VitalSigns posted:

Visual differences are a poor way to classify people according to ancestry, ancestral classification is done with Y-chromosomes and by mitochondrial DNA.

When scientists want to figure out how closely two groups of people are related they do genetic assays, they don't pull out paper bags and stick pencils in people's hair and measure noses because those features are mediated by a complex interaction of multiple genes, epigenetics, and environment and we've known for decades how unreliable they are at determining ancestry.

You're peddling pseudoscientific nonsense in 2016 somehow, please don't bleed yourself to death trying to balance your humours or punch holes in your skull to let out the evil spirits.

Squalid posted:

Interesting theory. Tell me, which one of these people, based on their European DNA exclusively of course, do you think is more white?







Do you think these persons would be treated any differently? Do you think their clothes or accent might change how people perceive them?

Woolie Wool posted:

Ordinary Americans benefit immensely from the continuing consequences of the crimes of the early colonialists and thus are, to some small degree, part of those crimes. Without colonialism, there would be no such thing as a "first world country". The road to the affluent society is paved with millions upon millions of corpses.

TheNakedFantastic posted:

How accurate visual determination of race is mostly relies on the geographical distances of the races, between North Europeans and Southern Africans for example you can probably guess with 100% accuracy which race individuals belong too. With Greeks and Turks it might be much harder if you're not from that area. In general I'd say most people recognize even close neighbors as being ethnically different if they're familiar with the locals.

Inaccurate in some cases is not the same thing as being wrong even unscientific although that's not really what I'm arguing or really important in this discussion beyond how upset it seems to make some people.

Crowsbeak posted:

Funny, most "Turks" except for a majority around Ankara and the Anatolian highlands are descended from the people's that were in Turkey long before 1071. In fact Greeks and Turks share a large amount of "west Asian" DNA. The real difference between them is culture and religion. Frankly I don't blame a people for having trouble with mass migration as it can overwhelm services and large cultural differences can make assimilation difficult. However this discussion about "race" just shows some of us here to be xenophobic creatures.

Cardboard Box A posted:

TheNakedFantastic posted:

Well that's pretty much my point although I guess that's a confusing example, Greeks and Turks are generally able to tell each other apart despite being generally closely related.

TheNakedFantastic posted:

Fascism at this point is just a scare word for anyone right wing slightly outside the orthodoxy of the Republican party and has lost all meaning in general discourse.

TheNakedFantastic posted:

Fascism at this point is just a scare word for anyone right wing slightly outside the orthodoxy of the Republican party and has lost all meaning in general discourse.

icantfindaname posted:

Same but with 'nationalism'. I feel like I've been seeing that word used a shitton these last few months by people talking about the thread topic who have absolutely no idea what it means or any kind of grounding in its history beyond it being something they're pretty sure is bad and that they should loudly hand-wring over

Cardboard Box A posted:

Read it again

TheNakedFantastic posted:

Most peoples alive today live as the heirs of immense crimes of one sort or another. Certainly the West should stop imperialism and exploitation but I also don't think the West should be colonized by the third world as some sort of penance for things the average person has very little control over.

icantfindaname posted:

is this actually true? you hear it said on occasion that east asians can tell each other apart (at least japanese and koreans) but actually no they can't, it's racism causing a confirmation bias, both on the part of the asians who claim to be able to tell and the dipshit orientalist white people who will believe and repeat anything about the strange and mysterious ways of the inscrutable Jap. Greeks vs Turks might be a little different because of the amount of ethnic cleansing shenanigans involved in the creation of both of those countries, but I doubt it

TheNakedFantastic posted:

They both look mixed race (Or in Obamas case he looks "African American") so I couldn't really say. I don't know what you're trying to prove with these examples really.

TheNakedFantastic posted:

How accurate visual determination of race is mostly relies on the geographical distances of the races, between North Europeans and Southern Africans for example you can probably guess with 100% accuracy which race individuals belong too. With Greeks and Turks it might be much harder if you're not from that area. In general I'd say most people recognize even close neighbors as being ethnically different if they're familiar with the locals.

Inaccurate in some cases is not the same thing as being wrong or even unscientific although that's not really what I'm arguing or really important in this discussion beyond how upset it seems to make some people.

TheNakedFantastic posted:

Fascism at this point is just a scare word for anyone right wing slightly outside the orthodoxy of the Republican party and has lost all meaning in general discourse.

quote:

Eco wrote “Ur-Fascism” for the New York Review of Books in 1995, a provocative and challenging essay about how to recognize fascism, a piece dismayingly topical in the face of Donald Trump’s ongoing popularity. But this is where the comparisons to Hitler ring hollow—per Eco’s criteria, Trump is most certainly a fascist, but he’s no Nazi. One of my German history professors, Elisabeth Domansky, someone who had grown up in post-war Germany, used to argue with American interpretations of German Exceptionalism, one of the myths that we propagated to prove that “it could never happen here.” More importantly for me in this instance, was her insistence that the Nazis were not “irrational.” They represented, she argued, the ultimate instance of the “rational” state.

This alone, the idea of Nazis as rational agents, would seem the roughest of methods by which to dismiss the Trump comparisons to Hitler without having to resort to an internet meme. Eco, on the other hand, gave us a perfect template for looking at the phenomenon of Donald Trump. Eco, too, argued that Hitler had a complete philosophy as a dictator. Mussolini had no such thing. “Mussolini did not have any philosophy; he had only rhetoric.” Mussolini began as a militant atheist, but embraced religion when “the bishops … blessed the Fascist pennants.” Fascism originated in Italy, and Eco stresses that to understand fascism, one must first understand that fascism “was a fuzzy [original emphasis] totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions,” … [run by men where] “few of them had the intellectual equipment to control it.” It does not make fascism tolerant—Gramsci, the one who taught us about concepts like “cultural hegemony”—died in a fascist prison. And yet, Eco also argued that fascism was a “rigid discombobulation” “philosophically out of joint” but nevertheless “firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations.”

Squalid posted:

You're close, but I'm afraid you'll have to pick a race for the first guy, North African is not a race, and while the last might have both European and Asian heritage, if he identifies as a specific race, and everyone in his community agrees with his identification, in what sense is he mixed race?

Squalid posted:

Obama looks African American, aka black. That is the race with which he identifies and is customarily identified as. It is also the race of this guy:

Would you describe this fellow as black? I would. I wonder what proportion of his genome comes from Europe. What is my point? Barack Obama and probably the second guy have no fewer European genes than the lady in the other picture. Yet the first person is going to be treated as if she is a white person, regardless of the fact that 50% of her genes come from Asia. The fact that you can correctly tell she is mixed race when prompted isn't going to change the way in which she is identified by the general populace. Because race is much more than just your genes.

There is no non-arbitrary definition by which you can start to delineate races, and if any genetic definition were formalized it would immediately be rendered nonsensical by the actual way in which race is practically understood. There is no accepted scientific definition of race. None. African Americans are as meaningful a race as the English. You cannot understand these identities via genetics.

That the visual determination of race only functions in ideal, rather than real conditions indicates a serious problem. Where do you draw your lines? If race is based on quantifiable differences why is it applied so inconsistently in practice? There is clinal variation between human populations of course, even significant genetic differences. These cannot be matched up with race as it exists in practice. Examined with the rigorous methods of biology race collapses either into a cultural folk construct or is twisted beyond the recognition of the general public.


A practical example. I am a white American. Everyone recognizes me as white. Yet in terms of genetic heritage, I am little different from many mestizo populations which you have identified as significantly different genetically from the US (white population). My heritage is the same as a mestizo from Chile or Costa Rica, yet that race literally does not exist in the United States. Neither does colored, or mulatto, or any other mixed race identity. Like all races, they can only exist in specific cultural contexts.

In America these categories have been collapsed into White black Indian Asian and all the complexity in between is simply smudged out. Are Turks white or Asian? The question is as meaningless and pointless as delineating the Indian Ocean from the Pacific.

What is the significance of this revelation? Well in terms of culture, you can simply redefine race at will to meet various social needs. Oh whites are being demographically annihilated? Well good news, see whiteness is based on a shared European cultural heritage, so Latin Americans are in! In terms of genetics the most important groups are the West Africans, East Africans, Bambenga/Bayaka, Khoisan, and then everybody else can be lumped together, more or less. So if we're concerned with demographic changes in the United States we could just start calling everybody in the out-of-Africa group Caucasian, bam no more demographic changes! Or we could say, oh, anyone with at least 50% European genes is white, and bam, we don't even have a black President anymore.

Tesseraction posted:

The full essay.

Fascism is not 'anything outside of Republican orthodoxy' but given that holocaust survivors and people who've experienced actual fascist regimes are saying "uh yeah, actually this is looking pretty familiar" should probably give you more pause for thought than some 13 year old kid calling his teacher fascist because they confiscated his nintendo DS.

TheNakedFantastic posted:

You could apply all those descriptors to the Republican or Democratic platforms.

Tesseraction posted:

This isn't true outside of a kindergarten level of understanding of either party's platform.

TheNakedFantastic posted:

So you wouldn't describe Republican and Democratic rhetoric ("the most important hallmark of fascism") as self contradictory or incoherent? What specific policies of Trumps, either mentioned in the article or as part of his platform, would you specifically describe as being so starkly different from mainstream conservatism rhetoric that marks Trumps as a fascist and the Republicans as merely right wing? Is it his harder line on immigration? Anti free trade rhetoric? Is that all it takes to say Trump is a nascent or full blown fascist?

TheNakedFantastic posted:

So you wouldn't describe Republican and Democratic rhetoric ("the most important hallmark of fascism") as self contradictory or incoherent? What specific policies of Trumps, either mentioned in the article or as part of his platform, would you specifically describe as being so starkly different from mainstream conservatism rhetoric that marks Trumps as a fascist and the Republicans as merely right wing? Is it his harder line on immigration? Anti free trade rhetoric? Is that all it takes to say Trump is a nascent or full blown fascist?

Thuneral posted:

Well if you look at the current politics 'fascism' is anything that doesn't flow along party lines. If you are not a HARDLINE DEMOCRAT or a HARDLINE REPUBLICAN you are a fascist. If you want change, you are a fascist.

Don't worry about the rhetoric, both parties are pants on head retarded and anyone who thinks this election is about DEMS VS REPUBES and not the PEOPLE VS ESTABLISHMENT is part of the problem.

Tesseraction posted:

I don't want to spread my response too thin, here - pick one of these questions so that I know what to effort post upon, because you've provided a multitude of things genuinely worth someone effortposting about :

- whether or not the Democratic Party (either via the establishment or Sanders insurgency) is fascistic
-whether or not the Republican Party (either via the establishment or its insurgent candidates) is fascistic
-whether Donald Trump is divergently fascistic compared to the Republican Party proper (which may or may not be fascistic, see previous dash)

These are all interesting questions, all worth discussing, but word-count alone won't allow such a post on the SA forums. Can you pick one of prime importance?

TheNakedFantastic posted:

Why don't you just stick with your reasoning for trump to keep the thread somewhat on track

TheNakedFantastic posted:

You seem to want absolutes and dismiss the idea of race altogether because it isn't accurate 100% of the time or because it's caught up with "arbitrary" social definitions, but that's just how things in the real world work, all systems of relations or classifications never work all the time, but they persist because they are accurate/good enough.

I could show you a picture of a chimp and bonobo and you would probably not be able to tell them apart. They can even have (probably) viable offspring together, this doesn't make classification by species a sham. At some point any system of classification meets some "arbitrary" point of delineation in which closely related subjects and edge cases make an absolute judgement difficult.

quote:

"I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me." Of his 32 great-great-great-grandparents, five were black and the other 27 were white. All members of his immediate family had fair skin, and his mother Madeline was also blue-eyed and blonde.

Squalid posted:

Unluckily for the populists, the more vigorously they defend whiteness they weaker they become.

Squalid posted:

Ah you ask a good question, answering it will help me bring this derail back to the subject of the thread In general, why do we we want to classify complex natural phenomena? Specifically why do we use racial classifications?

The point about species is well taken, especially in light of how modern genetic research has exploded our understanding of the species. Ring species, a continuous population cline that does not interbreed at either ends, are well known. Gene transmission is now now known to occasionally occur between species with different chromosome counts, and viruses can carry genetic material even across kingdoms.

Yet for those who seek to manage our natural resources or study ecosystem functions the species remains a useful unit of analysis. It is relatively self contained with clear practical breaks between its population and those of other species (most of time, under certain circumstances it can break down). We continue to classify species because it is useful and has practical applications in the conservation of genetic diversity.

These classification schemes are created because they are useful. So what is the use of race? Does it accurately describe genetic divisions within the human population? No, all of Asia from Sri Lanka to Siberia are clumsily lumped together despite an ancient division, and even worse, it's paraphyletic excluding Native Americans despite an obvious physical similarity to East Asians. Btw some genetic research indicates Native Americans are a polyphyletic classification, with Eskimo and Inuit having a close affinity to some Siberian people.

Squalid posted:

Can we use it do identify the prevalence of heritable illnesses? No, for example in the case of sickle cell anemia many African populations are devoid of the disease while it is common in several parts of Europe and Asia. Does race indicate genetic isolation and speciation? No gene flow connects and has connected all human populations on earth since pre-history.

Squalid posted:

So, given that race is not useful for describing genetic or population based differences between human groups, what is it good for? Race is a national identity. There are genetic differences yes, much like there are observable genetic differences between the Irish, the English and the French. White and black are national identities in the United States, not much at all like the biologically meaningful concept of a population but very similar to the tribal identities of German and Slav, Hutu and Tutsi.

The biological basis is almost incidental, and when necessary easily ignored. See the case of Walter Francis White, civil rights activist and Executive Secretary of the NAACP:

Squalid posted:

Would you disagree with Mr. White here, as to his race? A hard argument to make. If being White and black is a national identity rather than the evidently meaningless biological category, then we can see the utility of the classification. It is for defining ourselves, and who is not like us. It is a cultural category, like Hitler's Aryans, that exists to give people reasons to trust or distrust one another, create excuses for working together or throwing someone under the bus. The biological traits are simply the pretext. And that is why the rightwing nationalists want to define Hispanics as not white, though it's ridiculous when applied to Chileans or Argentines. They want to keep them other, so as to justify excluding them.

Squalid posted:

Unluckily for the populists, the more vigorously they defend whiteness they weaker they become. In the 19th century the Anglo-Protestant's maintained white supremacy by allowing the Irish and other catholics to buy in to the identity. Attacks on Hispanics and Asians, particularly Muslims, make it more difficult to forge the shared identity that can support the white-supremacist agenda, unless they can succeed in their effort to halt or severely constrict immigration. Not a likely prospect, much easier just to shift the boundaries of whiteness a bit.