0 comment Wednesday, October 8, 2014 | admin
Further to my recent entry about the latest outbreak of PC mania at a university, this comment thread on the story at the David Thompson blog yielded this rather amusing link about 'Victimhood Poker'.
Victimhood Poker (VP) can trace its roots all the way back to the admissions department at Harvard University, where its constituent parts were invented back in 1978 following the U.S. Supreme Court's Bakke decision. In the interest of fairness and in order circumvent arbitrary admissions criteria such as scholastic performance and standardized test scores, sociologists at Harvard devised a brilliant system of using cards to assign a numerical value/ranking to applicants' physical features, sexual preference, religion, and/or gender. By enabling the University to avoid making admissions judgments tinged with ingrained and systemic Western racism/sexism/homophobia, the card-based admissions system was a huge success and it soon spread to other Ivy League schools such as Yale, Columbia, Brown, and Princeton.
[...]
One fateful day in 1996, a group of intoxicated freshman at the State University of New York- Oneonta broke into that college's admissions office looking for rolling papers and Doritos. Instead, they found the deck of victimization cards. Unsure what they were or what to do with them, the drunk freshmen stole the cards and took them back to their dorm. As legend has it, later that night over a carton of Marlboro light cigarettes and a case of warm Miller Genuine Draft, the freshman engaged in the first ever game of Victimhood Poker.''
We've all heard of the playing of the race card, and you can see the whole race deck at the link above.
It's amusing, but the fact is, real people's lives are affected by the use of this bogus system of penalizing the majority and rewarding 'underrepresented minorities' strictly based on their skin pigmentation. (Hey, I'm only repeating what I've been told so many times over the last 40 or so years: that race is only 'skin color' and nothing more. So why reward someone strictly for pigment in their skin? Isn't judging the content of their character supposedly desirable, according to a saint of the politically correct church?)
The value of the cards in the 'victimhood deck' displayed on the blog is based on the spoils system established by Harvard, which awarded points based on race and sexual orientation as well as sex, male or female. However, the hierarchy they established by that points system is not exactly analogous to the de facto hierarchy of victimhood. If I had to re-order the list, I would say that black trumps all, with Hispanic second these days, followed by Moslems, an up-and-coming contender for the crown. The rest of the hierarchy I would leave as it is, considering that it seems to reflect the real-life value accorded to the various victim groups, and their position on the PC totem pole.
American Indians take a fairly low position on the totem pole (irony intended), perhaps indicating their relative fewness in number, compared to the ever-burgeoning Hispanic population and the very vocal black population with their practiced shakedown artists like Jackson and Sharpton. Despite silly controversies like the recurring one over sports mascots with Indian names (polls have shown that most Indians don't care), Indians are just not very active in the victimhood competition. Moslems, by contrast, are among the more vocal groups when they smell an opportunity to cry victimhood and extort some kind of apology or concession. So they are fast moving up in the pack of victims.
Those who strictly adhere to the pecking order among various competing victim groups must have some tough choices to make these days; the difficulty of choosing who to afford the most sympathy to must be severe for the true believers in academia or the media these days; their agony is almost palpable when they are forced to choose a 'good guy victim' in stories like those of the riots in recent years between blacks and Hispanics, mainly in California. What do the media do in reporting those stories? One suspects that since the media are heavily dominated by 'diversity' these days, with many reporters having obviously Hispanic names, they must simply go with their own. But for the white liberal journalist the choice must not be so easy; do they pick the most downtrodden victim and champion him or her? Do they toss a coin? Or is there some kind of written guideline that comes along with the templates used by these professional journalists' associations, which are politically correct to the max?
Or are the leftists and the professional victims smarter than we think, and purposely trying to create a backlash which might work in their favor? The left works that way; they look to provoke violence so as to make themselves appear to be put-upon victims of 'hateful' right-wingers and racists. Then they stand back and feign innocence, while those they goaded are blamed and punished.
This latest affront, with the re-education classes and the 'all whites are racists' nonsense is, I believe, an overplaying of the leftists' and race-baiters' hand. I think they are causing a great deal of resentment and ultimately a backlash to their agenda. They just don't know when enough is enough.
Victimhood Poker (VP) can trace its roots all the way back to the admissions department at Harvard University, where its constituent parts were invented back in 1978 following the U.S. Supreme Court's Bakke decision. In the interest of fairness and in order circumvent arbitrary admissions criteria such as scholastic performance and standardized test scores, sociologists at Harvard devised a brilliant system of using cards to assign a numerical value/ranking to applicants' physical features, sexual preference, religion, and/or gender. By enabling the University to avoid making admissions judgments tinged with ingrained and systemic Western racism/sexism/homophobia, the card-based admissions system was a huge success and it soon spread to other Ivy League schools such as Yale, Columbia, Brown, and Princeton.
[...]
One fateful day in 1996, a group of intoxicated freshman at the State University of New York- Oneonta broke into that college's admissions office looking for rolling papers and Doritos. Instead, they found the deck of victimization cards. Unsure what they were or what to do with them, the drunk freshmen stole the cards and took them back to their dorm. As legend has it, later that night over a carton of Marlboro light cigarettes and a case of warm Miller Genuine Draft, the freshman engaged in the first ever game of Victimhood Poker.''
We've all heard of the playing of the race card, and you can see the whole race deck at the link above.
It's amusing, but the fact is, real people's lives are affected by the use of this bogus system of penalizing the majority and rewarding 'underrepresented minorities' strictly based on their skin pigmentation. (Hey, I'm only repeating what I've been told so many times over the last 40 or so years: that race is only 'skin color' and nothing more. So why reward someone strictly for pigment in their skin? Isn't judging the content of their character supposedly desirable, according to a saint of the politically correct church?)
The value of the cards in the 'victimhood deck' displayed on the blog is based on the spoils system established by Harvard, which awarded points based on race and sexual orientation as well as sex, male or female. However, the hierarchy they established by that points system is not exactly analogous to the de facto hierarchy of victimhood. If I had to re-order the list, I would say that black trumps all, with Hispanic second these days, followed by Moslems, an up-and-coming contender for the crown. The rest of the hierarchy I would leave as it is, considering that it seems to reflect the real-life value accorded to the various victim groups, and their position on the PC totem pole.
American Indians take a fairly low position on the totem pole (irony intended), perhaps indicating their relative fewness in number, compared to the ever-burgeoning Hispanic population and the very vocal black population with their practiced shakedown artists like Jackson and Sharpton. Despite silly controversies like the recurring one over sports mascots with Indian names (polls have shown that most Indians don't care), Indians are just not very active in the victimhood competition. Moslems, by contrast, are among the more vocal groups when they smell an opportunity to cry victimhood and extort some kind of apology or concession. So they are fast moving up in the pack of victims.
Those who strictly adhere to the pecking order among various competing victim groups must have some tough choices to make these days; the difficulty of choosing who to afford the most sympathy to must be severe for the true believers in academia or the media these days; their agony is almost palpable when they are forced to choose a 'good guy victim' in stories like those of the riots in recent years between blacks and Hispanics, mainly in California. What do the media do in reporting those stories? One suspects that since the media are heavily dominated by 'diversity' these days, with many reporters having obviously Hispanic names, they must simply go with their own. But for the white liberal journalist the choice must not be so easy; do they pick the most downtrodden victim and champion him or her? Do they toss a coin? Or is there some kind of written guideline that comes along with the templates used by these professional journalists' associations, which are politically correct to the max?
Or are the leftists and the professional victims smarter than we think, and purposely trying to create a backlash which might work in their favor? The left works that way; they look to provoke violence so as to make themselves appear to be put-upon victims of 'hateful' right-wingers and racists. Then they stand back and feign innocence, while those they goaded are blamed and punished.
This latest affront, with the re-education classes and the 'all whites are racists' nonsense is, I believe, an overplaying of the leftists' and race-baiters' hand. I think they are causing a great deal of resentment and ultimately a backlash to their agenda. They just don't know when enough is enough.
Labels: Affirmative Action, Cultural Marxism, Leftism, Political Correctness