"Change the system"

Ok, look.  I absolutely possess incompetence at humaning.  People who like me express non-rhetorical doubt about my material humanity.  Anything that involves being any good at politics is precisely what I can't do for half a distant squeaky noise at an antique hinge convention.

And I know that "change the system" is inherently nonsense; the point of a system is that you can't change it.  (If you can change it, it isn't a system; it hasn't got feedback that keeps it stable.)

What you can do is replace the system.  The way you replace the system is by finding the people who experience uselessness in the current system and convince them that your proposed change gives them use and significance.  People will do almost anything not to be useless.  (Most of the current anglosphere political struggle is over whether non-white, non-male people can have inherent utility, as distinct from the derivational utility of making white, male people happy.)

So, not only would Bernie not have won, arguing that Bernie would have won is a way to avoid acknowledging that the voting is not fair and open so it really doesn't matter who would have won a free vote; the core threat from Hillary is not personal incompetence but demonstrating non-white, non-male inherent utility in unequivocal ways.  (Guess why the votes are free and fair.  Go on, guess.)  Can't have that; there's a clear majority of folks who the current system insists are inherently useless, and they're way more numerous than the middle aged white males who figure their uselessness is someone else's fault and stop thinking there.  (It's not obviously a false conclusion, but stopping there and blaming who you're told to blame isn't especially clever.)

There's another bit about La Dauphine and whether it's real desire for post-patriarchal power structures or the cynical appearance of such a desire.  And still a third bit -- of course we want a different system.  The current system has failed utterly.  We're having a self-inflicted existential crisis for the next hundred years because that was apparently easier and better than not being quite as rich.

The notion of privilege

Ok, first off -- the people complaining about privilege are (generally) complaining about a real thing.

They're not complaining about it effectively, in part because they're (generally) utter strangers to the exercise of actual power and in part because they're (at risk of being) violently suppressed if they speak frankly.  The whole notion of "privilege" is passive-voice and lacking actors.

(Rather like "Black Lives Matter"; absolutely about just complaints, but if you have to call it that it's not going to work.)

I'm going to ignore how the power structures got there.  I'm just going to talk about what they do.

There's two kinds of things that the power structures do.  One is not interfere; basic levels of participating in the power structure mean your daily business doesn't get interfered with.[1]

Two is suppress opposition to your preferences; on a big scale, this is something like who the Dakota Access Pipeline gets routed over (or how Roundup somehow doesn't have safety data filed with the government of Canada), and on a moderate scale this is how highways get more money than transit.

You need a lot of social standing to exercise Type Two power.  You don't need much at all to exercise Type One power.  (This is what members of the valorized category get for showing up.)

Thing is, this stuff isn't passive; this works by hurting people if they complain until they either die or stop complaining.

So the question is NOT "do I have privilege?" (a question that descends into moral taxonomy very rapidly, becoming entirely useless in the process), but "did I (or am I) trying to compel this person to change their behaviour?"


[1] the point of "driving while black" stops is to insist that nobody, no matter how nice their car or how stable their income, can participate in the power structure while black.  You will get your daily business interfered with.  There are a whole lot of other examples.  None of them are fixable without replacing the mechanism of categories.

Beauty is a judgement, not a property

That's it.

Beauty isn't a property.  Nothing is beautiful.  Beauty exists as a thing is apprehended as beautiful.  Right then.  In the apprehending mind and not otherwise.  It's not some sort of quantum entanglement with God or Truth or any other delusion.  There is no beauty in the properties of matter.  Beauty doesn't apply outside the apprehending mind.  (At all.  Ever.  Any other apprehending mind may perceive some other beauty, but it isn't this one.  All apprehension is fleeting.)

The impossibility of self-knowledge if you're thinking of beauty as a property is one of the things that makes me sad, because the mistake is ubiquitous, profitable, and enforced.  (Profitable behaviours are enforced.  The folks arguing for the general utility of markets have some explaining to do.)

Westward from the Davis Strait

Air temperature and wind intensity 2017-06-13 looking down on the North Spin Pole 

Ocean currents and Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly 2017-06-13 looking down on the North Spin Pole

earth.nullschool.net is an interesting and information display of global near-current conditions.  It won't cheer you up; note the plumes of cold water off Svalbard and down the Davis Strait.  That's glaciers bleeding to death.

Look at another time and you might see warmish air flowing between Fram Strait and the Beaufort Sea, clean over the Pole.