Sanders is consistently the most popular and respected politician in America long after the election while Hillary Clinton is dreadfully unpopular. Winning primary races is different winning the general election (polls consistently showed that Sanders had a better chance of winning against Trump than Hillary did) and the conscious of public opinion. Also the media was a big factor that kept people from properly knowing enough about Sanders and comparing him to Clinton during that period as explained here:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/05/where-did-the-bernie-sanders-movement-come-from-the-internet.html

You're right he's more of a social democrat than a socialist. In fact, his proposed policies were just barely fit in the category of social democrat, it's basically just what most of the 1st World already had. But he's emphasized a new language into the mainstream political consciousness, and that's the stark class differences. He's also bit more of a socialist than informed critics seem to think because he supports the Worker Cooperative movement.

I general sympathize with this article's exposition on the matter, I just don't think any amount of police training will help significantly to change the problem:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/01/the-nice-cop

I tend to think of how people act in terms of incentives, and if people in authority are positioned with too much instruments and opportunities to control others, there is going to be abuse all around. There just needs to be a better way to organize security in general.

I don't mean to pick on just you here with my rambling, Crankus, but what bothers me the most about the idea of white privilege, and indeed privilege in itself, is the tendency of those who believe in it to focus almost entirely on macro examples. — Buxtebuddha

I'm too armored in white male privilege to fell any slings and arrows from your response. Just kidding.

It is not possible to address macro and micro aspects of society at the same time. Thank you for your helpful personal anecdote.

Privilege comes as a package. Those who really have a lot of privilege have it because of their wealth, education, social connections, physical appearance, personality, heritage, and race and sex. When I was last in Chicago (before the 2016 election) I stopped in to survey Trump Tower. I wandered around looking for whatever there was, and quickly noticed that I was being followed. I clearly didn't belong there, despite being white and male.

The school I attended was 100% white, and there was a hierarchy of white males. The "privileged" white males were on the basketball or football teams, had lots of friends, (got good grades, I guess; don't know for sure), were good looking, and so on. There was also a hierarchy of white females. Most of the students were excluded from the higher reaches of the hierarchy. It was simply not open.

I'm well aware that many blacks are systematically excluded from... all sorts of things. It isn't just that they are black. They often present as poorly educated, not well versed in standard English (which is spoken by all races in English speaking countries), not dressed in standard business attire, and so on. Their deficiencies may not be their fault; their language usage and attire may be culturally inflected. None the less, they will get the brushoff if they are too far from the mean -- and so will whites, asians, hispanics, and native americans.

It is always a question for the excluded whether, and in what, they really want to be included. Being an outlier has its advantages. By being excluded in the past, gay men were able to put together community for themselves. I've been excluded and I've been accepted; acceptance feels better. But exclusion is one of the possible things that can happen.

Nobody but you said anything about epidemic levels. — andrewk

So you've probably taken a few anecdotes and extrapolated from them some grave problem, though not grave enough for you to label it an "epidemic." Okay. So what? I imagine there is Asian privilege on the buses in Asian countries, wherein non-Asians are made to feel uncomfortable. Why don't we talk about Asian privilege, then? Or African privilege? Or Hispanic privilege?

I think the major factors are fear, poor training and lack of psychological screening. — andrewk

Good, progress. Notice these things have nothing to do with being white.

Does this mean you're a republican? — Joshs

Yes, on most issues of American politics apart from healthcare, environmental policies and some economic issues.

Good, progress. Notice these things have nothing to do with being white. — Thorongil

More made-up irrelevant nonsense. Nowhere did I say that police who shoot blacks are all white, or even predominantly white.

I suppose it's futile to hope that at some stage you'll actually start to engage with what people have written, rather than what your feverish imagination tells you they might have written.

Sorry, but racism isn't anywhere near the most significant factor in why police shoot some black people. It's noteworthy, however, that you attribute the mere fact of a black man being shot by a police officer to racism. Do you realize how insane that is? — Thorongil

Let's make this simple. In police fatal shootings, civilians from “other” minority groups were significantly more likely than Whites to have not been attacking the officer(s) or other civilians and that Black civilians were more than twice as likely as White civilians to have been unarmed.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9133.12269/abstract;jsessionid=8BFE5F45677070AA9A729F26B245D853.f02t03

Are you suggesting that despite a 99% confidence in the statistical significance, the fact that they're black is just a coincidence?

But I think the phrase 'the lie of white privilege' is silly. — andrewk

Sure, it's just clickbait, just like my own thread title - a marketing element.

White privilege is simply not having to wonder whether a stranger will suddenly start to abuse you on the bus, just because of what you look like. — andrewk

The problem here is that I don't think that being white, in and of itself, prevents a stranger from abusing you on the bus. First of all, it depends on the geographical area we're talking about. And it also depends on many other features - if you have something that stands out - a weird looking nose, etc. - you may get people abusing you, regardless of your skin color. If you're a super big, muscular, strong and tough-looking black guy, you most likely won't get people abusing you on the bus. That's why I say that it really depends - we can't frame it as "white" privilege, as if this sort of privilige belonged only to whites and not people of other skin colors too. I think that, instead, it ought to be framed as being a decent human being and not abusing others, regardless of why the perpetrators claim to do it.

In the US it is also not having to fear a police officer every time one comes near, that they may stop and search you, or even shoot you, because of what you look like. One would have to live under a rock to think that such a privilege does not exist. — andrewk

Yeah, that is probably right, the US is a strange society in that regard.

Thinking about the kind of 'privilege' involved here, I think part of why it's so hard to talk about and articulate is that it isn't privilege in a positive sense, of having something someone else doesn't, but instead a strange privilege that involves not having something, a privilege involving an absence of something and not it's presence. It's a privilege involving not having to do, think, or talk about certain things, in a way that others might have to. I think @andrewk's examples are apposite, but a particular instance of this resonated with me when I heard about recently - the idea of 'the talk', a phenomenon so widespread as to have it's own little designation: that involving black parents in America universally having to educate their children on how to survive police encounters, as a matter of necessity: https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12401792/police-black-parents-the-talk

There was an article by ProPublica a while back that really captured the difference in behaviour this kind of thing incurs: https://www.propublica.org/article/yes-black-america-fears-the-police-heres-why . An except:

"The shots stopped as quickly as they had started. The man disappeared between some buildings. Chest heaving, hands shaking, I tried to calm my crying daughter, while my husband, friends and I all looked at one another in breathless disbelief. I turned to check on Hunter, a high school intern from Oregon who was staying with my family for a few weeks, but she was on the phone.

...Unable to imagine whom she would be calling at that moment, I asked her, somewhat indignantly, if she couldn’t have waited until we got to safety before calling her mom.

“No,” she said. “I am talking to the police.”

My friends and I locked eyes in stunned silence. Between the four adults, we hold six degrees. Three of us are journalists. And not one of us had thought to call the police. We had not even considered it. We also are all black. And without realizing it, in that moment, each of us had made a set of calculations, an instantaneous weighing of the pros and cons .... As far as we could tell, no one had been hurt. The shooter was long gone, and we had seen the back of him for only a second or two. On the other hand, calling the police posed considerable risks. It carried the very real possibility of inviting disrespect, even physical harm. We had seen witnesses treated like suspects, and knew how quickly black people calling the police for help could wind up cuffed in the back of a squad car."

I think this resonated with me in particular because I'd be that person calling the police (I'm not exactly white, but these are issues that remain somewhat removed from me). I don't think I would have thought there would be any reason not to.

-How do you know the hierarchy is based on competency? Most people stay within their income bracket (and near where there parents were). So it could be that nearly everyone is incompetent, but it seems more likely that those who held power (whether political or economic) in the past has a strong relationship with who has it in the future. I'll just let you know that white people did not eliminate nepotism, not from politics nor in economics. — MindForged

I would say that over time the hierarchy always shifts towards competency. This doesn't mean that there cannot be cases, some of them even for hundreds of years, when incompetent people maintain positions of power. That is quite frequent - look at Justin Trudeau - no competency, he's there just because of his father.

Many people look at things in this way, but it's just a short-term thing. It's not sustainable - and when I say sustainable, I'm referring to the fact that it's not sustainable over many generations.

Regarding the concrete example you provided. Statistically, people may stay within their income bracket, but that isn't what interests me. What interests me is the possibility of moving from one income bracket to another. That isn't something that you can assess statistically because it presupposes that all people (or at least most people) are willing to do what it takes and desire to move from one income bracket to another. And of course, this just isn't true. Most people grow comfortable in their income bracket over time, and this is a personal observation I've made.

-Even if it is in fact the case that hierarchies cannot be eliminated, that does not entail that no specific hierarchy cannot be eliminated. Nor does competency need to entail privilege unless you are just something like social Darwinist ("those who succeed are the ones who are competent" seems to fit the bill) — MindForged

Hierarchies cannot be eliminated, but sure, they can be changed.

I never said competency entails privilege. But competency naturally translates in greater power to influence your surrounding environment. That's why things fell apart in the Eastern Soviet bloc, because people were promoted solely based on political connections and ideological reasons, and not on competence. Such a structure cannot survive in the long-run.

-So wait, you do acknowledge the existence of the Bourgeoisie??? Marxists define (it's not the full definition) that as the class which by whatever means necessary perpetuates their ownership of the means of production. — MindForged

Sure.

-Oh, lol, so we just exclude corruption? Hm, I guess when businesses (all of the most successful of which) sprinkle campaign donations on dozens of politicians we can just exclude that as counting against the idea of them being competent (otherwise they needn't manipulate the political process to their benefit by using their money). — MindForged

Yeah, I excluded it because corruption is a problem and needs to be addressed separately from whether or not someone is successful in their business. Someone can be successful without being corrupt.

Didn't Marx hold that advances in production, technology, and so on would result in new kinds of thinking? — Bitter Crank

Actually, he held the dialectical view, that advances in thinking and advances in production go hand in hand, and one spurs the other. Quantitative progress leading to qualitative progress in a loop sort of way. And sure, I agree with that view. When new possibilities of behaviour open up (that's what new technology does), then thinking changes to take those into account, which again opens up new possibilities of technology, etc. etc.

Somehow, I don't think most members of "the left" who you consider to be behind all these identity schemes would recognize a communist or a socialist if their lives depended on it. It's a strange kind of Marxism, if you ask me -- perverse. — Bitter Crank

The issue is precisely that the left campaigns on these points - they may not be responsible for them, but they certainly create unrest and add fuel to the fires. The left as it exists today, not the left in principle, because remember, I am somewhat left-leaning too as the many political tests I've done 1 year or so ago illustrate.

It isn't the case that Marx focussed on conflict between haves and have nots: He focussed on the conflict between producers and owners -- the working class and the bourgeoisie. The WRONG that Marx identified wasn't that some people had more than others, it was that those who produce all wealth (the workers) do not benefit proportionately, and that those who benefit DISPROPORTIONATELY (the bourgeoisie) do no work at all. EDIT: They perform work putting things together, but once assembled, they hire people to make sure it stays put together. — Bitter Crank

I think that the underlying issue is that people have grown accustomed to (or perhaps are forced to?) sell their labour instead of sell what they produce. For many, that is because they never learned how to produce anything. The social environment does a lot of harm here since it trains people to be handicapped. Basically, from the moment you enter the gates of your school, you are trained to sell your labour, not the products of your labour. You are told to stay in the schooling system, follow the path they lay out for you, get that degree, or get that job they help you to get, etc. You are never told "listen, you have useful things to give for society. You must concentrate on producing what is useful for your fellow human beings" - no, the message is always to trade your labour for money, instead of your products for money.

So the issue that many on the left don't get is that it's not business and the trading of commodities, goods and services that is problematic. It's the trading of labour. So the entrepreneur is actually the person who most often understands this - that the so-called exploitation happens when one trades their labour for money instead of their production for money. Labour is intrinsically tied to time - you need to spend time to labour. But production isn't. Production can happen without spending time, thanks to automatisation, or in the case of software, reproducing your product is essentially free, regardless of the number of copies you sell. So in the decoupling of production from labour, therein lies the "surplus value" that the entrepreneur takes for himself. And this decoupling is done at multiple chokepoints. One of them is in terms of means of production directly (the factory is owned by you, and your workers effectively pay you rent to use it to sell their labour), or in the distribution channel, in connecting client with product.

So all good entrepreneurship runs on the "rent" model. Getting paid for "renting" some means of production or means of distribution. Entrepreneurship is premised on the idea of passivity - all entrepreneurs want passive income, it is almost the Holy Grail. Passive income is determined by the amount of time required to make it. Rent, software, and money itself are very passive. Rent, you don't have to do much to collect it. Software, easy to reproduce, and resell, takes almost no work. And money, well, if you have lots of money, you give it to the speculators, and they breed it, so that it produces lots of babies for you.

What enables this kind of entrepreneurship is simply the fact that not everyone is an entrepreneur. If everyone became an entrepreneur, and nobody sold their labour, but rather the products of their labour, then there would be no problem. Hence distributism. So entrepreneurship is the solution, not the problem, which is what the left of today doesn't understand.

Another thing we have to take into account about Peterson is his milieu: Peterson is a college professor. College campus are exactly the kind of place where one would expect ideological excess because on campus are thousands of students (well... hundreds, anyway) who are anxious to try on radical new theories in a relatively safe environment (they are, after all, paying customers).

The wannabe radicals may be right, wrong, or not even wrong, but they can't, don't, and won't affect society very much. Once they get out of college and get hired to work in a large corporation, they will find they are not allowed anywhere close to the levers of power. If they attempt college stunts at work they are likely to get fired.

Peterson has perhaps been overly influenced by what happens on his (and other) campuses. It's a very lively but unrepresentative school playground. — Bitter Crank

I wouldn't say that those people aren't destructive once they exit University. Their attitudes influence elections, they influence workplace environments, and so on.

I would say that over time the hierarchy always shifts towards competency. This doesn't mean that there cannot be cases, some of them even for hundreds of years, when incompetent people maintain positions of power. That is quite frequent - look at Justin Trudeau - no competency, he's there just because of his father.

Many people look at things in this way, but it's just a short-term thing. It's not sustainable - and when I say sustainable, I'm referring to the fact that it's not sustainable over many generations.

Regarding the concrete example you provided. Statistically, people may stay within their income bracket, but that isn't what interests me. What interests me is the possibility of moving from one income bracket to another. That isn't something that you can assess statistically because it presupposes that all people (or at least most people) are willing to do what it takes and desire to move from one income bracket to another. And of course, this just isn't true. Most people grow comfortable in their income bracket over time, and this is a personal observation I've made.

How do you know the hierarchy "shifts towards competency"? You didn't really answer my question, you just told me what you believe is the case. How is incompetency unsustainable? This isn't the interplay of man vs wild, where failure means death, so I don't know what you're appealing to to justify this belief. The political process is not remotely free of nepotism.

Well it should interest you because it suggests that success isn't fully determined by competency. Like I hate to use a cliche example, but Trump is mega rich, as was his father (not to mention the question of just how much he actually improved his finances after his inheritance). His extreme affluence is directly a result of what his parents had.

I never said competency entails privilege. But competency naturally translates in greater power to influence your surrounding environment. That's why things fell apart in the Eastern Soviet bloc, because people were promoted solely based on political connections and ideological reasons, and not on competence. Such a structure cannot survive in the long-run.

Bro, you literally said that competency entails privilege:

Yes, the Marxists claim that the bourgeoisie maintain a certain social and economic structure because they are the ones who have power, and since it benefits them, they use their power in that direction. But as Peterson explains in the video, it's not power, but competency, that allows them to be the privileged social class. There is a hierarchy, hierarchies cannot be eliminated, and that hierarchy is based on competency. The bourgeois are at the top because they have shown themselves to be the most competent at taking care of their society.

Which sounds hopelessly naive for reasons I went over before.

Yeah, I excluded it because corruption is a problem and needs to be addressed separately from whether or not someone is successful in their business. Someone can be successful without being corrupt.

Except, as the example I gave shows, the corruption is at least in part how businesses become more successful. If bribing political officials under the hilarious moniker of "campaign financing" to net economic moves beneficial to the business in question isn't corruption assisting success, I don't know what it. The point isn't that success is impossible sans-corruption, the point is the most successful businesses are usually the ones who fuel corruption for their own ends, meaning it's not all (or even mostly) competency based. Your response to corruption just ends up being a choice to ignore the counter-examples to your view.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/09/california-police-white-supremacists-counter-protest

Have some more pomo marxist propaganda chaps.

More made-up irrelevant nonsense. Nowhere did I say that police who shoot blacks are all white, or even predominantly white. — andrewk

You can't read your own writing? Look at what I originally quoted of you:

White privilege is simply not having to wonder whether a stranger will suddenly start to abuse you on the bus, just because of what you look like. In the US it is also not having to fear a police officer every time one comes near, that they may stop and search you, or even shoot you, because of what you look like. — andrewk

If you can't see the implication here, in addition to the explicit meaning of what you wrote, then I can't help you.

Are you suggesting that despite a 99% confidence in the statistical significance, the fact that they're black is just a coincidence? — Pseudonym

Yeah.

By the way, your article's authors assume implicit bias, but that's been debunked: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Can-We-Really-Measure-Implicit/238807

Did you even read the article you cite? Here's a few quotes.

"... casts doubt on the supposed connection."

"... the correlation between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior appears weaker than previously thought."

"... there’s not necessarily strong evidence for the conclusions people have drawn,"

Note 'doubt', 'appears' and 'not necessarily'. Hardly 'debunked'.

In addition to the excessive certainty you've given this study, it is only about the relationship between visual bias stimuli and behaviour. It doesn't have any bearing on the issue of whether prejudiced behaviour actually exists.

Can you expand on this? — Noble Dust

Well, it's a difference of attitude. One claims that suffering is part and parcel of the nature of existence as we experience it now, and thus cannot be eliminated completely (it can only be fought against, held at bay, etc.) while the other party thinks that someone is responsible for the badness of existence, and if those people or agents are removed, then existence will be good.

I watched quite a bit of the film somewhat horrified. — Banno

Why horrified at Peterson's speech?

So please have a listen to the lecture when you have some time, and post your thoughts. — Agustino

This is a lecture version of fake news.
This is a towering straw man of bollocks.

It's that that you comment on form my post?

It was how he kept looking to the ceiling.

Project Implicit (the implicit bias measurement test site) is a good example of the problem of social science as a whole. Thinking and behavior are difficult to precisely measure and connect.

No one doubts that prejudicial thinking and behavior exists; no one doubts that people are biased; we can observe biased behavior. Still, we can and do sometimes misattribute a given bias to behavior. When examined very closely, thinking and behavior have a not altogether straightforward relationship. We can misinterpret observed behavior.

Tests (like Project Implicit's) attempt to get closer to the truth of the matter by measuring behaviors in an artificial, controlled setting. The tests employ interesting and possibly valid strategies, but the results may or may not seem individually congruent with one's own self-knowledge. Drawing a strong relationship between these kinds of tests and results on the one hand, and real-world behaviors is difficult at best.

The implication cannot be seen because it is not there. You are imagining it.

You are never going to be able to conduct a sensible discussion if you keep on telling people that they said or meant something that they didn't. You are not a mind reader.

You can bold my words as much as you like. That won't make an accusation of 'racism' appear amongst them. 'Racism' is a concept that I find deeply unhelpful and avoid using wherever possible.

Identifying a harm that a person suffers is not the same as blaming somebody for that harm. If that's the way you look at the world then that's your misfortune, but it's just silly to assume that everybody else looks at the world the same way.

These are excellent admissions. Still, you're not off the hook yet, for the fact remains that you want white privilege eradicated. Why want that, if not because you do blame people for inflicting harm, such as in the examples you gave? You're trying to have your cake and eat it too, my friend.

These are excellent admissions. — Thorongil

There were no admissions. You're making stuff up again.

My position has not changed one iota. The only thing that has changed is that maybe you are finally starting to realise that all the conclusions that you leaped to about what my position was were ridiculous and unfounded.

Why do you find it so hard to just say 'Sorry, I got it wrong.'

If I recall correctly the initial 'talk' was from an Asian father to his son. The 'talk' became known as something that went on in ethnic families, I think even Eric Holder indicated his father gave him the talk.

White fathers worry about their children too but they don't have this kind of worry. White people are largely invisible to themselves in a way that different toned ethenticities can never be. I don't think many white people consider themselves privileged because their view of themselves in aggregate is too entwined in the culture they dominate.

Coventry University and the University of Illinois visited five cities across the US and spoke with over 400 people who identified themselves as white working-class (10/2017). Conclusions follow:

1)classic definitions of white working-class communities, framed around ethnicity, income, education and occupation, are narrow and outdated and not accounting for their lived experiences and economic realities;
2)participants identified with being white working-class based around values through which they differentiate themselves from other groups - including being hardworking, honest and not dependent on welfare;
3)economic insecurity (living "paycheque to paycheque"), rather than traditional class credentials such as education or occupation, underpins many participants' identification as white working-class;
4)'fairness' was frequently emphasized by participants, who feel that it is not being applied equally and that racial minorities are supported through welfare and social services while they are left in the slow lane;
5)the concept of white privilege was rejected by many participants, who felt their whiteness was a disadvantage in terms of "reverse racism" existing in the labour market and lack of representation of voice;
6)whiteness was mostly unspoken, with participants preferring to refer to themselves as "working" or "working-class", with communities of colour, conversely, framed not by class but by ethnicity;
7)use of racialised language was common, particularly when participants referred to concerns around neighbourhood change, economic decline, welfare dependency and blame for societal problems;
8) immigrants and racial minorities are seen as being outside the working class and a racial "other", even if they share a similar economic position to those in white working-class communities.

After the civil rights movement, affirmative action, and the rest, America expected that its racism problem would dissolve away, but that has not happened and to quote John Derbyshire

So I think there is a cold, dark despair lurking in America’s collective heart about the whole thing.

White people are largely invisible to themselves in a way that different toned ethenticities can never be. I don't think many white people consider themselves privileged because their view of themselves in aggregate is too entwined in the culture they dominate. — Cavacava

Is this a virtue or a fault? Do you really want white people to be white conscious?

White fathers worry about their children too but they don't have this kind of worry. White people are largely invisible to themselves in a way that different toned ethenticities can never be. I don't think many white people consider themselves privileged because their view of themselves in aggregate is too entwined in the culture they dominate. — Cavacava

Yeah, that's actually a really fascinating point, the idea that white identity - to the extent there is one - ends up often being sublimated into class or even 'attitude' categories ('hardworking, etc'). I wonder if this is a kind of socio-psycho response to a phenomenon that might be called the particularization of white identity, that is, the creeping acknowledgement that 'white' no longer stands for a universalist non-ethnicity (as when 'ethnic' simply means 'non-white'), and is coming to be seen as one ethnic identity among a circle of others (complex and problematic as it might be). And I mean this in the most banal way as when TV shows or memes now speak of 'white people things'.

There's a moment in one of my favourite recent films, End of Watch, when Michael Peña's Latino character jokingly tells Jake Gyllenhaal's white character to leave him alone and enjoy his 'white people stuff' - an evening at the symphony that Gyllenhaal had planned with his girlfriend. I don't think this is a joke that could have been made - or even thought-up as a joke - 10 or so years ago. And there's a kind of lovely dialectical implication in the joke too,insofar as, as a joke it pokes fun of there being 'any-color-people stuff' at all.

But if you couple this emergent particularization of whiteness with (a) the problematic historical discourse of 'whiteness' (often associated, for good or ill, with racism and bigotry), and (b) the complex political dynamics of racial history in the US, and you get a recipe for just the kind of sublimation, I think, described in the report you link. So it's definitely the case that white people negotiate race too, in a way specific to them, and in a way definitely worthy of study as well.

It's that that you comment on form my post? — Banno

Yes, because the rest was a pile of unargued manure.

Now you're dodging my questions.