I oppress myself. I grew up with parents who loved us, lots of sibs. It wasn’t perfect. But it was nice. I married good man, I have great kids. I can do and get what I want/need. Love my pets. Love my volunteer work.
I oppress myself by being agoraphobic. I tend to stay in my comfort zone. I try to push the boundaries everyday. Sometimes I’m successful. Mostly not.
At this point I will not fly or travel very far. I don’t like crowds, public places or wide open spaces, either. Certain noises and smells send me running.
I’m privileged to know this about myself. I do work on it, daily. I’m mostly happy.
I didn’t vote, I’m not sure where I’d fit.
A lot of the posts seem to be answering whether the person is fortunate or unfortunate, or giving examples who would be more fortunate, etc. Being fortunate or unfortunate doesn’t mean you necessarily are privileged or being oppressed, unfortunate and oppressed being especially far from the same thing. It might be more arguable that you are ‘privileged’ to eg. be born into a good family with above average looks, intelligence. etc. But lately that term has been co-opted to mainly mean race or other group affiliation, the effect of which on life outcomes is very possible to overstate IMO, whereas OTOH a lot of people now insist you are ‘privileged’ by belonging to a certain group, end of story, in which case it shouldn’t be necessary to ask people whether they are privileged, it would follow automatically from their group membership, in that worldview at least.
These questions are completely inane without taking intersectionality into account. OP fail.
White male hetero, Ivy League degree, preternaturally handsome, plenty of money, mule-sized dick, big house in one of the most exclusive (but also integrated!) neighborhoods in the United States.
I should be out there grinding widows and orphans under my heels, passing laws against minorities, dumping sewage in the reservoirs, cheating and lying and grifting in every direction in order to further line my pockets.
Sadly, my main ambition is to sit in a comfortable room and read books. With good tobacco and whiskey within reach.
im a white cis male, born in a pow camp after my mother was raped and eventually killed by the viet cong, where i was tortured and starved on and off for 15 years, escaped and by the time i was 23 years old, finally learned how to read.
i dont own a car or a home, i have two sets of clothing and i make less than $12,000 a year.
so very privileged, actually. all you need is the right skin colour and equipment downstairs, and youre basically set for life. though sometimes i wish i could understand the hardships of others. since a lack of melanin and estrogen basically makes you into a sociopath, my interest in human suffering is a purely intellectual endeavour-- it is no substitute for experiencing real oppression. i spend my days on the golf course at the country club-- sure, i cant afford the fees. but if you vote for trump they wave them. (i keep telling them thats election fraud, but they just laugh.)
The sad part is, you think you’re shitposting but the living situation you describe, the one you evidently think is the most horrible (fluent in English, two sets of clothes, a paying job that while considered poor still lets you live without being hungry and rent a small apartment with water & heat in any large Western city, which implicitly includes access to the internet and modern healthcare) is still leagues ahead of what 80% of people on this planet get to live with.
So yes. Even in that hilaaarious scenario, you’d be very privileged.
narrows eyes looks both ways YOINK !
but youre moving the bar–
because some of the above post is exaggerated, and some of it is simply fabricated, but the fact that privilege is spoken of most often by people who are far more well-to-do than i will likely ever be, in the same western country we are both thinking of.
so yes, you think i think im shitposting, but im actually calling out the deeply and most unusually privileged talking about privilege.
now, the white cis male part-- sure. thats true. i had a transgender sjw come to my wedding to keep me informed of all the things i didnt understand. he (his preferred pronoun, and all i ever knew him as anyway) wouldnt miss an opportunity to school me on all the ways in which some people were privileged and others were oppressed.
but all in all its a lot more reasonable (seems nuanced) in the context of marxism, while from here it seems like more of a ridiculous pissing match and ad hom fallacy glorified into a complete ideology of its own.
i eat about a meal a day, i eat a lot of rice, and pretty much everyone here is more privileged than most of the chinese.
lets not adopt their style of government. i dont mean communism-- i mean anything china does-- lets consider not doing that.
if youre going to move the bar, pretty much all the people talking about oppression are privileged. if youre going to make my point for me, i should just say thank you. but i thought id clarify.
They make pills for that.
I was born in an American family that had slightly above average income for the country, and thus was way above average for the world. I remain in a middle class American household. Thus I consider myself privileged. Privileged means wealthy. Middle class Americans are wealthy by world standards.
I’ve also used countless wonderful technologies in my lifetime that didn’t exist two centuries ago. That could be considered another type of privilege.
I do not take concepts like “white privilege”, “male privilege”, etc… seriously.
I think it’s worth pointing out – following your impeccable faultless logic here – that women are totally beaten out on the matter of privileged lifestyle by the ocean quahog, a species of marine bivalve mollusk that can live more than 400 years. Even the humble Greenland shark is more privileged than women: it usually lives to be over 200.
You appear to be admitting to trolling, i.e. making up facts in order to get a desired reaction from your audience (or to “make a point”). You may not be aware that this arguing tactic (outside the Pit) can result in official sanctions, and/or to ridicule in a certain thread in that Pit. In fact, I see you’re already there.
nope, was not aware. also, most of my posts are more sincere (and imo, so was this one, since im not actually trying to mislead anyone-- but at least you clarified the rules, i should probably thank you) it was simply rhetorical.
the truth is that i make a great deal of effort to examine things from both sides (or additional sides) of the debate. when the left annoys me, i complain about them. when the right annoys me, i sympathise (a little) with the left. i think the two party system is a joke, and lean libertarian. im pretty tired of the right and the alt-right being conflated in every story, every post, because they arent the same thing-- and one is far more dangerous, and so is conflating the two.
but theres no rule against that here, is there?
theres some obvious advice in your post, and if its not too late i intend to follow it. but if it is too late-- well, thats how it goes. all the best. i wasnt joking about being poor though. i wasnt posting for laughs, either.
When I got pulled over in college, they didn’t even give a reason. I’ve been pulled over for reasons also, some of which I did and some which were just checking. For instance my car matched the description of a car they were looking for. I don’t count them as issues.
When I was a kid they were significantly less respectful than they were when I was over 60. The disrespect was more in being stopped - I’ve never been stopped for no reason after cutting off my hair and looking middle class. And in the back of that cop’s mind was the thought that I might be a Harvard student with a rich and powerful father, and that giving me too much grief could be bad for his career.
The college I went to was 1/6 women my year. Now I’d like to think I’d have gotten in even if it was 50/50 (as it is today) but maybe not. That’s pretty much a textbook example of male privilege.
When they changed living arrangements to be able to accept women, there were plenty available and qualified, just in case you thought this was justified.
time limit seems to be up on the edit, so i will just reply here. theres clearly one set of rules for most of the forum, and another for the pit-- hadnt paid attention to that before.
the pit is extremely rude and self-justified, and im probably going to lose interest in the forum after running the gauntlet there anyway. so, i suppose this could go either way.
but if the goal is to drive me out, it wont take much-- just convince me that its not worth the bother and ill be out. id like to pass the time and chat with some people on my own terms-- maybe that will work out, maybe it wont. it wouldnt be the first time i got jumped on by a bunch of people on a forum, and thats pretty much how politics works now anyway-- so if its that bad, ill just get banned or leave, shaking my head.
theyll do the same and stay. after the past few years i doubt anybody could convince me theres really more to it than that. i will thank you after all, for the heads up though. i dont know if you meant it as a kindness, but i think its more fair-- so thanks.
This could probably be said of the vast majority of people who have ever voiced the opinion that they don’t have “privilege”. Essentially no one I would ever have a conversation about “privilege” with are not themselves “privileged”, and certainly not the people who complain vocally about white / male / hetero “privilege”.
it is mostly a lead-in to scapegoating. youre privileged, im not, therefore it is your fault. collectively.
all members of a privileged group are responsible for all members of an unprivileged group.
we are highly encouraged to rely on that sort of generalisation as rule in all our thinking. and the icing on the cake is that if you disagree-- of course you do-- because being privileged (in just one way) makes it literally impossible to understand.
when you move from groups to socio-economic status, it becomes a shell game where rich people complain that they are part of a group that doesnt have the same opportunity to become rich-- and people who arent rich cant understand what its like to not have that opportunity, because there are other people who look like them that dont.
at a certain point it just becomes purely ridiculous. by then everyone is already convinced, so we just go forward as if its as sure as the tides.
I’m male, Jewish (the majority in my country), Ashkenazic (the more privileged Jewish ethnicity), college-educated, served in a combat unit (a fairly advantageous thing here - and sure, I volunteered, but I was also born physically capable of volunteering), from an educated, upper-middle-class, warm and supporting family. My parents may be immigrants, but they’re immigrants from New Jersey, so it’s not that big a disadvantage.
I’d say I’m privileged to some degree.
I don’t think I’m either. I get a raw deal out of life, in the grand scheme of things, so it sure doesn’t feel like privilege to me. B but I’m not hated or regularly threatened or otherwise insulted, so I’m not oppressed either. If anything I’m just overlooked.