Mike_L wrote:Spearthrower wrote:
[Several posts on genetics, most notably
#217.]
Okay, you make a good argument for absence of a scientific basis for race.
And, sure, anyone who recognises (or "believes in") race is by definition a 'race realist'.
The government statisticians who compile and process census questionnaires are then also race realists.
I am not sure that stands to reason either in the abstract or in the specifics.
There may well be government bureaucracies around the world which still employ 'race' but then there are government bureaucracies around the world who are legally obliged to think in terms of numerous prevailing ideologies, like religion or political persuasion without thereby conferring any truth status in the evaluation of those quantities.
I can't speak for all nations as I've no first-hand experience with all of them, but in those dozen or so nations I've lived in either as a resident or as an immigrant, I've never seen a census or government form that asks of 'race' as a question.
Mike_L wrote:Spearthrower wrote:Taking the
2011 UK census as an example...
The section on ethnicity was expanded to include a "Gypsy or Irish Traveller" tick-box under the "White" heading and an "Arab" tick-box under the "Other ethnic group" heading, whilst Chinese was merged into the "Asian British" category, which formerly only included South Asian ethnic groups.
Ok, but I don't even need to read the link to know that there would be no mention of the word 'race' there, and the sentence you've cited says "ethnicity".
There's a clear distinction: 'race' is specifically concerned with phenotypic quantities, that is the biological 'hardware' produced by DNA, whereas 'ethnicity' comprises national or tribal affiliation, language, religion, and other 'software' inculcated post birth.
Mike_L wrote:'Race' (or 'ethnicity') exists in bureaucracies around the world, including in post-apartheid South Africa.
I think it's important here to unpack a bit further. I don't want to say that no government in the world employs the outdated concept of race because a) I simply don't know whether it's true or false and b) even if they do, they're wrong c) there are ample governments who employ anti- or pseudoscientific quantities in their bureaucracy so I don't really know what this point is meant to measure.
But race and ethnicity are not synonymous in the English language.
I could have black skin, an Indonesian father, be a member of the House of Lords, speak Welsh as my mother-tongue, and be a practicing Jew. The only element there that race is concerned with is the first: the phenotypic, and people who believe in race would use that eminently observable quantity to depict me as belonging to something that I may never have had anything at all to do with in my entire life, probably even more than that, they'd consider it foundational and more value-laden than the others whereas, it actually tells us nothing other than that some of my direct ancestors a few generations ago immigrated from a specific geographical location.
But more importantly than any of this - the core argument here is fallacious (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum). Even if 90% of the people of Earth believe in and value the concept of 'race' that doesn't mean or infer that it's actually true. This is readily exemplified: the vast majority of people on this planet are theists, does that mean that theism is true? Rather, it just shows that people hold onto bad beliefs inculcated into them despite a lack of evidence or evidence to the contrary, and while we are obliged to recognize that lots of people believe in gods and races, that doesn't mean we're obliged to accept the beliefs are valid just because of popularity.
Mike_L wrote:In one section, I was required to check one of five boxes: ('Black African', 'Coloured' (mixed race), 'White', 'Asian or Indian', or 'Other'). Had I not filled in 'White', she would have taken one look at my face and filled in 'White' on my behalf.
Ok, but what's meant to be the point there? Your skin is white. That census-taker can see different hues and tones so naturally they're going to note the pigment of your skin. The question you should be wondering is why exactly that's relevant, and what it's meant to be relevant for.
Mike_L wrote:Spearthrower wrote:However, racism at its core regards the belief that races possess distinct characteristics that make them discernible from one another and those characteristics are discrete enough that it warrants perceiving them as separate races.
...in which case "racism" is entrenched in bureaucracies across the planet.
If I'm "racist" then it's because I live in a racist system.
I don't think that's really disputable. You come from a nation where a value-laden form of racism maintained a system of race-based discrimination until very recently - in fact, in your own life. The post-Apartheid state doesn't imply that the entire nation and all its citizenry has moved beyond those concepts even if they're in opposition to Apartheid - the people who lived under Apartheid are still alive today, and it's not like the mere act of it ending means those beliefs have been wiped from peoples' minds.
And see my previous point regarding the core fallacy there.
Mike_L wrote:Well, I agree that that's not a good look. FWIW, I'm not a regular follower of Mark Collett's YouTube offerings. (I think I saw one other a while back -- on male pride, and having a sort-of MGTOW slant).
Right, but please re-read the original argument I was making with respect to that post exposing the 4 main tenets of the alt-right and its radicalizing process. Again, I am not trying to call you names here, Mike_L - that's not my goal, nor am I trying to make you look bad, nor am I virtue-signalling or anything else... I am arguing that you have been radicalized by an alt-right agenda on the internet, and I already pointed out to your previously that the pipeline carries you towards darker and darker positions coming from sources you would have questioned and even been disturbed by previously. The process of radicalization is to slowly normalize what are basically already extreme positions couched in gentler terms but ultimately to push further to positions that you otherwise would not have inhabited had you not been prepared. And again, I am not being antagonistic when I tell you that this alt-right pipeline is fairly well documented.
That's why it's not at all surprising that you saw a MGTOW/male pride video from him because single white men are the predominant target and victims of alt-right radicalization. This process takes isolated and vulnerable people, tells them they've been the victims of injustice, recapitulates their situation in new terms, tells the newly minted adherent that believing X - the alternative worldview - will make them feel better about themselves, then having rebuilt those people in that image, starts feeding leading them into ever more extreme positions through similarly psychological processes to other elements of the attention economy.
It's very similar to what happens in a cult. Think about it for a moment: do you think cults would get many members if they started right out the gate by saying 'Well, what we're really all about is giving all our money to this one guy, giving the cult leaders sexual favours, then committing suicide all together'? Rather, cults pull people in through very gentle means, a self-selective process where the most vulnerable become hooked, whereas those with sturdier frames of reference or a greater sense of self-worth never let themselves be drawn into the snares.
I do want to be careful here to explain that when I talk about people like yourself being radicalized, I am not suggesting there's a group of men sitting in deep, plush armchairs in a smoky room conspiring how to delude and indoctrinate the masses. In this way, it's NOT like a cult at all where there's an individual or group intently trying to increase the cult's membership. It's actually a structural element, more Darwinian than decreed, where human psychology is readily exploited by particular tropes and forms of information. No single person or group of people is trying to radicalize Mike_L, rather, and this is the disturbing part, a fairly substantial quantity of this can be placed at the feet of algorithms. That alone should make you very concerned.
Think about how you ended up being presented with a video by an actual white-supremacist Nazi, a person who's motivation is to tell the world to hate the other. Was that what you had in mind when you signed up to Youtube?
Mike_L wrote:I recalled seeing a text article (author unknown) on the subject of "Europeans being written out of their own history". When I looked for it again (Google), Collett's vid appeared at the top of the list. I watched it and found myself in agreement with everything he says, so I posted it here.
It was probably on Breitbart: it sounds like the kind of fatuous guff that Breitbart 'reports' breathlessly on.
But that's comparatively irrelevant to the fact that a) you ended up being presented with an actual argument from a white-supremacist Nazi b) that your original contact with the idea wasn't accidental but a result of machine learning and c) that you have been immersed sufficiently to not only agree with an actual Nazi but to tell other people about how you agree with everything a Nazi says.
For me, were you a personal real world friend of mine, this would be intervention territory. You're approximately, I would estimate, just about primed enough to start being sympathetic to suggestions regarding the need to take action rather than just listening passively.
Think dispassionately for a moment about how a person becomes enmeshed in a cult. How does it occur? The person doesn't start out wanting to be in a cult. They don't recognize they're being indoctrinated into a cult. They would deny being part of a cult. Then they find themselves willingly doing something that would never ever have occurred to them
were they not part of a cult.
Mike_L wrote:The foreign culture resists integration with the existing one. And this, according to the likes of Ash Sarkar, is the way it should be.
Integration. The word, to me, suggests there are two distinct things, whether that be two systems or two objects, and the process of integration is intended to bring both of them together to operate as a whole. If I were to look for synonyms there, I would say 'blend', or propose as an idiomatic analogy the idea that 'the sum is greater than the parts'. Whereas, the way you appear to be using it is to suggest that the foreign culture 'integrates' by abandoning their distinctness. conforming to and becoming indistinguishable from the other. Think about two companies integrating: for me, the concept of integration there suggests that both parties work to overhaul elements of their own work flow system in order to operate efficiently as a whole, there's a tactic acknowledgment of parity. Whereas, you seem to be suggesting that there is no parity there, that one is subordinate to the other. Two countries can 'integrate' (i.e. something like the EU) but when only one country is obliged to make all the changes, that's not a relationship between equals, but between master and vassal.
Let's push this into a S. African context. With black people predominantly in the seat of power now, were they to suggest that further integration would help help past ills and allow society to move forward, and their proposal meant that you and other white skinned people needed to forget Afrikaans and speak only isiZulu, abandon your handed down cultural practices and traditions, convert to a traditional African faith (I appreciate that most S. African people are Christian regardless of their skin pigmentation) - you wouldn't consider that 'integration' - that word would sound Orwellian in that context.
Mike_L wrote:That's probably true in many cases, but I think it's rather uncharitable to assume that every case of 'white flight' is rooted in simple racism.
Let's be clear here, you referred to 'white flight' not just white people moving somewhere else for perhaps economic or other reasons, and white flight specifically indicates white people leaving areas for racial reasons.
I am not saying there can be no other reason or motivation for white people to move somewhere, but if we're talking about white flight, then I think it's definitive that the motivation is rooted in simple racism.
I find that a very strange notion. I'm a Londoner, and were I not already living abroad, do you seriously believe that I would let a bunch of theocratic fuckwits run me out of my home?
You have to remember, this idea of 'sharia patrols' was really just a bunch of morons and occurred a few times, not representative of anything other than them and their moronism and not something at all widespread or common. Their 'patrols' were all perfectly fine so far as the law was concerned (they were basically just 'walking' which isn't against the law) right up until the moment that they tried to pretend to even a tiny degree of authority whereupon they were arrested and charged with harassment. And it's not like they had the backing of other Muslims - they were just plonkers, so why is this relevant at all? Can you cite examples of white people moving away from the area on the basis of this bunch of plonkers' actions? I very seriously doubt it.
Worse for the argument, the main antagonist who caused the group to come into legal jeopardy was a white-skinned British person of anglo-saxon/celtic descent who had recently converted to Islam. So it beggars belief that this would induce other white people to leave - why notionally doesn't it also induce non-white people to leave on the exact same grounds, whatever they are?
Mike_L wrote:A cultural group that is dispersed is ultimately weakened...
I'm sorry but while I understand the words, I don't parse the way you're using them there. A dispersed cultural group is weakened? Does that mean a gathered together cultural group is strengthened? What does 'weak' and 'strong' refer to there? Weak or strong with respect to what? To politics? Then you're making an assumption that political persuasion is 'cultural' - but despite all the different cultural backgrounds in the UK, the main 3 parties still represent the majority of political beliefs. How can this then be?
For me, you're trying to smuggle in a position here that won't be able to stand up to scrutiny.
Mike_L wrote: white Christian or secular folk living in the countryside while Sharia law gains a foothold in the capital (where political and economic power resides). That's the kind of "winning" that Ash Sarkar openly celebrates.
Consider Thailand for a moment. Wikipedia says...
Sorry, but this is just outright delusional. Sharia doesn't and hasn't 'gained a foothold' - British law is ubiquitous. Muslims - regardless of their skin pigmentation - are perfectly entitled to seek alternatives to the court to resolve disputes between themselves in exactly the same way that I could resolve a dispute with my neighbour without going to court, and we could agree to do so on any grounds we felt like - we could resolve our dispute through a hopscotch challenge if we so agreed. They can't circumvent or supersede criminal law or British law though. To strip away a lot of the bullshit you might have been inculcated with... if a Catholic commits a crime, they're perfectly entitled to seek absolution from God through confession, but after doing so they can still be arrested by the police and charged according to the nation's laws. That's Sharia's role in nations that aren't Muslim theocracies.
Mike_L wrote:How would the people of Thailand react if white Britons NOW started moving
en masse into Bangkok...
Honestly, the truth is probably so alien to you that you might have trouble believing me. The way they HAVE reacted, because it's already happened with more than 2.5 million Europeans working here, is to just carry on as normal - Thai culture and Buddhism though are remarkably tolerant compared to our own traditions. Just to give you some indications: Thais traditionally have a proper name - based usually on Sanskrit words (note: imported from India!) - and a nickname. Traditional nicknames are things like Wan, Dee, Som, Bam etc. whereas the most common nicknames of the last few decades are Max, Mark, Sam, Benz (like the car), A and B (twins, usually) - in other words, names they think sound English. That's largely how Thais have reacted.
At worst, the reaction might be a tad venal or exploitative: some Thais profit well from the existence of foreigners, and thus become their biggest advocates. But there's no indication whatsoever of the fomentation of race-based hostility we've seen in Europe and the US.
That's not to say that Thais universally like foreigners, or Europeans, but Thai society just doesn't work the way you're imagining.
Mike_L wrote:and started with Christian patrols in the streets of the capital?
Sorry Mike, but you don't get to pull that one. A single incident comprising a dozen individuals - British born individuals, btw - cannot be characterized as immigration to the UK 'starting with', nor how immigration in the UK is generally, nor even as a remotely common occurrence - it's a single incident, not something you can simply pretend is a norm. Why would anyone rational take the actions of a few people and ignore the 2 or 3 million people NOT doing that? Why do the muppets get the spotlight? Because you're giving them the spotlight? In reality, British people don't consider this reflective of foreigners in the slightest - it's the actions of a few muppets, not of a race, a culture, or a religion.
Also, as much as it
really shouldn't surprise you - Christians have been proselytizing here in Thailand for hundreds of years, have numerous foreign-funded mega-churches, and I've personally witnessed (and made loud mockery of) street soap-box fire & fury proselytizers promising endless torture for the pagans. As in most countries, the way Thais respond is to take a wide berth in case they get spittle on their clothes, and carry on about their business.
It's really only in the focus group of videos you consume that this gets amplified beyond its actual merit. I'll bet you a pound to a penny that more time has been spent by alt-right folks in YT talking about sharia patrols in London than was actually spent by those muppets patrolling. That should tell you something.
Mike_L wrote:Would the Thai people be "racist", "bigoted" or "xenophobic" if they objected to it?
Wait... who's objecting to it? You want me to try to address what 'Thai people' would do in this scenario when you're concocting a fictional analogy that British people have responded to the Sharia patrols. That's not what's happened. Alt-right fuckwits on YT, regardless of whether they're British born and white, do not get to speak on behalf of all other British people, or all other white skinned people.
However, were Thais to take a few incidents of foreign-caused problems, blow it up way out of proportion and seek to blame the actions of a few on an entire continent, then YES Mike_L,
YES,
YESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYES... that would indeed by
racist, bigoted and xenophobic, definitionally! That's why I would confidently state that whoever the content creator is that made the video you consumed to borrow into this idea is absolutely a bigoted racist. And yes, I think that you engaged in purveying the same ideas makes you a bigoted racist
contextually here in that you are an infected vector for bigoted, racist memes (of the memetic sort) attempting to spread those ideas in this community. It's one thing to believe something, and quite another to proselytize it, to try to convince people of it, and once again, one of those repeated components of alt-right radicalism is how alt-right adherents seek to bring their prejudices into sites that are not compatible with or relevant to those ideas. This forum is just not the place for it Mike - you might want to pretend that means we're an echo-chamber, hive-mind of drones or whatever, but that's just part of your belief system trying to protect your bad ideas from acknowledgment of rejection by people you'd really wish you could actually convince to your beliefs.
Regardless though, please, please, please forget for a moment trying to engage in a back-and-forth with me - I am some dude on the internet who lives a thousand miles away from you, and someone you're very unlikely ever to meet in your life... whatever I believe or disbelieve cannot impact you... what you SHOULD be concerned about is where your ideas come from, and whether they can stand up to your own honest scrutiny, whether these beliefs were what you wanted to subscribe to all the way back whenever it was that you first attempted to address your sense of existential isolation by listening to some amusing videos on YT about feminazis or purple-haired SJW's, or whatever the gateway drug was. Know thyself.
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