Re: Agreed

Or, perhaps, our situation allows the abuses of government to be far more obvious to us than to those who have not been abused by the government.

I'd say that our persecution, which is unique in the modern world, has created schemas, filters through which we (MAPs in the general sense) view the world, and it's far more likely--obvious, really--that our perspective is strongly skewed by that. We see the State Monster and its influence everywhere, and we see the tangential issues in vastly simplified and black & white terms, as with Stahntii's painting the majority of welfare recipients as undeserving leeches. That kind of thing permeates the MAP worldview at every level.

Of course, we are not the only party to be systematically abused by government. Many of these abuses are also quite obvious to other minorities, including blacks and American Indians in the United States, and Arabs and Muslims in several Western countries. As a hidden minority we have a similar perspective to the homosexuals prior to the 1970s, but without the ideological baggage which they have since acquired. This perspective is especially rare as many of us are in a position to understand the perspectives of both minorities and the majority, and quite a few of us can even approach the issues with a substantial degree of education.

No, but we are the prime extant example. Note that even many of you complain now about how minorities which were once as marginalized as we are have become examples of the very problem they once fought so valiantly to overcome. It never fails to astound me how, for example, some MAPs lash out almost violently against political correctness while simultaneously failing to acknowledge how they've erected their own version of it here. But it made me realize that other minorities may not see the problem either. In their eyes something meant as an innocent comment can be perceived as genuine racism or sexism even when it is not, and they can be utterly offended by that. By the same token, too many MAPs overlook glaringly obvious examples of completely awful people in their midst. Or offer only two interpretations of any given event presented by the media: 'didn't happen that way' or 'undetermined.' Or minimize the suffering of people who wasn't necessarily a victim in the conventional sense but who still got a raw deal by circumstances. Or ignore the real possibility that this stuff isn't quite as simple and clear-cut as they'd like it to be. Or . . . the list goes on and on.

Well, we are not so much about debate here as about discussion - and as I noted in my reply to Minstrel, I believe that GC is one of the best discussion forums on the net. Not only is GC visited by far more people than most of us imagine, but we are visited by a lot of bright people, most of whom never post - and I find ideas that are posted here often seem to percolate into the public consciousness, and not infrequently come back to me by way of co-workers or random people I meet, many of whom I expect have never read the board themselves.

And here is another example of what I mean. This forum is rife with code words which are implied to mean one thing but in reality mean something different. In this case, "discussion forum" is really a code word for "this is where you come to learn what to say to antis and nons." This isn't a discussion board; it's an indoctrination board, and if you reject the indoctrination in any capacity then you are viewed as an anti or a traitor, even if you aren't necessarily called one up front.