“Many today have difficulty understanding how the Puritans could execute people based on something like spectral evidence. Yet modern moral panics are more like witch hunts than one might suppose.”
Source: The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars
“Pick any person in the world and know them closely. You will discover their sad story. Everyone feels victimized in some way or the other. We all are victims of a collective illusion but we keep pointing fingers at each other.”
“How could you do that to me?" I repeat. I don´t have to itemize. He knows what I speak of.
Eventually N produces three answers, in this order:
1. "Because I am a complete rotter." I silently agree, but it´s a cop-out: I have maggots, therefore I am dead.
2. "I was stressed at work and unhappy and we were always fighting...and you know I was just crazy..."
I cut him off, saying, "You don´t get to be crazy. You did exactly what you chose to do."
Which is true, he did. It is what he has always done. He therefore seems slightly puzzled at the need for further diagnosis, which may explain his third response:
3. "I don´t know."
This, I feel instinctively, is the correct answer. How can I stay angry with him for being what he is? I was, after all, his wife, and I chose him. No coincidences, that´s what Freud said. None. Ever.
I wipe my eyes on my sleeve and walk toward the truck, saying to his general direction, "Fine. At least now I know: You don´t know."
I stop and turn around and fire one more question: a bullet demanding attention in the moment it enters the skin and spreads outward, an important bullet that must be acknowledged.
"What did you feel?"
After a lengthy pause, he answers. "I felt nothing."
And that, I realize too late, was not the whole truth, but was a valid part of the truth.
Oh, and welcome to the Serengeti. That too.”
Source: Split: A Memoir of Divorce
“A social environment that is conducive to false accusations could lead us to people being falsely accused of falsely accusing others.”
Source: The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars
“One tweet includes a photo of her at fourteen, skinny and smiling through braces in her field hockey uniform, the text screaming, THIS IS HOW OLD TAYLOR BIRCH WAS WHEN JACOB STRANE ASSAULTED HER. I try to imagine the same line paired with the Polaroids Strane took of me at fifteen, my heavy-lidded eyes and swollen lips, or with the photos I took of myself at seventeen, standing before a backdrop of birch trees, lifting my skirt as I stared at the camera, looking like a Lolita and knowing exactly what I wanted, what I was. I wonder how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me.”
Source: My Dark Vanessa
“In academic circles influences by Said, any reference to acts of 'terrorism' was soon regarded as off-limits, a reflection of Zionist efforts to discredit the legitimate aspirations of a subject population by casting aspersions on their so-called freedom fighters. In this way, 'blaming the victim' was deployed as an ideological weapon that might constrain debate.”
Source: The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies
“Campus victimhood culture is so conducive to accusations on behalf of victim groups that we should not be surprised if many turn out to be false.”
Source: The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars
“The concept of political correctness is now used in a variety of ways, but must often it refers to the rules about what words and ideas are forbidden for being offensive, particularly if they are offensive to women and minorities.”
Source: The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars
“Competitive victimhood can both encourage and limit the spread of victimhood culture. It may lead the clash between dignity and victimhood to transform into a clash between competing victimization narratives, or it may cause the victimhood revolution to devour its own, eventually burning itself out.”
Source: The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars
“You cannot be happy if your primary identity is that of a victim, even if you really are one.”