Date: 2017-02-11 11:39 pm (UTC)
garote: (machine)
From: [personal profile] garote
"Traitors to their own people" is not something you get to declare from outside a given group. And they would not place you in their group, I guarantee it. People on the left have A Thing about placing racists outside their in-group.

I see you vilify them for "being conditioned to ignore race". As I've said elsewhere, race is a malleable and subjective construct. Like language, we are not born knowing it, we are born with the capacity to construct it, as our current environment describes it to us.

What I really want to ask you though is, since you think there is some kind of race war going on, that all of the other races are eagerly fighting except for those gosh-darned leftists... What are the consequences of "losing" this war?

I mean, aside from what seems to be the obvious: The collective world population will have somewhat darker skin.

What else is at stake??

Date: 2017-02-12 12:52 am (UTC)
garote: (machine)
From: [personal profile] garote
There you go using that word "genocide" again... I don't think it means what you think it means. Overwhelming one set of facial features with another through voluntary interbreeding is not "genocide". You're going to have a hard time finding enough people interested in redefining it that way. And ... the victims of actual genocide will probably be really upset at you as well!

Date: 2017-02-12 01:58 am (UTC)
garote: (machine)
From: [personal profile] garote
I'm sorry, but every dictionary ever printed, and everyone else I've ever met, humbly disagrees with you.
You don't get that kind of victim status. Though you clearly prize it.

Date: 2017-02-12 01:30 am (UTC)
garote: (machine)
From: [personal profile] garote
I think we're almost on the same page here with race. The language analogy is helping. But there's a crucial point that's missing.

Have you ever tried to learn a very foreign language? Like, as a native English speaker, tried to learn some form of Chinese? It's very difficult for two reasons. First, there are sounds the Chinese make that do not have analogues in English, and we tend to map these sounds onto ones we already know when picking up the language, and they get stuck. That leaves us with an accent that is very hard to eradicate and can even mangle our speech completely.

And second, Chinese is a tonal language. That means by varying the pitch of your voice between high and low, you actually change the meaning and structure of your words. We use tone to convey emotion and intent behind words almost exclusively, and using it to change meaning or grammar is a totally foreign idea to us, and to learn it we have to push aside a huge amount of our emotional expression, and re-learn it around the new language.

The point is, because we are already native speakers of another language, it is actually a big uphill battle learning this new language, because we have to redefine many categorizations of sounds (to reduce our accent) and we have to use sound in a totally different way.

In other words, we've been "calibrated" to communicate with one peer group, and now that "calibration" is working against us when we want to communicate with a different one.

This is different from spatial awareness. You learn spatial awareness once, and only tweak it as you go. Gravity is the same for everyone. Balance works the same way for everyone with four limbs and a spine. The length of your reach and the weight of your body changes only very slowly and that training is never an impediment unless there's some kind of accident (like you lose a limb) or you go into space, or go deep-sea diving without training first.

Race is like language. Not like spatial awareness. The shorthand and the distinctions you have learned to make with race are:

1. not universal, even across what you call "your own" race,
2. not always an advantage - and can be a huge disadvantage at times,
3. not subject to an objective standard for quality - only a subjective one.

Date: 2017-02-12 02:09 am (UTC)
garote: (machine)
From: [personal profile] garote
Noooo, they were correlating chunks of the genome to facial features, with a suspiciously large margin of error. They are still way waaaayy distant from being able to alter DNA to give you those facial features.

And as I pointed out elsewhere. There are many many facial features, and shades of distinction amongst those features, and where you draw the lines to declare a race is not objective, "ontologically" or otherwise. The races defined even vary across different disciplines - forensic anthropology versus sociology versus archaeology for example - and are even contested within those disciplines, and are also in a state of flux.
Edited Date: 2017-02-12 02:09 am (UTC)

Date: 2017-02-12 03:55 am (UTC)
garote: (machine)
From: [personal profile] garote
You like that word "suppressed". It's exciting. Makes you think there is something really valuable here eh?

Fun article. From page four, emphasis added:

- - -

Many scientists apparently worry that proof of divergent brain evolution could be so racially polarizing that we, as a society, would almost be better off in the dark. Hawks responds that the best safeguard against bigotry is educating the public. He thinks we understand enough about human genetics to know that the notion of racial superiority is absurd. Intelligence, he argues, is not a single trait but a vast suite of abilities, and each ancestral environment may have favored a different set of talents. What is sorely needed, he says, is “an ecological framework” to interpret the results. “Groups are best adapted to their own environment, which eliminates the question of superiority.” Even he concedes, though, that communicating the nuances will be no easy task.

“Whatever we find,” Wang says, “it would never be justification for abandoning the egalitarian value that all individuals, regardless of their ethnicity, are deserving of the same rights and opportunities.” Moyzis expands on that line of reasoning, putting a sunny spin on the group’s findings. “It would be boring if all the races were fundamentally the same,” he argues. “It’s exciting to think that they bring different strengths and talents to the table. That is part of what makes melting-pot cultures like our own so invigorating and creative.”

Of course, in melting-pot cultures all kinds of ethnic groups intermingle freely, and the children who result literally meld our DNA together. Even if those groups were diverging, international travel is now causing the diversity to get lost in the genetic reshuffling. “That’s the ultimate irony,” Moyzis says. “By the time we finally settle this debate, we’ll all be such a mixture of genes that we won’t care.”

- - -

Date: 2017-02-12 04:30 am (UTC)
garote: (machine)
From: [personal profile] garote
Then why are you intent on fighting a war drawn across arbitrary lines?

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