What’s interesting about Salon’s ill-advised decision to wade into this, aside from the fact that it threatens to create an ouroboros of irony that might very well swallow all reality as we know it, is that the Gawker piece is asking regular people to determine, through a series of online votes, which group is the least privileged in America. Salon, of course, sees this kind of determination as something too important to be left to the unwashed; calling out privilege is strictly for professionals.
And nobody has elevated this kind of thing to a Ph.D-level position the way Salon has.
This whole privilege tournament brouhaha between some of the most ridiculous sites on the web has indeed been amusing, like watching a food fight break out in the cafeteria at the mental hospital (neurotypical ableism!!) I’m not sure that last sentence is true, though — Salon seems to have moved to corner the market on sappy personal stories about life lessons, often with a weird, voyeuristic bent to them. Stuff like, “I thought I’d left the BDSM lifestyle behind, but my skills as a dom saved my relationship with my neurotic dog.” I think of it as soap opera salaciousness for the NPR crowd.