Wednesday, May 14, 2014

"Checking your privilege" at Harvard

So Harvard's Kennedy school is going to have a mandatory orientation course for first years on 'Checking your privilege'.  I presume this is going to focus on how "'white' or 'rich' or 'male' people get everything and have all the fun and that they're a bunch of jerks and they should say sorry to everyone else and anyway give us a bunch of their money or at least let us use their cool car once in a while, the cracker bastards".  Or something like that, I'm not really hep to the culture among high end parasitic government larvae during their pupation phase.  But I do know that they make particularly ugly, noxious apparatchiks when they claw their way out of their chrysali and up the body politics' rectum. 

"The wonks in training at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government will soon be subjected to a new and touchy-feely line of inquiry: Checking Your Privilege 101," reports Kat Stoeffel of New York magazine. "In response to growing demand from student activists, administrators committed Friday to adding a class in power and privilege to its orientation program for incoming first-year students.


Sorry for the colo-rectal imagery but there is clearly something rather retentive about the obsession of some people over the life experiences of other people or over their own privileged life experiences for that matter.  In the old days we called thinking about someone else's advantages envy and thinking about our own privilege as pride.  And here's the thing:  people thought both of them were bad.  Yet now we see the sophisticates at Harvard holding courses celebrating, indeed obsessing on these mortal sins..  And no doubt feeling good about themselves from the process. As Jim Taranto points out: all this talking about 'privilege' is just another way for the 'privileged' to preen about how they are so 'humble' even though they are so damn good.  It's certainly a lot cheaper than giving up their 'privilege' to someone else. Which none of them has chosen to do.

Hat tip Jim Taranto

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