class struggle. However not is this case. Reparations are very much a Cultural Marxist talking point, not something pushed by orthodox Marxists.

Note as Cultural Marxism melds into regular or Orthodox Marxism at the extreme, with no clear boundary between the two, so at the other extreme Cultural Marxism melds into what I call Corporate Marxism. :lol: Cultural Marxism the ultimate strategy of subversion has itself been subverted by the very people it was designed to destroy.
#14999482
Rich wrote:I think the purpose of such demands is not to get the reparations, but to delegitimise the current order. Also by popularising impossible demands they may increase the pressure for the kind of realisable demands such as those made by Black Lives Matter or increased non White representation in high paying leadership positions in Academia Business, politics etc.

I have said before that in practice it is often difficult to distinguish Cultural Marxists from regular "orthodox" Marxists. Trotskyist and other far left groups often spend an inordinate amounts of time campaigning on issues of race, gender, sexuality, Palestine or Cuba solidarity as opposed to intra national class struggle. However not is this case. Reparations are very much a Cultural Marxist talking point, not something pushed by orthodox Marxists.

Note as Cultural Marxism melds into regular or Orthodox Marxism at the extreme, with no clear boundary between the two, so at the other extreme Cultural Marxism melds into what I call Corporate Marxism. :lol: Cultural Marxism the ultimate strategy of subversion has itself been subverted by the very people it was designed to destroy.


Are you done with your anti-Jewish conspiracy theory?
#14999484
Hong Wu wrote:The LGBT community has historically been targeted for a long time. If we owe other marginalized communities reparations for their past victimization, does the same logic dictate that we owe LGBT people reparations?

I don't owe anybody any reparations.
#14999486
There shouldn't be a full scale compensation scheme no, saying that as a gay man. Individual business should provide compensation against unlawful discrimination if/when the litigant can prove it.

If it's a minimum wage job I wouldn't say it's worth the hassle.

Fortunately, or to the extent I know, I've only been unfairly and illegally discriminated against because of my sex. Been told twice by 2 separate managers for a cashier position "I want a girl!". I wouldn't take them to court for it, even with legal aid. You choose your battles.

The responses of the shameless and brazen bigots here is unsurprising. Not even and expression of opposition to the persecution we've suffered for hundreds of years. Even to the point of capital punishment and murder in cold blood! No, not a word! Like James Fields, they'd call for the perpetrators to be let off!
#15001396
As an LGBT myself like redcarpet, I don't see why reparations (from the Oligarch class) would be helpful here.

First of all, we ALL suffer from sexual regulation. Even if gay sexuality is less punished than it used to be in some regions, all sexuality is restricted, regulated, and demeaned. MeToo, "Rape Culture", marriage, monogamy, nuclear families.... all of these things are unnatural memes that punish natural sexuality for everyone.

So we should ALL receiver reparations from the Oligarchs. They control our sexuality the same way that farmers breed cattle - and this is also harmful to cattle's quality of life.

Secondly, "reparations" usually means money. And while some targeted minority groups from the past (black ex-slaves, first nations) do require a financial boost to acquire some kind of social equality, gay people mostly require a lack of discrimination against them.

This is actually much more difficult to obtain from capitalist oligarchs than a one-time cash settlement. Oligarchs prefer cash to change because capitalism needs to scapegoat minorities every time it crashes and burns. So by paying a group off, they reserve the right to scapegoat this group (or any other group) when this is necessary to safeguard their (bumbling) control over other people.
#15008300
redcarpet wrote:The responses of the shameless and brazen bigots here is unsurprising. Not even and expression of opposition to the persecution we've suffered for hundreds of years. Even to the point of capital punishment and murder in cold blood! No, not a word! Like James Fields, they'd call for the perpetrators to be let off!


No civilized country puts someone to death for being gay...
#15008472
Here is a fun question...

If sexuality is fluid, wouldn't it also be generally true that there were exponentially less people that were identifying and living as homosexuals a century ago?

Monogamy, heterosexuality, etc., these are all social constructs... So, too, is any other sexuality: it is formed by people participating in the community story-telling of gender & sexual norms. Just as how people can get sucked into all manner of behaviors that are alien to us now, why should we assume that there were very large groups of sexual minorities back then..? Wouldn't it be the case that our shift in the collective consciousness and deconstruction of past social norms has generated more alternative sexuality?

Of course, we would have people on the (bogus?) Kinsey scale that would still be same gender attracted, but a significant amount of those would be able to acquire heterosexual tastes and at least live as conflicted straight people...


Hong Wu wrote:The LGBT community has historically been targeted for a long time. If we owe other marginalized communities reparations for their past victimization, does the same logic dictate that we owe LGBT people reparations?


I am waiting for there to now be talk of reparations for fat kids and ugly people...
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