Well I wasn't intentionally trying to frame it in the context of actual experiments or science, but if you want to think of it that way.... it would be pretty atypical for the framers of an experiment to respond to an unexpectedly bad/distracted/statistically non-useful outcome with "WELL. It must be the people that are flawed!" instead of "Let's redesign the experiment and try again".

Atmospheric CO2 is at 402.80 ppm.

Agree. Nobody wants to hear the smarmy, "Well it could be worse" response. "Oh your mother died from improper diabetes care in the bass-ackwards Allegheny hospital system? Well it could be worse. You could be BLACK." Jesus. Applied on the individual level, which is truly the only place that changes anything, the "white privilege" approach is appalling. At a certain (higher) class level in society, it functions as a progressive tax on moral superiority, but below a (still pretty high) income and class level, it's a regressive bludgeon.

I really think it is not that a broke-ass white person can't think critically (and I don't think you said that, I'm just clarifying), since mostly they can, and maybe a few can't, but more importantly, they've got other shit to worry about in their lives that takes precedence over making space in their brain and time in their daily activities to develop a nuanced and informed view of racism in post-9/11 America. You have to take care of people's basic survival needs and health problems and fears for their children before you expect (keeping in mind that "expecting" is SUCH a class-privileged stance) them to want to sit down and talk about "What The Confederate Flag Means to Me" with a black person.

(I just thought of the best argument against me, but I have to go get a haircut.)

In this and most contexts, I do tend to use the dictionary definitions of words (no sarcasm intended). One does not need to have one's own personal definition of the word to make this argument. Few people residing in a group (here identified as "white") that is comprised of hundreds of millions, if not billions, would look at any of the following definitions and think to themselves, "Yup! Other people would definitely be within their right to say that about ME! Hot DAMN, I am TOTALLY the top of the heap!".

    noun
    1. a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most
    2. a special right, immunity, or exemption granted to persons in authority or office to free them from certain obligations or liabilities
    3. a grant to an individual, corporation, etc., of a special right or immunity, under certain conditions.
    4. the principle or condition of enjoying special rights or immunities.
    5. any of the rights common to all citizens under a modern constitutional government
    6. an advantage or source of pleasure granted to a person

I wish I could come up with a better word; "intersectionality" is such a tone-deaf intellectualism that it will never catch on with the people whom it most needs to reach.

To the bat-thesaurus!

I look at my life and I think, "My god, I am SO LUCKY. I am SO PRIVILEGED." But if someone else looks at my life and said "You are SO LUCKY. So PRIVILEGED", my first response would be the same as anyone's: "Fuck you. That's not your fucking place to say. You don't know ANYTHING about me or my life or what I've had to struggle with." And I would be in the right to think that, though not to say it.

The word "privilege" is a failed experiment, despite the fact that I 100% agree with the truth underlying it. If you have to keep explaining a word over and over and over... assuming the person you say it to hasn't already punched you in the face for being an asshole... then the word is not doing its job. Its job is to communicate a concept succinctly, and it is failing by conveying the opposite, making people angrier, less receptive, and at best, guilt-ridden for something they were born with. Is that what we should aim to do to people?

People will always find a scapegoat for why their loved ones get sick. Today, GMOs, yesterday, impure thoughts and moral decay, and before that, the evil eye. It's hard to make sense of an unfair and inequitable world with science; science qualifies everything with "some evidence" and "probably" and "we can't say for certain".

The only requirement for a scapegoat is that its invisible hand should be hard to prove or disprove. What makes GMOs so weird as a scapegoat is that it is so easy to disprove short- and medium-term harm. It's also easy enough to understand that normal agriculture and gardening, as practiced for several millennia, is a process of trying to create wildly uncontrolled large mutants. MUTANTS, people. Then, pick the most mutant-tastic one, and if you can reproduce it reliably, you've got "New Varieties BC 3,207: Improved, Larger Phooeyacia barbaziqux, with bigger seeds that malt at lower temperatures for beer-in-a-jiffy like you've never beered before!" in the plant catalog. Meanwhile, you have no idea what the health implications of that new DNA sequence are.

THAT is why people use the "ticking time bomb" argument with GMOs. As long as you take a halting problem stance on GMOs, you can _never_ be proven wrong.

Most people drive everywhere and work desk or retail jobs and watch tv and comment on the Internet and basically do everything BUT work up a 45 minute solid sweat 3x a week -- study after study has shown short-, medium-, and long term harm from not exercising. You'll die of something, but you'll die of heart disease from not exercising infinitely more often than you will die of Franken-fruit that suddenly GROWS TEETH. INSIDE you. And gives you AUTISM of the small intestine over forty years. Or something. Hasn't happened yet, but you know. Ticking time bomb!

Don't put the opinions of a generalized "other" first, that's true. But listen to the opinions of those you respect, and re-examine often if the people you choose to respect are the right people for the job. If one of those people were to die today, would people come to their funeral simply to be seen at the funeral of someone well-known or high up in some hierarchy... or would they come to that funeral to talk about their wisdom, their quiet contributions to society, the way they made time for others, rarely complained, worked with their hands, or welcomed everyone and anyone into their home?

As I grow older, I find individuality, and my desperate greedy scrabbling for it, to have been over-rated. The cult of The Individual (which does have intellectually interesting roots) offers merely linear rewards. (Perhaps I was not Individual enough?) But somehow, doing things for others, noticing others (really noticing, as in quieting your own thoughts in order to reframe your mind to imagine being another person) as part of everyday life, caring for people who may have no opportunity to return that care in the future -- there is just something exponentially more satisfying about it, though perhaps only when you are choosing it for yourself. Perhaps it is because I don't worry so much about my identity -- without my sense of self at risk, I'm much more free to choose to do what I want, and increasingly I do not choose the things and people that promise "happiness". (Which is not entirely subjective, but can be broken down into components that may matter more or less to you.)

That said, it takes bitter experience to recover from giving to toxic souls. Some people stay bitter the rest of their lives. I have to fight that same bitterness. Its value on the Internet as "life experience street cred" is not worth the harm of holding on to it.

(Do you know that giving gifts is a form of asserting power and reinforcing hierarchy? So you must also think on what it means to give to people, what is given, what is really received in return.)

Being a grownup sucks, sometimes, even often. I say it a lot, jokingly. But even as I say it, the truth, that is mine and mine alone, is that I am free. So free. So lucky! Everywhere that I look, I find a person on whom I can bestow a smile or ask about their day or do a little extra work for.

You just have to find your own answer, but usually when you do, it turns out it was blindingly obvious all along.