@fdrake @unenlightened

Guilty of not having read this thread thru (it’s long!).


But i wanted to talk about this subject and this thread is what presented itself.


I’ve had a crisis of faith w/r/t identity politics these past years. I believe wholeheartedly that there are deep deep eternally-scar-leaving traumas attendant on growing up within-yet outside- a culture.

As a young guy, I had body dysmorphia, bad, which made me feel unfit to take up the symbolic mantle of personhood offered me. I couldn’t, because i couldn’t bear people looking at me.

I won’t diminish or not take seriously my suffering just bc im white and male, bc that suffering was very real. It rent and cobbled me for the entirety of my twenties. BUT i will say that I imagine that the suffering of others, even more peripheral to the dominant culture, is much much more acute than mine, in ways i only have dim imaginative access to.

I don’t scoff at it, but i do question the logic of identity politics qua formal political movement. There are incredibly important actual benefits to being formally recognized, none of which i want to minimize or discount.

What bothers me is when identity politics becomes not a means to flourishing, but an end in itself. When the end is to be recognized as having been wronged. Now, again, i think there are innumerable real, systemic wrongs . And they should be brought, writhing and ugly, into the light of impartial condemnation and rectification.

I’m talking about the fostering of a way of thinking about self which holds as an ultimate goal the recognition by an external authority as being someone with a legitimate plaint. That authority can be the administration of one’s university or the twitter community.

As a kid in college, i had misshapen ambitions that revolved around being recognized as ‘clever.’ The university and its faculty, directly and indirectly, both sanctioned and perpetuated this tendency. Maybe i got in at the end of the baby boomer model of education as self-actualization vs self branding. It doesnt matter bc both models are terrible. The point here is the gold star/ no good conditioning i internalized shaped my way of going into the world. To this day - and even here - i want to be seen as a clever, good guy. (Maybe unelightnened can sympathize, as a true-blue baby boomer - The smart guys seem like the hindu guys + the hard-stuff known passably well + alan watts.) This stuff goes deep.


So the question is how does that play out when we turn good, deep, felt and real literature of oppression (take your pick, my favorite is Baldwin) into a model of being. We know slender well-moneyed boys who like beckett are absurd, and we’re right. Is that the extent of absurdity? When literature of oppression is offered as a model, the way beckett once was, when an auhority figure nods or scoffs, in this way or another, what happens?

Well, people will be incentivized to simulate oppression even when they’re actually oppressed. And the flimsy film of performative oppression will fire up detractors and lend credence to their false cause.

This is the problem of teaching expression of oppression. The form itself corrupts and devalues the very real content. If everyone who reads the nyt loves the bluest eye, then the bluest eye had been castrated.

If you are content with letting someone recognize your suffering (even if you hold that they cant actually recognize it, and are constitutively incapable of it) you've ceded something.

You make your worth dependent on someone recognizing your suffering. That’s a good means but its a terrible end. Look at ‘fearless girl’ commisoned by wall street. We’ll recognize your fearlesness all day, it says, just dont try to change, you know, business

Fearless, but not feared

As if those in power do not relinquish it voluntarily... — unenlightened

Indeed, but what stood out for me looking at the figures, was how the genocides were eclipsed by the famines. Simple inequalities of resource distribution still killed more people than any of these regime change initiated slaughters, but then that does sound a little left-wing ... just... trying to resist... the inevitable urge to murder thousands of people...

Quote? — gurugeorge

"The decimation of Native Americans was a result of diseases accidentally brought from the Old World, they weren't murdered by Whitey." - gurugeorge

" ... violence is part of the story, but a relatively minor part." - gurugeorge

"... most property comes via inheritance and exchange, and if you trace it back to its origins, it's some form of original acquisition out of the state of nature." - gurugeorge

:clap:

Do you think there's something inherently spectacular - as in spectacle - about identity politics? Your description of it seems to paint consciousness raising as similar to watching a horror movie; look at how the little ones are suffering, isn't this horrible? Irrelevant of the good intentions - wanting some basic things for oppressed identities - it seems that this transforms some aspects of any concrete person who is subsumed under the identity as a public display.

This is the problem of teaching expression of oppression. The form itself corrupts and devalues the very real content. If everyone who reads the nyt loves the bluest eye, then the bluest eye had been castrated.

Solidarity within identity politics, then, has a perverse aspect; the oppressed are identified with their image, and people take your voice for purposes of the movement, or recognise it was already theirs all along...

If you are content with letting someone recognize your suffering (even if you hold that they cant actually recognize it, and are constitutively incapable of it) you've ceded something.

as you were already equivalent to the soundbites generated about you.

Does that seem sensible? I've been going through Society of the Spectacle recently and it's probably colouring my response.

I vaguely remember that you see all politics as identity politics. — fdrake

Yes. It seems to me that what is objected to is always the identifications of the oppressed. It is not confederations of business people, gated communities, millionaires clubs, armies, nations, etc.

Well, people will be incentivized to simulate oppression even when they’re actually oppressed. And the flimsy film of performative oppression will fire up detractors and lend credence to their false cause.

This is the problem of teaching expression of oppression. The form itself corrupts and devalues the very real content. If everyone who reads the nyt loves the bluest eye, then the bluest eye had been castrated.

If you are content with letting someone recognize your suffering (even if you hold that they cant actually recognize it, and are constitutively incapable of it) you've ceded something. — csalisbury

There is a danger to identification as oppressed, and the man to go to for its deep analysis is Franz Fanon. But to put it into a handy slogan, I could say, "there is no virtue in being oppressed".

This means that whenever the oppressed come together to resist and end their oppression, they are aiming to dissolve their identity - the basis of their own collective power. And if they are not intent on undermining their identity as oppressed, they are intent on maintaining it.

Yes. It seems to me that what is objected to is always the identifications of the oppressed. It is not confederations of business people, gated communities, millionaires clubs, armies, nations, etc. — unenlightened

There is a danger to identification as oppressed, and the man to go to for its deep analysis is Franz Fanon. But to put it into a handy slogan, I could say, "there is no virtue in being oppressed".

I feel as though the idea that there could be virtue in it is some projection from an un-oppressed out group. That the meek will inherit the Earth makes it tempting to emphasise your meekness. This is a retrojection which gives rise to the perception of political activism as 'virtue signalling' - those who are seen to 'virtue signal' are judged simply because their expression indicates a lack of virtue in those applying this judgement. The whole game is somewhat pathetic, as if, say, Christian gays were not protesting some real cause of marginalisation when rallying for their right to marry; they were just signalling their moral superiority to those who disagreed with them.

In this broad sense of identity politics - identity politics as the politics of rights elevation of a somewhat homogenous group - all political action concerned with the differential treatment of groups can be cast as identity politics.

I think a common error along the way, which (fairly or unfairly, I can't say at this point) I'm seeing as exemplified in @gurugeorge's responses, is to make this conceptual generalisation of identity politics while still treating identity politics in a more derogatory sense. All politics as identity politics, all identity politics as mere identity politics.

By 'mere' identity politics I mean political acts whose entire purpose is to produce recognition of an identity's plights - the kind of thing which can be seen in the worst excesses of Twitter and tumblr -. A pseudo-politics of goalless representation. Popularisation - carving out a place in public discourse for some issue affecting a group - is necessary but insufficient for producing social or economic change about that given issue.

Those people who practice this address such 'mere representation' to a invisible guarantor of social justice. Those who criticise politics as such on this basis express nothing but a need for recognition by this vanished God of political change. As if the point of politics was to produce a cancellation of marginalising ideas within public discourse rather than to impede or circumvent the conditions - politico-economic-legal structures - which continuously create this marginalisation in the first place.

I think a common error along the way, which (fairly or unfairly, I can't say at this point) I'm seeing as exemplified in gurugeorge's responses, is to make this conceptual generalisation of identity politics while still treating identity politics in a more derogatory sense. All politics as identity politics, all identity politics as mere identity politics. — fdrake

Well I think it is more so exemplified in the oppressed themselves, at least that is where it becomes paradoxical. One can say that women are underrepresented in positions of power without claiming that women are better than men, or that a woman politician cannot e a bad politician. One can support the decolonisation of Africa without pretending that Idi Amin was something other than an insane genocidal tyrant.

The difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich have more money, not that they are more greedy. There is something to the notion of virtue signalling when, say, people claim that Hilary Clinton has a claim to the presidency by virtue of being a woman - that is no virtue.

But that is not to deny also the virtue signalling of those who identify as 'responsible individualists who do not whine all the time'.

I didn't ask for some random quotes of me, I asked for where I said: "they just all died mysteriously but completely unsuspiciously shortly after voluntarily handing over their land."

Obviously disease is not mysterious or suspicious, and I never said they voluntarily handed over their land.

I think a common error along the way, which (fairly or unfairly, I can't say at this point) I'm seeing as exemplified in gurugeorge's responses, is to make this conceptual generalisation of identity politics while still treating identity politics in a more derogatory sense. — fdrake

I've treated the variety of identity politics that's taught in universities in a derogatory sense, but that's not the only kind of identity politics. All politics is indeed identity politics in one way or another - whether it's good or bad depends on the way it's used.

So which examples of identity politics do you think of as irredeemable rubbish and why, then?

So which examples of identity politics do you think of as irredeemable rubbish and why, then? — fdrake

Anything modeled on the Marxist type of societal analysis (of oppressor/oppressed groups, with the groups marked by their closeness to, or distance from, "power", arbitrarily defined). So: anything based on good, old-fashioned Marxism; anything based on analyses derived from Critical Theory, or any other blend of Freudianism and Marxism; anything based on Feminist analyses, or derived therefreom as a template; anything grounded philosophically in Post-modernism or Post-structuralism; anything based on Intersectionality and/or Standpoint Theory.

Basically, all "xxx studies" need to be thrown into the bin and the humanities need to be cleaned up, university identity politics is a mind-virus and a pseudo-intellectual, quasi-religious cult, as well as a scam that's at the root of the multi-billion dollar NGO/Diversity Industry. The whole mess is just a giant leech on the body politic that's created a generation of periwigged, pompadoured "elites" who've been living off the backs of the common labourer, and who are about to lose their heads if they're not careful.

Our identity is fine, your identity is suspect, their identity is outrageous.

So which examples of identity politics do you think of as irredeemable rubbish and why, then?
— fdrake

Anything modeled on the Marxist type of societal analysis (of oppressor/oppressed groups, with the groups marked by their closeness to, or distance from, "power", arbitrarily defined). — gurugeorge

How about the so-called 'silent majority' in the US, who've had their freedom of speech oppressed by the politically correct dictates of the wicked and evil postmodern neo-Marxists?

You just described an incredibly heterogenous bunch of.. well.. everything. Absolutely not worth aggregating them into a coherent whole... They aren't a coherent whole, never will be, and were never intended to be.

A set of distinctions that allows the equation of Freud with Foucault is not very accurate.

Regardless of theoretical confusions; when you see something like gays banding together for gay marriage to be a thing, people advocating for and setting up needle exchanges in drug infused areas, the end of apartheid, setting up free evening classes in impoverished areas, the entry of all races into most parts of the workforce; would you agree these changes are in part attributable to 'identity politics' in the broad sense?

So: anything based on good, old-fashioned Marxism — gurugeorge

Well, blame who you will, but I don't think "old-fashioned Marxism" is a very good culprit. It's more likely new-fangled Marxism that is source of the nonsense. That and critical theory, POMO, and all that stuff.

Marx wasn't a 'splitter' he was more of a 'lumper'. He looked at 'lumps' like the bourgeoisie and the working class; he didn't split up the 'lumps' into all of the imaginable divisions like white working class, black working class, hispanic working class, female working class, male working class, undocumented working class, jewish working class, urban working class, suburban working class, rural working class, young working class, middle aged working class, old working class, lazy working class, ambitious working class, and so on and so forth.

The current fixation with identity is the province of obsessive-compulsive splitters. It isn't enough to separate out homosexuals and heterosexuals; there are gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, queers, and don't-know-their-ass-from-their-elbow-sexuals. Transexuals magically split into... 10? 50? 100? different versions, some comprising less than 1 person (some twit who has mixed feelings). Every conceivable ethnic, racial, or geographical feature can be used as a wedge to further split things down as far as possible.

Have you heard of "games of uproar"? I think the SJW types, so called, like games of uproar. The splitters expose many new surfaces on which conflict can be imagined, if not observed, and by exaggerating everything, they can fuel their needs for excitement in these games of uproar.

Thus shall the universities be remade in your image and your clones shall inherit the earth. Praise be, we are saved.

Wouldn't it be better though to continue to argue for your point of view in a free marketplace of ideas rather than to try to forcefully suppress those you don't agree with?...Which suggests a lack of confidence in your own position. (Not that real Maoists the world over wouldn't in principle applaud your book-burning ways. Maybe y'all should get together.)

You didn't ask me, but... what the hell. Some of it is "identity" and some of it isn't.

Take the gay marriage issue. It wasn't part of the initial gay liberation agenda, even if a few gay people tried to marry as early as 1970. It didn't get major traction until much of the "acceptance" items on the agenda had been won. Gay advocacy could have stopped there. "Advocacy" is beneficial, but it is also a raison d'être and if the gay agenda had been met, what further need would there be for advocates? Little to nothing. Marriage was pushed to the fore, and grafted on to the liberation agenda, even if this sort of assimilationist move was contrary to the original "liberation" idea. As gay marriage became acceptable, transsexuals became the cause-celebre. It has never seemed to me that transsexuals seeking a medical solution (drugs, surgery) to their alleged problem were ever a natural part of gay liberation. None the less, here we are.

Needle exchanges? Night classes? Ending apartheid? No, I don't think these are identity-motivated. For one, a good deal of the drive to implement needle exchanges comes from the public health agencies. Many of the workers in these programs are not IVDU, though some are, or were. Rather than an identity movement, I see it more as "applying social marketing technology". Some people who start free evening classes no doubt below to the target audiences, but a lot of those programs are staffed by people who don't belong to the target group. Again, it's a well practiced social up-lift strategy with a history back into the 19th century. Apartheid? Most of the people I've seen agitating against apartheid were white Americans who didn't have much connection to South Africa. It is a good thing that white activists opposed apartheid, but I don't think opposition was based on identity.

Self Help programs generally are ethnicity based--because they arise out of a specific community. The gay response to AIDS was identity based self help. Organizing west coast agricultural workers and the grape boycott was self help with an ethnic base. The National Farmers Organization (now long gone) was a rural white-ethnic based agricultural self help drive. The civil rights movement was a black ethnic self help movement.

I didn't believe that the examples I gave could be accurately described as identity politics, save perhaps how gay marriage was strategised. The point I was trying to make was that when 'identity politics' becomes 'the politics of extending rights of or de-marginalising a group' it's already lost most of its meaning. An incoherence that comes from misunderstanding what identity politics is rather than from any incoherence in identity politics.

I was hoping that you'd chime in and provide some decent historical context, it was why I included the needle exchange thing as an example.

Self Help programs generally are ethnicity based--because they arise out of a specific community. The gay response to AIDS was identity based self help. Organizing west coast agricultural workers and the grape boycott was self help with an ethnic base. The National Farmers Organization (now long gone) was a rural white-ethnic based agricultural self help drive. The civil rights movement was a black ethnic self help movement.

I agree with that characterisation, I don't think identity politics has anything but a pejorative sense. Politics is usually about some group or another being subjected to blah, trying to stop or circumvent blah and the conditions that keep blah happening; in this sense it's about the differential treatment of groups coupled with the imagination of specific ways things can be improved. (and then trying to do these things)

In that regard, even intersectionality and standpoint theory make some kind of sense. The insight that people from different backgrounds are likely to have different experiences is something that needs repeating; even if the theoretical tenets of standpoint epistemology are disagreed with.

It depends on the grain of one's analysis obviously. There are things different about the groups on my helicopter list, sure, but there are also linked genealogies, similarities; and it's the things shared that are causing the problems - as I said, the problem is the typical social analysis in terms of oppressor/oppressed, first practiced by Marx in terms of socioeconomic class, that's been translated wholesale into the idioms of gender and race.

To provide some positive character to identity politics, I think it's politics characterised as: representation without goals; raised consciousness of problems without attempt at worked solutions; solidarity with people rather than against problems.

↪fdrake It depends on the grain of one's analysis obviously. There are things different about the groups on my helicopter list, sure, but there are also linked genealogies, similarities; and it's the things shared that are causing the problems - as I said, the problem is the typical social analysis in terms of oppressor/oppressed, first practiced by Marx in terms of socioeconomic class, that's been translated wholesale into the idioms of gender and race.

Linked genealogies? You mean like what they produce in post structuralism? Bloody French, coming over here, codifying the trope of the genealogical critique of ideas.

What're the shared things? How Marx tackles problems is quite a lot different from how Foucault tackles them, Deleuze is different again... Post-structuralism and 'pomo' in general are really the name of a historical moment rather than any shared set of ideas. Perhaps in general they were reacting against - with sympathetic criticism - enlightenment scientific ideology (da big bomba), structuralist linguistics and the existential/phenomenological traditions.

as I said, the problem is the typical social analysis in terms of oppressor/oppressed,

I don't think that anyone is sitting there believing society is structured to fuck over individuals with certain properties; people are marginalised through omissions, legal restrictions, or accumulated advantages. These structural problems usually have suffering as a blind consequence rather than as a conspiratorial drive. If you notice that people in category X have in rough in way Y, you produce a schism between X and not X, effected by Y and not effected by Y. How else are you supposed to locate sites of historical struggle and of the resistance of individuals to their societal conditions than by coupling those effected with the reasons they were effected? What's so wrong with that?

book-burning ways — Baden

Oh for heaven's sake. Universities have the right to have whatever programs and courses they see fit. They can change their minds, and they can be persuaded. The State also has an interest in what it pays for.

What're the shared things? — fdrake

Mainly an unquestioning belief in equality, which is especially amusing in the context of relativism - but then it can always be excused as a "leap of faith," and by God the lemmings have going for it :)

I don't think that anyone is sitting there believing society is structured to fuck over individuals with certain properties; people are marginalised through omissions, legal restrictions, or accumulated advantages. These structural problems usually have suffering as a blind consequence rather than as a conspiratorial drive. If you notice that people in category X have in rough in way Y, you produce a schism between X and not X, effected by Y and not effected by Y. How else are you supposed to locate sites of historical struggle and of the resistance of individuals to their societal conditions than by coupling those effected with the reasons they were effected? What's so wrong with that? — fdrake

It's a possible analysis, oppression does happen sometimes, just as exploitation happens sometimes.
But it's not the only lens through which we ought to understand history and the relations between human beings. The reason it's become a cult, is because the relevant forms of "oppression" have been defined into existence, rather than found.

You don't have to look hard for instances of actual oppression in the world. They're verifiable, falsifiable, one can be accused of oppression, and be innocent of it, and show one's innocence.

Again, comparing and contrasting with Marx is instructive: actual instances of what people ordinarily call "exploitation," (which is falsifiable) he wasn't all that interested in. What he was interested in was definining capitalist relations as intrinsically exploitative. Something of the same kind of linguistic folderol is at work with the geneological descendants of Marxism (a lot of these schools of thought were created by ex-Marxists, or disgruntled Marxists): relations between man and woman or between blacks and whites are understood to be intrinsically oppressive, in a way that's lost touch with falsifiability - IOW, you are kafkatrapped into being an "exploiter" simply by virtue of belonging to the group defined as exploitative, and you cannot demonstrate that you are not an exploiter, you have to "confess your privilege." It really is quite like Original Sin, and taken in a very Calvinist sort of vein at that.

On the other hand, suppose there are lingering traces of oppression, cobwebs of it here and there in our institutions and working life, should we do nothing about them at all? Sure, you could have, for example, a "Nightwatchman Feminism" to stick around and tidy up the loose ends. But what we have instead is a Feminism long past its sell-by date trying to justify its keep by proposing ever more absurd, made-up categories of human interaction as "oppression of the wamenz." And it's the same for the race-baiting machine, the Diversity Industry in business, etc.

It's happened already! The long anticipated Peterson-Žižek debate occurred.

I think you're confusing the scope of structural properties. On the level of a society, certain groups will probably have more advantages afforded to them; sometimes this is ok (like citizens), sometimes it's not ok (like citizens being unable to vote), sometimes there's a lot of ambiguity and horrible shit (treatment of asylum seekers).

Insofar as someone is saying people from different categories can never have genuine relations, send them to the Gulag; insofar as they're highlighting that different groups are treated differently in some ways and that maybe this isn't always a good thing -or an acceptable thing- in some instances, don't Gulag them.

On the other hand, suppose there are lingering traces of oppression, cobwebs of it here and there in our institutions and working life, should we do nothing about them at all? Sure, you could have, for example, a "Nightwatchman Feminism" to stick around and tidy up the loose ends. But what we have instead is a Feminism long past its sell-by date trying to justify its keep by proposing ever more absurd, made-up categories of human interaction as "oppression of the wamenz." And it's the same for the race-baiting machine, the Diversity Industry in business, etc.

There's always housework to do. Equating political activism with the worst excesses of social media and the worst bastardisations of Theory is easy to score points with. Just make sure you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater; it's not all pointless because some of it is crap.

Just to annoy people, and confirm my status as postmodern neo-marxist pervert, here's a brief waffle about a form of conflict theory that has stuck in my mind unaccompanied by a theorist's name. It seems pertinent to current politics, and possibly even this very debate.

The general idea is that whenever two or three are gathered together there will be conflict. And this is the nature of society, world without end amen. But in a stable society, which is about as good as it gets, the conflict is largely internalised. This can happen because the individual has many identifications, of religion, class, ethnicity, etc. So in the stable society, these identifications are orthogonal to each other; they are independent variables. So you and I might have the same religion, but different ethnicity, and class, whereas me and Mr Smith, share the same ethnicity, but differ as to religion and class, and you and Mr Smith share the same class but differ in religion and ethnicity. In this situation, all our alliances are conflicted, depending on the issue, such that one's opponent in one thread is one's ally in another. And this, believe it or not is a recipe for peace and tranquility, because no one wants to destroy another, because everyone is an ally on some issue.

Rather, it is when these identities are aligned with each other, and the classic case is N Ireland, that violence breaks out. In this case, if you are protestant, you are middle class, loyalist and ethnically Scots, whereas if you are catholic, you are working class, republican, and ethnically Irish. And this is a recipe for civil war, precisely because the identities are so aligned and produce a loyalty that is undivided, and a conflict that is completely externalised.

Now what seems to have happened to us recently is that all our conflicts have been either aligned or reduced to a single conflict (wealth). "It's the economy, stupid". Identities are becoming polarised, and this is the recipe for internal harmony and external conflict, we all know who our friends and enemies are, and they are always the same. One of the signs of this alignment is the multi-dimensional epithet: 'Alt-right Christian fundamentalist neo-liberal' vs pomo neo-marxist identity obsessed bleeding heart atheists.

Good points, but what I see is a lack of substantial conflict. The problems in front of us may be grave (climate change for instance), but it's not coming home to us in a way that leads to real political engagement.

IOW, political movements today are like soldiers marching in a parade. There is no war. They're just marching to keep their skills up.

I was hoping that you'd chime in and provide some decent historical context, it was why I included the needle exchange thing as an example. — fdrake

Thanks for your confidence, but it has been quite a while since I have observed much about needle exchange.

What I saw, public health outreach, was welcome by IVDUs, because they recognized the risk (not always, but quite often) and it was offered without judgement. It's surprising to me that needle exchanges aren't common place, even ubiquitous. At least I see needle and other 'sharps' disposal units in a lot of washrooms where one wouldn't expect to find them. The last iteration of needle exchange I witnessed was a mobile operation where drug users could either visit the needle exchange van and get what the needed (plus testing, at certain times) or could arrange a visit somewhere with the van driver.

The better approach is "safer shooting galleries" which also are generally a public health approach and which run into more legal barrier than needle exchanges do. The safer shooting galleries do not offer drugs, they offer clean works and a safe place to enjoy the high, and someone on hand with Naloxone (or similar opiate receptor antagonists), should it be needed--which it quite often is.

The final approach to safer drug use is providing the kit and caboodle--works, drugs, setting--the whole thing. This relieves the addict of health risks, and avoids the criminal activity often required to get money for drugs. I don't think anybody in the US is doing this at this point. There are at least a few groups that would offer all this if they could get approval and funding.

Peer generated efforts are difficult because the peers are engaged in criminal activity to start with, and can't just show up at a city, county, or state health department and ask for money to start a program. They wouldn't be considered creditable by themselves. The health departments themselves are staffed by understanding, thoughtful professionals who none-the-less have their limits. The relevant staff may not want to get too deeply involved with IVDUs. Non-profit agencies have to be recruited, and there one finds the same reluctance to get too involved, and fears of PR disasters.

The take-away message on AIDS prevention is that it isn't going well. It isn't that nobody knows how to do HIV prevention education, doesn't know how to reach vulnerable groups (like young black gay men), isn't capable of creating effective messages (or finding someone who can), or can't find people willing to do the leg work on the street and in neighborhoods.

This limp wrist or limp dick approach starting appearing in the late 1990s with just really very mediocre education efforts replacing what had been more vigorous efforts; Then under George Bush doing education got more difficult because of more scrutiny and oversight demanded by the federal government. Material, for instance, had to be reviewed to make sure it wouldn't offend anybody. A fatal requirement. Sexual health messages that get to the point will definitely offend someone.

It's like there is a "failure of will" on the part of both public health people and communities. The statistics are clear that new infections are occurring regularly, despite there being reasonably effective to very effective methods of preventions -- condoms or a daily Truvada pill, an AIDS drug that when taken by the uninfected, prevents infection by the virus by suppressing reverse transcriptase). The cost of prevention is always less than the cost of treatment when someone gets infected.

I must admit that if I were 30 and sexually active, (sigh) I would hesitate to commit myself to taking Truvada every day for maybe 20 or 30 years. It isn't terribly dangerous, but it can have serious side effects, and it doesn't eliminate the need for condoms--for either HIV or other STDs.

Here's a CDC bar graph on 2016 infections: