Why I believe DK was a mistake

Multiplayer Discussion
182

I don’t understand why this seems like some difficult concept.

Privilege: A privilege is a certain entitlement to immunity granted by the state or another authority to a restricted group, either by birth or on a conditional basis. Land-titles and taxi medallions are examples of transferable privilege – they can be revoked in certain circumstances.

An example: Disabled people are given the privilege of parking in Handicapped designated parking spots that no one else is allowed to park in without a fine.

Do I really need to falsify it?

Honestly, how can you make any claim that privilege doesn’t exist when it is literally everywhere around you in all sorts of forms?

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183

Do you really think they would argue in good faith at any point anyway?

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I put it into quotation marks for a reason, and yes, I could agree with that.

Indeed, as have many other ‘terms’.

I could also add that any concept can be not only taken to the extreme beyond the point of ludicrousness, but also twisted beyond recognition, which is exactly what I’ve hinted at.

What’s more, even if you consider something like technology, a reasonable measure of social constructivism must have its place there — after all, technology should be done for people.

Yep, the value of some green pieces of paper is absolutely a social construct, rather than something intrinsic.

Not only that, but that, too.

I thought it was clear enough that I was mocking the ‘SJW’ connotation of this world (see above, by the way — I believe it’s rather aptly said about ‘tainted concepts’) of this word, rather than your generic dictionary definition.

A counterexample of a ‘privilege’ theory I was referring to: Everyone born in a certain month (or something like it) has automatically received an unfair boon of +2000 to luck and +9000 to the matchmaking-rigging factor, which is thus their ‘privilege’. Therefore, they should be stripped of their collection and demoted to Bronze 10 permanently in order to end their oppression. For justice! :hammer:

See the problem with it? No way to falsify it, no matter what. Same thing with ‘genders’ (outside of linguistics, that is), ‘horoscopes’, ‘superstrings’ and so on, and so on.

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Hmm. I find the “state of other authority” part interesting.

I am of the belief that white privilege exists. I am not, however, of the belief that white privilege is severe. The way I see it is: it is a sad fact of life that the kind of people who unironically go to 4chan’s wrongthink board actually do exist in the flesh, and according to actual studies they seem to account for about 5% of white Americans, which is about 3% of Americans overall. In contrast, I figure about 1% of Americans have some kind of irrational hatred of white people. The difference there is two percent, which means that the severity of white privilege can basically be summarized as: going from white to black means that 1 out of every 50 random people you encounter goes from a normal polite person to a total jerk. That’s not nothing — I don’t know about your job, but I deal with about 150 strangers a week, so that’d be +3 jerks/week. Even if they mostly hide it, even if it doesn’t change any words spoken and it’s just 3 less smiles received per week, that’s enough to notice.

But that’s not really that bad. In the ranking of daily frustrations it should be in about the same tier as morning traffic. Of course, this was very much different back when America was more than 3% racist; I’m just talking modern day here.

Getting back to your definition, my conception of white privilege existing doesn’t say that it comes from the government. As far as I know, the only government policy that actively discriminates on the basis of race is affirmative action, and that discriminates against white people (but no, it’s not that big a deal). No, white privilege unfortunately comes from the racists themselves, because even though they’re only 3% of the overall population that’s still enough. Sad but true. Is /pol/ an “authority”? I hope not.

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I’d love to further that discussion, as I tend to agree with you, but these forums are a little too…sensitive to this sort of thing. I really don’t want to lose my image/link posting privileges…oh look, a real privilege!

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I chuckled .

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188

Perhaps I’ll elaborate some more why I likened it to solipsism.

The way I see it, a typical crude, grotesque version of ‘social constructivism’ looks approximately like this:

  1. Everything is a social construct.

  2. Therefore, whatever bright idea my pug-faced friends and I came up with is the ultimate truth — because ‘truth’ is a ‘social construct’ too, so our little pug-faced company has socially constructed it, see?
    The key difference to naive solipsism in the most blatant form is that, instead of a wordview with everything revolving around a single person, there’s an attempt to hide behind a ‘consensus’ in some pug-faced ‘group’, otherwise looks quite similar to me.

  3. Thus, you should shut up and bow down to our enlightened, progressive and so on idea, because ‘social constructivism’ reigns supreme, remember?

The motivation for it is not necessarily the aversion to status quo, as you put it, or something like it — how about some old things like power and money (speaking of progress in the human nature, by the way)? Nobody really cancelled the old ‘divide and conquer’ principle, and can you name many better ways to divide people than some of those ‘progressive’ theories? Besides, the concept of a scapegoat is still there, too, except instead of withes or heretics, you can hunt ‘X-ists’, where ‘X’ is from the same field as ‘social constructs’, ‘privileges’ and so on, you know…

Yeah, go on, travel somewhere to Russia, for example, and tell them about it, especially regarding a thousand (plus-minus) years of history before any kind of USA was a thing (there are older civilisations, of course, but since you wanted ‘white’, this’ll do, I suppose — besides, you’ll find not that many ‘whiter’ lands). :smirk:

Haven’t you suggested above that somebody move about a bit and not perceive the world as a carbon copy of their surroundings? I suppose I could return that suggestion to you mildly.

There are generally also so-called ‘quotas’ and so on — all according to ‘progressive’ theories we’ve discussed here.

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Are they, though? I was under the impression that they are a nearly unmoderated dump, unless something goes really wild and the community reacts to it somehow…

(Updated and edited a bit)

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They only come when someone reports something. It’s not proactively monitored, but rather retroactively.

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Indeed — what’s more, they must have received enough reports, apparently.

PS Updated the post above, having forgotten to add an important little piece.

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There are a few select people out there that would literally drool at the thought of reporting me. I don’t want to give them a legit reason.

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Alright, then I shan’t provoke you. Besides, I’d rather chat with you than certain other… select individuals. :grinning:

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This is so wrong. But its not my fight and i dont even know where to begin.
Its not the first time i see a vieuwpoint from you related to racial inequality that is completely wrong.

Either way,to get back to the topic of this thread.

Seeing the reception of this expansion on twitch,vieuwerships etcetera. It feels safe to conclude something went wrong somewhere along the road. Earlier Kibbbler was the most vieuwed constructed streamer with 2k and now it is asmodai.
Kripp isnt even playing it.

And now they shower people in legendarys in a last ditch attempt. Its great for the people who stuck around but its a bit to late for all the people that have left in the past few years.

I dont think its dk specifically. It actually is an improvement in design. I think the “fault” lies elsewhere and a bit earlier.

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194

Amen. You cannot eat money or coal. You cannot drink or breathe oil.

Spot on. Blizzard killed the fatted calf.

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Money is a construct in some way but it is not useless. It allowed for labour specialization and an efficient method of trade which increased productivity.

But oil and coal are definitely not a construct. And while you cant eat them directly,they greatly increase the output of things that you can eat.

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There are better ways though.
The problem is in the fact that certain people cannot monopolize those ways.
You cannot monopolize sunlight or wind.
And therein lies the whole reason for profiteers to wage war on those methods.

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By the way, if you play around with something along the lines of Pareto principle and consider, even hypothetically, those 3% controlling 97% of some resources, suddenly the number doesn’t seem that small anymore.

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Taking this argument to its logical extreme, assuming you know the direction of Wind, the averave thumb-power of the tosser and the exact weight ratio of the coin used you COULD find that tossing a coin doesnt come out to exactly 50/50, so as an expert at that game you can improve your odds.
That doesnt mean that you wont lose 49,995% of times anyways.
And if instead of a quick coinflip its a 10-20 minute long game, that is entirely decided on, a random number hitting the correct target, rolling the correct spells on Rune of the archmage, etc. it kinda sucks imo.
The RNG of Cardgames should be in the order of drawing cards from you deck and maybe some minor effects/tiebreakers. I see that Heartstone has always had more than that and to some degree thats probably ok, might actually add some fun here and there. But i find it absolutely reasonable to criticise that the RNG seems to be ever increasing to the point where you lose or win entire games, just based on one card rolling lucky.

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I do as well.

seven*

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That’s more or less what I was talking about, too.

I must add that if someone wants a roulette and they have fun with it, too, then it’s alright for them, I just can’t agree with Ben Brode’s notion of ‘skill’ in this case.

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201

Theft under a thousand dollars is routinely not a criminal offense. The vast overwhelming majority of theft in America happens in the form of wage theft. Every single paycheque issued by employers who commit wage theft is an incidence of theft under a thousand dollars. Biweekly pay, 26 paycheques per year, 26 acts of theft under a thousand committed against a working class person.

So it can be said that the crime of stealing under a thousand dollars is socially constructed in such a way that it’s only actually crime, as in an actual criminal offense with criminal punishments, if it’s committed by members of the proletariat.

If you’re a capitalist, theft under is just good business. And if it’s committed by a publically traded corporation, theft under is just maximizing shareholder returns on investment. Theft under is performing your fiduciary duty.

I just thought I would mention that, since you used theft under a thousand as an example.

Want to explain to me why so-called “law and order” conservative politicians only want to punish crimes committed by the poor and desperate? If they’re so in favour of “law and order” then why don’t they go after the people who own the means of production. They’re the ones committing the majority of thefts right?

Why isn’t stealing from the mouths of working families punished criminally? If you tried going to the cops to report a theft in the form of wage theft, they world direct you to your jurisdictions labor relations board. They would direct you to seek a civil remedy.

Consequences of theft under a thousand? If some single mother shoplifts baby formula, as far as I’m concerned that’s just a working class person taking back what the government allows to be stolen from us.

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