In this specific case, we have the implication that feminists and egalitarians don't overlap.
Everything else aside (I still have disagreements but I don't care to argue them, it's late), I just want to note that I don't think anyone's claimed that feminists and egalitarians don't overlap, but that the former is not a proper subset of the latter. Everyone I've ever read acknowledges that some feminists are egalitarians; the proposition in dispute is whether all feminists are egalitarians, or conversely and more to the point, whether some feminists are not egalitarians.
Yes, the whole point of that analogy was that the first premise of such a syllogism (either about Scotsmen or feminists) is tenuous because citing dictionary definitions to define who falls under the umbrella of an identifying term is inherently problematic, given the possibility (or especially the actuality) of people identifying with that term and failing to stay within the official definition of it. So defining "Scotsman" as "someone from Scotland", as obvious as it sounds on the surface, gets you into some trouble when the children of the children of the children of people who were from Scotland, who are not themselves from Scotland, are still identifying as "Scotsmen", just because they inherited the identity from their predecessors. Or likewise, defining feminism as "someone favoring gender equality" (which doesn't even have the superficial obviousness of "Scotsman = from Scotland"), when factions of later generations of the movement are not acting in favor of gender equality, but just inherited the identity from their predecessors.
Feminism, like most identifying terms in practice, is defined by whatever those who identify as feminists say and do, and to say that some of those who identify as feminists aren't really feminists because they're not sticking to some dictionary definition of it is a textbook case of No True Scotsman.
Alternately, we could take a literalist etymological approach (which I actually like, in general, a lot more other than the "an x is anyone who calls themselves an x" approach, for any x, but it doesn't seem to be very well-received these days), in which case "feminism" is literally the promotion of women's interests, period. To the extent that it's promoting their interests just up to the level of equality with men, it coincides with the dictionary definition of feminism; but the promotion of women's interests beyond that point does not fall outside the scope of such a literal sense.
Although since everyone self-identifying as a feminist, whether they really follow the dictionary definition of it or not, does actually fall under that literal etymological definition, it doesn't actually make any practical difference in this case which approach we take. Feminism as what those who call themselves feminists do, and feminism as what the word literally says, are both broader than what the dictionary says feminism is.
When a large number of people who don't live within the official boundaries of Scotland nevertheless loudly identify as Scotsmen (and have some historical ties to possibly legitimize their claim to the identity), saying "WikiAtlas defines the borders of Scotland as..." and then saying the people who don't live within those boundaries are not, by definition, Scotsmen, is by definition an example of a No True Scotsman fallacy.
That video is nonsense tarnishing PBS's otherwise good name.
Egalitarianism is literally thousands of years older than the first person to have ever strung the words "men's", "rights", and "activism" together in a row. Has that person never opened a history book?
Feminism has its roots as a subset of egalitarianism.
GGPP's question is analogous to "Why do you identify as a Californian instead of an American?" (and possible answers would be analogous too; someone might just be being more specific, or might be opposed to other subsets of the superset of which their group is also a subset, or any number of other reasons).
The traditional sense of "privilege" is not different from the feminist one; the feminist sense is just a special case of the general sense. It is a problem if people act like the special case is the all-encompasing sense and the broader, more general sense is somehow misunderstanding the concept though. I've encountered that problem with the word "derail" before, where a forum thread unrelated to gender issues drifted into a discussion of gender issues instead of its primary topic, and someone said that the first person to start the gender subtopic had "derailed" the conversation, which a feminist in the conversation took issue with, apparently thinking derailing meant only the one specific kind of derailing (changing the subject away from feminism to avoid talking about it) that she was familiar with, and was apparently oblivious to the much broader and older sense of "changing the topic of conversation" in general.
You missed the rest of that sentence: don't face problems "...that women do."
Yes, everybody has problems. Some people have problems that other people don't have, though. And being in the demographic that doesn't have those kinds of problems is all that it means to be "privileged" in that respect. And yes, you can be privileged in one respect and not in another, which was the whole point I was defending; that the problems that come with being a woman (that men don't have to deal with), or with being black (that whites don't have to deal with), pale compared to the problems that come with being poor (that even white men have to deal with, but rich people don't).
IANAP but I would guess that the quantum numbers add up such that it does look like the charm and anti-charm quark went "poof" in some respects (like color charge, I imagine, otherwise I don't see how the chromodynamics can work out with a five-particle system; the color of the anti-charm must be opposite that of the charm, whatever it is, and the remaining three red, green, and blue, respectively, to get a white particle as required by QCD), but left over residual features (like spin and electric charge) in the compound particle that indicates that the charm and anticharm are "in there" somewhere. I don't know enough to guess whether the masses of the charm and anticharm would annihilate and be released in the formation of the pentaquark.
The problem with what you're saying is that it makes accusations tantamount to guilt. Someone says something bad about you, or worse still, starts some kind of smear campaign to get something bad about you widely believed? With your attitude the possible responses are (1) deny the accusation, thereby "proving" the accuser right, or (2) lie down and accept that the world now believes something bad about you and there's nothing you can possibly do about it because anything you try will only make you look more guilty.
The good news is, now you can say bad things about people who want to hurt or discredit and there's nothing they can do to defend themselves, either!
Why is it a problem that whites enjoy privileges (read: don't face problems that people of color do)?
Why is it a problem that men enjoy privileges (read: don't face problems that women do)?
Why is it a problem that the rich enjoy privileges (read: don't face problems that the poor do)?
The answer is... nobody is claiming any of those things are a problem. It's not a problem that men don't face problems, it's not a problem that whites don't face problems, and it's not a problem that rich people (including children of rich parents like Brianna here) don't face problems.
It's only a problem that the opposite groups (women, minorities, the poor) do face problems.
And it's a problem when the people who don't face those same problems blow off the problems as being non-problems, just because to them, in their privileged positions, they aren't problems. It's not a problem that anyone is in a privileged position; it's a problem that other people aren't, and it's a problem for the people who are to blow off the problems of the people who aren't.
And to get back to GP's point: the problems that the non-rich face are probably more important and influential than the problems that the problems that non-men and non-whites face. I would much rather be a rich black woman and deal with the disadvantages of being black and a woman (that'd mostly amount to people saying and thinking things that would hurt me emotionally) than be a poor white man and deal with the disadvantages of being poor (that mostly amount to constant material threats to my continued health and safety).
Off-topic or not, I hadn't heard this claim before and am curious if it is true, but her Wikipedia bio says nothing about it and Googling her supposed former name only turns up sources of dubious veracity (that seem to be dedicated to attacking her and so might be making shit up to smear her -- not that being trans should be a smear, but I can see some people seeing it as such).
Can anyone claiming that she is trans link to some reliable source to back that up? E.g. something not connected to Gamergate (either side of it), preferably.
It doesn't use the same tune. The alternative song I'm talking about was featured in a restaurant in The Emperor's New Groove, so here's a clip from that:
Median household income is not the same as median personal income, it's almost twice that much. And I didn't say that the median person had $20/day to live off of, but that they made twice as much as the more typical full-time-minimum-wage person who only has $10/day to live off of; obviously, rent doesn't magically double when your income doubles, so the median person has more than double the disposable income. I was using an approximation of that median rent in my calculations (recalling it as being about $750, which you might note is for a single-bedroom apartment, so usually not being split between two income earners like you'd expect with a median household income being double the median personal income), and my own recollection of what I paid in taxes back when I was making about full-time-minimum-wage (which was about 1/6 of my income).
Someone making $7.25/hr, full time, renting a typical one-bedroom apartment, ends up with about $10/day to live off of. That's a far cry from your lazy beggar in the subway in terms of the work they do, and an equally far cry from many of the things you probably take for granted in life making an awful lot more than that. That's the kind of working poor who make up the largest demographic of Americans. And a full half of Americans make less than twice that (about 165% of it), as the median personal income is around $25k/yr. My memory of this part is less certain, but IIRC by the time you get up to the national mean personal income (i.e. GDP per capita), which is close to the same as the median household income (around $50k), you're making more than about 75% of the country.
I'm concerned that these graduates whose first real job is paying even more than that still may just not have occasion to realize just how terribly little their fellow countrymen -- the hard-working ones, not the beggars in the subway -- are making, and take for granted that anyone facing hardships they could easily overcome with that kind of income must just be some... lazy beggar in the subway, like you did.
That's where the privilege comes in. Nobody is denying that hard work or ability is a factor in success, only that it is not the only factor. Opportunity is another factor, and opportunity is not equally distributed, or else we would expect success to follow the same normal distribution as ability rather than the disproportionate distribution we actually see.
I mean flippant in the sense that in various discussions people get blamed for not doing things to prevent their own problems, when those things presume a level of income that most people simply cannot access.
For example someone here once blamed people who were suffering a supply shortage during an emergency for not keeping their pantry adequately stocked with emergency supplies, neglecting that a lot of people rent a tiny bedroom in someone else's house and don't have a pantry of their own to stock with emergency supplies, and also don't have the leftover income to stock up on emergency supplies after they're done paying for the food they need to eat that week.
The part where there are lots of people who can't afford that education, who lacked the upbringing to be able o engage productively in it if they could afford it, or the security to be able to take risks and move about to pursue better-paying jobs (if they got the education to qualify for them) without losing absolutely everything if they should slip up only once, or the guidance to realize that that was a path that was available to them (if it was). A lot of smart people with plenty of potential get dumped into their adulthoods straight into a day-to-day or month-to-month survival kind of living and never get the chance to pursue paths in life that could realize their potential.
Outcomes are the product of hard work and opportunity, and the inequality of opportunities is where privilege comes in.
I don't know if you think you're agreeing or disagreeing with me, but I'm not talking about beggars in the subway. I'm talking about people who work 40 hours a week and then have less than $10/day left over to cover all of their expenses after they pay rent. That's about the mode standard of living in this country. The median is about twice as well off as that. The mean around twice that again, but that's because a tiny handful of people making exorbitantly more than that pulls the mean up deceivingly high.
The world is not divided into lazy beggars and the hard-working elite. Most of it is full of the hard-working permanent underclass with little hope of ever crawling their way into a better place in life no matter how hard they try. And even most of the statistically "wealthy" in terms of income are still not even middle class in terms of assets, still so lacking in assets that they have to borrow most of what they live on from an even smaller fraction of super-rich.
Oh and of course you require half as much work from each of them as well, so they're still getting the same value for their labor, they just have to labor less.
Obvious solution (not that anyone will do it): pay twice as many people half as much each. That would bring the incomes down into the actual median range, and eliminate the unemployment problem.
It's not about guilt, it's about recognizing the way that other people have to live, so that when you make broad generalizations about society you don't assume that everybody has he advantages you have and dismiss the problems they suffer from lacking those advantages.
I kinda hate the way "privilege" gets thrown around a lot of the time, but this is pretty much the clearest sense of privilege here. And like all privilege, the point is not that it's bad that some people have it and they should feel guilty for it; it's bad that a lot of people don't have it, and those who do should bear in mind the different challenges that those who don't face.
I hope all these CS graduates making this kind of money right out of college realize the kind of rarefied strata that they are in.
More than half of all people on the country make less than half of their starting salaries.
I see so much flippancy from some people here in Slashdot who don't seem to realize the kind of money that most people in this country have to live on.
This is why the second part of the path of least resistance is openly admitting fallibility and qualifying every assertion.
Caught me saying something now that differs slightly from my account of the same events before? Fine... I guess I forgot some details since then. Or I forgot to mention some details back then. Thanks for highlighting that, now I can combine my present memory with the record of my earlier statements to get a more complete picture of the truth.
Caught me with a different opinion now than one I had before? Well that could be entirely because I changed my mind and though things over since then, and maybe I'm perfectly aware that I hold a different opinion now than before. If I wasn't aware of it... well, that's interesting, I forgot that I used to think that way. I wonder what made me change my mind since then. I would make this or that argument against my apparently former position these days, but I wonder if I'm forgetting some good argument against my current position that I used to be aware of.
Once you stop pretending to be infallible, your fallibility ceases to be a liability, so long as you own up to it when presented with it.
Slashdot Mirror
A condo doesn't free you from rent. A tiny home on its own land does.
In this specific case, we have the implication that feminists and egalitarians don't overlap.
Everything else aside (I still have disagreements but I don't care to argue them, it's late), I just want to note that I don't think anyone's claimed that feminists and egalitarians don't overlap, but that the former is not a proper subset of the latter. Everyone I've ever read acknowledges that some feminists are egalitarians; the proposition in dispute is whether all feminists are egalitarians, or conversely and more to the point, whether some feminists are not egalitarians.
Yes, the whole point of that analogy was that the first premise of such a syllogism (either about Scotsmen or feminists) is tenuous because citing dictionary definitions to define who falls under the umbrella of an identifying term is inherently problematic, given the possibility (or especially the actuality) of people identifying with that term and failing to stay within the official definition of it. So defining "Scotsman" as "someone from Scotland", as obvious as it sounds on the surface, gets you into some trouble when the children of the children of the children of people who were from Scotland, who are not themselves from Scotland, are still identifying as "Scotsmen", just because they inherited the identity from their predecessors. Or likewise, defining feminism as "someone favoring gender equality" (which doesn't even have the superficial obviousness of "Scotsman = from Scotland"), when factions of later generations of the movement are not acting in favor of gender equality, but just inherited the identity from their predecessors.
Feminism, like most identifying terms in practice, is defined by whatever those who identify as feminists say and do, and to say that some of those who identify as feminists aren't really feminists because they're not sticking to some dictionary definition of it is a textbook case of No True Scotsman.
Alternately, we could take a literalist etymological approach (which I actually like, in general, a lot more other than the "an x is anyone who calls themselves an x" approach, for any x, but it doesn't seem to be very well-received these days), in which case "feminism" is literally the promotion of women's interests, period. To the extent that it's promoting their interests just up to the level of equality with men, it coincides with the dictionary definition of feminism; but the promotion of women's interests beyond that point does not fall outside the scope of such a literal sense.
Although since everyone self-identifying as a feminist, whether they really follow the dictionary definition of it or not, does actually fall under that literal etymological definition, it doesn't actually make any practical difference in this case which approach we take. Feminism as what those who call themselves feminists do, and feminism as what the word literally says, are both broader than what the dictionary says feminism is.
When a large number of people who don't live within the official boundaries of Scotland nevertheless loudly identify as Scotsmen (and have some historical ties to possibly legitimize their claim to the identity), saying "WikiAtlas defines the borders of Scotland as..." and then saying the people who don't live within those boundaries are not, by definition, Scotsmen, is by definition an example of a No True Scotsman fallacy.
That video is nonsense tarnishing PBS's otherwise good name.
Egalitarianism is literally thousands of years older than the first person to have ever strung the words "men's", "rights", and "activism" together in a row. Has that person never opened a history book?
Feminism has its roots as a subset of egalitarianism.
GGPP's question is analogous to "Why do you identify as a Californian instead of an American?" (and possible answers would be analogous too; someone might just be being more specific, or might be opposed to other subsets of the superset of which their group is also a subset, or any number of other reasons).
The traditional sense of "privilege" is not different from the feminist one; the feminist sense is just a special case of the general sense. It is a problem if people act like the special case is the all-encompasing sense and the broader, more general sense is somehow misunderstanding the concept though. I've encountered that problem with the word "derail" before, where a forum thread unrelated to gender issues drifted into a discussion of gender issues instead of its primary topic, and someone said that the first person to start the gender subtopic had "derailed" the conversation, which a feminist in the conversation took issue with, apparently thinking derailing meant only the one specific kind of derailing (changing the subject away from feminism to avoid talking about it) that she was familiar with, and was apparently oblivious to the much broader and older sense of "changing the topic of conversation" in general.
You seem to be arguing with someone other than me about something other than what I was talking about.
You missed the rest of that sentence: don't face problems "...that women do."
Yes, everybody has problems. Some people have problems that other people don't have, though. And being in the demographic that doesn't have those kinds of problems is all that it means to be "privileged" in that respect. And yes, you can be privileged in one respect and not in another, which was the whole point I was defending; that the problems that come with being a woman (that men don't have to deal with), or with being black (that whites don't have to deal with), pale compared to the problems that come with being poor (that even white men have to deal with, but rich people don't).
IANAP but I would guess that the quantum numbers add up such that it does look like the charm and anti-charm quark went "poof" in some respects (like color charge, I imagine, otherwise I don't see how the chromodynamics can work out with a five-particle system; the color of the anti-charm must be opposite that of the charm, whatever it is, and the remaining three red, green, and blue, respectively, to get a white particle as required by QCD), but left over residual features (like spin and electric charge) in the compound particle that indicates that the charm and anticharm are "in there" somewhere. I don't know enough to guess whether the masses of the charm and anticharm would annihilate and be released in the formation of the pentaquark.
The problem with what you're saying is that it makes accusations tantamount to guilt. Someone says something bad about you, or worse still, starts some kind of smear campaign to get something bad about you widely believed? With your attitude the possible responses are (1) deny the accusation, thereby "proving" the accuser right, or (2) lie down and accept that the world now believes something bad about you and there's nothing you can possibly do about it because anything you try will only make you look more guilty.
The good news is, now you can say bad things about people who want to hurt or discredit and there's nothing they can do to defend themselves, either!
Why is it a problem that whites enjoy privileges (read: don't face problems that people of color do)?
Why is it a problem that men enjoy privileges (read: don't face problems that women do)?
Why is it a problem that the rich enjoy privileges (read: don't face problems that the poor do)?
The answer is... nobody is claiming any of those things are a problem. It's not a problem that men don't face problems, it's not a problem that whites don't face problems, and it's not a problem that rich people (including children of rich parents like Brianna here) don't face problems.
It's only a problem that the opposite groups (women, minorities, the poor) do face problems.
And it's a problem when the people who don't face those same problems blow off the problems as being non-problems, just because to them, in their privileged positions, they aren't problems. It's not a problem that anyone is in a privileged position; it's a problem that other people aren't, and it's a problem for the people who are to blow off the problems of the people who aren't.
And to get back to GP's point: the problems that the non-rich face are probably more important and influential than the problems that the problems that non-men and non-whites face. I would much rather be a rich black woman and deal with the disadvantages of being black and a woman (that'd mostly amount to people saying and thinking things that would hurt me emotionally) than be a poor white man and deal with the disadvantages of being poor (that mostly amount to constant material threats to my continued health and safety).
Off-topic or not, I hadn't heard this claim before and am curious if it is true, but her Wikipedia bio says nothing about it and Googling her supposed former name only turns up sources of dubious veracity (that seem to be dedicated to attacking her and so might be making shit up to smear her -- not that being trans should be a smear, but I can see some people seeing it as such).
Can anyone claiming that she is trans link to some reliable source to back that up? E.g. something not connected to Gamergate (either side of it), preferably.
It doesn't use the same tune. The alternative song I'm talking about was featured in a restaurant in The Emperor's New Groove, so here's a clip from that:
http://youtu.be/q9h57OIaMFs
There's already an alternate birthday song sun in every restaurant I've ever been to that had sang to people on their birthdays:
Happy happy birthday
From all of us to you!
We wish it was our birthday
So we could party too!
I always like to sing along under by breath a little parody I made up on the very topic of this article:
Happy happy birthday
From all of us to you!
We'd sing you "Happy Birthday"
But then we would get sued!
If the driver has a green ARROW, then pedestrians do not have the right of way (and shouldn't have a walk sign). Green arrows are protected turns.
Median household income is not the same as median personal income, it's almost twice that much. And I didn't say that the median person had $20/day to live off of, but that they made twice as much as the more typical full-time-minimum-wage person who only has $10/day to live off of; obviously, rent doesn't magically double when your income doubles, so the median person has more than double the disposable income. I was using an approximation of that median rent in my calculations (recalling it as being about $750, which you might note is for a single-bedroom apartment, so usually not being split between two income earners like you'd expect with a median household income being double the median personal income), and my own recollection of what I paid in taxes back when I was making about full-time-minimum-wage (which was about 1/6 of my income).
Someone making $7.25/hr, full time, renting a typical one-bedroom apartment, ends up with about $10/day to live off of. That's a far cry from your lazy beggar in the subway in terms of the work they do, and an equally far cry from many of the things you probably take for granted in life making an awful lot more than that. That's the kind of working poor who make up the largest demographic of Americans. And a full half of Americans make less than twice that (about 165% of it), as the median personal income is around $25k/yr. My memory of this part is less certain, but IIRC by the time you get up to the national mean personal income (i.e. GDP per capita), which is close to the same as the median household income (around $50k), you're making more than about 75% of the country.
I'm concerned that these graduates whose first real job is paying even more than that still may just not have occasion to realize just how terribly little their fellow countrymen -- the hard-working ones, not the beggars in the subway -- are making, and take for granted that anyone facing hardships they could easily overcome with that kind of income must just be some... lazy beggar in the subway, like you did.
(3) Had the opportunity to take those steps.
That's where the privilege comes in. Nobody is denying that hard work or ability is a factor in success, only that it is not the only factor. Opportunity is another factor, and opportunity is not equally distributed, or else we would expect success to follow the same normal distribution as ability rather than the disproportionate distribution we actually see.
I mean flippant in the sense that in various discussions people get blamed for not doing things to prevent their own problems, when those things presume a level of income that most people simply cannot access.
For example someone here once blamed people who were suffering a supply shortage during an emergency for not keeping their pantry adequately stocked with emergency supplies, neglecting that a lot of people rent a tiny bedroom in someone else's house and don't have a pantry of their own to stock with emergency supplies, and also don't have the leftover income to stock up on emergency supplies after they're done paying for the food they need to eat that week.
The part where there are lots of people who can't afford that education, who lacked the upbringing to be able o engage productively in it if they could afford it, or the security to be able to take risks and move about to pursue better-paying jobs (if they got the education to qualify for them) without losing absolutely everything if they should slip up only once, or the guidance to realize that that was a path that was available to them (if it was). A lot of smart people with plenty of potential get dumped into their adulthoods straight into a day-to-day or month-to-month survival kind of living and never get the chance to pursue paths in life that could realize their potential.
Outcomes are the product of hard work and opportunity, and the inequality of opportunities is where privilege comes in.
I don't know if you think you're agreeing or disagreeing with me, but I'm not talking about beggars in the subway. I'm talking about people who work 40 hours a week and then have less than $10/day left over to cover all of their expenses after they pay rent. That's about the mode standard of living in this country. The median is about twice as well off as that. The mean around twice that again, but that's because a tiny handful of people making exorbitantly more than that pulls the mean up deceivingly high.
The world is not divided into lazy beggars and the hard-working elite. Most of it is full of the hard-working permanent underclass with little hope of ever crawling their way into a better place in life no matter how hard they try. And even most of the statistically "wealthy" in terms of income are still not even middle class in terms of assets, still so lacking in assets that they have to borrow most of what they live on from an even smaller fraction of super-rich.
Oh and of course you require half as much work from each of them as well, so they're still getting the same value for their labor, they just have to labor less.
Obvious solution (not that anyone will do it): pay twice as many people half as much each. That would bring the incomes down into the actual median range, and eliminate the unemployment problem.
It's not about guilt, it's about recognizing the way that other people have to live, so that when you make broad generalizations about society you don't assume that everybody has he advantages you have and dismiss the problems they suffer from lacking those advantages.
I kinda hate the way "privilege" gets thrown around a lot of the time, but this is pretty much the clearest sense of privilege here. And like all privilege, the point is not that it's bad that some people have it and they should feel guilty for it; it's bad that a lot of people don't have it, and those who do should bear in mind the different challenges that those who don't face.
I hope all these CS graduates making this kind of money right out of college realize the kind of rarefied strata that they are in.
More than half of all people on the country make less than half of their starting salaries.
I see so much flippancy from some people here in Slashdot who don't seem to realize the kind of money that most people in this country have to live on.
This is why the second part of the path of least resistance is openly admitting fallibility and qualifying every assertion.
Caught me saying something now that differs slightly from my account of the same events before? Fine... I guess I forgot some details since then. Or I forgot to mention some details back then. Thanks for highlighting that, now I can combine my present memory with the record of my earlier statements to get a more complete picture of the truth.
Caught me with a different opinion now than one I had before? Well that could be entirely because I changed my mind and though things over since then, and maybe I'm perfectly aware that I hold a different opinion now than before. If I wasn't aware of it... well, that's interesting, I forgot that I used to think that way. I wonder what made me change my mind since then. I would make this or that argument against my apparently former position these days, but I wonder if I'm forgetting some good argument against my current position that I used to be aware of.
Once you stop pretending to be infallible, your fallibility ceases to be a liability, so long as you own up to it when presented with it.