| Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I know what you refer to, as I worked in SF recently for several years. I don't think it is true that white men are unilaterally demonized by any significant group in American culture today. There is obviously some of that occurring, and occasionally the behavior is a bit troubling, but I don't there is any major problem to worry about. The behavior you are concerned will go away naturally as the recent social movements mature and are able to see some of the progress they are making. In general, most people don't support the extreme behavior, so there is only limited space for it to survive. I do think patient and healthy pushback can be appropriate in the right circumstances. It is a tricky issue though. There are some very legitimate (and some less so) reasons motivating such behavior, even if, occasionally, some of the specific actions themselves are troubling. Anyone claiming rigid, simplistic absolute statements here seems wrong to me. Perhaps I'm biased towards (and privileged enough to do so) being patient with what I see as some temporary flare ups that are side effects of attempting to process and rectify some of the results of absolutely terrible historical occurrences over the past several hundred years. I don't know. We will see how the next 10 or 20 years go. I have to go so I won't address the other issues. These topics are tricky and hard to discuss with a short comment. I will say that the way you are discussing them is preferable to the person I accused of straw-manning. You seem more capable of considering nuance, which I appreciate. |