Race versus culture

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vegetariantaxidermy
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Re: Race versus culture

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

Dubious wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 10:44 pm Race could mean any number of things depending on agenda. But what it defaults to is biology and not anyone's customized opinions as what they would like it to be.
Do you really think people are citing biology when they talk about race? Of course not. They are referring to people who look different from themselves, and along with that difference often comes differences in beliefs, values, behaviour/customs etc. etc...
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Re: Race versus culture

Post by Dubious »

vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 11:32 pm
Dubious wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 10:44 pm Race could mean any number of things depending on agenda. But what it defaults to is biology and not anyone's customized opinions as what they would like it to be.
Do you really think people are citing biology when they talk about race? Of course not. They are referring to people who look different from themselves.
That's the point! People talk their "book" however it suits them to "interpret" a delicate subject even though the morphological variations are based on exceedingly minor genetic differences.

The real meaning of ethnicity is another casualty in most race debates. It's far easier to understand one when the other is understood, i.e., "race" denoted scientifically compared to the cultural and linguistic patterns which describe ethnicity.

Separating one from the other may prevent one from being a racist but not necessarily from acting like one.
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Re: Race versus culture

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

Dubious wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 12:28 am
vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 11:32 pm
Dubious wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 10:44 pm Race could mean any number of things depending on agenda. But what it defaults to is biology and not anyone's customized opinions as what they would like it to be.
Do you really think people are citing biology when they talk about race? Of course not. They are referring to people who look different from themselves.
That's the point! People talk their "book" however it suits them to "interpret" a delicate subject even though the morphological variations are based on exceedingly minor genetic differences.

The real meaning of ethnicity is another casualty in most race debates. It's far easier to understand one when the other is understood, i.e., "race" denoted scientifically compared to the cultural and linguistic patterns which describe ethnicity.

Separating one from the other may prevent one from being a racist but not necessarily from acting like one.
You lost me somewhere near the beginning. Could you define 'race' then? If it doesn't exist then at least say what it is that 'doesn't exist', or is it like the 'god' argument that both sides use to their advantage?
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Re: Race versus culture

Post by Belinda »

Londoner wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 1:50 pm
Seleucus wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 1:11 pm I can say quite confidently that I am well aware that Slavs, Koreans, Eskimos and Aborigines are all humans. So guess we can agree, that race, just like Golden Retrievers, exists.
So, having got rid of all the pseudo-scientific stuff, we can now refine further our understanding of what you mean by 'race'.

Is it cultural? Such that a black person can become a Slav if they conform to the cultural baggage that goes with being a Slav (and that you have a check list of what that cultural baggage is)?

Or is it about appearance? Is 'race' determined by what you agree are superficial features, like the shade of somebody's skin? So that every person with a sufficiently dark skin, (judged against some sort of colour chart), belongs to the same 'race', irrespective of their culture?
I too would like Seleucus to elucidate this point.

Pedigree dogs breed true to type, including linked anatomical appearance and specific mental abilities. Humans are like dogs insofar as they do inherit features from their parents. Pedigree dogs breeds' specific anatomies are linked to those breeds' abilities; especially working breeds. Humans' aren't.

It's still a matter of debate to what extent humans' genetic inheritance outweighs their nurture or vice versa. The difference between pedigree dogs and humans is that, in the human, anatomical features are not usually engineered to accompany mental abilities.In slave populations working American plantations I understand that this sort of deliberate breeding was attempted so that the owners got muscular offspring who were also docile.

In an environment, feral domestic dogs after a few generations revert to a mental and physical type that is limited only by the gene pool. True, we are not entirely like feral dogs and humans' breeding is such that culture does render the individuals more products of artificial selection than are feral dogs: social class has been a fact for a long time.

Difference of opinion therefore resides in the question of humans' innate mental abilities linkage (if any) to humans' anatomical features.


To presume that human anatomical features always fit with mental abilities , or cultures , is therefore erroneous.Talk of any pedigree animals is therefore a waste of time in this connection.

Would Seleucus please remind me; do you claim , one, that specific human anatomical features match specific mental personalities, or do you claim ,two, that specific cultural features match specific mental personalities? Or both?
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Re: Race versus culture

Post by Seleucus »

Arising_uk wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 6:20 pm...
vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 12:37 am...
Londoner wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 6:29 pm...
Summary

Offensive

The position that race doesn't exist or doesn't matter is a highly offensive and insulting thing to say. Race isn't only important to the White supremacist boogeyman. Black student associations, Pan Slavism, and the Pan Arab movement are all essentially racial movements. Denying people their racial identity is tantamount to intellectual genocide. What it means to be Chinese was a central question throughout Chinese history and drawing on racial Chineseness gave the people the purpose and strength to evict the Mongols and also the Portuguese from Taiwan. There is absolutely no shame in having a sense of racial identity and pride, on the contrary.

Grey

A world without race would be a very monotonous and meaningless place. Race is a deep part of who all of us is. The Javanese have occupied their island for almost six-thousand years, some anthropologist are reasonably beginning to believe the Aborigines have dwelt in Australia for towards one hundred millennia, and we know that the fair hair of Europeans is at least partly genetically attributable to the Neanderthals. Race is something we can all look at with curiosity and amazement, it contains links to the most ancient mysteries of the origins of our societies and ourselves.

Leveled

Everyone in the world has a basic idea of race. Even a child understands the basic premise. We easily speak of White and Black and Oriental and Nordic and Mediterranean and Japanese and so on. These races are entities that have stood for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. Meanwhile, there is also a critique of essentialism. The same post-modern critique can be leveled against any of a number or categorizations. We could say that adult and child are fictions and that puberty is a mult-stage proces, it begins at a different age for everyone, in fact human development is a life long process of change, and moreover some people never even enter puberty at all. We could say there is no such thing as man or woman or sex or gender and cite people like Judy Buttler and Gail Rubin and Guy Hocquenghem. We could probably attack the idea of salads, a construct of chavanistic chefs who cannot think outside Escoffier and then we would rebut by discussing the etymology of salads and the most ancient salt mines in Illyria and discuss cooked salads and so on. Simply both the essentialists and the post-modern critique are true at their level.

Dangerous

Taking the view that race doesn't exist or doesn't matter is a misguided and risky thing to do. The Greek merchants who settled in Egypt thousands of years ago were still Greek when Alexander's armies arrived. The Chinese in South-East Asia are still Chinese thousands of years after the imperial dynasty refused to allow them to return home. The Blacks in America are still Black after centuries, and the newly arriving Turks in Europe will still be Turks in a thousand years. People love their races. And while it is possible that non-Whorfian shifts can happen and race, language, culture and religion can move independently of one another, what actually is happening is the Egyptians still resemble their forebearers in the Fayum mummy portarits, the Yazidi still practice Zoroastrianism, the Jews are still Jewish, and the Dravidians still refuse to speak Hindi and use Tamil. These characteristics developed in symbiotic and cybernetic ecosystems over thousands of years. Western people play sports, value religious freedom, women's rights, democratic government and environmentalism. In a thousand years from now, Chinese immigrants to North America and Middle-Eastern migrants into Europe are going to have the same authoritarian political views, disrespect for women and disinterest in mountain biking they do now; if too many come into our homelands, our civilization is eventually going to be taken over and destroyed.
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Re: Race versus culture

Post by Londoner »

vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 12:37 am You lost me somewhere near the beginning. Could you define 'race' then? If it doesn't exist then at least say what it is that 'doesn't exist', or is it like the 'god' argument that both sides use to their advantage?
I think the closest you would get to defining 'race' was that it describes theories that purported to describe the various species of humans. If you do not have a modern understanding of genetics then it doesn't seen unreasonable to assume that the more different things look, then the more distantly related they are. For example, obviously a whale looks much more like a fish than a cow, so it must be more closely related to other fish.

I'd say it is also a survivor of a belief in creation, as described in the Bible. The world is comparatively new - no time for evolution. The species we see now were all created by God as they are, one by one. If one sort of man looks different from another, that must have been God's intention and done for a purpose. The mindset is one where everything has been designed, everything has a purpose. God has designed the world so the appearance of herbs signals their medical use, thus the appearance of people must signal their character.

So I don't think we can get a clear definition of 'race', because rather than being a stand-alone theory it was something that just seemed to follow from a general understanding of the world. I would say it is rather like 'Creationism'; a creationist may pick out things from science in order to bolster their argument, but essentially Creationism is a rejection of science. It cannot be defined because it is ultimately subjective, it is a state of mind. We see the same in arguments about race; the racist will quote facts, but when challenged will shift their ground. Because ultimately their belief is not based on specific evidence but is a consequence of the way they understand life in general.
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Re: Race versus culture

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

Seleucus wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 10:06 am
Arising_uk wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 6:20 pm...
vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 12:37 am...
Londoner wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 6:29 pm...
Summary

Offensive

The position that race doesn't exist or doesn't matter is a highly offensive and insulting thing to say. Race isn't only important to the White supremacist boogeyman. Black student associations, Pan Slavism, and the Pan Arab movement are all essentially racial movements. Denying people their racial identity is tantamount to intellectual genocide. What it means to be Chinese was a central question throughout Chinese history and drawing on racial Chineseness gave the people the purpose and strength to evict the Mongols and also the Portuguese from Taiwan. There is absolutely no shame in having a sense of racial identity and pride, on the contrary.

Grey

A world without race would be a very monotonous and meaningless place. Race is a deep part of who all of us is. The Javanese have occupied their island for almost six-thousand years, some anthropologist are reasonably beginning to believe the Aborigines have dwelt in Australia for towards one hundred millennia, and we know that the fair hair of Europeans is at least partly genetically attributable to the Neanderthals. Race is something we can all look at with curiosity and amazement, it contains links to the most ancient mysteries of the origins of our societies and ourselves.

Leveled

Everyone in the world has a basic idea of race. Even a child understands the basic premise. We easily speak of White and Black and Oriental and Nordic and Mediterranean and Japanese and so on. These races are entities that have stood for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. Meanwhile, there is also a critique of essentialism. The same post-modern critique can be leveled against any of a number or categorizations. We could say that adult and child are fictions and that puberty is a mult-stage proces, it begins at a different age for everyone, in fact human development is a life long process of change, and moreover some people never even enter puberty at all. We could say there is no such thing as man or woman or sex or gender and cite people like Judy Buttler and Gail Rubin and Guy Hocquenghem. We could probably attack the idea of salads, a construct of chavanistic chefs who cannot think outside Escoffier and then we would rebut by discussing the etymology of salads and the most ancient salt mines in Illyria and discuss cooked salads and so on. Simply both the essentialists and the post-modern critique are true at their level.

Dangerous

Taking the view that race doesn't exist or doesn't matter is a misguided and risky thing to do. The Greek merchants who settled in Egypt thousands of years ago were still Greek when Alexander's armies arrived. The Chinese in South-East Asia are still Chinese thousands of years after the imperial dynasty refused to allow them to return home. The Blacks in America are still Black after centuries, and the newly arriving Turks in Europe will still be Turks in a thousand years. People love their races. And while it is possible that non-Whorfian shifts can happen and race, language, culture and religion can move independently of one another, what actually is happening is the Egyptians still resemble their forebearers in the Fayum mummy portarits, the Yazidi still practice Zoroastrianism, the Jews are still Jewish, and the Dravidians still refuse to speak Hindi and use Tamil. These characteristics developed in symbiotic and cybernetic ecosystems over thousands of years. Western people play sports, value religious freedom, women's rights, democratic government and environmentalism. In a thousand years from now, Chinese immigrants to North America and Middle-Eastern migrants into Europe are going to have the same authoritarian political views, disrespect for women and disinterest in mountain biking they do now; if too many come into our homelands, our civilization is eventually going to be taken over and destroyed.
You just have it all wrong. Fanatics are never very bright. People are perfectly entited to object when their country is being sold out to the highest bidder, and invaded and outnumbered by people with completely different values, culture, and politics--that's quite normal, but yours are the ravings of a madman--straight from Nationalsocialist propaganda. The Nazis were the biggest idiots imaginable. They knew nothing about how natural selection works. 'Aryan' my arse. The top Nazis even looked like mutant degenerates.
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Re: Race versus culture

Post by Seleucus »

vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 11:35 am
Seleucus wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 10:06 am
Arising_uk wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 6:20 pm...
vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 12:37 am...
Londoner wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 6:29 pm...
Summary

Offensive

The position that race doesn't exist or doesn't matter is a highly offensive and insulting thing to say. Race isn't only important to the White supremacist boogeyman. Black student associations, Pan Slavism, and the Pan Arab movement are all essentially racial movements. Denying people their racial identity is tantamount to intellectual genocide. What it means to be Chinese was a central question throughout Chinese history and drawing on racial Chineseness gave the people the purpose and strength to evict the Mongols and also the Portuguese from Taiwan. There is absolutely no shame in having a sense of racial identity and pride, on the contrary.

Grey

A world without race would be a very monotonous and meaningless place. Race is a deep part of who all of us is. The Javanese have occupied their island for almost six-thousand years, some anthropologist are reasonably beginning to believe the Aborigines have dwelt in Australia for towards one hundred millennia, and we know that the fair hair of Europeans is at least partly genetically attributable to the Neanderthals. Race is something we can all look at with curiosity and amazement, it contains links to the most ancient mysteries of the origins of our societies and ourselves.

Leveled

Everyone in the world has a basic idea of race. Even a child understands the basic premise. We easily speak of White and Black and Oriental and Nordic and Mediterranean and Japanese and so on. These races are entities that have stood for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. Meanwhile, there is also a critique of essentialism. The same post-modern critique can be leveled against any of a number or categorizations. We could say that adult and child are fictions and that puberty is a mult-stage proces, it begins at a different age for everyone, in fact human development is a life long process of change, and moreover some people never even enter puberty at all. We could say there is no such thing as man or woman or sex or gender and cite people like Judy Buttler and Gail Rubin and Guy Hocquenghem. We could probably attack the idea of salads, a construct of chavanistic chefs who cannot think outside Escoffier and then we would rebut by discussing the etymology of salads and the most ancient salt mines in Illyria and discuss cooked salads and so on. Simply both the essentialists and the post-modern critique are true at their level.

Dangerous

Taking the view that race doesn't exist or doesn't matter is a misguided and risky thing to do. The Greek merchants who settled in Egypt thousands of years ago were still Greek when Alexander's armies arrived. The Chinese in South-East Asia are still Chinese thousands of years after the imperial dynasty refused to allow them to return home. The Blacks in America are still Black after centuries, and the newly arriving Turks in Europe will still be Turks in a thousand years. People love their races. And while it is possible that non-Whorfian shifts can happen and race, language, culture and religion can move independently of one another, what actually is happening is the Egyptians still resemble their forebearers in the Fayum mummy portarits, the Yazidi still practice Zoroastrianism, the Jews are still Jewish, and the Dravidians still refuse to speak Hindi and use Tamil. These characteristics developed in symbiotic and cybernetic ecosystems over thousands of years. Western people play sports, value religious freedom, women's rights, democratic government and environmentalism. In a thousand years from now, Chinese immigrants to North America and Middle-Eastern migrants into Europe are going to have the same authoritarian political views, disrespect for women and disinterest in mountain biking they do now; if too many come into our homelands, our civilization is eventually going to be taken over and destroyed.
You just have it all wrong. Fanatics are never very bright. People are perfectly entited to object when their country is being sold out to the highest bidder, and invaded and outnumbered by people with completely different values, culture, and politics--that's quite normal, but yours are the ravings of a madman--straight from Nationalsocialist propaganda. The Nazis were the biggest idiots imaginable. They knew nothing about how natural selection works. 'Aryan' my arse. The top Nazis even looked like mutant degenerates.
In basic junior high school terms, you forgot the becauses, sos and therefores; totally no supporting arguments or examples.

F
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Re: Race versus culture

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

Seleucus wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 11:50 am
vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 11:35 am
Seleucus wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 10:06 am
Summary

Offensive

The position that race doesn't exist or doesn't matter is a highly offensive and insulting thing to say. Race isn't only important to the White supremacist boogeyman. Black student associations, Pan Slavism, and the Pan Arab movement are all essentially racial movements. Denying people their racial identity is tantamount to intellectual genocide. What it means to be Chinese was a central question throughout Chinese history and drawing on racial Chineseness gave the people the purpose and strength to evict the Mongols and also the Portuguese from Taiwan. There is absolutely no shame in having a sense of racial identity and pride, on the contrary.

Grey

A world without race would be a very monotonous and meaningless place. Race is a deep part of who all of us is. The Javanese have occupied their island for almost six-thousand years, some anthropologist are reasonably beginning to believe the Aborigines have dwelt in Australia for towards one hundred millennia, and we know that the fair hair of Europeans is at least partly genetically attributable to the Neanderthals. Race is something we can all look at with curiosity and amazement, it contains links to the most ancient mysteries of the origins of our societies and ourselves.

Leveled

Everyone in the world has a basic idea of race. Even a child understands the basic premise. We easily speak of White and Black and Oriental and Nordic and Mediterranean and Japanese and so on. These races are entities that have stood for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. Meanwhile, there is also a critique of essentialism. The same post-modern critique can be leveled against any of a number or categorizations. We could say that adult and child are fictions and that puberty is a mult-stage proces, it begins at a different age for everyone, in fact human development is a life long process of change, and moreover some people never even enter puberty at all. We could say there is no such thing as man or woman or sex or gender and cite people like Judy Buttler and Gail Rubin and Guy Hocquenghem. We could probably attack the idea of salads, a construct of chavanistic chefs who cannot think outside Escoffier and then we would rebut by discussing the etymology of salads and the most ancient salt mines in Illyria and discuss cooked salads and so on. Simply both the essentialists and the post-modern critique are true at their level.

Dangerous

Taking the view that race doesn't exist or doesn't matter is a misguided and risky thing to do. The Greek merchants who settled in Egypt thousands of years ago were still Greek when Alexander's armies arrived. The Chinese in South-East Asia are still Chinese thousands of years after the imperial dynasty refused to allow them to return home. The Blacks in America are still Black after centuries, and the newly arriving Turks in Europe will still be Turks in a thousand years. People love their races. And while it is possible that non-Whorfian shifts can happen and race, language, culture and religion can move independently of one another, what actually is happening is the Egyptians still resemble their forebearers in the Fayum mummy portarits, the Yazidi still practice Zoroastrianism, the Jews are still Jewish, and the Dravidians still refuse to speak Hindi and use Tamil. These characteristics developed in symbiotic and cybernetic ecosystems over thousands of years. Western people play sports, value religious freedom, women's rights, democratic government and environmentalism. In a thousand years from now, Chinese immigrants to North America and Middle-Eastern migrants into Europe are going to have the same authoritarian political views, disrespect for women and disinterest in mountain biking they do now; if too many come into our homelands, our civilization is eventually going to be taken over and destroyed.
You just have it all wrong. Fanatics are never very bright. People are perfectly entited to object when their country is being sold out to the highest bidder, and invaded and outnumbered by people with completely different values, culture, and politics--that's quite normal, but yours are the ravings of a madman--straight from Nationalsocialist propaganda. The Nazis were the biggest idiots imaginable. They knew nothing about how natural selection works. 'Aryan' my arse. The top Nazis even looked like mutant degenerates.
In basic junior high school terms, you forgot the becauses, sos and therefores; totally no supporting arguments or examples.

F
It's only simple facts. What would a 'supporting argument' even look like? I wouldn't want to insult your intelligence :( Although Goebbels was a pretty good example of a stereotypical degenerate mutant, and there's the one with the huge beak-like nose and tiny eyes set far too close together. I think that was Heidrich.

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Re: Race versus culture

Post by Seleucus »

vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 12:12 pm
Seleucus wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 11:50 am
vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 11:35 am
You just have it all wrong. Fanatics are never very bright. People are perfectly entited to object when their country is being sold out to the highest bidder, and invaded and outnumbered by people with completely different values, culture, and politics--that's quite normal, but yours are the ravings of a madman--straight from Nationalsocialist propaganda. The Nazis were the biggest idiots imaginable. They knew nothing about how natural selection works. 'Aryan' my arse. The top Nazis even looked like mutant degenerates.
In basic junior high school terms, you forgot the becauses, sos and therefores; totally no supporting arguments or examples.

F
It's only simple facts. What would a 'supporting argument' even look like? I wouldn't want to insult your intelligence :(
No facts, only opinions. Go back to junior high school writing class.
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Re: Race versus culture

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

'Junior high school'. That's not American at all.

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Re: Race versus culture

Post by Londoner »

Like Seleucus, these old fascists never quite settled on what 'race' meant; whether it was about 'blood', culture or some combination.

In Britain, the right had difficulty pretending we were 'pure', so they went in for a sort of Lamarckian theory. Although the British might have had mixed origins we had 'evolved' into a single race through our shared history.

This enabled them to be flexible. When Mussolini was the leading politician, the British were the same racial type as the Italians (because of our shared history as part of the Roman Empire).

Later when the Nazis took the lead, we discovered that actually we weren't Mediterranean types, we were really northern Europeans, another sort of Nordic/Aryan.

Although if Hitler had won we would have had to erase any evidence of an earlier theory; did you know that we Europeans are Jewish? (Especially us British; not so much those Germans who are mostly Assyrian) . But this realisation did not make believers nicer to the Jews - because it was explained that people we think of as Jews are not really Jews. (They are descended from Satan.)

So given the rise of China, I expect it is only a matter of time before the right discover we British are 'racially' Chinese.
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Re: Race versus culture

Post by Seleucus »

Londoner wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 3:16 pm Like Seleucus, these old fascists never quite settled on what 'race' meant; whether it was about 'blood', culture or some combination.

In Britain, the right had difficulty pretending we were 'pure', so they went in for a sort of Lamarckian theory. Although the British might have had mixed origins we had 'evolved' into a single race through our shared history.

This enabled them to be flexible. When Mussolini was the leading politician, the British were the same racial type as the Italians (because of our shared history as part of the Roman Empire).

Later when the Nazis took the lead, we discovered that actually we weren't Mediterranean types, we were really northern Europeans, another sort of Nordic/Aryan.

Although if Hitler had won we would have had to erase any evidence of an earlier theory; did you know that we Europeans are Jewish? (Especially us British; not so much those Germans who are mostly Assyrian) . But this realisation did not make believers nicer to the Jews - because it was explained that people we think of as Jews are not really Jews. (They are descended from Satan.)

So given the rise of China, I expect it is only a matter of time before the right discover we British are 'racially' Chinese.
You couln't be more correct, at least on one level. It makes no difference what the truth is. Did Muhammad contemplate killing himself after his first vision or not? It doesn't matter, it's about how we connect to the stories and myths and what they mean for us. (That isn't to say that the truth isn't also very amazing.)
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Re: Race versus culture

Post by davidm »

Seleucus wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 10:06 am
Arising_uk wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 6:20 pm...
vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 12:37 am...
Londoner wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 6:29 pm...
Summary

Offensive

The position that race doesn't exist or doesn't matter is a highly offensive and insulting thing to say.
Except it doesn't exist, except as a bogus and contingent cultural construct.

Here is taxonomy

See "race" in there anywhere?

If people "like their races," it's only because most people are misinformed, to take the charitable stance, or else they're simpletons.
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Re: Race versus culture

Post by davidm »

Londoner wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 10:32 am
vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2017 12:37 am You lost me somewhere near the beginning. Could you define 'race' then? If it doesn't exist then at least say what it is that 'doesn't exist', or is it like the 'god' argument that both sides use to their advantage?
I think the closest you would get to defining 'race' was that it describes theories that purported to describe the various species of humans. If you do not have a modern understanding of genetics then it doesn't seen unreasonable to assume that the more different things look, then the more distantly related they are. For example, obviously a whale looks much more like a fish than a cow, so it must be more closely related to other fish.
Right. It's all bogus, and creationism has a lot to do with it, as you go on to say.

Interestingly, there is more genetic variation among "whites" and less genetic variation between "whites" and "blacks."
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