Thread:User talk:WaitingforGodot/I like you, Godot, but I'm going to have to call bullshit on that/reply (15)

Well, the kid who killed himself at my school did so because he was generically different, perhaps slightly "goth" if you like, rather than for being gay. I don't recall the reason for the second suicide, though I think it was to do with a parental breakup more than bullying.

You can't pull the "not as bad as" thing when you don't have first hand experience of it. Isn't that the entire argument when some concerns are dismissed but not others? For instance, and I apologise profusely for bringing this up again but it is a decent example, when Rebecca Watson was accosted in an elevator, the comment from Dawkins was that at least she wasn't in an Islamic country where she would have to be chaperoned and would practically be treated as property, and her resulting comeback was "you can't dismiss it because it's not as bad as..." And then wrote a screed accusing him of privilege because he wouldn't know what it was like. Yet, by the same token few people in the west have direct experience of being treated as property, and are pretty privileged not to have that experience. So why the multiple standards? You cannot say with one hand that we have no direct experience of a form of discrimination so can't dismiss it and then do just that with another.

You can either take things based on real personal experience with all the nuances that go with it, or you admit you're categorising things on arbitrary and broad strokes.