Peterson's 12 Rules for Life v2.0-- actual book discussion

[bennyboy]

Yeah, Benny is clearly a bright guy, but I don't get the impression that he is bothered much that there are people less fortunate who are struggling because men in power won't bother to fix the problems they themselves have contributed to and worsened.

If you can afford a computer and an internet connection, there's a starving kid out there who's missing a meal.  I'll bet your yearly snack budget could feed little Akbar for about 10 years, no?

Are black people in the U.S. struggling?  They have free schooling, no?  A welfare system?  Something like a basic health car system?  Did you earn all of the benefits that citizenship in your country (I'm assuming the US) provides?  Or was it handed to you by those who succeeded in establishing those systems before you?

Where do you draw the line?  Help those nearby you?  Well, nobody nearby me is particularly poor, since I live close to the Samsung mother ship.  Should I be deeply concerned about inequity in the world?  Which should I focus on-- black people who can't get into college due to low SAT scores (oh the racism!), or the families of brown people who were bombed to shit by American drones, and are sifting through mountains of rubble for garbage that they hope will be edible?

Should I draw the line at the human species?  What about the millions of livestock who literally live in shit, restrained even from moving, so you can have your daily Big Mac?  Am I required to care about them, as well?

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Yeah, I’m the first to admit I don’t have much faith anymore in the forces of good defeating the forces of evil, or even being all that different from them deep down, but I still have the presence of mind to not think “well, these unjust hierarchies are a good thing.” Inevitable, perhaps, and certainly difficult to take down, but not good by any means.

All hierarchies seem unjust to the majority who don't end up on the top of the pyramid. But that's not what justice is-- justice is about the social contract: each member of a society accepts certain responsibilities and has certain duties, and in that context, maltreatment of a citizen in good faith represents an unjust state.

But this isn't America's problem with racism. The problem is that America is losing hold, and ungracefully so, and needs to be firing on ALL cylinders. All citizens need to be as well-educated as possible, as healthy as possible, as motivated as possible, if America is going to avoid complete irrelevance within the next one or two generations. Anyone who doesn't think every possible dollar should be put into education, for all races and at all socioeconomic levels, is a traitor to the U.S. nation.

America as a whole, including even black citizens, is wayyyy better off than almost every other country in the world. But that's likely to end, and when it's the United States of China, we'll see what real injustice looks like.


Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems America is likely the most equal major nation in all history, and the fact that we can carry on a conversation like this one freely is a testament to the powers-that-be in the U.S.

[Rev. Rye]

There is just so much wrong in that last post, I don’t even know where to begin. Well, Wikipedia has an article covering most of the bases for racial inequality in the United States with links to dozens of studies demonstrating severe inequalities among America’s minorities. That should be a start.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_i...ted_States

And are you telling me that even in Western Europe, things are even worse? Well, I can’t find a sort of database of racial inequality in places there, but there is the GINI coefficient, which calculates income disparity. Note that the higher the coefficient (and the redder its place on the map), the worse it is. Let’s see how the US scores in comparison with other nations.



We may not have that much de jure discrimination on the books now, but there’s still an alarming amount of de facto discrimination and its effects are still evident to this day.

Getting it to the point where things really are as good as you say will be even harder and more time consuming than playing Desert Bus, And we may not get there in my lifetime, but that doesn’t mean there’s not still some room for improvement.

[GrandizerII]

Pretty much what Rev said. That said, I will address more some of the points you made in response to me once I'm back home. Hard to type on this shit phone.

[paulpablo]

Okay, even in that case, my point still stands as the British would only have used machine guns well after they “earned their privilege.”

To Paul, you were all too willing to say black people are racist against their own kind after putting in effort to deny white privilege is a thing of significance.

I didn't say the first part or deny the second part.

But I would say that in a place where white people have privilege purely based on the colour of their skin with an absence of any other significant privilege like being in a majority, or wealth, it would require the race who are in the majority to be racist in favour of white people.

Otherwise why would the majority give white people privilege unless they could take it by force, pay for it or earn it in some way.

[Rev. Rye]

And for those of us who didn't get my Desert Bus analogy, I'll explain it. It was part of a never-released Sega CD game called Penn & Teller: Smoke & Mirrors with six mini-games. The most infamous of them is "Desert Bus." Inspired by the moral panic surrounding video games at the time, they deliberately designed it to be as mundane and realistic as possible. The premise? You have to drive a bus 360 miles from Tuscon to Las Vegas. In real time.

You're not allowed to pause the game because, to quote the manual, "Does your life have a pause control?" There is bugger-all in the way of sensory input, and you have to keep going in a straight line, and the drive from Tuscon to Vegas somehow doesn't even include any sight of Phoenix (which the Greyhound version of this route passes through IRL), just rocks, signs, and maybe a bug splatting on the windshield. Except for the fact that you can honk the horn and make a door opening sound effect, that's it for sensory input.

You can't go above 45 mph, and, as mentioned above, you can't pause it. And if you get to the end of it, you get a single point, and, if you choose, you can do the return route and earn another point at the end. 

And if you have the bright idea of clamping the gas button down, well, the dev thought of that: the bus constantly veers to the right, and therefore, it requires constant supervision to keep it on the road, and if it goes off the road into the desert sands, well, it gets towed back to Tuscon in real time.

A short look at it:




A brave soul doing the whole damn 8 hours:




(also, on a side note, for a game that's supposed to be "stupefyingly realistic," they're pretty cavalier about which side of the road you're supposed to be on. Thank Jah for small mercies, I reckon.)

Honestly, that's a good analogy for how hard I think it will likely be to actually fix the massive inequality problems (and would be even if the Republican party weren't just a few Angstroms to the left of the NSDAP), and even then, I think some of them could very well be beyond fixing. Still doesn't mean they're somehow good or just.

[bennyboy]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_i...ted_States

And are you telling me that even in Western Europe, things are even worse? Well, I can’t find a sort of database of racial inequality in places there, but there is the GINI coefficient, which calculates income disparity.  Note that the higher the coefficient (and the redder its place on the map), the worse it is. Let’s see how the US scores in comparison with other nations.

Wait, we've been talking about justice, which I took to refer to abstracts like freedom of speech and action. Are you defining it in economic terms? If so, given the context right now, you'd better show this chart next to racial diversity charts, or % of population that is newly immigrated.

[The Grand Nudger]

I didn't say the first part or deny the second part.

But I would say that in a place where white people have privilege purely based on the colour of their skin with an absence of any other significant privilege like being in a majority, or wealth, it would require the race who are in the majority to be racist in favour of white people.

It actually doesn't..but that's just trivia as far as the US is concerned, since there is more than a smidgeon of racist sentiment wafting around.

Otherwise why would the majority give white people privilege unless they could take it by force, pay for it or earn it in some way.

White privilege -is- the lasting consequence of considerable force, and it has not always been extended to all those we might find "white" today. It's also a consequence of less destructive behaviors, like cultural and civic solidarity, albeit with a myopic view.

[bennyboy]

--edit--

Whoah, posted pet comment in wrong thread.

[paulpablo]

I didn't say the first part or deny the second part.

But I would say that in a place where white people have privilege purely based on the colour of their skin with an absence of any other significant privilege like being in a majority, or wealth, it would require the race who are in the majority to be racist in favour of white people.

It actually doesn't..but that's just trivia as far as the US is concerned, since there is more than a smidgeon of racist sentiment wafting around.

Otherwise why would the majority give white people privilege unless they could take it by force, pay for it or earn it in some way.

White privilege -is- the lasting consequence of considerable force, and it has not always been extended to all those we might find "white" today. It's also a consequence of less destructive behaviors, like cultural and civic solidarity, albeit with a myopic view.

If the privilege is the result of superior military force and resulting military actions that result in power then that's simply a power privilege.
It's not exclusively white or caused by having white skin.

[The Grand Nudger]

If the privilege is the result of superior military force and resulting military actions that result in power then that's simply a power privilege.

While that was once the case, it certainly isn't so any more, unless you count our police as a military force.  It doesn't take a battalion of infantry to maintain privilege anymore than it takes an army of calorie burning racists.

It's not exclusively white or caused by having white skin.

The type of privilege being discussed by the term "white privilege" most certainly is, and demonstrably exists.  Until you can get past this anxious hurdle you will not be able to cogently comment on -that- privilege.  It is a bag of tangible assets, conferred by identification as white.

Lay that aside for a moment, though. Let's run with this "oh, that's just some other so and so". So what if it were? If that privilege existed, for example..as a consequence of superior military force? Would it somehow reduce or diminish it's undesirability if there were guys with armbands running up and down the streets? No, OFC not.

Is Simply Power Privilege™...somehow.....different..in a society where power correlates directly to perceived ethnicity? The same question repeats itself with Simply Wealth Privilege™. Simply Majority Privilege™. etc etc etc.