Historical suffering transmuted into guilt is the gold standard of liberalism, but suffering is relative. In our wonderful multi-everything society, there are so many groups with so many claims to pain. Everyone agrees that the Heteronormative Caucasian Patriarchy of Doom is to blame for all of it, but that still leaves the question of dividing up the spoils of the system and all the privileges to be gained from denouncing privilege. A caste system doesn't work without priority, and calculating the priority of privilege claims by the perpetually underprivileged is complicated.Without the Victim Value Index, understanding how these priorities work can be confusing, even for liberals. It's particularly confusing for conservatives and libertarians who don't understand the system and dismiss it as liberal insanity. It is insane, the way all cultural taboos are, but there is a method to the madness.
The first thing to understand is the dirty little secret of the Victim Value Index. While loud vocal assertions of suffering are very important, the substance of such suffering is unimportant when moving up the ladder of the Victim Value Index.
If historical justice for suffering were the barometer, American Indians would be at the head of the line. While conceptually they are, progressives respond to praises of America by bringing them up, in practice they are somewhere near the back end of the middle. The group currently at the head of the line, Muslims, have the least claim on historical justice, but are at the center of civil rights activism.
Via David Thompson