I think that “privilege” (in its more reasonable forms) basically refers to a special case of the Typical Mind Fallacy, one where people are prone to dismissing or understating the problems of one group because they don’t personally experience them in the same way. For a relatively neutral example, there’s this bit in Yvain’s post:
I can’t deal with noise. If someone’s being loud, I can’t sleep, I can’t study, I can’t concentrate, I can’t do anything except bang my head against the wall and hope they stop. I once had a noisy housemate. Whenever I asked her to keep it down, she told me I was being oversensitive and should just mellow out. I can’t claim total victory here, because she was very neat and kept yelling at me for leaving things out of place, and I told her she needed to just mellow out and you couldn’t even tell that there was dust on that dresser anyway. It didn’t occur to me then that neatness to her might be as necessary and uncompromisable as quiet was to me, and that this was an actual feature of how our minds processed information rather than just some weird quirk on her part.
I would say that these are pretty much perfect examples of privilege: situations in which the perfectly reasonable problems of one party are completely invisible to the other, to the point that the other cannot even see what the problem is and thinks that the other person is just complaining about nothing.
The metabolically privileged don’t believe in metabolic privilege, since they are able to lose weight by trying! harder! to diet and exercise, and the diet and exercise actually work the way they’re supposed to…
So “privilege” is a useful concept, one which has actually already seen use in the LW community. In this context, “check your privilege” is a call to re-evaluate one’s assumptions and to take into account the factors which make the situation genuinely problematic for others but a non-problem for you.
Even the “privilege means you’re not allowed to have any opinion other than the social justice consensus” sense can be a somewhat reasonable one—there are plausibly positions where people frequently and commonly become guilty of the Typical Mind Fallacy, and where a consensus of the people who’ve given the issue some thought agrees on this, and people who disagree are likely to just be flat-out wrong. (You could say that it’s the SJW version of “read the Sequences”.)
A classic SJW example of privilege that I think is justified is the case of sexual harassment of women, where men frequently react to cases of harassment with variations of “I don’t see the problem here, if someone did that to me I’d just be flattered”. In that case, the fallacy involves an inability to take into account the fact that a behavior that one might consider flattering if it only happened rarely will become unbearable if repeated sufficiently often (obligatory link), and also that men being stronger women creates a sense of accompanying danger that wouldn’t be present in the case of women harassing men.
I thought Of Dogs and Lizards was also a nice illustration of these concepts:
This is where things get a bit tricky to understand. Because most examples of social privilege aren’t that straightforward. Let’s take, for example, a basic bit of male privilege:
A man has the privilege of walking past a group of strange women without worrying about being catcalled, or leered at, or having sexual suggestions tossed at him.
A pretty common male response to this point is “that’s a privilege? I would love if a group of women did that to me.”
And that response, right there, is a perfect shining example of male privilege.
To explain how and why, I am going to throw a lengthy metaphor at you. In fact, it may even qualify as parable. Bear with me, because if it makes everything crystal clear, it will be worth the time.
Imagine, if you will, a small house, built someplace cool-ish but not cold, perhaps somewhere in Ohio, and inhabited by a dog and a lizard. The dog is a big dog, something shaggy and nordic, like a Husky or Lapphund – a sled dog, built for the snow. The lizard is small, a little gecko best adapted to living in a muggy rainforest somewhere. Neither have ever lived anywhere else, nor met any other creature; for the purposes of this exercise, this small house is the entirety of their universe.
The dog, much as you might expect, turns on the air conditioning. Really cranks it up, all the time – this dog was bred for hunting moose on the tundra, even the winter here in Ohio is a little warm for his taste. If he can get the house to fifty (that’s ten C, for all you weirdo metric users out there), he’s almost happy.
The gecko can’t do much to control the temperature – she’s got tiny little fingers, she can’t really work the thermostat or turn the dials on the A/C. Sometimes, when there’s an incandescent light nearby, she can curl up near it and pick up some heat that way, but for the most part, most of the time, she just has to live with what the dog chooses. This is, of course, much too cold for her – she’s a gecko. Not only does she have no fur, she’s cold-blooded! The temperature makes her sluggish and sick, and it permeates her entire universe. Maybe here and there she can find small spaces of warmth, but if she ever wants to actually do anything, to eat or watch TV or talk to the dog, she has to move through the cold house.
Now, remember, she’s never known anything else. This is just how the world is – cold and painful and unhealthy for her, even dangerous, and she copes as she knows how. But maybe some small part of her thinks, “hey, it shouldn’t be like this,” some tiny growing seed of rebellion that says who she is right next to a lamp is who she should be all the time. And she and the dog are partners, in a sense, right? They live in this house together, they affect each other, all they’ve got is each other. So one day, she sees the dog messing with the A/C again, and she says, “hey. Dog. Listen, it makes me really cold when you do that.”
The dog kind of looks at her, and shrugs, and keeps turning the dial.
This is not because the dog is a jerk.
This is because the dog has no fucking clue what the lizard even just said.
Consider: he’s a nordic dog in a temperate climate. The word “cold” is completely meaningless to him. He’s never been cold in his entire life. He lives in an environment that is perfectly suited to him, completely aligned with his comfort level, a world he grew up with the tools to survive and control, built right in to the way he was born.
So the lizard tries to explain it to him. She says, “well, hey, how would you like it if I turned the temperature down on you?”
The dog goes, “uh… sounds good to me.”
What she really means, of course, is “how would you like it if I made you cold.” But she can’t make him cold. She doesn’t have the tools, or the power, their shared world is not built in a way that allows it – she simply is not physically capable of doing the same harm to him that he’s doing to her. She could make him feel pain, probably, I’m sure she could stab him with a toothpick or put something nasty in his food or something, but this specific form of pain, he will never, ever understand – it’s not something that can be inflicted on him, given the nature of the world they live in and the way it’s slanted in his favor in this instance. So he doesn’t get what she’s saying to him, and keeps hurting her.
Most privilege is like this.
A straight cisgendered male American, because of who he is and the culture he lives in, does not and cannot feel the stress, creepiness, and outright threat behind a catcall the way a woman can. His upbringing has given him fur and paws big enough to turn the dials and plopped him down in temperate Ohio. When she says “you don’t have to put up with being leered at,” what she means is, “you don’t ever have to be wary of sexual interest.” That’s male privilege. Not so much that something doesn’t happen to men, but that it will never carry the same weight, even if it does.
So what does this mean? And what are we asking you to do, when we say “check your privilege” or “your privilege is showing”?
Well, quite simply, we want you to understand when you have fur. And, by extension, when that means you should listen. See, the dog’s not an asshole just for turning down the temperature. As far as he knows, that’s fine, right? He genuinely cannot feel the pain it causes, he doesn’t even know about it. No one thinks he’s a bad person for totally accidentally doing harm.
Here’s where he becomes an asshole: the minute the gecko says, “look, you’re hurting me,” and he says, “what? No, I’m not. This ‘cold’ stuff doesn’t even exist, I should know, I’ve never felt it. You’re imagining it. It’s not there. It’s fine because of fur, because of paws, because look, you can curl up around this lamp, because sometimes my water dish is too tepid and I just shut up and cope, obviously temperature isn’t this big deal you make it, and you’ve never had to deal with mange anyway, my life is just as hard.”
And then the dog just ignores it. Because he can. That’s the privilege that comes with having fur, with being a dog in Ohio. He doesn’t have to think about it. He doesn’t have to live daily with the cold. He has no idea what he’s talking about, and he will never, ever be forced to learn. He can keep making the lizard miserable until the day they both die, and he will never suffer for it beyond the mild annoyance of her complaining. And she, meanwhile, gets to try not to freeze to death.
privilege: situations in which the perfectly reasonable problems of one party are completely invisible to the other, to the point that the other cannot even see what the problem is and thinks that the other person is just complaining about nothing.
That definition is incomplete without having power mentioned in it.
For example, it’s culturally difficult for “straight cisgendered male Americans” to show weakness. It’s not a problem for women. Take the stereotypical situation when a couple is lost and the man refuses to ask for directions. The woman is annoyed at him. Can he tell her “check your privilege”?
Even the “privilege means you’re not allowed to have any opinion other than the social justice consensus” sense can be a somewhat reasonable one
For example, it’s culturally difficult for “straight cisgendered male Americans” to show weakness. It’s not a problem for women. Take the stereotypical situation when a couple is lost and the man refuses to ask for directions. The woman is annoyed at him. Can he tell her “check your privilege”?
Depends on who you ask. I would say yes, some would say no.
I strongly disagree. It cannot be.
Right, a literal “never allowed to have” cannot be. What I meant to say was that positions that might easily seem like “you are never allowed to have this opinion” might actually be positions of “this position is so likely to be wrong as to not be worth wasting our time with”, which can sometimes (though definitely not always) be reasonable.
actually be positions of “this position is so likely to be wrong as to not be worth wasting our time with”
Sure, there are lots of those. But notice the difference in accents: “I think you have no clue to the extent that I am not going to bother and waste my time”—vs. ” You have no right to your opinion”, especially if there’s an explicit or implicit “because you belong to a privileged class”.
What on earth could it possibly mean for you to have (or not have) “a right to your opinion”?
One possibility that occurs to me is that the expression “I have a right to my opinion!” has to do with whether people will give you the last word — it’s a claim to power over other people in conversation. Asserting “I have a right to my opinion” is a way of saying, “Shut up! I’m not talking about this with you any more!” Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is a way of saying, “No, I won’t shut up; I will go on trying to convince you that you are wrong.”
Another possibility is that “I have a right to my opinion!” is a statement that one intends to continue to confidently assert a view which has been undermined by evidence or argument, without acknowledging or responding to the criticism. Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “you are being epistemically rude; stop it.”
A third possibility is that “I have a right to my opinion!” is an assertion that some topics are too socially volatile to be exposed to much criticism. This seems to be what people mean when they bring up “the right to your opinion” in matters of religious doctrine. Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “I’m not going to stop publicly debunking your religion just because you don’t like me doing it.”
Fourth, “I have a right to my opinion!” could be a demand to not be treated worse socially by others on account of one’s opinion, even if others may fear that the opinion may lead you to treat them worse. This would seem to be a demand for unilateral disarmament: “I will go on being bigoted against Blues, and I demand that Blues not treat me badly, even if they fear that I will treat them badly.” Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “Yes, I am going to treat your opinion as evidence about your character and your future actions, and treat you accordingly.”
Lastly, “I have a right to my opinion!” could be an effort to tar one’s (nonviolent) critics by associating them with some sort of (violent) censors — an Inquisition, a secret police — and to rally defenders of freedom to attack those critics. Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “I do not pose the kind of threat that you are claiming. You have no business invoking the defense of freedom on your opinion’s behalf, since freedom is not threatened. This is not a matter of ‘rights’; it is a matter of conversation, argument, and evidence. Stop trying to escalate it into a matter of ‘rights’.”
It’s also possible that “I have a right to my opinion” can mean “I have a right to enough time to assimilate new information without being told I have to think differently because someone else is sure they’re right.”
It might be interesting, the next time you come across someone who says “I have a right to my opinion”, to ask them what they mean.
After seeing your comment, I went and read what Wikipedia had to say about that incident.
I’d heard about Summers’ resignation only at some remove, and only really from bloggers who had opinions on one side or the other on the women-in-science issue. As a result, I hadn’t known that there were other contributing factors to Summers’ resignation besides that one. It seems that there were — including other conflicts with the faculty … and a corruption scandal involving Russia’s post-Soviet privatization program that led to Harvard paying a $26.5 million settlement to the Federal government.
I guess that goes to show the consequences of getting news from partisan sources. The rest of the story is substantially less exciting to folks who care about the “Social Justice vs. Political Incorrectness” Blue-Green war, though, so it’s no surprise it didn’t get as much press.
Sure. I didn’t read the original as a literal quote but rather as a rough characterization of a perceived attitude, so I didn’t pay much attention to the details of the exact wording, since I treated it as referring to a set of many different statements that include both of the variants in your comment, as well as others.
Even the “privilege means you’re not allowed to have any opinion other than the social justice consensus” sense can be a somewhat reasonable one
I strongly disagree. It cannot be.
Are you simply going to say you disagree with Kaj here on this last part or actually respond to their comment, especially say the end of the sentence you cut off where Kaj said:
there are plausibly positions where people frequently and commonly become guilty of the Typical Mind Fallacy, and where a consensus of the people who’ve given the issue some thought agrees on this, and people who disagree are likely to just be flat-out wrong. (You could say that it’s the SJW version of “read the Sequences”.)
I am going to point out that “you’re not allowed to have any other opinion” and “I believe your opinion is wrong because of A, B, and C” are very different statements.
How much depends on what one means by allowed? For example, it isn’t unreasonable to say that I shouldn’t have an opinion on whether or not sterile neutrinos exist- because I have nowhere near the physics background to remotely understand the question beyond at an extremely basic level.
it isn’t unreasonable to say that I shouldn’t have an opinion on whether or not sterile neutrinos exist
That depends on who’s doing the talking.
It’s not unreasonable for you to decide that you shouldn’t have an opinion on X until you found out more about X.
When another party tells you that you are not allowed to have an opinion on X the very first issue that pops up is what power/authority does that other party have to decide which opinions you are allowed to have and which not?
CYP doesn’t come up in discussions of neutrinos, it comes up in discussion of sociopolitical issues and in that context allowing or not allowing people to have certain opinions has a long and ugly history.
When another party tells you that you are not allowed to have an opinion on X the very first issue that pops up is what power/authority does that other party have to decide which opinions you are allowed to have and which not?
Is it similarly true, if another party tells me that the very first issue that pops up under certain circumstances is X, that the very first issue that pops up is what power/authority does that other party have to decide what the very first issue is and isn’t?
This seems to me a silly way to treat ordinary discourse.
When you tell me that X is the very first issue to pop up, I take that to mean you’re more interested in discussing X than anything else. If someone tells me I shouldn’t have an opinion about X, I take that to mean they’re not interested in hearing about my opinion. Yes, in both cases they are expressing themselves as though their personal preferences were facts about the world, but I just treat that as a fairly basic rhetorical maneuver to establish their conversation status.
I take that to mean you’re more interested in discussing X than anything else
Generally speaking, no, it doesn’t mean that I’m more interested in X. What it means is that the answer to X will influence and affect discussions of Y and Z so we might as well start with X because we’ll end up there anyway.
If someone tells me I shouldn’t have an opinion about X, I take that to mean they’re not interested in hearing about my opinion.
I take that differently—I understand that as containing a moral judgment as to which opinions are acceptable/allowed and which are not. After all in this case you can have an opinion as long as it is the correct “social justice” one. Any color as long as it’s black.
So it sounds like on your account, if I were to rail against you for deciding that we’re going to talk about X now and that I’m not allowed to talk about Y and Z, I would be missing the point, because what’s really going on has nothing to do with who is deciding what and who has the power.
Rather, you’re just pointing out that, since the answer to X will influence and affect discussions of Y and Z, there is a conversational failure mode we can avoid by talking about X first. On your account, you aren’t expressing a moral judgment about what topics are acceptable/allowed, you’re just saying that some topics will cause the conversation to proceed more usefully (by addressing the fundamental issues first) and others will cause it to proceed less usefully.
Yes?
By contrast, on your account, the “social justice” warriors who say that, for example, men aren’t entitled to an opinion about the prevalence of sexism against women in our culture, aren’t making any such claim. There is no model of conversational dynamics they operate from such that such expressions of opinion can be expected to cause a conversation to proceed less usefully. In that case it really is about who is deciding what and who has the power.
there is a conversational failure mode we can avoid by talking about X first
Not so much even a failure mode, as an observation that the optimal path is X → Y → Z and if you start anywhere else you’ll have to come back to X soon, anyway.
some topics will cause the conversation to proceed more usefully (by addressing the fundamental issues first) and others will cause it to proceed less usefully.
Yes.
such expressions of opinion can be expected to cause a conversation to proceed less usefully.
More than that, CYP generally aims at putting a full stop to a particular branch of a conversation. It’s like “This here is a Sacred Truth, all you can do is accept it, and we will tolerate no doubts about it”.
In that case it really is about who is deciding what and who has the power.
Claims to power, yes, not necessarily the actual power.
I don’t agree with your position generally, but I certainly agree that there exist individuals who have the kind of “This here is a Sacred Truth, all you can do is accept it, and we will tolerate no doubts about it” attitude towards what we’ve been calling “social justice”, and there exist many communities where such individuals exert disproportionate power.
When another party tells you that you are not allowed to have an opinion on X the very first issue that pops up is what power/authority does that other party have to decide which opinions you are allowed to have and which not?
I think you may want to see Kaj’s comment here, which I think clarifies what is going on.
I think that “privilege” (in its more reasonable forms) basically refers to a special case of the Typical Mind Fallacy, one where people are prone to dismissing or understating the problems of one group because they don’t personally experience them in the same way. For a relatively neutral example, there’s this bit in Yvain’s post:
I would say that these are pretty much perfect examples of privilege: situations in which the perfectly reasonable problems of one party are completely invisible to the other, to the point that the other cannot even see what the problem is and thinks that the other person is just complaining about nothing.
Similarly, Eliezer has explicitly used the term “metabolic privilege” in pretty much this sense:
So “privilege” is a useful concept, one which has actually already seen use in the LW community. In this context, “check your privilege” is a call to re-evaluate one’s assumptions and to take into account the factors which make the situation genuinely problematic for others but a non-problem for you.
Even the “privilege means you’re not allowed to have any opinion other than the social justice consensus” sense can be a somewhat reasonable one—there are plausibly positions where people frequently and commonly become guilty of the Typical Mind Fallacy, and where a consensus of the people who’ve given the issue some thought agrees on this, and people who disagree are likely to just be flat-out wrong. (You could say that it’s the SJW version of “read the Sequences”.)
A classic SJW example of privilege that I think is justified is the case of sexual harassment of women, where men frequently react to cases of harassment with variations of “I don’t see the problem here, if someone did that to me I’d just be flattered”. In that case, the fallacy involves an inability to take into account the fact that a behavior that one might consider flattering if it only happened rarely will become unbearable if repeated sufficiently often (obligatory link), and also that men being stronger women creates a sense of accompanying danger that wouldn’t be present in the case of women harassing men.
I thought Of Dogs and Lizards was also a nice illustration of these concepts:
That definition is incomplete without having power mentioned in it.
For example, it’s culturally difficult for “straight cisgendered male Americans” to show weakness. It’s not a problem for women. Take the stereotypical situation when a couple is lost and the man refuses to ask for directions. The woman is annoyed at him. Can he tell her “check your privilege”?
I strongly disagree. It cannot be.
Depends on who you ask. I would say yes, some would say no.
Right, a literal “never allowed to have” cannot be. What I meant to say was that positions that might easily seem like “you are never allowed to have this opinion” might actually be positions of “this position is so likely to be wrong as to not be worth wasting our time with”, which can sometimes (though definitely not always) be reasonable.
Sure, there are lots of those. But notice the difference in accents: “I think you have no clue to the extent that I am not going to bother and waste my time”—vs. ” You have no right to your opinion”, especially if there’s an explicit or implicit “because you belong to a privileged class”.
What on earth could it possibly mean for you to have (or not have) “a right to your opinion”?
One possibility that occurs to me is that the expression “I have a right to my opinion!” has to do with whether people will give you the last word — it’s a claim to power over other people in conversation. Asserting “I have a right to my opinion” is a way of saying, “Shut up! I’m not talking about this with you any more!” Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is a way of saying, “No, I won’t shut up; I will go on trying to convince you that you are wrong.”
Another possibility is that “I have a right to my opinion!” is a statement that one intends to continue to confidently assert a view which has been undermined by evidence or argument, without acknowledging or responding to the criticism. Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “you are being epistemically rude; stop it.”
A third possibility is that “I have a right to my opinion!” is an assertion that some topics are too socially volatile to be exposed to much criticism. This seems to be what people mean when they bring up “the right to your opinion” in matters of religious doctrine. Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “I’m not going to stop publicly debunking your religion just because you don’t like me doing it.”
Fourth, “I have a right to my opinion!” could be a demand to not be treated worse socially by others on account of one’s opinion, even if others may fear that the opinion may lead you to treat them worse. This would seem to be a demand for unilateral disarmament: “I will go on being bigoted against Blues, and I demand that Blues not treat me badly, even if they fear that I will treat them badly.” Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “Yes, I am going to treat your opinion as evidence about your character and your future actions, and treat you accordingly.”
Lastly, “I have a right to my opinion!” could be an effort to tar one’s (nonviolent) critics by associating them with some sort of (violent) censors — an Inquisition, a secret police — and to rally defenders of freedom to attack those critics. Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “I do not pose the kind of threat that you are claiming. You have no business invoking the defense of freedom on your opinion’s behalf, since freedom is not threatened. This is not a matter of ‘rights’; it is a matter of conversation, argument, and evidence. Stop trying to escalate it into a matter of ‘rights’.”
It’s also possible that “I have a right to my opinion” can mean “I have a right to enough time to assimilate new information without being told I have to think differently because someone else is sure they’re right.”
It might be interesting, the next time you come across someone who says “I have a right to my opinion”, to ask them what they mean.
For a trivial example, it turned out that Larry Summers did not have a right to his opinion about why women are underrepresented in certain fields.
After seeing your comment, I went and read what Wikipedia had to say about that incident.
I’d heard about Summers’ resignation only at some remove, and only really from bloggers who had opinions on one side or the other on the women-in-science issue. As a result, I hadn’t known that there were other contributing factors to Summers’ resignation besides that one. It seems that there were — including other conflicts with the faculty … and a corruption scandal involving Russia’s post-Soviet privatization program that led to Harvard paying a $26.5 million settlement to the Federal government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Summers#President_of_Harvard
I guess that goes to show the consequences of getting news from partisan sources. The rest of the story is substantially less exciting to folks who care about the “Social Justice vs. Political Incorrectness” Blue-Green war, though, so it’s no surprise it didn’t get as much press.
Of course it didn’t end there...
Sure. I didn’t read the original as a literal quote but rather as a rough characterization of a perceived attitude, so I didn’t pay much attention to the details of the exact wording, since I treated it as referring to a set of many different statements that include both of the variants in your comment, as well as others.
Are you simply going to say you disagree with Kaj here on this last part or actually respond to their comment, especially say the end of the sentence you cut off where Kaj said:
I am going to point out that “you’re not allowed to have any other opinion” and “I believe your opinion is wrong because of A, B, and C” are very different statements.
How much depends on what one means by allowed? For example, it isn’t unreasonable to say that I shouldn’t have an opinion on whether or not sterile neutrinos exist- because I have nowhere near the physics background to remotely understand the question beyond at an extremely basic level.
That depends on who’s doing the talking.
It’s not unreasonable for you to decide that you shouldn’t have an opinion on X until you found out more about X.
When another party tells you that you are not allowed to have an opinion on X the very first issue that pops up is what power/authority does that other party have to decide which opinions you are allowed to have and which not?
CYP doesn’t come up in discussions of neutrinos, it comes up in discussion of sociopolitical issues and in that context allowing or not allowing people to have certain opinions has a long and ugly history.
Is it similarly true, if another party tells me that the very first issue that pops up under certain circumstances is X, that the very first issue that pops up is what power/authority does that other party have to decide what the very first issue is and isn’t?
This seems to me a silly way to treat ordinary discourse.
When you tell me that X is the very first issue to pop up, I take that to mean you’re more interested in discussing X than anything else. If someone tells me I shouldn’t have an opinion about X, I take that to mean they’re not interested in hearing about my opinion. Yes, in both cases they are expressing themselves as though their personal preferences were facts about the world, but I just treat that as a fairly basic rhetorical maneuver to establish their conversation status.
Generally speaking, no, it doesn’t mean that I’m more interested in X. What it means is that the answer to X will influence and affect discussions of Y and Z so we might as well start with X because we’ll end up there anyway.
I take that differently—I understand that as containing a moral judgment as to which opinions are acceptable/allowed and which are not. After all in this case you can have an opinion as long as it is the correct “social justice” one. Any color as long as it’s black.
So it sounds like on your account, if I were to rail against you for deciding that we’re going to talk about X now and that I’m not allowed to talk about Y and Z, I would be missing the point, because what’s really going on has nothing to do with who is deciding what and who has the power.
Rather, you’re just pointing out that, since the answer to X will influence and affect discussions of Y and Z, there is a conversational failure mode we can avoid by talking about X first. On your account, you aren’t expressing a moral judgment about what topics are acceptable/allowed, you’re just saying that some topics will cause the conversation to proceed more usefully (by addressing the fundamental issues first) and others will cause it to proceed less usefully.
Yes?
By contrast, on your account, the “social justice” warriors who say that, for example, men aren’t entitled to an opinion about the prevalence of sexism against women in our culture, aren’t making any such claim. There is no model of conversational dynamics they operate from such that such expressions of opinion can be expected to cause a conversation to proceed less usefully. In that case it really is about who is deciding what and who has the power.
So the two aren’t comparable.
Yes?
Not so much even a failure mode, as an observation that the optimal path is X → Y → Z and if you start anywhere else you’ll have to come back to X soon, anyway.
Yes.
More than that, CYP generally aims at putting a full stop to a particular branch of a conversation. It’s like “This here is a Sacred Truth, all you can do is accept it, and we will tolerate no doubts about it”.
Claims to power, yes, not necessarily the actual power.
Yes.
OK; thanks for clarifying.
I don’t agree with your position generally, but I certainly agree that there exist individuals who have the kind of “This here is a Sacred Truth, all you can do is accept it, and we will tolerate no doubts about it” attitude towards what we’ve been calling “social justice”, and there exist many communities where such individuals exert disproportionate power.
I think you may want to see Kaj’s comment here, which I think clarifies what is going on.