Reply #582: Stop condescending to people.

[casstheturtle]

I'm well aware this is a political discussion board. I've been reading it for several years now, I'm not so ignorant that it's escaped my notice. I'm pretty sure everyone else here is aware this is a political discussion board as well.

The things that happen in people's lives are facts. Perhaps the ultimate facts when it comes to politics, which is the study of certain kinds of relations between people. What happens in individual people's lives as a result of a policy is one of the tests of the policy. The bad has to be taken as well as the good. And you can't just add up bad versus good experiences like numbers in a machine, you have to understand qualitative information as well as quantitative.

I am sure that the people giving their experiences on this thread are as aware as I am of what politics is, seeing that I note many are involved in political movements. Didn't you just bug Two Americas for being into politics instead of into helping people, though? Not that I happen to think that politics and helping people are or ought to be in opposition, nor do I think Two Americas isn't into helping people, but you did just chew someone out earlier for bringing up politics on a political board. You seemed to think it was uncaring or something. I guess now that you're trying to tell me that politics is somehow in opposition to individual experiences, you've done a 180 on that one.

But, seriously. Don't insult people's intelligence. Everyone here knows this is a political board, and whether we agree or not on the ultimate outcomes of our discussion, I am pretty sure personal experiences are relevant to politics, even if they do fall into a statistical minority. Which it hasn't even truly been shown they do, given the sources of the data you keep bringing up. I'd also of course like to know, if personal experiences are so irrelevant, why you continually bring yours up. Well, not really, because I don't consider your personal experiences irrelevant. But it's still strange to me.

See, to me, and to a lot of people here I'm sure, the way policy affects individual people is important. And the data-gathering methods you hold so dear, nearly always leave out people who are disenfranchised in one way or another. There are aspects of personal experience that can't be data-gathered on a form, too. Although I am pretty sure that if you went into the formal study of classism, you'd find a lot of the things that individuals are describing here. The thing is, relying on academic studies over the experiences of everyday people is itself a manifestation of classism: Most poor people aren't in the universities, after all. Some of us once were rich enough to afford that, some of us manage on scholarship or go to community colleges, but for the most part, our lives are taking place outside of academia. Demanding rigorous academic proofs of our lived day to day experiences is one more elitist way to silence people, but I'm sure you know that on some level. I don't want to come across as anti-intellectual here, I'm just saying that the ways academia trains people to use their intellects aren't the only good ways to do so.

Poor and working-class people have generally changed things by getting together and organizing against oppression everyone knew about because they lived it. Lived experiences have never to my knowledge been seriously considered irrelevant to fighting classism, by the ones doing the real fighting. Most real expertise is gained through life experience rather than through studying data in the abstract. And politics is about people, and our lives, and what happens to them, including how they are affected by political decisions. And I'm sure as you go through this board, you'll see people talking about how their lives are affected, without being asked to cite research data all the time. You don't have to agree with every single person's opinions formed through personal experience, to stop pretending that personal experience is just irrelevant.