alt Hacker NewsI (and probably the large majority of people who are labelled "liberal" within this discussion, not sure if it includes me or not) perfectly understand the origin of the need of building in-groups.
When I buy icecream for my kid, I don't pretend that it is because my kid is more worthy of icecream than the random kid. My objective is not to "favour my kid": I don't think of the icecream as something that my kid should deserve more than a random kid.
My point is that when you see a liberal person saying "it's a discrimination. it's bad", it is, in the large majority of the case, a discrimination where the principal motivation is "conflictual", where the principal motivation is based on "there is us, and there is them, and we want to end up with us having X and them not having it".
As proof, it is obviously not true to pretend that when you buy an icecream to your kid, the majority of liberal people will come at you and say you are discriminating.
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I agree that liberals don't think all discrimination is bad. I understand they're mostly opposed to what they consider unfair bigotry, I just think you fail to define it.
>there is us, and there is them, and we want to end up with us having X and them not having it
There is your family, and different families, and you want to end up with your kid having the last icecream rather then some other guy having it.
>My objective is not to "favour my kid"
But you are favouring your kid, and it would become conflictual if someone demanded your money for his kid.
A more realistic case might be education. I was told last week that there are too many high performing kids in my daughter's cohort and they don't have enough resources for her to get any support despite being multiple years past her curriculum. In fact, there are apparently at least enough high performing kids to fill an entire classroom. From other parents I've learned that this has been an ongoing issue for years, so it's not some surprise that the school has never had to deal with.
Now to me, there's an obvious solution to that problem. For the school, it is apparently quite non-obvious to put the smart kids together. My impression is that this comes down to "discrimination" despite the fact that the advanced kids are probably also better behaved and can have a worse teacher to student ratio, so lower resources if anything. In fact, I think they would thrive just being in a room together with a babysitter and some creative toys they could play with with each other and maybe 30 minutes a day of instruction. But for some reason we can't segregate kids by ability and need every classroom to span the entire range (presumably because "segregation" is also axiomatically bad).
My general impression is that people who self-identify as Liberal are more likely to defend this than people who self-identify as Conservative (this is probably a very US-centric categorization since the words don't at all follow their meanings; "Liberals" tend to be extremely illiberal and "Conservatives" tend to not be very conservative).