privilege as a meme

i mean i guess in brief if you're using sociologically meaningful language that actually applies to people from communities that face unique categories of oppression, the way some people use otherkin notions to explore trans/queer identity, it's one thing. but if you're using it because you think you're a purple pony inside and why won't society stop oppressing you for being a purple pony in the body of a straight white dude, you are first against the wall. to an extent.

― hoospanic GANGSTER musician (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Tuesday, April 9, 2013 2:49 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah whatever the value of the term, seeing it hijacked by deviantart brony types is pretty nauseating

sometimes its useful to remember that suffering is universal

maybe when there's loads of aging bronies still desperate for a unicornotomy we can take them serious

ha that shit is so far out

reminds me of a recent letter to dan savage scolding him for saying that being polyamorous was not a "sexuality" on par with being gay. it was an... arrangement. or a hobby. or a kink. or a need. or some other thing, he said (i forget). hoo boy were people pissed! mr "monogamy is a myth" himself! everything has to be at the level of fundaments of identity. in this way i think this intersects with american language of the rights of the self in constitutional-legal term but i haven't thought that through yet really

There was a thing maybe posted in some ILX thread about the "privilege" enjoyed by primary vs. non-primary partners (sorry if this is the incorrect term) in various kinds of polyamorous relationships. I thought this was kind of a narcissistic usage -- being a "non-primary partner" is not a trait, it's just a status in a particular arrangement.

i prefer bottom bitch

"speaking as a side piece..."

remember college when people used "privilege" as a verb all the time? I don't think I've heard that in a while.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pevbj2ubH50

i feel like people should be challenged to check the validity and fairness and logic of what they're arguing or what they believe, not their right to say anything at all given their background. i mean surely if someone is speaking in a way that's blinded by privilege then their views can be taken to task?

― Tioc Norris (LocalGarda), Tuesday, April 9, 2013 8:00 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

very quotatious post

also yes i feel like a heretic for hating the tone of jezebel but i hate the tone of jezebel so fucking much

yeah for sure many seek to silence rather than engage via the #privilege tag

don't out me for that i would be shunned and would have to be like 'check your jezebel-liking privilege'

haha

i like lindy west tho i can for sure see why she might grate

i like privilege as a concept insofar as it makes people self-reflect on their own circumstances, and if it makes people think more about the experiences of others, especially those of a different race/gender - i hope that ultimately it leads to empathy, which i think is what will save us all

generally i think anything that makes people self-reflect / become more self-aware is a good thing

that should be jezebel's marketing campaign

to the extent that I sometimes don't like the jezebel tone it just seems symptomatic of the larger annoyingness of that Bloggin' TM voice that I think there's a thread about.

mirrors are cool too

leave brony alone

Hah I actually used the phrase 'unexamined privilege' this morning but it was aimed at people handwaving away the reasons why people might hate Thatcher and if you can't use it THEN the word might as well be retired immediately.

she had these tweet earlier that made me think abt starting this thread

Lindy West ‏@thelindywest 1h
Not everything is fodder for your little academic thought experiments. Have some fucking perspective.

Lindy West ‏@thelindywest 1h
So tired of this internet attitude: "I'm just a liberal white guy THINKIN' about stuff! Come on, girls, you should think harder & be nicer."

cause the top one could be applied to her way of thinking about things too, theres a lot of academic influenced discourse on popular blogs these days, i tihnk they kind of fuction as a bridge for an academic approach to reach a mass audience, where in traditional media there was a fire wall there where it was understood that you abandon academia when yo graduate because academic writing is obvs the worst writing in the world

I kinda feel that people should embrace and generalize privilege more. Maybe not take it for granted but realize that working regular hours and having electricty and clean water and whatnot are, indeeed, privileges, but also privileges that we should try to make as universal as possible. Also, civility, and not shooting people too much and whatnot.

one universal constant about privilege is that people HATE being called out on it

i like privilege as a concept insofar as it makes people self-reflect on their own circumstances, and if it makes people think more about the experiences of others, especially those of a different race/gender - i hope that ultimately it leads to empathy, which i think is what will save us all

generally i think anything that makes people self-reflect / become more self-aware is a good thing

― 乒乓, Tuesday, April 9, 2013 4:16 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah that for sure is the ideal outcome, but i think to some extent it can me undermined via attachment to the concept of privilege itself, like once i was talking to this girl a party about the problems of the world and she finally was just all trust me ive studied this a lot and its all the patriarchy, and i was like you are going to be very disappointed when the patriarchy is finally smashed

it is a privilege that our lord god suffers us to persist -- that we are not swept from the face of creation -- think abt it

yeah it's useful as a tool of awareness for sure. I haven't personally been involved in any conversations where I've seen it used to shut down a speaker.

On a related note, does anyone on ilx say, "check your privilege?" I think I would need an explanation of what that means.

not enough room on this plane for yr privilege

i sort of feel like logic is the weapon we should use against prejudices, because they are all entirely illogical, but that is probably a particularly privileged way of looking at things since it betrays that it's the lack of logic that annoys me as much as the hatred, since i'm not a direct victim of the latter.

rationalists def need to check their privilege

i dont feel like ive ever had accusations of privilege used as a weapon against me but i have def, on the internet of course, seen people try to use it to carry more weight than its constructed for, theres tendency just to cut and paste privilege into any old argument, which is when i think we reach memehood

i dont really believe in 'logic' unless youre talking about like first order or symbolic logic or something

i feel like people should be challenged to check the validity and fairness and logic of what they're arguing or what they believe, not their right to say anything at all given their background. i mean surely if someone is speaking in a way that's blinded by privilege then their views can be taken to task?

Isn't the idea that, being privileged, I'm listened to in ways that less privileged people are not? So, whatever the validity of what I say, I am obligated to abstain from speech if speaking right now would contribute to other voices being ignored?

It does seem to me that privilege is also frequently invoked as short-hand for a certain kind of invalidity, or just as an explanation for why a person has said something wrong. But the "right to speak" angle has some power, I think.

yeah i don't think logic is always the way to go, when you try to reason with forms of oppression that have well-rehearsed arguments you end up often as not engaging with people who are never gonna argue in good faith

it's like i've said before, people who complain about bad manners are as often as not using class/language to silence criticism

it's a great privilege indeed to speak against inequality and have your argument received on its merits, rather than its tone or its suspected motives

maybe i'm just getting on my hobby horse too much but i also like 'privilege' because it's meme-ifying right around the same time that everybody is realizing that the american dream is dead, there is no such thing as social mobility anymore

that is interesting

looking forward to that realisation sinking in over here

like... for so long the standard response to p much any questions of inequality / oppression has been, well, if u put ur head down and work hard like my father did, u can overcome it! in this land of opportunity, america

but like maybe the only real wealth engine out there that isn't lawyering/banking/medicine is like... tech startups, which tend to be dominated by people who had access to expensive computers + ungodly amounts of uninterrupted leisure time since they were small, aka privileged dudes

like on the other end of the ideological spectrum i think are randians and they should all be summarily shot and their bodies dumped into the atlantic

Isn't the idea that, being privileged, I'm listened to in ways that less privileged people are not? So, whatever the validity of what I say, I am obligated to abstain from speech if speaking right now would contribute to other voices being ignored?

this makes sense except, where does it stop? i mean given that a scale of who is less privileged would be almost endless... i don't mean to refute your point, just interested.

does privilege cut into notions of american individualism? does it actually remind people that yes, you only got where u are becaues u stood on the shoulders of giants?

i was thinking about starting a thread called 'creating a language to talk about class in america' and i think that privilege in some ways acts as a proxy for talking about class in america

they are def intimately connected concepts

the narrative i've been hearing has never been put your head down and work hard, but rather hustle and angle your way in BAMN, and by and large i think it's accurate, if not particularly palatable advice. there are barriers in front of you if you play fair, so cheat.

does privilege cut into notions of american individualism? does it actually remind people that yes, you only got where u are becaues u stood on the shoulders of giants?

― 乒乓, Tuesday, April 9, 2013 4:46 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

actually, it's funny how discussing privilege is kind of more necessary in America as an antidote to this kind of thinking. In a rigid class structure, it's hard to imagine telling the upper class "check your privilege." They'd be like "yeah no shit I'm privileged, I'm upper class." That doesn't mean you wouldn't need a language to discuss why that's unfair, but it's in America where people convince themselves they worked for everything they have.

yeah exactly

The initial response to 'my favorite movie is Miami Vice' was 'straight men live in a different world from the rest of us' - which isn't particularly mean or rude, just baffling in its bad open mic quality comedy. Don't have a meltdown over something that wouldn't get into your tight 5 at Yuk Yuk's!

https://archive.ph/DwnEe

this lady has a whole lore and backstory! (links to an atlantic article)

the thing about, like, message board/USEnet/chat room etc flame wars is they used to eventually burn themselves out because other people occupying the same space got tired of it impeding their ability to discuss things and eventually things just dissipated.

meanwhile Twitter is like this wide open sandbox that everybody has access to/shits in, so just when things die down, a bunch of bots/agitators show up and stoke the flames again, and those with Calum-esque impulse control can't ever free themselves from the temptation to respond to every tweet/quote tweet, and it begins an endless cycle.

so you can be some obscure dude with a Suzuki and a large collection of vintage Pogs and wind up in a USA Today article because you lost your mind after hundreds of people reacted critically to your insensitively timed dick joke.

also I regret to inform that I tweeted something she didn't like to someone who had tweeted in response to the OP and now she has blocked me, so now I'm ~part of the story~ yay

I considered being person 900101 to respond to her that Miami Vice rules.

the other thing is that like, this entire thing kind of illustrates how it's a breeding ground for learning how to DARVO the fuck out of people.

like after all of the well-intentioned people noped out, of course the people replying now are largely misogynists, racists, and people who should touch grass, because they pretty much turn up to all viral twitter threads to pick at the bones, but she's now retroactively using this to legitimize the bullshit, unhinged heteronormative toxic garbage she posted at the beginning. like you don't just get to broadly spray the area and hit innocent bystanders just because some awful people showed up, that was kind of the argument against the Covington Catholic School kids that invaded that Native American protest - the Black Israelites shouting homophobic shit didn't make it ok for them to invade the Native American presentation and act like smug, entitled white kids, cos they were two different things.

but then again, the people that are needling her now aren't doing so out of any good will for anybody and keeping themselves amused, so....fuck them too.

lol I can't believe how many words I devoted to this thing that I didn't know existed before this morning.

I often think THE KING OF COMEDY is the most important movie of the past 40 years or so and this is kind of why

gonna be tedious and state the obvious again, this is the intended way for corporate social media to work. it's designed to encourage people to act rapidly and without forethought. why? because keeping people glued to the site is _engagement_, and the best to keep people engaged is by encouraging conflict. this is the business model and has been for, well. a very long time now. there was no money in usenet flamewars.

if there had been, I'd have retired already

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/10/opinion/campus-protests-progressive-henderson.html

I didn't watch that video, but I did click through to Henderson's twitter account and he's a completely worthless, bog-standard conservative

looked for a representative of his deeply unoriginal "insights" and I think this one works best:

With @jordanbpeterson and @MrAndyNgo pic.twitter.com/F9Z4jwpgkW

— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) November 25, 2021

Jeremy Irons is totally playing him in the eventual biopic

lol I assume you mean JP not the nyt taking another swing at "what if Buckley/Vance/etfc. weren't white?"

that video is some sloppy stuff.

like a conservative private school social studies project.

lol yep rob

making fun of college kids is the political project of our times

actually, casting Irons as the new-model young non-white fascist mouthpiece might be kinda lol

that video is some sloppy stuff.

glad I didn't click, but christ was the nyt ever not so thirsty and gullible for this god & man at yale bullshit? are the editors exclusively yalies who hated their classmates' politics? it is very tiresome.