Timothy Redwine
2 min readOct 4, 2023

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People should be pragmatists and do what works.

Every minute spent quarreling over ideological doctrine, membership, practice, etc. is a minute not spent distributing mosquito nets to people at risk of malaria infections, vaccinating the unvaccinated, sheltering domestic violence victims, schooling the illiterate, etc.

If you have to convince a group that you belong; if you have to walk on eggshells to avoid violating group demands, protocols, expectations, etc.; and if you have to go out of your way to limit yourself to only being an "ally" of the group, then your resources are probably best spent elsewhere.

I believe that the economist Jeffrey Sachs has asserted that we have the resources to globally eradicate things like poverty. In other words, we choose not to do it. Gandhi put it this way: "The world has enough for everybody's need, but not enough for everybody's greed".

It appears that people are more concerned about the meaning of labels, who gets to apply those labels to themselves, and the orthodoxy that comes with carrying the labels than they are concerned about actually solving problems, stopping avoidable suffering, helping those who are in need, etc.

Maybe someday some of the world's ideologues will get their wishes and we will have things like "equality", "liberty", etc. We will probably give up our humanity in the process and be a collection of label-bearing automatons.

If feminism is going to be a force for positive change then it is going to have to welcome all people who share in its vision as they are; take what people have to offer, not what orthodoxy demands; and allow people to be pragmatists and do what works.

Why do people think that it is so important that we get one relatively recent ideology/movement right anyway? Do they not see their ethnocentrism? The world is a big place. History has been a long story with many different plots, sub-plots, twists, turns, etc. Humanity is a very diverse bunch. Does it ever occur to people that instead of trying to cope with one group's my-way-or-the-highway attitude that they should indeed find the nearest entrance ramp and get back out on the highway where there are countless other options for living according to one's values, working according to one's ideals, and realizing collective goals?

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