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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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If someone is famous enough to be an obvious example, then they're privileged and so don't count.

If someone isn't famous enough to be an obvious example, than no one's ever heard of them or knows to use them as an example, so they are ignored.

Gina Carrano is famous enough to have been heard of, but doesn't have billions. If it could be demonstrated that she suffered serious online harassment and that this harassment has been ignored, would that advance the conversation, or would the answer be that she's still too privileged?

Gina Carrano is famous enough to have been heard of, but doesn't have billions. If it could be demonstrated that she suffered serious online harassment and that this harassment has been ignored, would that advance the conversation, or would the answer be that she's still too privileged?

I think the claim of privilege would probably be thrown to see if it would stick, but I suspect most people would predict that it wouldn't stick due to the fact that she's not all that "privileged" even merely by Hollywood standards, to say nothing of the standards of Rowling. It doesn't help that her skin isn't super white, though I don't know if she has any actual heritage that would win her some oppression points.

I can only speculate about what the actual tactic would be. There are a couple common tactics that immediately come to mind. One is just minimizing the harassment she faced, saying that it's unfortunate, but why do you care about that when there are literally trans people getting genocided every day in America? The other is just retreating from the position that women deserve special protection because they're women and saying she fucked around and found out or played stupid games and won stupid prizes. This is actually the same basic position as the people who call out the Sarkeesian defenders of the world as catastrophizing what was standard part of online discourse that was already cliche 10 years ago. Of course, logical inconsistency has also been a cliche in discourse in general, and so this shouldn't be surprising; that said, when an ideology specifically denigrates things like logical or rational thinking as being something white oppressors imposed on the rest of us, my guess is that followers in that ideology are more susceptible to pushing logically inconsistent behavior and rhetoric.