Excerpt from one of my posts from earlier today (some hyperlinks added):
We don't force the Amish to have a Rainbow Gathering
on their land. We don't force Disney World to have
Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC). We don't force people
in Mecca to welcome Christians and build Christian
churches there. We don't force armed uniformed bossy
types into every area, telling local people what to do,
how to behave. We don't force Havana to open itself
to McDonalds. We don't protest every "Boys Only" sign
we come across and say "if you use Python, you must
be non-discriminatory". We are not bullies of that flavor.
That's the "we" I'm a part of and represent to this group.
Your "we" may vary (YWMV).
When it comes to diversity, I'm really into freeing the world
of bossy armed forces types who seek to control by brute
force. I favor Unicode because it diminishes the leverage
of the Anglophone club. I find the English language (its
thinking patterns) too dominant for my taste, even though
it's the only language I speak (unless I call it American
and twist it in various weird ways-- I'm quite the twister,
by necessity).
I'm into defying the power some thinking they have to control
the intellectual heritage of the species using a control
language called "law" that is not only unfair but waaaaay
too slow and smug about itself.
I see free and open source cultures starting to world
dominate by displacing lawyers as a controlling elite.
That's the big picture I'm looking at.
<< snip >>
Of course many white males are anything but privileged. Some
have been stop-lossed and are dying in slavery. White males
die in death camps etc., their skin color no protection.
I like 'My Fair Lady' as ethnography in that it gets to the nub
of many issues: it's not that she's "a she" so much as that she
talks and acts a certain way, has various mannerisms associated
with a certain role, class, category of person. These reflexes
can be reprogrammed whereas physical features are more
fixed. We call it education. Elites learn to act entitled in various
ways, assert their privileges. Do we begrudge them? Shouldn't
everyone be entitled, not just a few? Sounds wrong in English?
So much the worse for English if so?
People with privilege have sometimes just learned to act entitled.
That sounds like a bad thing, but what if you're a child laborer
and join a union because you're entitled to longer breaks? Now
it sounds OK. Traditional peoples about to be displaced from
their native lands *should* act "entitled" lest the lawyers come
in with eviction notices and simply tell them to leave, because
of the dam they want to build.
http://www.kewa.org/project.html
People are entitled to say "no" a lot more than they do I think.
I'm not a big fan of being endlessly patient and passive in the
face of adversity until its too late. Fatalism and "just getting
through the next day" aren't attitudes befitting people calling
themselves "programmers" (an activist-sounding verb).
