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funeralxempire
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09 Nov 2014, 9:50 pm

Shau wrote:
funeralxempire wrote:

I've underlined the most important thing you've said.

X privilege isn't guaranteed to make your life good, but things would be even worse without the benefits provided by various categories of privilege.

I'm often frustrated by 'social justice folks' who get fixated on a specific issue to the point they can't view the world except for through that lens. This will lead to them not understanding that they may well be additionally privileged in ways they haven't ever considered relative to others; causing those people to forget that there's many forms of privilege, not just the ones their professor pointed out to explain the general concept with real-life examples.

You can't really lecture someone on how 'privileged' their existence is if you haven't bothered to examine the circumstances of your own existence.


I think it's also important to consider that it's quite possible that various types of privilege are not necessarily equally distributed. That is to say, some males have more male privilege than other males.

Allow me to give an example. Being male opens a lot of opportunities, there is no question about that. However, a lot of those opportunities cannot be realistically seized by many men. For example, compare a lower class male and an upper class male. That upper class male will have far more chances to utilize his male privilege than the lower class male. This would mean that the upper class male has more male privilege than the lower class one, even after controlling for the upper class male's class privilege.


I'd say depending on the specific aspect of privilege you're talking about, the effects might be additive or they may multiply. The benefits of gender and class in the scenario of getting a loan for your small business are likely to play out differently than say in the scenario of taking your car in for repairs. Many of the benefits of male privilege are present regardless of class or race, while others are modified by other categories being present.

It's not that someone who's white and not-NT has less white privilege compared to someone who's white and NT (going to your earlier example), it's that they're less able to take advantage of it.


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Shau
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09 Nov 2014, 11:07 pm

funeralxempire wrote:
It's not that someone who's white and not-NT has less white privilege compared to someone who's white and NT (going to your earlier example), it's that they're less able to take advantage of it.


More or less the same thing, in practice. Either way, I think we for the most part agree.


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RhodyStruggle
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09 Nov 2014, 11:09 pm

Shau wrote:
What do you folk think? #NotAllNeurotypicals are bullies, sure...but #YesAllAutistics face discrimination from neurotypicals.


On the one hand, I do often find myself stereotyping neurotypical people. On the other, I don't require a hashtag reminder in order to catch myself when I commit such an error. I conjecture this is due in large part to the normality of neurotypicality resulting in a massive data-set from which to generate counter-examples to stereotypes.

As with any kyriarchically-imbalanced relation between social spaces (e.g. [in no particular order] wealthy people > poor people, men > women, white people > people of color, heterosexual people > LGBTQI people, neurotypical people > autistic people), the inverse relation doesn't hold. In keeping with my prior conjecture, I speculate that this is due to the members of the dominant social space having a poverty of information about the members of the dominated social space. The domination-relation itself appears to interfere with information flow (Kevin Carson has written on that theme, I'm sure others must have as well) via a process I'll call "kyriarchal amplification"*, but in the case of (neurotypical people > autistic people) this is compounded by autism's manifestation (when embedded in a neurotypical-dominant context) as a communication disability.

Perhaps if autists ever adopt toward neurotypicals the eugenicist posture they take toward us, while possessed of the social power with respect to neurotypicals required to effect the threats implied by such posturing, to an extent comparable to that which the neurotypicals have already effected against us, there will be room to argue for a need for #NotAllNeurotypicals. Until such time, just like #NotAllMen, such a hashtag would be the creation of noise via kyriarchal amplification to drown out the voices of the oppressed.

* Here's a (somewhat) formal definition of this hypothetical phenomenon of kyriarchal amplification.

Let Sn be a social space.
Let I be a set of social network pathways, i.e. lines of communication between social entities.
Let B_p_t : I be the greatest quantity of information which can be transmitted via the paths of I using communications protocols p over interval of time t.
Let I{a,b} represent the set of all social network paths by which information may be transferred between Sa and Sb without bias to the direction of information flow.
Let I[a,b] represent the set of all social network paths by which information may be transferred from Sa to Sb.
Let I[b,a] represent the set of all social network paths by which information may be transferred from Sb to Sa.
Let K : Sa --> Sb be a kyriarchal relation between the spaces Sa and Sb, such that Sa dominates Sb.

Hypothesis:
Let Sx and Sy be social spaces. Then ( B_pz_t : I{x,y} ) = ( (B_pxy_t : I[x,y]) + (B_pyx_t : I[y,x]) )
If ( K : Sx --> Sy ), then ( (B_pxy_t : I[x,y]) > (B_pyx_t : I[y,x]) )

The kyriarchal amplification A_K enjoyed by members of Sx with respect to members of Sy is given by:

A_K ( Sx , Sy ) = ( B_pz_t : I{x,y} ) - (B_pyx_t : I[y,x]) )

Solving for z is left as an exercise for the student :D



Last edited by RhodyStruggle on 10 Nov 2014, 2:01 am, edited 2 times in total.

RhodyStruggle
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09 Nov 2014, 11:17 pm

Shau wrote:
I think it's also important to consider that it's quite possible that various types of privilege are not necessarily equally distributed. That is to say, some males have more male privilege than other males.


Right. Social privilege appears (to me, at least) to be generated by a recursive function. That is to say, one's privilege within a given domain D is determined (to a significant extent, if not entirely) on the basis of one's privilege within other domains which intersect with D. As I grok it, that's the fundamental basis of (social context) intersectionality.



Shau
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09 Nov 2014, 11:37 pm

I'm guessing you're a math major. I'll take a moment to digest your technical post, but I like your style!


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RhodyStruggle
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10 Nov 2014, 1:47 am

Thank you! Was a math major, philosophy minor. Graduated with my Bachelor of Science degree a few years ago.

I love math - it is the language in which the universe speaks its existence. If you can grok "set", and if you can grok "recursion", and if you can grok "grok" (which is admittedly much more difficult, I'm only just starting to get it, but it's the key to what mystical religious traditions call ecstasy, what Buddhism calls Nirvana, what mathematicians call "mathematical beauty," what drove Pythagoras mad), then you can grok everything.

Fat lot of good it does one, in a world where most seem afraid of math. I try to pick up their slack though, because after all, they're me. All are one, one is all.

Sound preachy? That might be because religion operates on a similar level of abstraction with respect to human experience, as mathematics does with respect to the physical universe. So the domains map to one another very well, perhaps even isomorphically.

Pray indulge me while I demonstrate:

In the beginning, there was a beginning. For there to be a beginning, a point of reference must exist such that it can be said that the beginning began. As the beginning did begin, it can be said that it began. By implication, that-which-began may not be the only that to begin from a beginning. And here the topologist would also note that, while that-which-began may be conceived as a closed set, there is no reason to suppose it might not also be a clopen set. (Many Worlds hypotheses, validated by Genesis!)

God is the null set. God recursed, instantiating the Monad within Ourself; a set within a set. But the Monad was without form, and void (had neither algebraic structure, nor metric); and darkness was upon the face of the deep (light is a quantifiable phenomenon - without a metric, the Monad was in darkness). And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (God, being the set which contains the Monad and thus not needing light to grok the Monad's essence, observed the Monad. But without the metric which would bring light, God could not grok the Monad without grokking it entirely, as no concept of degree was yet defined for this iteration of existence. Thus God recursed upon the Monad; which begat the Spirit of God, the Dyad, the Other; a topology upon the Monad, by which its elements might be discriminated. ) And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. (The topology defined by the Dyad was sufficient to permit the illumination of the Monad.)

I could go on, but it is getting late, and any continuance might be better suited to a new thread anyhow. I hope you enjoyed my story, and that you think no less of me for believing every word of it.



Jono
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10 Nov 2014, 6:35 am

Shau wrote:
So.

Those of us that have been following the dregs of Twitter and Tumblr are familiar with the #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen hashtags. The short of it is that a bunch of (mostly) guys made a hashtag proclaiming that not all men rape, harass, discriminate, etc. The response was a hashtag proclaiming that yes all women experience harassment, rape, discrimination, etc.

Now, I was having a conversation earlier about intersectionality with some...less cerebral liberal types at uni when the above hashtags came into focus. They kept hammering me with rhetoric about "white privilege" this, "male privilege" that, so I shot back, pointing out that young people with ASDs face abysmal employment prospects and harsh social stigmas, and autistic children deal with suicidal ideation rates orders of magnitude higher than most normal people.

http://www.dps.missouri.edu/Autism/Auti ... et2011.pdf
http://news.psu.edu/story/267913/2013/0 ... d-attempts

First Link wrote:
The proportion of young adults with autism who had a job was comparable to that for young adults with deaf-blindness or with multiple disabilities...

Second Link wrote:
The researchers found that the percentage of children with autism rated by their parents as sometimes to very often contemplating or attempting suicide was 28 times greater than that of typical children...


I swear one of them was just about to blurt out "Not all neurotypicals are like that" but she must caught herself at the last second. What do you folk think? #NotAllNeurotypicals are bullies, sure...but #YesAllAutistics face discrimination from neurotypicals.


Now we're talking about neurotypical privilege. It's one of the types of privilege that they don't often think about.