photo credit: monkiemag

I made some bad choices relating to some credit cards that I have and I have been slowly paying off my debts. The big problem was that the amount of money per month that I was putting on the cards was only a little bit more than the amount of money per month that my interest charges were adding. Progress was slow.

I handled this by calling the bank and transferring to a credit card with a lower interest rate. From now on, more of my monthly payments will go to the principal instead of the interest. During the call, the guy suggested that if I could find money equal to the balance on my card, I could zero the credit card,and then write one of those Visa Cheques that have 2% interest, giving me an even better ratio of interest to principal payment.

This plan is conceivable because I have friends and family who might have enough cash lying around that I could borrow it from them for a few days to enact this scheme. It’s one of the nice things about being middle class: you are surrounded by people who have spare resources that you can borrow from time to time to help with tough spots.

Poorer people don’t have access to the same kind of resources. This is one of the reasons that the Grameen Bank is so important as a tool for alleviating poverty.

Easy access to temporary resources is something that you might call a privilege of being well-to-do.

Privilege

I have a problem with the common use of the word “privilege” in phrases like “male privilege” and “white privilege”. To my mind, privilege connotes things that you get that you don’t necessarily deserve. Special powers or nice things that lift you above others. Platinum plus membership cards and so on. I’ve since spoken to a number of other people about this and found that a lot of different people have very different reactions to the meaning of the word.

If you click on that “white privilege” link, you’ll come to a list of 50 things that Peggy McIntosh considers to be special privileges of being white. Read the list. The overwhelming majority of those things should not be (my definition of) privileges, they should be inalienable rights. Mixed in are some things that look more like (my definition of) privileges (”26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.“).

Pareto Optimality

A Pareto optimal condition is one where it is impossible to to make anyone better off without making someone worse off. A Pareto optimal move is one where you make someone better off without making anyone worse off.

We should be able to fix “15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.” without needing to make any white people worse-off. Same thing for “20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.” There are a number of things on the list that should just be a part of human dignity, that we should be able to fix in a Pareto optimal move.

Under my instinctive definition of privilege, these are not privileges that white people have. These are things that EVERYONE should have but do not. We should be working to make it so that everyone else catches up.

Compare those to items like “44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people of my race.” This strikes me as a privilege which white people will probably have to give up. With a limited number of hours per year for teaching, if there’s going to be more diversity in curricula the proportions will have to shift and white-only parts would have to come down.

Confusion

The problem I have with common use of “___ privilege” is that it mixes both types of unfairness. Things that I have that other people could also have are different from things that I have at the expense of other people. Confusing the two creates resistance and disagreement where otherwise none might be.

They are different flavours of problem with different kinds of solutions. They should have different words.

photo credit: Colin Purrington

The difficulty with projects like personal blogs is that you tend to start doing them when you have a lot of time and attention. Then, unless you are a much more diligent person than I am, you let them lapse when other exciting (paying) projects come up and fill your time.

When I started posting regularly on Quiet Babylon, I had just left my position at Capybara Games, a company I had helped start. Burned out from the hours, looking ahead and seeing success for the company but not immediate relief, I made one of the more difficult decisions of my life and walked away. Slightly adrift but still in love with games, I decided to make Quiet Babylon an outlet for a lot of my ceaseless thinking about how games are made, how games are designed and how games are played.

At the time, I had it in my head that I’d maybe teach myself some programming and start working on a project of my own. I did begin down that path, messing around with Java in my spare time, sketching out a few simple ideas that I could implement in a reasonable time frame as I learnt my way around a language and so on. I put all of that on hold for a genuine vacation in August, intending to ramp back up when I came home.

Instead, I was hired to work on the Canadian election.

The fact is that I’ve been on the road since May and aside from The Penny Arcade Game (release weekend) and Prof Layton (this past weekend) I HAVEN’T BEEN PLAYING GAMES. There comes a point where writing about other people’s writing about games instead of games themselves means you aren’t really adding anything to the conversation.

Looking back at the, frankly, embarrassing early posts and reading through to the last time I updated, there is a clear development in my writerly voice that is away from some kind of contrived I-have-no-idea-what-I-was-thinking to just-me-talking. The natural next step is to lift the self-restriction on posting only about video games, added in the vain hope that a focused blog would attract a readership. (It didn’t, Neither did all the obsessive futzing with the back-end.)

So hello the 50 of you that are subscribed via feedburner! Maybe you will will like where I go with this or maybe you will not. Doesn’t especially matter anymore. This is a personal blog now.