My words was a counterpoint that any advantage someone has over someone else "needs to be dealt with".
I don't think we have a common understanding of "advantage," then. In this context, an advantage is when possessing a particular trait improves your success without improving your skills, or above and beyond the level to which it improves your skills.
So I gave an example of an advantage that not only cannot be dealt with, but would be oppressive if it could.
I suppose "unfair advantage" would be a better term... you see, intelligence only improves success insofar as it improves ability or skills.
As well if an advantage doesn't lead to success, you are no longer advantaged.
An advantage leads to
increased success, not absolute success. If you're poor and white, you still had a
smaller chance of being poor than if you had been black, and you are probably
less poor than you would have been if you were black.
That's hardly a meaningful disadvantage.
I think your drawing a lot more from what I am saying than what I intended, but let me try to catch you up to the conversation. Yes it isn't a meaningful disadvantage, well it is sociopathy if taken to its logical conclusion, but I was simply laying the ground work that just because something is an advantage it doesn't mean that advantage cannot come with sizable or even overwhelming disadvantages that might make it impossible to gauge.
Hmm... within a particular context, this is untrue, but this might be holistically true. Still, since privilege is more the property of a trait than a person, it should still be possible to say that on the whole, being white is more advantageous than being black, ferex.
I was simply calling back to an earlier point in the conversation where it was outright said that "Privilege" comes with that disadvantage, therefor one cannot say that privilege is always pure advantage.
Has anybody ever said that an advantageous trait
always comes with absolutely no drawbacks?
Or rather my goal is to challenge the precepts that "Check your Privilege" is based on. That it requires a lot of assumptions about a person, society, their gender, their race, the color of their skin, their orientation. That it requires assumptions about their lives and how the advantages present themselves.
...I am somewhat lost. What is "check your privilege", and how does it require these assumptions?
It requires an assumption of perpetual victimhood and eternal victimizer.
I really do not see how anything requires that assumption.
To say nothing of how it is actually used "Do something about it!" Vs. What it actually means. (At which I have yet to see it used properly once)
Doesn't it "actually mean" that one should be aware of their privilege?
It is a topic worthy of speaking on its own given the whole "Men are rapists" thing gone out of dang control and reached a serious boiling point.
Nobody is saying that literally all men are rapists. We are saying that men are significantly more likely to rape or sexually assault people than are women.
On the
other hand, "guilty until proven innocent" is terrifying as hell and should be killed with fire.
Then again I also looked at the concept of pick-up artists and sort of realized that a big part of it has to do with the fact that men, as a whole, need to initiate in our society and as such the entire hones is on them to be charming.
There's a rather big difference between initiation and coercion. Coercion requires initiation, yes, but it's more than that.
Which means they are more observable.
True - women are discouraged from doing certain things romantically, and pick-up artistry is a subset of those things.