Since we are getting to the point where the HN formats are making lines be quite short, I would just like to say thanks. My goal by continuing the discussion was to see the view and understand the arguments when discussing groups with power as a source for racism (and by extension, other ism's). Out of happenstance, only two days ago I also listened on a keynote that highlighted the importance to listen and see the human in on-line discussions.

> Powerful groups usually become allegiant to one another only when threatened by a large accumulation of less powerful groups

Such groups are very temporarily in coherency, and don't seem to match the concept of "white men" when described as a cause for ism's. If anything, grouping people based on race or gender without a very specific context seems to loose all the attributes of a allied group with aligned interests and goals.

> Nearly all dynamical systems involve feedback ... Eventually, the lower classes want to resemble the high classes, and mimic the same behavior

I think studies done by Robert Sapolsky on social ranking in baboons to be quite enlightening on this. He showed that if you group individuals by ranking, number 3 competes with 2 and 4 but not with 1 and 5. To theorize, I think that when individuals of a class mimics the behavior of whoever is at top, they do so in order to primarily compete with the nearest ranking members of the same class. The power relation between the top and those at the bottom becomes very indirect and largely unintended through this mechanism.

> I should warn against relying too much on behaviors attributed to a prehistoric past

Fully agree, and mostly bring it up as a point where we tend to view men as powerful because some nation forbids unmarried women to be outside, while we have similar situation in nations where unwealthy men are also not allowed outside. The variation in culture has a much bigger impact on power distribution and liberty than gender has on a global scale.

> [New feminism]. I don't like this distinction. Feminism is simply the ideology of having women attain the same power as men. Feminists simply have different strategies of attaining those goals.

If we look at the left and right politics, both strive to attain economical progress and prosperity. The distinction is in the strategies of attaining those goals, the values behind it, and from that a lot of effort and energy is expended to fighting each other. A think a major factor in this is when two strategies conflict with each other, you end up with two opposing ideologies with the same goal.

To take a few example, Difference feminism encourage and promotes diversity, and have a large undertone of biology in their message. A company should strive 50% women and 50% men because men and women are different and brings different values. The older feminism movement want to eliminate the defining aspect of diversity, and have companies only see the humans behind the applicants for which the natural result should be, spread over enough companies, 50/50.

To bring a second area of conflicting strategies, lets bring up domestic violence. A key statistics that new feminism commonly brings up is that 80% of reported perpetrators are men and 20% are women, often witch explicit implication of testosterone as a biological cause for violence. A common phrase used by feminist is "men violence against women". However, if we look for supporting evidence in homes where there is two men living together, or two women, we don't get the expected result of higher and lower violence based on gender. What we find is that regardless of the genders, the amount of domestic violence is identical.

New feminism reaction to that data can be read in several papers and reports, released in the last 20 years. The full title, often cut in half, is now days "Mens violence against women and violence by people in same-sex relationships", perfectly matching the data and (in my view) completely missing the point. Looking from the perspective that we are all humans, wouldn't it be better to ask why 80% of the time men are implicated as the perpetrator in heterosexual relationships? I would even go as to say that the strategies should simply focus on reducing the human behavior of turning verbal arguments into physical confrontations, rather than focus on gender.

> to change policy in an aristocracy, you could either convince one king and thirty noblemen, or 100,000 peasants

To change culture in an aristocracy, I don't think its enough to convince one king and thirty noblemen. They can influence peasants to mimic the higher class behavior with incentives of higher social status, but that will inherently be within the constraints of existing culture that defines the social structures. If someone want to attain change outside of those, the only method that historically has worked (as far as I seen) is by getting those 100,000 peasants to align with the new values. Wealth and power can help or slow that progress, but it can't force or stop it (although we may be, as you say, getting there, which is a very scary thought).

To go back a bit and talk about racism, if we want to stop racism we can't only talk about white men. Having people to see humans rather that skin color takes a value change, and it is currently very ingrained into everyones mind. The black panther movement was by my interpretation an reflection of the white supremacy movement, putting skin color as an defining feature in create the in-group and out-group. Similarly, new feminism is doing a similar thing to gender.