Comment on How possibly?
TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today 15 hours agoI think you’re running into a little cognitive dissonance. In this scenario, the privilege is what is causing the disadvantage in the first place. You cannot be privileged in a truly equal society, therefore you can’t elevate everyone to a privileged class, you can only equal the playing field.
It’s a zero sum game.
Hacksaw@lemmy.ca 15 hours ago
I was with you most of the way but you lost me here. Some of the biggest privileges for cis straight white males is that they don’t have to deal with racism, sexism, and bigotry over who they are and who they love. That’s not a zero sum game. We can all have that privilege. That privilege isn’t what causes bigotry.
There are some privileges that would be lost, like being preferentially hired by racists. But for the most part we’re fighting in large part for equal good treatment. It’s not a zero sum game.
TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today 15 hours ago
How does that racism materially present itself? With racism it’s by decades of economic support and government programs aimed at creating wealth for a certain ethnicity over another. With sex it’s decades of reinforcing gender roles and denying educational opportunities for women. Rules about race mixing were created to deny a dilution of the ethnic collective of political power.
I would argue that it shouldn’t be a privilege, but a universal right.
I think you might want to look up the definition of privilege. You can’t be privileged unless someone is being disadvantaged. If you want to get rid of privilege then what you’re saying is you want everyone to be treated the same.
bizarroland@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I’ve tried to bring this up before, but I personally don’t believe everyone should be treated the same.
In an ideal world where we had an objective way to measure this, I would prefer that we lived in an absolute meritocracy.
Some people are a better fit for a particular purpose than other people due to racial advantage, gender advantage, physical advantage, age advantage, or any other number of advantages that they have been gifted by the miracle of life and talent, or that they have earned from dedication and struggle.
In my ideal world, if you remove all of the things that are not important to the task at hand, and only judge based on who is most fit for the task at hand, then the people who are the best fit would get the most appropriate reward for their capacity.
As a nonwhite male IT worker, my ability to lift heavy objects is secondary to my ability to fix a printer. If a female can fix printers better than I can, she’s more than welcome to have the job at the same pay they would have paid me for it.
Hacksaw@lemmy.ca 36 minutes ago
It’s almost like you wrote a whole thing to say “from each according to their means, to each according to their needs”
Unless you intended to say that you prefer “to each according to their means” because you believe people who achieve more due to their natural gifts should get more… But that’s kind of fucked up when you really think about it. I hope you’re born gifted!
TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today 13 hours ago
Imo an absolute meritocracy would first require a society of absolute equity. Otherwise how would you know if someone is actually more inherently better at something or if they just had more opportunity?
I think meritocracies are a nice idea, but they’ve mostly been supported by societal elites throughout history because they know it’s easy to score when you’re born on third base.
Chippys_mittens@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Godeeem