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Comment by khafra | Hacker News Reader

On 14, the failure mode is called "not carving reality at the joints." Because .00001% of men wield large amounts of political power, whereas even fewer women (at least, visibly) do so, political power is a male privilege.

There are certainly reference classes for "likely to wield political power" that change the likelihood ratio by far more than "male."

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You're missing the point.

The issue is not the raw numbers, but the pychological problem - that people like you are not in power, or not as equally holding power. That you are not of the type of people who have power.

And yes, there are other privileges, like White privilege, middle/upper-class privilege, straight privilege, cis privilege, not-abused privilege, and so on. These intersect to cause more issues again.

The assertion that people in privileged positions can never see their own privilege is refutation-proof; but when you start creating negative categories like "not-abused" to privilege, it's hard to claim with a straight face that anybody except the people actually in power are all that privileged.

Unless, of course, you're privileging gender privilege far above other types of privilege.

...and I just hit semantic satiation.

"The assertion that people in privileged positions can never see their own privilege is refutation-proof" Actually, I never said this, and I wouldn't. Most people who are privileged don't directly realise this, but it is common for concerned parties to learn about privilege to begin to "check their privilege" - to question how their privileges affects their interpretation of something.

I am privileged in some ways, and not in others. Generally privileges are treated as being different and hard to compare, because "oppression olympics" (arguing some are more harmful than others) never actually helps the discussion, and generally leads to people forgetting to check their privileges - who am I to speak for the experiences of other minorities?

The fact that you act amused at "not-abused" as a privilege is part of the whole problem, especially when you consider how this intersects with with privilege (or lack thereof) issues.

The concept of intersections between privileges (or the lack thereof) is important - that some combinations of the effects of a privileged society are worse than others.

My amusement is at the application of the word "privilege" to a negative description.

I currently enjoy not-superstitious privilege, not-being-kidnapped privilege, not-being-forcefed-arsenic privilege, and many others that help me maintain my status and position in ways I may never have thought of. But calling them "privileges" is silly; it leads, as I said, to semantic satiation; and that's part of the whole problem.

Many people here do not enjoy neurotypical privilege, but they don't use that language, they try to describe the actual problems they face and the ways to surmount them as efficiently as possible.

You are missing the point. You are choosing to slice reality at the joint of gender, assuming that people with breasts are "like you" but people without are "different". Of course, in a discussion of political power, this is not a very useful way to slice. Male predicts very little. Insider status (e.g., child of politician) predicts a lot more.

You are also implicitly assuming that the category of "like you" matters at all. But that's a choice you are making. I can choose to view Peter Thiel as "not like me" because he is gay. I can also choose to view him as being "like me" because I aspire to be awesome in the same ways that he is.

If women are less likely to make this choice, that's not privilege. That's simply the choices of individuals holding them back.

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