Finding out that you're not the Rebel Alliance, you're actually part of the Empire and have been all along

boing
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Big, fat answer, because I think this is Important.

I hope I do attempt to see other people’s point of view. I do not try to make someone else conform to my own weirdness, instead of embracing and learning from theirs. I don’t think that expressing a hope that we could perhaps take a bit of the poison out of such interactions is an attack on others who may have a different view.

There are people who try and game every interaction. I hope you do not, in the spirit of compromise, admit that there may be proven differences in intelligence between races, or global warming may have been invented by scientists so none of their evidence is valid, or that science proves the existence of God but scientists are afraid to say so because of peer pressure, or any number of other arguments on the web I have seen recently where people claim to ‘teach the controversy’ or ‘want to open up the debate’, and claim they are being ‘silenced’ or ‘censored’ when their point of view is not given equal weight. If we do that, rather than ask for reliable evidence, then we have lost.

So, what do we do? Who shall game the gamers? Can we hope that ‘reasonable’ people - even if we can decide who we are - to game the situation against the others? What are our chances of winning when pitted against a horde for whom gaming is all, and the normal rules of reasoned debate are just something that holds you back? Look into the bottomless abyss that is 4chan, and then tell me that we must win if only we all try a bit harder to see the other fellow’s point of view. I could do with cheering up.

I think there is no generic situation. I do not see how we can game the gamers and win. I don’t think we want a regulated internet where all ‘nasty’ people are banished forever. But we could at least try to understand what drives these cycles of hate, and perhaps in doing so, we could gently apply the brakes, without censorship or oppression for anyone.

Meanwhile, you can re-define what sort of “fight” it is. This is what most of the other posts seem to be doing. Maybe, with some dodgy allies, you can hold the moral high ground for a while, until you turn on each other. Politics has worked this way for a long time. But it’s still a “fight”, and I’m not really interested.

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I’m grokking what you are saying, but I guess I feel the need to add that my own particular (and peculiar I might add) life has been a touch more equal than other friends and family.

But perhaps I could chalk that up to my devilish good looks.

153

That’s the wrong problem, dude. And the smaller one.

Hint:

http://shankerblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/xkcd.png

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154

I’m not sure what to think. I read that exact same passage as you:

At the same time, I want you to understand that that very real suffering does not cancel out male privilege, or make it somehow alright.

And I just don’t see that at all. Is there any way that a person can talk about the differences between how men and women and the negative impact that has on women that doesn’t trigger this response? Is it the word privilege? I’m not being aggressive here, I just honestly don’t get how what she said makes her come across this way to you.

This I totally agree with. I think her claim that men get to be people at all times is a gross exaggeration - especially for young men of colour who, as we so regularly witness lately, aren’t even paid basic respect in death.

For this one, I feel like you are taking the claim too personally. I don’t read “Men are socialized too…” as “All men…” Tons and tons of men really do think the way she describes about women being the gatekeepers of their happiness, and we have a fairly recent example of a man explicitly writing out this way of thinking in his manifesto before killing a bunch of people. I think she’s making an important point here, and men are definitely socialized in a way that makes a lot of them see the world this way.

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155

Why the use of the term irks me so badly is because the main, distinguishing characteristic of “priviliedge” as a term is that it is something explicitly granted by a higher power. A person can’t happen to have or come from priviledge in some vague sense - they can only have it directly bestowed upon them. It indicates a formal arrangement. For me it is exactly as contentious as “blessed”, and moderate leftists use it casually without acknowledging that they are subtly giving people power over others by using it.

What most people here refer to as priviledge is something informal, and not hierarchally based. For example, in the US and Europe at least, the laws almost universally recognize the equal worth of different races and genders. As do the charters of practically all schools, corporations, workplaces, etc. So there is no “higher power” bestowing favor upon people for these reasons. Which is not to say that there are not real problems here with regards to how people are sometimes treated. But I’d argue that it is not “priviledge”, and using the term is counter-productive in establishing and recognizing a society of equals.

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I’ve been reading Hidden History of Portland, Oregon, and like other accounts of the history of US expansion on the West Coast I’ve read, it’s an account of overtly genocidal racism on the part of white settlers, with scarcely a hint of any opposition by whites until the late 19th century, and no effective opposition by whites until the early 20th century. Prior to the emergence of the IWW, even the labor movement in the West was overtly racist.

Of course, the soldiers and workers were mostly desperately poor, and experiencing horrible exploitation themselves. But, they were the ones carrying out the genocide, and the ones who remained living in Oregon once all the corpses were burned.

That’s the foundation of white privilege, and you need to see the links between that moment and the present, and see the similarities.

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157

May I be of some assistance here?

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158

So? If hegemony is precisely what people mean, why not say so instead of twisting another term?

This basically reflects what I was talking about. The idea of any racist, sexist hegemony in the US and Europe (I am not so sure about elsewhere) which is not reflected in the laws of these territories is, as I was saying, informal. There is no explicit granting of priviledges, unlike with apartheid for example.

Giving credit to even the idea of hegomony requires that one even believe in arbitrarily defined classes of people, or that that anybody actually “rules” anybody else. It’s not an unconventional outlook, but there are those of us who don’t subscribe to it.

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So you don’t think the U.S. is, and always has been, a plutocracy? With elites pulling the strings largely for their own economic interests, and using racism, sexism, classism and so on to divide and conquer the rest of us? And that they’re doing so hegemonically, that is, by making “arbitrary” divisions seem natural and common-sensical?

You may prefer to believe in the fantasy that they’ve set up and maintain that that’s not happening – you may prefer, that is, to be controlled by hegemonic power – but I sure don’t.

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160

You misunderstand me. I don’t believe that people can have power over each other. Economics are merely an instictually-driven superstition. Property and territory are pre-scientific bugbears which don’t exist in the real world - apart from the perceptions of people who choose to credit them. If you believe that a person controls you because they have magic paper or sacred pine cones or whatever other thing, knock yourself out. Just because it’s a popular outlook doesn’t make it objectively real, or of any lasting consequence.

Nobody with such base motivations has suffiecient control over even their own minds to actually control anybody else.

Historically, the US has been a plutocracy. But, like other nation states, it is also a fictional construct. It is not run by “elites” because they can’t be assumed to belong to the same milieu or share the same goals as others, they are competing off in their own little insular world.

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Go tell Mike Brown that no one has power over him.

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162

I honestly don’t understand this (and I am not driving trollies). Aren’t transactions, property, and economics placeholders for time, work, and (perceived) value? How does superstition work into it?

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Sure, they can function as symbols, if a person uses them as such. But most people only inherit these symbol sets ready-made by others instead of devising their own. Most people seem to not be motivated to symbolize in economic terms, and are simply socialized into doing it by other people. In this way, I think it functions like a religion. It works because people believe that it works, and it provides a structure to society - albeit an arbitrary one.

This line of reasoning assumes that all people have inherently similar values and motivations as each other. Probably because it is convenient to assume this. The illusion of consensus appears to be a powerful motivation.

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Totally pedantic and off topic, may be dragon snacks

But aren’t you describing a protocol and not a superstition?

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Now you’re just contradicting yourself. A plutocracy is run by elites; that’s the very definition of a plutocracy.

Ugh, we’re really talking past each other, and your apparent inability to grasp some rather basic concepts isn’t helping.

Peace out.

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I think we don’t realize just how fine the line is between “what tends to be most common among this demographic” and “here’s the thing about you people”. It’s really, really, REALLY hard for an outsider to point out a negative behavior in a group without an implied accusation.

Again, it’s one of the things that worries me about feminist language- Exclusionary language is great for establishing a group identity and reinforcing a call to action, but is terrible at convincing outsiders to join or change their way of thinking. Inclusive language is just the opposite: A poor choice for firing up the true believers, but hands down the best option for gaining converts. Using exclusionary language in a debate just comes off as combative and unreasonable.

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It might be disingenuous to claim that I don’t understand the concepts of economics and political power. It is possible that I understand and refute them.

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It’s more that I did some self-examination, found it to not be true of me, and it made me wonder what percentage of the population fits this claim. Now, I do know people who hold feelings about school days, but they tend to be infantile in other ways, too.

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169

But… Why?

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170

I think it’s a more fundamental approach to the very topic at hand. Part of finding solutions “outside of the box” is understanding when apparently universal problems are actually observed only in limited domains. I’d say this applies to most social problems, people seem to worry almost exclusively about how they feel about each other rather than how the world at large works.

Of course, they can be protocols. But aren’t superstitions protocols also? Shibboleths people use as a means for tribal identification? Starting from first principles, my question would be: “Do those protocols seem to facilitate anything necessary or desirable?”

Because such concepts seem to be of limited applicability. Because they seem to me to be much of the underlying cause of people’s mass confusion between facts and opinions. Because they tend to be based upon wishful thinking and many unexamined assumptions which basically amount to pre-programmed human behaviors. My goals are important because I think they are? I need to be comfortable and survive because I am programmed to? Even the most basic human motivations don’t withstand much by way of logical scrutiny. Which I suspect is precisely why people don’t seriously consider such factors when making their decisions.

And yes, I think this has everything to do with why people treat individuals and groups badly.