Republicans can’t pass an immigration bill, and somehow that’s Obama’s fault

[Sean Renaud]

So basically nothing. Thought so.

 

[PayDay]

So basically nothing. Thought so.

What is nothing to you is everything to me. I love the United States of America and the Constitution.

In any other country in the world, I would have been killed or murdered for being a heretic.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Yeah. . .no you wouldn't have.

 

[PayDay]

Yeah. . .no you wouldn't have.

Then you don't know what you are looking at, as I have said to you before. Creepers even tried to kill me in this country for being a heretic.

Grow up.

 

[Sean Renaud]

We're actually still quite religious in the US. If you nearly got lynched here for your religious beliefs you'd probably have been safer anywhere in Western Europe. I'm sorry face the facts, we are not the best country any anything good these days. You can attempt an argument that we've got the best combination of traits but the reality if there is any single thing you value there is a better place than here.

 

[PayDay]

We're actually still quite religious in the US. If you nearly got lynched here for your religious beliefs you'd probably have been safer anywhere in Western Europe. I'm sorry face the facts, we are not the best country any anything good these days. You can attempt an argument that we've got the best combination of traits but the reality if there is any single thing you value there is a better place than here.

COME TO SEE THE SIMPLE MINDS INHERENT IN THE SYSTEM---^

 

[KingOrfeo]

Also: I have no privilege.

You do if you're white.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Fuck You. I am worried about my Constitution.

You needn't worry about it for any reason connected to immigration.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Creepers even tried to kill me in this country for being a heretic.

Of course you're a heretic -- I keep tellin' ya, we don't actually worship Satan, he's just a name for our egos, and anyone in your grotto will tell you the same!

 

[Que]

You do if you're white.

White-Guilt-Liberal-Racism much?

So it's just skin deep this privilege of which you speak? All of my advantages are washed away if only I could tan better? What if I have a last name of Rodriques, but I am whiter than you? What if my last name is Bundeshoffer and I have dark skin and blue eyes?

Is Obama 1/2 privileged?

What about in an environment like telecommuting where no one that I work with know my shame of being white?

Does an impoverished, out-of-work Appalachian coal miner who is white have this privilege over, say... A highly paid black roughneck working an oil platform two weeks a month in the gulf?

What about a black club owner versus the white bouncer or restroom attendant he employs?

You are an ambulance chasing lawyer but you have a passing familiarity with the law as it relates to racial discrimination, yes?

Lets suppose that in the entire state of Florida and your animated discussions with the many black folks you hob-knob and fraternize with, you come to hear of an instance where some deserving, qualified black man has been pushed aside for some asshole with white privilege. Do you happen to have any legal advice or could you refer him to anyone that might be able to SLIGHTLY rectify that injustice? Maybe?

I hope some smart, black lawyer beats you to the hospital today and eats your white-privileged lunch.

 

[KingOrfeo]

White-Guilt-Liberal-Racism much?

So it's just skin deep this privilege of which you speak? All of my advantages are washed away if only I could tan better? What if I have a last name of Rodriques, but I am whiter than you? What if my last name is Bundeshoffer and I have dark skin and blue eyes?

Privilege:

Privilege is the benefits and advantages held by a group in power, or in a majority, that arise because of the oppression and suppression of minority groups. Often these benefits and advantages are not codified as legal rights and arise as secondary qualities to suppression (see the examples below). This causes them to become difficult to spot, and remain unseen or unrecognised. This aspect in particular is known as privilege blindness.

Because of privilege and the related blindness to it, people who ostensibly support equal rights for people can still inadvertently marginalize them by being distanced from their concerns.

Privilege is a key concept within a sociological and social justice context. The term derives from the basic definition of "privilege" (that one has special rights over another), but is expanded upon as a specific term of art amongst social justice activists — and as a result can lead to it being misunderstood and dismissed immediately (see the misconceptions section below).

Privilege is when you think something is not a problem because it's not a problem to you personally.[1]

Worked examples

The concept of privilege can be applied to many different social justice areas, including class and wealth distribution, racism or sexism/misogyny. Privilege is essentially the immunity that some (usually majority, usually in-power) classes have against these forms of discrimination. As well as these "hidden advantages", there is also the case of how society is set up to treat majority vs minority classes in terms of their expectations, preconceptions and stereotyping. It is best illustrated by a few examples of clear cases and subtle cases.

Walking home at night

The majority of rape cases are male-on-female, a statistical asymmetry that is well-quantified. The result is that a fear of rape, or a threat of rape, is a real thing for women far more than for men. Generally speaking, men have fewer reasons (both statistical and tangible) to fear a sexual assault. This is what is being referred to by "privilege" in this sense. Men have a particular privilege not to experience this fear, or in other words women have a particular under-privilege (or lack of privilege) to experience it.

Public displays of affection.

Heterosexual imagery is used in the vast majority of advertising and media, despite the fact that as much as 10% of the population may be gay, or some degree of bisexual or queer. In short, heterosexual behaviour is on constant display, is rarely ever challenged, and is effectively "normalised". So, consider the cases where people say that they're all for LGBT equality (cf. "Not racist, but..."), but disapprove of it being displayed prominently and "rammed down their throats". This is a classic case of privilege and privilege-blindness because ostensibly overt displays of affection from homosexuals are actually no more or less overt than those from heterosexuals. Boy-girl hand-holding is unlikely to even register for most people, while boy-boy or girl-girl combinations in the street — because of their relative rarity — are likely to produce a much stronger signal.

In short, those who ask homosexual couples to be less open and "in your face" about their gayness simply don't realise how open and "in your face" heterosexual couples are.

Racial profiling

The Arizona bill "Arizona SB 1070"[2] attracted significant controversy because it encouraged racial profiling of suspected illegal immigrants. This appeared to attract broad support from Americans, with 60% backing the idea of racial profiling. However, the majority of people voting were (and still are, presumably) white and therefore would never have been the victims of any racial profiling. Being victimized for their skin color was never a foreseeable consequence for those people, and so they lacked any personal salience towards the issue.

This lack of salience is exactly what the "privilege" argument addresses. People make the assumption that because something is not an issue for them, it should not be an issue for others. This is clearly not going to be the case.

Car repair and other things that are seen as unfeminine

The most common demonstrations of privilege that most people will see is the occasional demonstration by TV news shows of what happens when women take cars into repair garages. Quite simply, dishonest mechanics are more likely to cheat women on repair costs than men.

Similarly, websites like Not Always Right[3] show stories of women being taken less seriously than men by customers in places like video game shops.

Non-standard dialects

People who are native speakers of non-standard dialects such as African American Vernacular English or Cockney may be discriminated against as being somehow "inferior" or stupid because they supposedly speak "wrong" English. Of course, non-standard dialects are not "incorrect" forms of the standard language, but simply different things with different rules. Native speakers of non-standard dialects are inherently disadvantaged when it comes to learning the rules of the standard variety, but standard language speakers usually do not realize this.

Privilege blindness

What is so difficult about privilege, and is highlighted in the racial profiling case above, is that it is a concept that is very counter-intuitive to privileged groups. Privilege is, by the social justice definition, the advantages people have that they don't often think about because they never have to experience the oppressive side. Understanding it requires an active effort to see things from the perspective of other, underprivileged people. This can lead to problems both small-scale and the large, from a man's chronic inability to get women to talk to him to the imbalance in performance in English, math and science between the sexes and sexism in hiring in the hard sciences, computer sciences and nursing.[4][5][6][7]

Misconceptions

The principal misconception of privilege is that it applies exclusively on (or scales evenly and perfectly down to) an individual level, and so that the existence of individuals from a class considered privileged (e.g., white males) within a class considered underprivileged (e.g., working class poor) disproves the concept. This isn't the case at all. "Privilege" in the social justice sense applies only to classes of people, as far as it could be quantified it is only a statistical average. On average, those in an ethnic majority experience privilege, and on average those in minority groups experience oppression. For example, the fact that Barack Obama is the President of the United States doesn't prove nor disprove anything to do with white privilege or racism within the United States.

The second major misconception is that privilege is a quantifiable set of experiences that add up. It is instead a qualitative thing relating to experiences of a specific kind. For instance, the particular "male privilege" of not feeling sexual discrimination at work, or being pressured into raising children exclusively, isn't offset by economic or wealth class - it might apply with slight qualitative differences across class boundaries, but overall it is not a number that is then mitigated by other factors.

Furthermore, the misconception that intersectional factors can "cancel out" privilege of one sort or another ("I don't have white privilege because I'm poor" or "I don't have male privilege because I'm not white") disregards that life would probably be different if that privileged intersection were to go away or stop being rewarded by society. Not all privileged groups benefit equally, depending on different social intersections, but benefit still exists in some way over some other demographic that doesn't enjoy the same invisible allowances. Basically, there is no linear scale of privilege you can move up and down on, instead there are different types of privilege.

Further examples

Basic examples of privileges talked about in this sense include:
* The ability of men to walk alone at night without the fear of sexual assault that is often experienced by women.
* The fact that for a man to be in public without a top is socially acceptable, while it seldom is for a woman.[8]
* The fact that sexual promiscuity is a socially desirable trait in men, but is often denigrated in women.
* The ability of whites to avoid racial profiling or to avoid greater prison sentences.
* The ability to use a gendered bathroom straightforwardly, when compared to the experiences of transgender or otherwise gender-nonconforming people.
* The ability to effectively manage the workload of day-to-day life, when compared to the experience of chronically ill people.
* The ability of the rich and powerful not to worry about the financial implications of an accident or unexpected illness, when compared to the poor.
* The ability of certain light-skinned people of colour, "straight-acting" gay/bisexual people, and the like to pass as part of the privileged classes even though they're not members of it.
* The ability of some transgender persons to be readily identified by others as the gender that they identify as. This is also called "passing privilege."
* The availability and affordability of education, including parental financial support.
* The fact that men typically receive considerably longer prison sentences than women who commit the same crimes.

 

[PayDay]

You do if you're white.

Since when? Racist---^

You needn't worry about it for any reason connected to immigration.

No one believes you.

Of course you're a heretic -- I keep tellin' ya, we don't actually worship Satan, he's just a name for our egos, and anyone in your grotto will tell you the same!

What? Are you fucking retarded? You have never told me anything. Who are you talking to?

...by the way: 'ration al' sure is a funny phrase.

It's obvious what you are.

 

[unregistered]

 

[PayDay]

There's a difference between passing the Obama amnesty and a real immigration bill.

Both of which the United States of America does not need.

 

[KingOrfeo]

What is nothing to you is everything to me. I love the United States of America and the Constitution.

Never forget that those are two very different things, and an America under a different constitution would still be America.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Since when? Racist---^

See post #111.

What? Are you fucking retarded? You have never told me anything. Who are you talking to?

WHHHOOOOOSSSSHHHHH!!!!!!!

 

[KingOrfeo]

Both of which the United States of America does not need.

If the presence of millions of undocumented immigrants of indeterminate future status is a problem, then the only solutions would be the one, or the other, or mass deportation -- the last of which will not happen, and probably cannot happen, and certainly would be very bad for America's economy if it did happen.

 

[PayDay]

Never forget that those are two very different things, and an America under a different constitution would still be America.

Lies and slander.

Why are you ok with NOT having the United States of America?

 

[PayDay]

If the presence of millions of undocumented immigrants of indeterminate future status is a problem, then the only solutions would be the one, or the other, or mass deportation -- the last of which will not happen, and probably cannot happen, and certainly would be very bad for America's economy if it did happen.

Sounds like unrealistic academic bullshit from a self professed lawyer---^

 

[PayDay]

See post #111.



WHHHOOOOOSSSSHHHHH!!!!!!!

Trash post is trash. I've read the drivel you posted. How many alts do you have?

 

[KingOrfeo]

Lies and slander.

Why are you ok with NOT having the United States of America?

You are missing the point. Since 1789, France has been through at least 11 different systems of government -- five monarchies, five republics and a fascist regime -- and through it all, France remains France, still the same country. China remains China after three millennia and more of different imperial dynasties, periods of disunion, republican rule and Communist rule. The USA is no different in that regard. We are an ordinary nation-state -- not an idea-state like the old Soviet Union, which collapsed when people stopped believing in it.

 

[PayDay]

You are missing the point. Since 1789, France has been through at least 11 different systems of government -- five monarchies, five republics and a fascist regime -- and through it all, France remains France, still the same country. The USA is no different in that regard. We are an ordinary nation-state -- not an idea-state like the old Soviet Union, which collapsed when people stopped believing in it.

No, you are missing the point:

New does not automatically mean better.

 

[KingOrfeo]

No, you are missing the point:

New does not automatically mean better.

Never said it does. What's that got to do with anything? I do not mean to suggest a new system of government for America would necessarily be a better one. Content is everything. But, that does not mean the present system is above all possibility of being replaced by something better. E.g., a parliamentary system instead of a presidential system would probably be better. Some things the FFs were just wrong about, and separation of powers apparently is one of them -- certainly the world's presidential republics have no better track record for power abuses than its parliamentary ones.

 

[PayDay]

Never said it does. What's that got to do with anything? I do not mean to suggest a new system of government for America would necessarily be a better one. Content is everything. But, that does not mean the present system is above all possibility of being replaced by something better. E.g., a parliamentary system instead of a presidential system would probably be better. Some things the FFs were just wrong about, and separation of powers apparently is one of them -- certainly the world's presidential republics have no better track record for power abuses than its parliamentary ones.

Yes you did. I can clearly see your variation of hope and change. Belligerent does not make you right.

 

[unregistered]