Assassination of U.S. citizens; Indefinite detention; Arbitrary justice; Warrantless searches; Secret evidence; War crimes; Secret court; Immunity from judicial review; Continual monitoring of citizens; and Extraordinary renditions.

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/16/who_are_the_victims_of_civil_liberties_assaults_and_endless_war/singleton/

With the upcoming election between Obama and most likely Romney, this article gave rise to an Obama reelection slogan.

Obama: To Hell in a Handbasket More Slowly than Romney

I think it would make a great bumper sticker.

http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/2012/01/our-take-on-marines-urinating-on-taliban/

http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/2011/03/thoughts-on-the-american-kill-squad-photographs/

But what the heck. Let’s start with a link:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/08/31/122789/wikileaks-iraqi-children-in-us.html

The incident occurred in Iraq in 2006. A UN investigator found that autopsies showed that all the victims had been handcuffed and shot in the head. The dead included four women, five children under the age of six years old.

This information was in part revealed by the wikileaks leak. And it is one of the reasons that the Iraqi government refuses to extend the US occupation of their country.

Can’t imagine why.

http://satwcomic.com

Pretty much says it all.

One can get value from the words attributed to Jesus Christ even if one is not Christian.

The religion that is “privilege”, like any other religion, contains fundamentalists, moderates, and folks who only go to church because its a great place to gossip. There are followers of “privilege” who use the teachings of privilege to try and better themselves while allowing others to find their own, possibly completely different (i.e. nonbeliever), path. There are those who preach “privilege” as the one true god and that everyone must forsake all other gods and worship at the alter of “privilege”.

There are those who use the religion that is “privilege” as a way to go on a witchunt to find sinners and burn them at the stake. There are the “fire and brimstone” (pillar of salt) preachers of privilege. And there are also the “New Testament” (love thy neighbor) advocates of understanding “privilege”.

I am not a follower of the religion that is “privilege”. I can see potential value in the discussion, but in the end, the language, the tone, the etymological baggage, the approach, and everything that is wrapped up in the term “privilege” seems to me to create more problems that it solves.

I support equality. And I think that equality can be achieved through looking at one group being at a disadvantage relative to another group, or through looking at one group being at an advantage over another group. But I think the term “privilege” is loaded with emotional baggage of wrong doing.

More importantly, I think anyone who is a follower of the church of privilege is a fool to ignore the denominations within their church who use the term “privilege” as a guilt bat and as a gag. I think witchunting, guilt batting, gagging, and burning at the stake, are far more common than many members would admit.

The thing of it is this: Does the term “privilege” create more problems than it solves?

No doubt, the moderates and the folks who use “privilege” to improve themselves likely assume that all followers of privilege are just like them. It was a mistake I was making myself, thinking that all members of the church of “privilege” were the same, that if one person used privilege as a bat, they all did.

As far as I can see, the notion of “Privilege” points to an idea that might be useful in the fight for equality, but the word is packed with such baggage of guilt and wrong doing that it seems nearly impossible to have even a single conversatino about privilege without someone usign it as a guiltbat. And it seems that privilege is a young enough religion that followers don’t distinguish themselves as different denominations even though they are completely different.

There are other ways to discuss the issue that “privilege” tries to highlight without the baggage that the word “privilege” evokes. A simple example woudl be the word “advantage”. Advantage refers to a difference between two people or groups, without assigning guilt or blame or implying which one is “right” and which is “wrong”. THe word “privilege” assigns guilt and blame and implies that privilege is “wrong” and unprivilege is “right”.

That creates issues when you have privilege just by virtue of beign straight, white, and male. It carries along with it the baggage that you are wrong and guilty for being straight, white, and male.

And more than one member of the church of privilege uses the term exactly that way. The more moderate members seem to be unable to correct their more fundamentalist, fire and brimstone, members.

I could just as easily say that I am at an *advantage* over others by virtue of being straight, white, and male, instead of saying I have *privilege* as a result of the same.

Both point to a difference in power between straights and gays, whites and blacks, men and women. But “advantage” doesn’t carry with it the association of guilt and wrong doing. Nor does it carry with it the implication of how to correct privilege. There are rights and there are privileges. Rights are things that everyone deserves. Privileges are advantages extended to a small group, and that privilege can be taken away if the group misbehaves.

As a white person in a country that has racial profiling by the police, I am at an *advantage* over people of color when it comes to how I relate to the police. But the way the police treat me is not a PRIVILEGE, it is a RIGHT. It is a right that has been taken away from people of color. No one should fear the police will treat them poorly just because of their skin color. If you call that a PRIVILEGE, then that word carries with it the implication that you want to TAKE AWAY the way the police relate to me and make me worry that maybe the cops will treat me badly because I am WHITE.

Being treated fairly by the cops is a RIGHT. It is not a PRIVILEGE.

Calling it a privilege carries along with it a whole bunch of baggage that doesn’t fit the facts of that scenario.

But followers of the religion of “privilege”, especially the witchunters, the fire and brimstone preachers, and the folks looking for a religion to hide their guilt-battery behaviour behind, those people don’t care that the word doesn’t fit the facts. They aren’t using the term for its accuracy of description. They’re using it for its accuracy as a weapon. They can swing “privilege” in a room and hit someone nearly everytime.

The fire and brimstone preachers aren’t going to change the term “privilege” because it is inaccurate or because it makes the fight for Equality and Equal RIGHTS harder. They aren’t focused on equality. THey are focused on the witchhunt.

The thing is that the moderates of the religion, they actually ARE motivated for equal rights. The question I’m wondering at the moment is whether they can see that the way many of the members of their church are actually on a witchunt and that the use of the term “privilege” is making it harder to attain equal rights than some more accurate, less baggaged, terminology.

At the moment, I don’t think they do.

And I had zero context in which to view the hostage crisis. As far as I knew we, the United States, were minding our own business when suddenly, out of the blue, some evil people who hate us for no reason decided to attack us and harm us.

My response was to become a strident attacker of all things Iran. Carter had botched the rescue mission. But then Reagan was elected and I thought his tough talk and ass-kicking was what the world needed to restore justice and fight these evil people.

It wasn’t until about ten years after the Iranian Revolution when I was having a discussion about the middle east with someone (Who I viewed at the time as a peace-nik, tree-hugging, useless hippy). I said something about the attack coming out of the blue and they hated us because we were so great, and they responded by saying something like “they hate us for Operation Ajax”.

I looked at them as if they had 40 heads. I had no idea what they were talking about.

I then went to the library and started looking for information about operation Ajax. The short of it was that in 1953, the CIA overthrew the government of Iran and installed a dictator, the Shah. The shah was a brutal dictator and tortured and killed tens of thousands of Iranians so he could keep himself in power. The US did everything it could to keep the shah in power for decades. And it wasn’t until 1979 that the Iranian people were finally able to overthrow that brutal dicator.

It was at that point, I had to admit that if I had been born in Iran and lived through that, I would have supported the revolution.

The Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979 had made me hate Iran. And it wasn’t until 10 years after that event that I got the context that, had I been born into their shoes, I would have hated the Shah and hated the US for keeping him in power for a quarter of a century.

It was probably another ten years after that realization that I was finally able to sort things out to my satisfaction, and understand all the events in the larger context of history.

1979 -> The event
1989 -> Learn I had been looking at the event with no context
1999 -> learn at least a minimal level of history about the event to understand it all.

The 9/11 attacks are this generations “event”. Today is the ten year anniversary after those attacks. And I just wonder if today’s generation is now starting to go through some realizations that their original view of the event was a view with no context.

I wonder if people who in 2001 believed President Bush when he said they hate us for our freedom, I wonder if those people today might be looking at 9/11 and realizing that Bush was lying.

It will be interesting to see how it unfolds over the next 10 years to see if we can get to a point of looking at 9/11 with enough historical context to truly understand that day.

This story could have easily been about some random person Louis ran into on the bus. They’re both on the bus. Loius is standing. The bus lurches. Louis is thrown a bit and ends up stepping on some guy’s toes. The guy gets furious at Louis and says he did it on purpose. Louis tries to apologize. And it ends with the guy demanding the police show up so he can press charges for assault.

The humor is someone taking an unintentional nonmalicious event and trying to convert it into a completely intentional, malicious, totally ‘wanted to mess with someone else’, event.

I realized that this sounded almost exactly like some of the conversations I have about privilege.

Privilege-blamers will try to use privilege to shame or blame or guiltbat someone. They sometimes do this by taking something unintentional and unmalicious and converting it into intentional malice.

A privileged person is by definition at an advantage over someone in a minority class. But the privileged person may have not done anything intentional to cause this. They may be valiant fighters of the equality for all cause. But they still have advantages that they enjoy until equality is achieved. A privilege-dishwasher will use basically accuse the person of privilege of gaining those advantages intentionally, maliciously. That they did it on purpose.

Another example of this the “Offended On Purpose”. A person of privilege says something and the person they are saying it to gets offended. The offended person then turns the offense into something that could only have been done intentionally and maliciously by the speaker.

I saw a person with an incurable disease get angry at a person who had said to them “I hope they find a cure.” And then the offended person twisted it so the person must have intentionally maliciously wanted to offend them. And how dare they.

This is a priviledged-dishwasher incident.

Ascribing intentional malicious intent to an unintentional nonmalicious incident.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/09/06/shut-up-and-listen/#comment-274020

every time you post a comment along the lines of “But both points of view are valid” you inevitably shift the focus away from the more marginalized POV

Why is the marginalized POV marginalized?

Is it because they haven’t gotten enough “air time”? Is it because privileged people have run the united states for 200 years while the marginized people had to shut up? And now to fix it, marginalized people get to talk for the next 200 years and privileged people ahve to shut up?

No.

The marginalized POV is marginalized because the majority class of the population doesn’t acknowlege it.

Why? Well, for a lot of people in whatever majority group you talk about, its because the people in the majority group simply have no clue that other people are dealing with stuff that they don’t have to deal with.

So how do you balance the focus of the privileged point of view with the marginalized poitn of view?

You get the privileged people to understand the marginalized people have different POV’s then them, have different experiences of life, often much worse.

In a discussion between majority and minority classes, a balanced focus of POV’s would be to find that both sides POV are valid.

people from both sides can report their experience of life adn both can be valid.

Woman: I experience sexism.
Man: I don’t experience sexism.

Both are speaking to their own individual, personal experience. ANd neither one is trying to say the other person’s experience is wrong.

Both POV’s are valid.

You have now achieved balance between both POV’s as far as those two individuals are concerned. Lather, rinse, repeat for the rest of the population.