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Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

> “Men are advantaged in every aspect of our society,

> “We tend not to prioritize men’s health, but it needs unique attention, and it has implications for the rest of the family. It means other members of the family, including women and children, also suffer.”

> Advocates for more research into men’s health say the goal isn’t to steal resources from women, girls and gender minorities.

So men's health deserves to be an issue only because it may impact children well-being, and only if it doesn't steal resource from other more noble causes.

I don't know how US audience reads this type of article, but as a foreigner, it seems every single issue nowadays has to be artificially rebranded as a social justice fight.

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The problem, at least in US general social discourse, it everything is viewed through an essentialist lens. It's an addictive resolution to the ambiguity of post-modern thought, because it reduces nuances to a cacophony of labels, creates clear villain/hero dichotomies, and allows everyone to architect their maximal perfect victimhood.

What is essentialism?

Basically a thing is only the sum of its parts. Dictionary defines it as the backwards of existentialism: essence precedes existence

Apparently, it’s reducing that individuals are what they are, because of the circumstances that created them (like root cause analysis).

This is in contrast to assigning some other factor that may be that might be too paternalistic, too taboo or too “blamey” to consider (like incompetence or a lack of spirituality/belief).

It’s a bit of a mindfuck for me, because how else are you going to explain a given situation without looking at the factors that created them.

Essentialism is the idea that there is a pure form of something tied to its classification. Basically it's allowing classification to supersede qualification.

Originally it was used by right-leaning schools of thought to justify racism and sexism. They viewed women and minorities as "essentially" inferior as an essential factor of their classification as such.

Now it is used by left-leaning centers to create narratives of human. They view differences in human attainment essentially the cause of certain social factors, individuals and institutions that are justifiably characterized as such because they are "essentially" evil.

'liberal-leaning' not left leaning. And they're winning.

They already expurged feminism from emancipation, replacing it with empowerment.

I thought BLM was the BPP successor, but weirdly, any leader referencing the rainbow coalition get shafted, as it seems that Fred Hampton is waaay better as a martyr than as a thought leader. But he was assassinated because he was a Marxist who reassembled minorities, not because he was black.

And declaring institutions are influencing human behavior is not essentialism. 'l'existence précède l' essence' apply to living being, human constructs can be essencialized, and that's why people believe in essentialism, or at least that's how I understood Sartre.

>The problem, at least in US general social discourse, it everything is viewed through an essentialist lens.

Which is the highest of ironic outcomes to critical theory in American humanities departments spending the 80s and 90s trying to get us all to grasp the instability of monolithic framing of identities, historicism, etc

Edit: TBF, people like Wendy Brown at UC-Berkeley saw this coming in the late 90s

Unfortunately it takes that kind of language to get some people to even notice men face issues.

The constant bombardment of "Men's advantages" by many groups has had the effect that empathy for men's issues non-existent unless it intersects with problems that matter to them.

You’re reading a zero sum situation into something that’s not one.

Social justice / culture wars are basically clickbait gasoline for stories. This will not change until we end ad view driven journalism.

I mean I’m sick of it and see that voiced often. It could end when people stop responding to it.

WaPo is on the same level as FOX News in my opinion. The NYT is on that level as well.

I can understand not thinking highly of Wapo and NYT, but what sorts of things would you point to that would put them on the same level as Fox News given what we’ve learned about Fox News in recent weeks from the Dominion lawsuit?

Perhaps the fact that Washington Post has also lied about stories in the past and had to settle lawsuits for huge amounts as a result?

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/24/media/washington-post-sandman...

> “Nicholas Sandmann agreed to settle with the Post because the Post was quick to publish the whole truth—through its follow-up coverage and editor’s notes,” Sandmann’s attorney, Todd McMurtry, said in an email.

See the difference?

> and had to settle lawsuits for huge amounts as a result

Are we talking about the Sandmann settlement here? Because as far as I know, we have no clue what “huge” might entail in that case. Whatever it was, I’m quite confident it doesn’t belong in the same descriptive bucket as $787 million.

> So men's health deserves to be an issue only because it may impact children well-being

"...but it needs unique attention, and it has implications for the rest of the family..."

> and only if it doesn't steal resource from other more noble causes

"...the goal isn’t to steal resources from women, girls and gender minorities..."

So no and no.

> it seems every single issue nowadays has to be artificially rebranded as a social justice fight.

What do you think "social justice" means?

> So men's health deserves to be an issue only because it may impact children well-being

You say 'only because it may impact children', the article says 'and it has implication for the rest of the family'.

That rather changes the statement.

Yikes. What snowflakes these mortals be.

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