The claims of privilege and oppression from different people make me laugh myself to tears. Claims of either one loses all meaning when the people doing the whining are going to top-notch universities or from extremely well off families. That would be like Donald Trump Jr. taking to the news and claiming a set race or group had more privilege than him.

Yes, because everyone who talks about privilege is at a top notch university or from a well off family. And even if they were, you do realise that people can identify issues without the issue necessarily affecting them. And if you really think that even rich women at top notch universities are unaffected by privilege, then you're completely ignorant of the real world.

Even people who actively fight against biases have them. There are numerous studies that show this, in science, in music and many other areas.

What's incredible is that even the victims of bias have them. When presented with quick images of black or white people and asked "shoot or don't shoot", the black people are more likely to be "shot", even by other black people.
The same goes for women, where even other women are more likely to rate the same candidate for a job as less desirable if they are female.

I'm ignorant of the real world? Yeah, I'm not a kid whining about privilege and oppression in the US while being ignorant that they have it made here compared to other countries.

Women don't have privilege and are oppressed? So which does it fall under that women get lesser punishment for murder on average compared to men? What does it fall under that women have their own scholarships and grants they can apply for to attend college? What does it fall under that women on average get custody of children and alimony during divorce proceedings? What does it fall under that even after January 2016, women can join combat units, but aren't required, as of yet, to sign up for the draft? What does it fall under when a Ted Talk segment states that women make up 50% of manager positions in the workforce?

They aren't fighting for 3rd world countries, they are whining about first world problems. In the US a woman can call a guy an idiot (many do) and nothing major happens (usually, unless they are abusive neanderthals). In some 3rd world countries, a woman just speaking up or speaking her mind will result being beaten, raped, or even murdered.

In the US women are guaranteed an education from K-12 and assistance to attend college; just like men. While Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by Taliban for daring to want girls to receive education.

The US has women in Congress. We had a woman run for Vice President in 2008 and have a woman running for President in 2016.

The wage gap, the claim that women get paid less than men, the claim that doesn't take into account the fact that men on average work more hours than women because women, on average, are social so they work fewer hours in order to spend time with family or friends. This has been debunked so many times that I'm amazed it is still a talking point for any group.

Do women avoid hiring other women? Sure, here is one explaining why she doesn't hire women.

The problem with all these people crying privilege or oppression is that it is completely subjective. These people think they should get a certain thing handed to them, and the second that it isn't they play the privilege and oppression cards. I asked one night how women were oppressed, the one reply that had more than "they just are" was a woman claiming women were oppressed because they just started researching breast cancer and treatment options. Her reply made me scratch my head as they have been researching that for decades now.

To show how easy it is to pull this, I could find other DeVry graduates that took their Game and Simulation Programming degree, but never got hired to the industry and claim being oppressed for some made up reasons. I could use my weight as an excuse for being oppressed or even as a reason I don't get hired into the game industry. I've seen some fat people claim skinny people have more privilege than them. The reason they use gender and race is because the minute you call them on their lies they can label you sexist or racist in hopes of shutting you up.

In the US, modern college students are becoming more ignorant of the real world and the media is giving them air time to show how dumb our youth are getting. Like demanding safe spaces where feelings trump human rights (like the fiasco of the Professor that stopped a student journalist and called for some muscle to remove him from the safe space).

The wage gap, the claim that women get paid less than men, the claim that doesn't take into account the fact that men on average work more hours than women because women, on average, are social so they work fewer hours in order to spend time with family or friends.

That is kind of a bullshit excuse, man. You want to pin it down to "women just make different choices and choose to focus on family", but that's just not true. Women have imposed to them that "family comes first" from day one. Men don't. I know for a fact that my own mother worked a regular 9-5 job, as my father did, as happens in most working class families that need 2 salaries in order to make ends meet, but she also had to work when she got home; domestic chores, cooking, looking after the children, looking after her parents as they got older even. All my father did after work was rest. Don't get me wrong, he is a good guy, and he considers himself progressive, at least politically, but why split the work that needs to be done around the house if you don't have to, nobody pressures you or shames you for not doing it? Because that's what expected of traditional gender roles. They were taught that's how things work by their own parents. My mother wasn't going to get any kind of support if she went "on strike"; everyone, including her parents, would demand she did her duty and don't disrupt the peace of the household. Things probably have gotten better with our generation, but not entirely. Domestic chores are still considered a "woman's job" that go with the territory; if the guy does help around, he's considered some great hero. It also depends on the country and its culture/traditions, the world is not divided between USA and muslim-land. And even in the USA, there's NYC and there's Texas.

But we do have hard data, if imperfect, on salaries vs demographics across a swath of industries, and on rates of violence vs demographics, and so on.
I'll grant you also that the concept of privilege is an interpretation of what social scientists see in data and in trends -- its in some ways more hypothesis than conclusion.

Agreed, we do have hard data and this can be used to build hypotheses. But if they fail, we need to be prepared to modify or abandon them.

Take, for example, the proven earnings disparity between men and women that we have observed for decades. Privilege might tell us that this is an example of the unearned advantage men have simply for being men. But if we are looking to close this gap, privilege is like using a hammer when we need a saw. It might do the job, but others which get into specifics, such as comparing specific jobs(anaesthesiologists vs. anaesthesiologists), examining the impact of specific choices (maternity leave) and specific behaviors (comparative negotiation styles) will create a clearer picture. Privilege leads us to declare difference exists that must be addressed without knowing what or why.

But I think casting it as if its little more than sociologist spit-balling is disingenuous

It's not spit-balling. My criticism is that it's a highly defective model that all too often appears to be generating heat without shedding light.

Let it not be lost on you that by setting off "white" from "have significant depression" with the word "but" rather than "and" you are revealing some level of unconscious bias even while you are attempting to disprove that the affects of unconscious bias are too small to have a statistical impact.

It may not be a bias of your own, often these things come about just because we've absorbed a lot of the cultural radiation. Nevertheless, using the word "but" here implies an inverse relationship between the two sides -- one side is not like the other -- since we know that experiencing a significant depression is not desirable, the implication becomes that being white is desirable. You likely didn't mean to make that implication, but I hope you can take from it that this is the kind of cultural radiation exists, and that sometimes we emit more of it ourselves than we might like to think.

If you were to recipient of such radiation on a consistent, ongoing, and frequent basis it could begin to take a toll. This is one of those micro-aggressions people talk about, even if it doesn't seem very aggressive on its own.

Consider this from another point of view: How is it that three letters gave you magical insight into my mind? Did three letters reveal the secret inner workings of my (unconscious) bias or was that simply framed using the language of privilege theory?

I'm afraid I don't believe in micro-agressions. My wording, the inverse relationship you are criticizing, is actually coming from the popular tenets of privilege theory. My point is that it is incredulous that a white male who suffers debilitating depression is privileged over a black female suffering from the same based solely on race and gender.

There have been numerous study findings which have shown that putting "black" names or female names on the exact same resumes correspond to a statistically-significant degree with receiving fewer interview offers.

Is it possible that non-normative names encounter greater resistance?
http://keenetrial.com/blog/2013/05/22/ethnic-sounding-first-names-and-getting-the-job/

Does Vasily encounter as much resistance as Anton? If it were down to pure racism you'd think he would be favored. If it's tribalism and rejection of non-normative names, then you should expect this to be more universal, though we don't have any studies that I know of to that effect yet.

The Irish are an interesting case,

So we have a demonstrable case of white people who did not enjoy white privilege? So we must allow then that not all people enjoy white privilege, in which case, what good is white privilege as a lens for viewing the world?

If you argue that white privilege is somehow temporally located then it must be a relatively recent phenomenon where the Irish are concerned. In the US that would be the 1940s.

Furthermore, in today's America where we mostly don't have strong ties to the lands our forefathers emigrated from, our skin colors often stand in place of having a strong national or cultural heritage.
Its difficult today to be be against the (white) Irish when you identify as a white guy, more than, say, a Frenchman. Depending on where the culture stands, the

In England anti-Irish sentiment continues to this day and was rife during the Troubles. So we now then must allow that white privilege must be a thing both temporally and geographically located, which also doesn't apply to all white people-- in which case, again, as a lens revealing universal truths, what good is it?

As for foreign blacks vs US-born blacks, you're right that race alone doesn't directly account.

This then gives privilege even more limited utility.

I might point out, though, that many US-born blacks are born into inner-city neighborhoods with poor schools, few job opportunities for they or their parents,

Yep, you describe my life precisely (parent, fwiw)

where turning to crime might be the only way one has to support themselves

You know I struggled for a moment with how to reply to this, because it is both monstrous and everything wrong with privilege theory. What you are excusing here is, on average, the victimization of those people in the very same neighborhoods that are poor. The people you seem to be excusing are the people who make the neighborhood bad, and they deserve no excuse. "Only way" is an enabling fiction, as the vast majority who make the right choice every day already know.

where escaping this environment is not a realistic opportunity

Morgan Freeman once had a one word, rousing rebuttal to this very idea. (Not polite, so I have to suggest Googling his response to Don Lemon on this exact point).

I might point out that many of these children go years or lifetimes without one or both parents because they've been locked up for committing crimes,

Yep, I have memories of visiting a jail as a toddler.

I might point out that those parents, when arrested, don't typically have access to a real attorney for those very same reasons, and will receive roughly 30 minutes of a public defender's time (because their caseload 20x what a paid attorney deems sustainable and ethical) and that public defender will encourage every one of his clients to just take the plea, regardless of the merits of the case, because he knows his client can't afford to win a real trial. I might point out that a plea deal is still a "strike" and you've only got three. I might point out even plea deals, statistically, carry more jail-time for blacks than for whites. I might point out that when going to trail, blacks are statistically convicted at higher rates and given harsher sentences than whites. I might point those things out, but I won't, because there's clearly no reason why a US-born black man would earn less than a foreign-born black man.

Have you lived this life? You do realize that we all don't go to prison or get in trouble with the law, right? You do realize that some of us look at the odds stacked against us and apply a strategy that stretches deep into culture and world view, right? Wild parties no. Study yes. Entrepreneurial criminality no. Part-time job yes. Instant gratification no. Patience and sheer bloody mindedness yes.

When you fetishize a culture, when you move from "noble savage" to "noble underclass" you do real human beings a grave disservice. Rather than recount my own reality and the reality of many friends and family members to me, why not ask how it is that some of us do well and others do not?

Advocates for the disenfranchized need to be about empowerment. If you're doing anything else, you're doing harm. We need to be asking how the community can produce more Garret Morgans, more Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, more Mark Deans. Hero worship is a good thing when you have nowhere to go but up.

Privilege, as a lens to look through, is concerned with trends not individuals. It doesn't attempt to predict my life outcome any more than climate science tries to predict the weather during a given month next year. Whether you want to call it "privilege" or something else has as little bearing as whether we call it "global warming" or we call it "climate change" -- the trends are the same, and the call to action is the same.

From my perspective you are arguing that global warming is being caused by clouds. I grant clouds are not an insignificant factor, but to stop there is to miss the big picture.

I do agree also that a lot of time and goodwill is wasted to arguing pedantries, tone-policing and tone-police-policing, glad-handing, and trying to score ally-ship cookies.

I'm glad we agree on this but have you ever wondered WHY this exists and why this is the most prominent face in social and mass media?

I don't think it's the people. I don't think we suddenly have a crop of people into those things spilling out into the world at large.

I think it's the flaws in the philosophy itself.

To show how easy it is to pull this, I could find other DeVry graduates that took their Game and Simulation Programming degree, but never got hired to the industry and claim being oppressed for some made up reasons.

At the risk of agreeing too much, I have a real life example of a friend who took a test to get into a game course and washed out (he resisted blaming someone else thankfully). He considered himself to be really good at math and bombed pretty badly in the test's math section. A question I asked him was, "What did you study beforehand?"

He was surprised at the question.

I said to him, "What were your competitors doing? Do you think they might have been warming up? Practicing? Ask yourself why this wasn't natural for you. If you not only don't know the answer to that question, but didn't think to ask it, THAT is the core barrier to overcome."

We can pat ourselves on the back teaching young people that they are oppressed and someone must change in order to give them something, but it is far more effective to empower people with specific strategies and the resources to realize them.

[color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif][background=#fafbfc]You want to pin it down to "women just make different choices and choose to focus on family", but that's just not true.

I think the real story is mixed, with grains of truth on both sides. Consider: http://www.payscale.com/career-news/2009/11/women-earn-less-than-men-a-result-of-pregnancy-leave

What's interesting is this study found a huge disparity in pay gap over 100k and very little under 100k.

@Wavinator: I think the issue here is...imagine a 200m race where half of the athletes start with a 100ms handicap from the get-go. If they complain that this is unjust and the handicap must be lifted, you reply "Bullshit, Usain Bolt would win the race by a landslide even with a 200ms handicap". While I get your point that some of them would use this handicap as an excuse to not give it their full best, since they're convinced they're not gonna win anyway, and have a self-fullfilling prophecy, it doesn't mean that it's not unjust to ask from some to be extraordinary in order to achieve the same results as others that are...not so extraordinary.

(And yeah, I do feel uncomfortable debating this with someone that had it way worse than me, but since we agreed to discuss ideas on their merits... :) )

To be fair, from your description alone (got a link to this particular tweet?), that DOES come across as mansplaining, regardless of intent (which I'm sure was benign) if it was her job to be a 3D modeller. Like it or not, condescending explanations by men directed at women come across as mansplaining even when they aren't obviously so. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the act that is labeled "mansplaining" also happens with men - I've had concepts re-explained to me by senior devs that I already know, apparently purely on the grounds that I haven't been in the industry as long as they have - but that act becomes more "politically charged" (for lack of a better term) when it happens to a woman just due to the history and context. Arguably, him being chair of a women in games initiative makes it worse, because that means he should be familiar with the issues and therefore know better.

My description was a summation of things - I also don't have a link as this was on twitter around a year to 18 months ago and oddly enough I don't keep links to bullshit events just in case I need to refer to them later ;)

It was part of her job, but it was also his job too - the reply was made off the back of her advice to someone else, a counter point to what was, based on available evidence, not the best advice which could be given. His choice at that point was put forward a counter argument or let someone else potentially take bad information away from the exchange - he decided to give his professional opinion.

However the rest of what you said basically backs up my point and my position - I'm a white male, I can't say ANYTHING without someone taking it wrong and The Mob turning up.

There was no need for a mob; a reply of 'this is work in progress' would likely defused the situation nicely and is a discussion.
Instead the mob was called down, someone trying to do the right thing was torn a new one and people like me, watching on, end up thinking "Fuck the feminist man, they are bat shit, I'm out", walls go up and the situation gets worse.

If I can't present my professional opinion to a woman for fear of a mob then we have taken a step backwards.

(And this was some terrible stuff; comments telling him to fuck off, asking who he thought he was, I seem to vaguely recall something about people like him should die although I wouldn't swear to it, basically vile stuff which if a group of men had said it to a woman would be shouted about up and down the internet, and all of it utterly utterly out of proportion to what boils down to 'I think the texture resolution is too high')

Do you realize that mocking an artist for having the texture in their source art in "too high resolution" is just the most noob thing there can be (from a engineer stand of view)???? A few packs of wolfes on that blasphemy, she was right.

I'm sorry, where the FUCK did you get 'mocking' from?
Don't even THINK about reframing the argument to 'mocking'.
There was no 'mocking' there was just advice based on advice which seemed bad.
There was NO justification for a 'wolf pack' and the fact you can sit there and claim as such is bullshit frankly.

@Wavinator: I think the issue here is...imagine a 200m race where half of the athletes start with a 100ms handicap from the get-go. If they complain that this is unjust and the handicap must be lifted, you reply "Bullshit, Usain Bolt would win the race by a landslide even with a 200ms handicap". While I get your point that some of them would use this handicap as an excuse to not give it their full best, since they're convinced they're not gonna win anyway, and have a self-fullfilling prophecy, it doesn't mean that it's not unjust to ask from some to be extraordinary in order to achieve the same results as others that are...not so extraordinary.

So you're saying that poor people/minorities/women are less capable than whites/asians, and need to be boosted by society as a handicapped person needs a prosthetic during a race?

As someone who does the majority of our IT hiring/interviews/pay recommendations, the male/female pay gap thing is 100% a myth for wages under 130k~ The reason why jobs over that DO have a pay difference is because those jobs are extremely important, and having someone take maternity leave/take off for more family emergencies can be absolutely devastating. It's the same case for a male though, if a male wanted to have a more active social/family life I'd hesitate just the same to hire him at the same rate as someone dedicated to the role.

To put it into perspective, we got 4 weeks of vacation time per year, and it accrues yearly when it's not used. I currently have 18 weeks of vacation time accrued, using my time on on funerals or moving, mostly. A typical work day is I start meetings at 8:00, get to work at 10:00, work until 3:00, have lunch in my office (while working), and work until around 7:00 before going home. On days where we have items being launched (every 4-5 weeks), I work from 9:30 - until whenever it's done (usually around 11:00).

It's absurdly hard trying to find women (and men, but especially women) willing to work the same schedule, because it pretty much demands that they have a full-time spouse to take care of the kids, and stay at home dads are way more rare than stay at home moms. Honestly, I'm dreading when I have kids, and have no idea how I'm going to be able to handle it, but that's the tradeoff for a well-paying job.

If I can't present my professional opinion to a woman for fear of a mob then we have taken a step backwards.

Especially in tech, where the best solution is almost always collaborative. Take a loot at the great debugging PVS studio publishes in their performance/debug breakdowns

http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0384/

If they chose a game that happened to be developed by a woman would it be "mansplaining"?

@Wavinator: I think the issue here is...imagine a 200m race where half of the athletes start with a 100ms handicap from the get-go. If they complain that this is unjust and the handicap must be lifted, you reply "Bullshit, Usain Bolt would win the race by a landslide even with a 200ms handicap". While I get your point that some of them would use this handicap as an excuse to not give it their full best, since they're convinced they're not gonna win anyway, and have a self-fullfilling prophecy, it doesn't mean that it's not unjust to ask from some to be extraordinary in order to achieve the same results as others that are...not so extraordinary.

So you're saying that poor people/minorities/women are less capable than whites/asians, and need to be boosted by society as a handicapped person needs a prosthetic during a race?

Wow, really? I was talking about an artificial/imposed "handicap"(another term for "penalty", if you will, for sports), not an actual handicap in abilities obviously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicapping

As in, all the athletes start with time counting at 00:00, but some start with time counting at -00:010. Or, as in, in a hurdle race, some athletes have to jump over 8 obstacles, and some have to jump over 12. Yes, a poor kid has less chances at good education and career opportunities than a more affluent one. The one from a more affluent family does have a head-start for the sole fact that they were born in an affluent family. Are we really debating that? That doesn't mean the poorer kids have *no* chances, it doesn't mean they can't overcome the additional obstacles and become great, it means they generally have *less* chances, *more* obstacles, and they have to put *more* effort for equal result. *Generally*. *On average*. I think in this board we can understand these terms, right?

Sure, maybe a kid from a wealthier family suffers from severe depression, and that makes it for them harder than a kid from a poorer family, but we're not comparing individual cases, because in large groups they tend to "neutralize" each other. When we're comparing the temperature in 2 objects, we're not comparing the odd molecule in the cold object that might have greater energy than the odd molecule in the cold object. We compare the averages, we deal in macroscopic terms. The kids in the "poor" group have equal chances of having depression, some physical malady, or any other sort of disadvantage beyond wealth. That means that, with the abilities in both groups being generally the same, the group which gets a head-start will most probably have more individuals that progress further than the group that starts with a disadvantage. That's the handicap I'm talking about, and for which the poor kid has no responsibility whatsoever, but they have to deal with it anyway.