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> Privilege" is a terrible word to have become entrenched for such a useful concept, because many people instinctively get their backs up about being told they'

> Privilege" is a terrible word to have become entrenched for such a useful concept, because many people instinctively get their backs up about being told they're privileged when they don't have to face a challenge that someone else faces. I think people get their backs up because privilege checks as a concept are based largely on stereotypes/generalisations and confrontational behaviour, not empathic individual relating. > And it's not just a question of generalization, but a question of whose stories get told through the media. Whose lifestyles make it into the "lifestyle" section That's because the mainstream media is, by definition, normative - so it caters to what are considered cultural norms. The great thing about the Internet (and one of the good things about the postmodern breakdown of the metanarrative) is that while there are still dominant cultural norms, they're not standards to live up to anymore in the sense they might have been in the modern era. We're fragmenting into subcultures of subcultures where everybody can find a place where others share their tastes or beliefs. I find the idea that competing narratives have to share space in the mainstream media to be a strangely modernist-apologetic approach for a (progressive) movement that could do much better by embracing the breakdown of the normative standard by creating competing spaces.

yesenadam 6y ago
"the mainstream media is, by definition, normative" ELI5 please? or, you know, 10ish.
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  sure thing - so the idea is that the mainstream media exists to prop up the status quo. Not in the sense that it was invented for that reason, but the incentives at play force the media to essentially play to the confirmation bias of their audience in order to be competitive. Given that the media also pretends to present an objective truth (the idea of objective truth is also a very modernist ideal, but I don't want to go too deep into the postmodern rabbit hole here), the outcome is that the status quo is presented as the objective ideal. Thus if you believe that narrative, anything that isn't the status quo is treated comparably as inferior.
  - yesenadam 6y ago
    Thank you. :-) Although ..you seem to have used as many jargony or cliché phrases in this paragraph as the previous one, it doesn't seem at a significantly lower level. "exists to prop up the status quo" .. "the incentives at play" .. "play to the confirmation bias of their audience" .. "the status quo is presented as the objective ideal" All these seem a bit murky, rather hand-wavy. Maybe it's not possible, or would be too lengthy, to ELI10. I kind of know what you mean, but I feel there are unexamined assumptions buried in those murky phrases. Who can tell if they're right or not? It's impossible to say exactly what they mean. e.g. How would you go about finding out if something actually "exists to prop up the status quo" or not? (Sorry if this comment is a waste of time.)
    - beaconstudios 6y ago
      It's jargon-y because I'm using terminology you don't regularly use. I talk like this all the time, not to try to sound smart or academic (I really value clear communication, some ideas are just hard to communicate clearly) but because these are the terms I think in. I am trying to translate from my terms into what I assume are yours though (leaning on some cultural assumptions here), so please bear with me. > (Sorry if this comment is a waste of time.) I find these exercises inherently valuable because I need to learn to make these ideas understandable if I am to try to help popularise them, which I would like to. > How would you go about finding out if something actually "exists to prop up the status quo" or not? So I'm using a concept called teleology here. It's a way of thinking about the purpose of a system in terms of its outcome. The media "props up the status quo" in the same way that Darwinian evolution "adapts species to their environment". There's no conscious agency there; no one is at the helm of evolution, making it do so (with apologies to biblical literalists). So how do you find out if the media props up the status quo? The same way you find out if Darwinian evolution adapts species to their environment: you observe it and see if your hypothesis holds up over time. If the media's reporting lines up with assumptions you would make from your deepest beliefs, then either both the media and you are perfect truth-uncoverers (which would be impressive given epistemology, ie the study of how we can know things, is still a hotly-debated topic 2000 years after its creation), or the media is blowing smoke up your ass.
pjc50 6y ago
> creating competing spaces. Creating a competing space in which everyone agrees your norms are true is completely inadequate if that's not the space that policy gets made in. And within each country, there is effectively only one of those. It doesn't matter if you create a "competing space" in which black lives have equal worth to white ones if the police are operating in a very different one defined by "killology". Nothing says "normative" like the barrel of a gun. Besides, when people do create competing spaces they get denounced as "safe spaces" or "filter bubbles", even if everyone in the space knows full well what goes on outside the bubble.
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  Man, progressivism is so close to an ideology I could get behind, but it's like half a cup of postmodernism and a teaspoon of systems theory. I'm a glass deep on both. As an ideology you have correctly identified an inequity in treatment by law enforcement based on race, but the lack of systems theory and postmodern understanding leads you (as an ideology) to ascribe this to human perpetrators who actually want this to happen. I'm sure there are racist police out there, but systemic racism is not caused by racist individuals; its caused by the behaviour of systems (the justice system, systems around poverty, long term effects of previous explicitly racist policy). Until progressivism fully discards modernism and embraces postmodernism and systems theory, I don't believe it will be able to solve any of the problems it has identified. > Besides, when people do create competing spaces they get denounced as "safe spaces" or "filter bubbles", even if everyone in the space knows full well what goes on outside the bubble. For what it's worth, people criticise safe spaces for the use of the term "safe" implying that opinions are violence (which is just a bad formulation of the fact that bad opinions can lead to violence), and filter bubbles lead to a lack of dialogue, where in my ideal people can live freely in their bubble but agree to join a dialogue with someone from another bubble with mutual consent so we don't all spiral into self referentiality (ie hyper reality) through bias reinforcement.
  - solosoyokaze 6y ago
    > As an ideology you have correctly identified an inequity in treatment by law enforcement based on race, but the lack of systems theory and postmodern understanding leads you (as an ideology) to ascribe this to human perpetrators who actually want this to happen. I'm sure there are racist police out there, but systemic racism is not caused by racist individuals; its caused by the behaviour of systems (the justice system, systems around poverty, long term effects of previous explicitly racist policy). Until progressivism fully discards modernism and embraces postmodernism and systems theory, I don't believe it will be able to solve any of the problems it has identified. Weren't all of those systems designed, implemented and enforced by individuals? Racist policy makers, racist voters... from a systems perspective, systemic racism is the function of individual racism aggregated over time. If anything, it seems modern and not post-modern to extract racist individuals from systemic racism as they are part of and the origination of the systems themselves. It's treating humans as something outside of the system, which is a view I'd align more with modernism.

yesenadam 6y ago

"the mainstream media is, by definition, normative" ELI5 please? or, you know, 10ish.

beaconstudios 6y ago
sure thing - so the idea is that the mainstream media exists to prop up the status quo. Not in the sense that it was invented for that reason, but the incentives at play force the media to essentially play to the confirmation bias of their audience in order to be competitive. Given that the media also pretends to present an objective truth (the idea of objective truth is also a very modernist ideal, but I don't want to go too deep into the postmodern rabbit hole here), the outcome is that the status quo is presented as the objective ideal. Thus if you believe that narrative, anything that isn't the status quo is treated comparably as inferior.
- yesenadam 6y ago
  Thank you. :-) Although ..you seem to have used as many jargony or cliché phrases in this paragraph as the previous one, it doesn't seem at a significantly lower level. "exists to prop up the status quo" .. "the incentives at play" .. "play to the confirmation bias of their audience" .. "the status quo is presented as the objective ideal" All these seem a bit murky, rather hand-wavy. Maybe it's not possible, or would be too lengthy, to ELI10. I kind of know what you mean, but I feel there are unexamined assumptions buried in those murky phrases. Who can tell if they're right or not? It's impossible to say exactly what they mean. e.g. How would you go about finding out if something actually "exists to prop up the status quo" or not? (Sorry if this comment is a waste of time.)
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
    It's jargon-y because I'm using terminology you don't regularly use. I talk like this all the time, not to try to sound smart or academic (I really value clear communication, some ideas are just hard to communicate clearly) but because these are the terms I think in. I am trying to translate from my terms into what I assume are yours though (leaning on some cultural assumptions here), so please bear with me. > (Sorry if this comment is a waste of time.) I find these exercises inherently valuable because I need to learn to make these ideas understandable if I am to try to help popularise them, which I would like to. > How would you go about finding out if something actually "exists to prop up the status quo" or not? So I'm using a concept called teleology here. It's a way of thinking about the purpose of a system in terms of its outcome. The media "props up the status quo" in the same way that Darwinian evolution "adapts species to their environment". There's no conscious agency there; no one is at the helm of evolution, making it do so (with apologies to biblical literalists). So how do you find out if the media props up the status quo? The same way you find out if Darwinian evolution adapts species to their environment: you observe it and see if your hypothesis holds up over time. If the media's reporting lines up with assumptions you would make from your deepest beliefs, then either both the media and you are perfect truth-uncoverers (which would be impressive given epistemology, ie the study of how we can know things, is still a hotly-debated topic 2000 years after its creation), or the media is blowing smoke up your ass.

pjc50 6y ago

> creating competing spaces. Creating a competing space in which everyone agrees your norms are true is completely inadequate if that's not the space that policy gets made in. And within each country, there is effectively only one of those. It doesn't matter if you create a "competing space" in which black lives have equal worth to white ones if the police are operating in a very different one defined by "killology". Nothing says "normative" like the barrel of a gun. Besides, when people do create competing spaces they get denounced as "safe spaces" or "filter bubbles", even if everyone in the space knows full well what goes on outside the bubble.

beaconstudios 6y ago
Man, progressivism is so close to an ideology I could get behind, but it's like half a cup of postmodernism and a teaspoon of systems theory. I'm a glass deep on both. As an ideology you have correctly identified an inequity in treatment by law enforcement based on race, but the lack of systems theory and postmodern understanding leads you (as an ideology) to ascribe this to human perpetrators who actually want this to happen. I'm sure there are racist police out there, but systemic racism is not caused by racist individuals; its caused by the behaviour of systems (the justice system, systems around poverty, long term effects of previous explicitly racist policy). Until progressivism fully discards modernism and embraces postmodernism and systems theory, I don't believe it will be able to solve any of the problems it has identified. > Besides, when people do create competing spaces they get denounced as "safe spaces" or "filter bubbles", even if everyone in the space knows full well what goes on outside the bubble. For what it's worth, people criticise safe spaces for the use of the term "safe" implying that opinions are violence (which is just a bad formulation of the fact that bad opinions can lead to violence), and filter bubbles lead to a lack of dialogue, where in my ideal people can live freely in their bubble but agree to join a dialogue with someone from another bubble with mutual consent so we don't all spiral into self referentiality (ie hyper reality) through bias reinforcement.
- solosoyokaze 6y ago
  > As an ideology you have correctly identified an inequity in treatment by law enforcement based on race, but the lack of systems theory and postmodern understanding leads you (as an ideology) to ascribe this to human perpetrators who actually want this to happen. I'm sure there are racist police out there, but systemic racism is not caused by racist individuals; its caused by the behaviour of systems (the justice system, systems around poverty, long term effects of previous explicitly racist policy). Until progressivism fully discards modernism and embraces postmodernism and systems theory, I don't believe it will be able to solve any of the problems it has identified. Weren't all of those systems designed, implemented and enforced by individuals? Racist policy makers, racist voters... from a systems perspective, systemic racism is the function of individual racism aggregated over time. If anything, it seems modern and not post-modern to extract racist individuals from systemic racism as they are part of and the origination of the systems themselves. It's treating humans as something outside of the system, which is a view I'd align more with modernism.