Privilege

[dank69]

You've never met a black person in your life.

Maybe ones you might have met got shot moments before you would have met them? Since they're all getting shot all the time, that's one explanation. That or you're a shut in that has an absolute stupid view of black people and how pitiful they all must be, constantly in fear of getting shot. (Like a lot of your shut in ilk that also don't actually know *any* minorities.).


Seriously, it's a fucking strange alternate reality some peeps are mired in.

It's a little early to be drinking so heavily, or maybe you are just still drunk from last night? In that case, I forgive you but, go to bed, you're drunk.

 

[interchange]

I have seen many in my own family that I would not say were at the level of being called a racist, but, have expressed racist beliefs. My dad is probably the perfect example. I have never seen him shy away from any group of people, and, have never once seen him say or do anything disrespectful to someone based on their race. That said, him and I were talking and he said that he does not like that culturally immigrants are shifting the identity of the US. He wants to limit immigrants coming to the US not for jobs, but because they are changing the culture he grew up with the culture they have. At first I thought he was speaking imperfectly and what he really wanted to say was that he feared the negative parts of other cultures becoming part of the US culture, so I pressed him on it. I was incorrect, and he truly believes that changing US culture, even if it means only taking the good parts, is bad.

Where it became racist was that he believed that we should limit people based on race as race and culture are so linked.

I don't necessarily hear racism there, but that could be a stance used to justify prejudice. Personally, I think a conservative value of maintaining a cultural identity is perfectly valid and is developmentally expected as people age. If that value is valid, then it comes into conflict with more egalitarian values. The reality is all of our ideals cannot co-exist. We have to make priorities, and it is not wrong to do so. Such a thing is surrender to necessity. Now, if your dad believed that outside cultures could not contribute to society in any positive way or especially if certain groups were discriminated against with no logical reasoning, then that would certainly be racist.

The core of Trump's message is one of conservative ideal. He is trying to maintain or regain the greatness that many people in America have associated with being American. That ideal is not bad. Unfortunately, his message and execution are a fantasy, and they cross over into overt racism without actually working us closer to the ideal he represents. And his actual politics aren't very republican. But he is certainly conservative because the value he bases his politics on is that shining conservative ideal, and it's why he was elected President. The ideal itself is not bad, but his overt refusal to surrender to reality and to do so at cost to innocent people and groups is more than bad.

 

[Maxima1]

You're the one moving into the "some animals are more equal" territory. It flies in the face of the principle that we must judge each person on their own merits. The distinctions you're trying to make are meaningless if we're committed to that principle, the principle of racial equality.

As I've said, group differences doesn't mean that it's logical to treat all blacks the same (inferior) or all whites the same (superior). The ~1 SD difference in the black-white IQ gap is lower than the potential gap between individuals, so there is considerable overlap. Your typical sensibilities are why most psychology departments don't have any courses on intelligence.

 

[shortylickens]

He just got out and some stories have been circulating lately.

http://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/fort-worth/article3840394.html

The same judge hammered another teenager for a lesser offense.
20 years for one fatality. As opposed to 2 years for 4 fatalities. AND Ethan Couch fled the country.

Makes me hate the judge even more than I already did.

 

[Juiblex]

I've earned all my privilege. It's called having integrity and respect. It goes along way.

 

[glenn1]

I don't necessarily hear racism there, but that could be a stance used to justify prejudice. Personally, I think a conservative value of maintaining a cultural identity is perfectly valid and is developmentally expected as people age. If that value is valid, then it comes into conflict with more egalitarian values. The reality is all of our ideals cannot co-exist. We have to make priorities, and it is not wrong to do so. Such a thing is surrender to necessity. Now, if your dad believed that outside cultures could not contribute to society in any positive way or especially if certain groups were discriminated against with no logical reasoning, then that would certainly be racist.

The core of Trump's message is one of conservative ideal. He is trying to maintain or regain the greatness that many people in America have associated with being American. That ideal is not bad. Unfortunately, his message and execution are a fantasy, and they cross over into overt racism without actually working us closer to the ideal he represents. And his actual politics aren't very republican. But he is certainly conservative because the value he bases his politics on is that shining conservative ideal, and it's why he was elected President. The ideal itself is not bad, but his overt refusal to surrender to reality and to do so at cost to innocent people and groups is more than bad.

Trump's "Make America Great Again" is the same type of vapid and formless pablum as Obama's "Hope" and "Change" that's deliberately vague and open-ended enough to allow you to read into it whatever you want. I have seen no evidence that Trump has any core values outside self-aggrandization and certainly no "shining conservative ideal." Hell, even what most Republican voters would agree upon as a "shining conservative ideal" seems to have shifted so much as to be barely recognizable over the past 2-3 decades. Trump just is the realization of the partisan fever dreams of someone who promises to impose the desires of their voting base without the reality-based constraints of compromise that politics requires. Voting for Trump (or other politicians who follow his basic model) is voters willingly surrendering to a power fantasy scenario, an exercise in hoping that wishful thinking (and a vote for Candidate X of course) can magically create the outcomes they've been denied in real life. Main difference is that IMHO Trump has come to believe his own schtick whereas Obama knew his periodic musings about "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow" was campaign hyperbole and aspirational. Obama is the person you know who will sometimes come to believe and want you to try fantastic and wishful thinking solutions (like the Atkins diet) and Trump is the huckster who has spent his life dreaming up and selling you the "next big thing" like copper bracelets for arthritis, etc. and then when it doesn't work says you were stupid to believe it would (before he ramps up selling you his next quack idea).

 

[zinfamous]

It’s an excuse is all it is.

If only you grew up black, or hispanic.

 

[zinfamous]

I've earned all my privilege. It's called having integrity and respect. It goes along way.

along where?

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

I can make 4/5 coffee.

 

[bshole]

Privilege is another term for actually enjoying the rights and opportunities we all have in law. I am privileged that when a cop busts me for speeding he writes the ticket and goes onto the next revenue target. He doesn't jack me around, search my car, or shoot me.

If you want an alternate view of "white privilege" and a somewhat compelling argument that the assignment of group privilege can lead to the destruction of civilizations and the rise of violent civil war, please read the attached article in its entirety. The paper argues that white privilege is an extraordinarily divisive concept which originated from a wealthy white woman who never gave a dime to charity or helped the poor in her insular life. The paper avers that she put the guilt of her lack of charity on the backs of people who shared her skin color.

Note that this author is not alone in his opinion that identity politics are a threat to western civilization at the moment. This view has been echoed by Johnathan Haidt, Steve Pinkerton and Brett Weinsten (among many other academics with experience in the relevant fields). These guys are experts who do real data backed science whose findings are heavily cited by scientists (the defining mark of quality research in the sciences).

Very few of the people reading this article—whatever the color of their skin—will have even the vaguest idea of the comfort and privilege in which Peggy McIntosh grew up and to which she has since become accustomed. Nor will we have access to the world of opportunities that she has been fortunate enough to enjoy. But even though the lifetime of privilege McIntosh has experienced is almost certainly due to her wealth and not the colour of her skin, she nevertheless found a way to share this irksome burden with the illiterate children of Kentucky coal miners, the hopeless peasants of the Appalachians, poor single mothers struggling to make ends meet on welfare, and the vast majority of whites in the United States and throughout the world who never had the chance to attend Radcliffe or Harvard. She simply reclassified her manifest economic advantage as racial privilege and then dumped this newly discovered original sin onto every person who happens to share her skin color. Without, of course, actually redistributing any of the wealth that, by her own account, she had done nothing to deserve.

All of which means that pretty much anything you read about ‘white privilege’ is traceable to an ‘experiential’ essay written by a woman who benefitted from massive wealth, a panoply of aristocratic connections, and absolutely no self-awareness whatsoever. This alone calls into question the seriousness and scholarly validity of the derivative works, since they are all the fruit of a poisonous tree. But McIntosh’s hypothesis was eagerly embraced nonetheless, because it served a particular purpose—it helped to mainstream a bitter zero-sum politics of guilt and identity. This dark epistemology has quietly percolated through the universities and the wider culture for two decades now. It has had the effect of draining attention from a massive and growing wealth gap and it has pitted the poor against one another in public spectacles of acrimony and even violence. Even so, it was readily embraced by progressively-minded professors who might otherwise have had trouble squaring their thirst for social justice with their high six figure salaries. In the last decade, this dogma has come screaming out of the nation’s august halls of learning and into mainstream civil discourse (although to call most of what passes for discourse today ‘civil’ somewhat labours the definition). And, still, we are endlessly and forcefully reminded that to question this concept in any way is, in and of itself, racist.

Identity politics have made organizing in social movements almost impossible, as division and suspicion are increasingly encouraged and groups splinter as a result. Every work and every action is now scrutinized for micro-aggressions and the “invisible package of unearned assets” benefitting anyone not deemed to be sufficiently ‘marginal.’ No one, it seems, is interested in questioning the wealth gap anymore. Those of us on the Left who still care about social justice are now expected to devote the limited resource of our attention bandwidth to the cultural appropriateness of cafeteria food. And, all the while, the emphasis on divisive racial categories and the arrogant dismissal of debate has handed the radical Right the best recruiting tool it has ever had.

But then what do I—a person privileged by accidents of race and gender—know about ‘identity politics,’ that Peggy McIntosh does not? Well, I can share at least one lesson drawn from my own ‘lived experience.’ The year I turned 25, I was serving as a United Nations Peacekeeper in the former Yugoslavia. My unit engaged the Croatian Army in what would come to be known as the Battle of Medak Pocket. Eventually, we halted the enemy’s advance and pushed them back.

Clearing a house after the fighting, we discovered the contorted and charred bodies of two young women tied to chairs. One was estimated to be in her early 30s, the other in her late teens. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police techs who processed the scene for the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague confirmed what we could tell just by looking at the corpses: the exaggerated arching of the backs, the screams of agony that still seemed ready to burst from what remained of their gaping mouths, the fingernails embedded in the wood of the chair arm—these two young women had still been alive when they were dowsed in gasoline and set alight. But then the tech added a detail that was not readily apparent. His tests appeared to confirm that they were almost certainly already dead when the Croatian Army rolled into town. That meant they had been burned alive by their neighbours. People they had lived beside and gone to school with.

The area that the Croatian army had briefly overrun had been mixed Croatian and Serbian farming villages. These people had lived together for half a century. They had intermarried, lived in the same streets, eaten the same food, and attended the same social events. But slowly, starting in the 1980s, political leaders and demagogues of various stripes had started using a politics of identity to solidify their social and political power. Each side’s citizens were repeatedly told by respected academic figures that they were being robbed, and that the ‘other’ was exploiting unearned ‘social privilege’ granted by their ethnic status. Children were taught this in school as received truth and ostracized if they dared to question it. Slowly, this curated resentment built into hatred. From there, events developed according to an inescapable logic. Sometimes, soldiers on one side of the ethnic conflict would ask us for news of a high school sweetheart or friend across the lines. But identity allegiance remained paramount. To those who respond with the fatuous claim that this was simply a ‘white-on-white issue,’ I will only note that, as I was fighting for my life in Eastern Europe, the same divisive hatreds were being broadcast across Rwanda by Télévision Libre des Mille Collines. Tribal hatreds are not a white or a black problem, they are a human problem.

There is a reason that Bannon was almost giddy with excitement when the left mainstreamed identity politics. When your political enemy is thanking and encouraging you to engage in an activity, why would you engage in it?

https://quillette.com/2018/08/29/unpacking-peggy-mcintoshs-knapsack/

 

[nickqt]

If you want an alternate view of "white privilege" and a somewhat compelling argument that the assignment of group privilege can lead to the destruction of civilizations and the rise of violent civil war, please read the attached article in its entirety. The paper argues that white privilege is an extraordinarily divisive concept which originated from a wealthy white woman who never gave a dime to charity or helped the poor in her insular life. The paper avers that she put the guilt of her lack of charity on the backs of people who shared her skin color.

Note that this author is not alone in his opinion that identity politics are a threat to western civilization at the moment. This view has been echoed by Johnathan Haidt, Steve Pinkerton and Brett Weinsten (among many other academics with experience in the relevant fields). These guys are experts who do real data backed science whose findings are heavily cited by scientists (the defining mark of quality research in the sciences).







There is a reason that Bannon was almost giddy with excitement when the left mainstreamed identity politics. When your political enemy is thanking and encouraging you to engage in an activity, why would you engage in it?

https://quillette.com/2018/08/29/unpacking-peggy-mcintoshs-knapsack/

It's funny how the left is supposed to have mainstreamed identity politics, yet the left includes every single American minus US conservatives.

 

[alcoholbob]

Amazon Prime.

I pity the fools who have to use AMZL Logistics for their shipping...

 

[zinfamous]

just how did bshole's account get stolen by an avowed pepe-loving white supremacist incel?

It's baffling how quickly that happened.

 

[Victorian Gray]

just how did bshole's account get stolen by an avowed pepe-loving white supremacist incel?

It's baffling how quickly that happened.

It wasn't all that quick.