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Privilege is fake and just used to bully white cis men. It's a justification for discrimination. It's the same as the n-word in principle, used to single out people of a particular race. The weird thing is that some people consider it acceptable... it's just anti-white racism, the opposite but equivalent to anti-black racism.

See, this is the "two wrongs don't make a right" approach, which passes moral muster.

The people who don't care about reverse -isms are more concerned about punching up versus punching down, though they also tend to be careful to not define either of those things clearly, so they can be flexible in their social aggression. The biggest mistake they make as moral actors is failing to take economic and social standing as a separate axis of comparison. Not all white guys have privilege, not all minorities live in the ghetto.

I’d argue the point of “Privileged” is to generalize people. “Privileged” is something all white people are, and it’s commonly presented as something they have in roughly equal proportion.

The point of doing so is to allow the wealthiest richest white people to maintain their wealth and dominance over everybody by drawing negative attention to powerless people who look similar as a scapegoat. There is a reason why enacted measures to remove “privilege” do not include wealth redistribution but include many measures where the cost is put largely on lower and middle class people.

When is the last time you heard about a DIE seminar holder talking about the racial wealth gap (in 2019 whites held 87% of US wealth) and we instead mostly talk about relatively smaller income gaps? It’s because the concept of white privilege, conceptually back to the day of the invisible knapsack, rested in the idea that if most people of a racial group experienced something positive they had racial privilege. It focuses on the average and ignores the edge cases. All inequality is blamed on the average cases. The remedies disproportionately affect the average.

> It's... not that people have a _need_ to do that. And let's be honest, you know it.

No? People don't have a need to do things like change their forum handle to "Kill All Men" (expressly allowed by this CoC)? Post profile pictures drinking from mugs labeled "Male Tears" (expressly allowed by this CoC?), or "This is dumb and you are dumb for suggesting it. You fucking suck." (expressly allowed by this CoC if aimed at a man or white person). These are all things that have happened in the last few years around various tech communities.

> If you think there's a _need_ to be able to hurt others, be it the group you are somehow against or think about them hurting you, I don't think the issue is in the CoC.

It is if the CoC doesn't just tolerate it, but expressly condones it as acceptable behavior.

> Do you think it weird that it doesn't seem an issue at all?

On the contrary, it has been an issue many times. Randi Harper and Linux Foundation, Adria Richards at Pycon, Sarah Mei, Coraline Emhke. (Note that I am not saying any of those people or positions they hold are right or wrong, but "it's not an issue at all" is quite demonstrably incorrect).

> Maybe if a good number of people hadn't done bad things for decades, no one would need a CoC. But this is the world we are living, where people define themselves by their ability to mock and shame others. One group happened to do it a lot more.

"I am marginalized, therefore my opinion trumps yours". Hm.

When we start talking about the need of some people to feel safe and giving them very great latitude in how they accomplish this, you can easily end up with situations like one in Oregon, where a male student had a no contact order, and was banned from being on campus with a female student, or being in their classes (I say 'their' because they were both enrolled in said classes, not as a gender statement) and had to change dorms. Why?

Not because of anything he did wrong.

Because he resembled someone who had raped a female student. The rapist lived thousands of miles away, and was not a student, but because the "resemblance" was traumatizing, the administration at his university felt it was acceptable to impose restrictions on his behavior, location, employment. That, effectively, her safety (for whatever definitions of 'safety') trumped his comfort. Sound familiar? In fact, they didn't even tell him why he was subject to this no-contact situation, he found out completely by accident. (https://harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-128/trading-the-megap...)

I think that there are very real consequences when such things are mis-applied, no matter who the source, and who the subject. And I think that handwaving it away as "If you have a problem with any of this, maybe you need to look at yourself" is puerile and overly simplistic, if not insulting.

Are you against making comments towards someone’s race/sexuality or not? “Well it depends on their race” is not one of the two options. Learn to be honest instead of responding to a yes or no question with an essay just because it would put your consistency into doubt.