Racism is baseless

[aleCcowaN]

Today I was thinking in the instance of human group most close to reproductive isolation I know. A race I am one eight made off: the Basques.

The Rh^- is so abundant that miscarriages were commonplace until modern medicine found a solution. Particularly, marrying a foreign man was condemned and those miscarriages seen as a sign of cursed unions.

The difference between the incidence of Rh^- among the Basque is much higher than the Europeans as a whole. Up to 40% in certain sub-groups, when in the general European population is about 15%, 1% among Sub-Saharan African and almost non-existent in the population of East Asia, Oceania and Native Americans.

But among who they call "African-Americans", on the beat of what they called Jim Crow laws, Rh^- is about 7% of the total population, what suggests that about half the genetic trove of that population is Caucasian, which is not to surprise anyone, as owners, their sons and employees found their ways to abuse slaves, and breeding your own stock of slaves was cheaper than importing new slaves.

I am not surprised all that perverted confusion in the pass has torn the hearts of some modern Usaians into this nonsense of political correctness about the race. But that doesn't mean neither of both is right. In this vaguely defined Usaian ethnic group (widen into an Anglospheric cluster) seems to exist the constant of them believing to be the centre of the universe, and the discussion of this topic is not exception at all.

 

[mijopaalmc]

Since when are Basques a race?

 

[aleCcowaN]

You are pretty haughty for someone who refuses to distinguish between the sociopolitics of race and the biology of race. The legislation you cited deals with to sociopolitics of race while the discussion we're having addresses the biology of race.

No-one is the denying that the sociopolitics of race is real. We are just disputing that there is any coherent biological basis for the sociopolitics.

I never knew of race being a biological concept other than a set of regular distinctive characteristics among certain populations that get passed in a regular and stable way when they reproduce among themselves. Race is mainly a sociopolitic construct that has some point of contact with the narrow utility of the biological concept. Both notions of race make sense only in the context of comparing this population with alien populations.

In Argentina the concept linked to anthropology and biology is etnia not raza. And sociologically raza is an important and somewhat controversial construct. On the good side of it, Columbus' Day is called "Día de la Raza" which means the day two different worlds met and how we have come to be diverse and rich by the contributions of so many peoples. On the bad side of it there's the concept of conservar la raza (to keep those genetic characteristics "uncontaminated") and mejorar la raza (to enhance some lazy ethnic groups by breeding them up with people known to be hard workers). For that reason our Día de la Raza lost its name. It continues to be a day when representatives of all possible collectivity parade in their typical clothes, so you can see a group of gauchos from Buenos Aires Province with their typical attires, followed by Paraguayans, Emilian-Romagnans, Chinese with a dragon, Mapuche Natives in their typical attire, Scotts with bagpipes, and so on. But the name has changed because of similar stupid conceptual bickering like the one discussed in this thread: it now is "Day of Respect to Cultural Diversity". Any mention to a gene pool has been excluded.

People is stupid everywhere, but I have something to say, we don't take our problems and make them the problems of all mankind as Anglospherites do, what includes this race **** political-correctness-driven thing.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Since when are Basques a race?

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raza_vasca

You have your head so deeply in your Anglosphere that you can't see you're just part of the world.

 

[mijopaalmc]

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raza_vasca

You have your head so deeply in your Anglosphere that you can't see you're just part of the world.

It's not an issue of beliefs; it's an issue of what the words actually mean in their respective languages. "Raza" in Spanish does not necessarily mean "race" in English. You're objecting to the fact that the English native speakers are not using "race" in a way that is akin to how "ethnic group" is used in English--a connotation that it does not carry on English.

Since we are having the discussion in English, perhaps you should stick to the English meanings and stop equivocating.

 

[aleCcowaN]

It's not an issue of beliefs; it's an issue of what the words actually mean in their respective languages. "Raza" in Spanish does not necessarily mean "race" in English. You're objecting to the fact that the English native speakers are not using "race" in a way that is akin to how "ethnic group" is used in English--a connotation that it does not carry on English.

Since we are having the discussion in English, perhaps you should stick to the English meanings and stop equivocating.

Edited by zooterkin: 

Edited for rule 0.

Raza means race exactly. So you would do good in trying to understand what we're talking about instead of looking for loopholes and shortcuts to avoid presenting a sound universal approach to the topic.

Edited by zooterkin: 

Edited for rule 12.

 

[mijopaalmc]

Edited by zooterkin: 

Edited for rule 0.

Raza means race exactly. So you would do good in trying to understand what we're talking about instead of looking for loopholes and shortcuts to avoid presenting a sound universal approach to the topic.

Edited by zooterkin: 

Edited for rule 12.

*sigh*

When discussing racism in English, "race" does not carry the connotation of "ethnic group". I understand that you don't want to restrict yourself to what "race" means in English because it justifies you're air of superiority. However, if you substitute "raza" in for "race", you are literally discussing a different thing.

Quit equivocating.

 

[Delvo]

I never knew of race being a biological concept other than a set of regular distinctive characteristics among certain populations that get passed in a regular and stable way when they reproduce among themselves.

Well, that's biological.

According to Jonathan Marks (Marks, Jonathan (2008). "Race: Past, present and future. Chapter 1". In Koenig, Barbara; Soo-Jin Lee, Sandra; Richardson, Sarah S. Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. Rutgers University Press.):

(4) what was left – the component of human diversity that was not cultural, polymorphic, or clinal – was very small.​

"Small" ≠ "non-existent". Your source does not support the claim you said it would support.​

 

[Delvo]

Let's take a look at how this went the last time we were down this path, Vortigern...

every time the deniers' piles of lies are demolished, they quit the thread it happened in, wait for a while, and start a new one hoping nobody who saw the previous round will notice... same behavior pattern as with other brands of woo-woo.

Wow, I can see the future!

Later on, you linked to some papers that you must have hoped nobody would actually look at, because you claimed that they supported a "no such things as races" claim, which they clearly did not... and also (in the same post) tried telling everybody that what the word really means is something different from how anyone ever really uses it or what dictionaries say (behavioral differences rather than physical/physiological), again supported with links that didn't actually support it at all...

...then there was a later post in which you ran away from the original biological claim and just focused on trying to redefine the word as something else that would be easier for you to attack, this time linking to a couple of dictionaries, plus a couple of other sites that weren't dictionaries but you acted as if they were anyway, but then, even for the links that were actually to dictionaries, still lied about what even your own links said because what they actually said contradicted you.

This time, maybe we can skip the bulk of the routine, straight to the last part, where you abandon the argument over definitions too and explicitly admit that you don't care about the facts because your moral crusade trumps them.

 

[macdoc]

Bonobos are not genetically pre-disposed to violence, humans and chimps are.

Again, this is outright false.

__________________

You provide a link ...claiming predisposition is false
http://phys.org/news/2016-03-ancient-japanese-hunter-gatherers-warfare-inherent.html

Yet quote nothing from the link you provided. Why is that? Because the paper in question does not dispute my conclusion at all.....all it illustrates is a period in Japan within a small group - 2500 pople - violence was low.

This paper reports the mortality attributable to violence, and the spatio-temporal pattern of violence thus shown among ancient hunter–gatherers using skeletal evidence in prehistoric Japan (the Jomon period: 13 000 cal BC–800 cal BC). Our results suggest that the mortality due to violence was low and spatio-temporally highly restricted in the Jomon period, which implies that violence including warfare in prehistoric Japan was not common.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-03-ancient-japanese-hunter-gatherers-warfare-inherent.html#jCp

Perhaps you did want readers to look at the rest...

In recent years, scientists have found evidence of many hunter-gatherer groups that behaved in a violent manner, sometimes even banding together to wage war on other people or groups. That has led to more evidence of the common assumption that humans are inherently violent and that war has generally been the result when two or more groups have different ideas of how things should be done. In this new effort, the researchers suggest such findings might be premature as they have found an example of an early hunter-gatherer culture that did not appear to wage war or even behave in a violent manner.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-03-ancient-japanese-hunter-gatherers-warfare-inherent.html#jCp

So they have found ONE exception ....

 

[Roboramma]

This does a pretty good job of refuting the idea that humans are not predisposed to violence:

https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths/

The interesting thing of course is the data as a whole, for that please go to the link, but to quote the most shocking example:

Site: Crow Greek, 1325 CE (South Dakota) Share of Violent Deaths: >60%

My source for the data: Keeley (1996)
Comment and Source that my source quoted: Keeley (1996) writes: ‘Contrary to Brian Ferguson’s claim that such slaughters were a consequence of contact with modem European or other civilizations, archaeology yields evidence of prehistoric massacres more severe than any recounted in ethnography.(Footnote 23- 23. (Middle Missouri) Zimmerman 1980; Wilky 1990; Bamforth 1994; (Southwest) Haas 1990: 187, and personal communication.) For example, at Crow Creek in South Dakota, archaeologists found a mass grave containing the remains of more than 500 men, women, and children who had been slaughtered, scalped, and mutilaced during an attack on their village a century and a hdf before Columbus’s arrival (ca. A.D. 1325). The attack seems to have occurred just when the village’s fortifications were being rebuilt. AU the houses were burned, and most of the inhabitants were murdered. This death toll represented more than 60 percent of the village’s population, estimated from the number of houses to have been about 800. The survivors appear to have been primarily young women, as their skeletons are underrepresented among the bones; if so, they were probably taken away as captives. Certainly, the site was deserted for some time after the attack because the bodies evidently remained exposed to scavenging animals for a few weeks before burial. In other words, this whole village was annihilared in a single attack and never reoccupied.’

 

[Hlafordlaes]

Well, that's biological.

"Small" ≠ "non-existent". Your source does not support the claim you said it would support.

Fair enough. There is this, for example:

In 2000, at a White House event celebrating their completion of the first draft of the human genome, Craig Venter of the Institute of Genetic Research and Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health declared that the concept of race had no genetic basis. Genetics offered no support for those wishing to place precise racial boundaries around groups. Despite rebuttals and objections, no matter how one cuts it, the data have come out much the same: Between 5 and 7 percent of human genetic diversity is between subgroups within the classically defined races; 6 to 10 percent of the total human variation is between those groups that we think of as races in an everyday sense based on skin color. The remainder of the variation occurs at the individual level and cannot be categorized by group or subgroup. Certainly some traits are more clustered in specific populations than in others, such as skin color, hair form, nose shape and blood type. But race is little more than skin deep in biological terms, and individuals are frequently more genetically similar to members of other so-called races than they are to their own said race.

So, we have some clusters. And? Is there a point to be made here? Say, what is their role/ importance in strictly biological terms? Does this clash with the socially-derived attributions often made in behavioral terms?

As the minor differences among races are as stated in the quote, related to superficial characteristics, this makes race invalid for most discussion, especially socioeconomic or political, with the glaring exception of how to deal with ignorance and bias. Otherwise, we might as well start talking about how short people come up, well, short. And can sneak more easily. Not to be trusted!

 

[aleCcowaN]

*sigh*

When discussing racism in English, "race" does not carry the connotation of "ethnic group". I understand that you don't want to restrict yourself to what "race" means in English because it justifies you're air of superiority. However, if you substitute "raza" in for "race", you are literally discussing a different thing.

Quit equivocating.

Knock it off with your playing the dumb thing. You evidently are a monolingual creature.

Raza is race. Etnia is an intermediate between ethnic group and race. You are the embodied Anglospheric disdain: as you think the Basques to be an ethnic group the whole Spanish language must be wrong.

 

[aleCcowaN]

<deleted>

 

[aleCcowaN]

Fixed that for you

Bonobos are not genetically pre-disposed to violence, humans and chimps are.

Again, this is outright false.

You provide a link ...claiming predisposition is false
http://phys.org/news/2016-03-ancient-japanese-hunter-gatherers-warfare-inherent.html

Yet quote nothing from the link you provided. Why is that? Because the paper in question does not dispute my conclusion at all.....all it illustrates is a period in Japan within a small group - 2500 pople - violence was low.

This paper reports the mortality attributable to violence, and the spatio-temporal pattern of violence thus shown among ancient hunter–gatherers using skeletal evidence in prehistoric Japan (the Jomon period: 13 000 cal BC–800 cal BC). Our results suggest that the mortality due to violence was low and spatio-temporally highly restricted in the Jomon period, which implies that violence including warfare in prehistoric Japan was not common.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-03-ancient-japanese-hunter-gatherers-warfare-inherent.html#jCp

Perhaps you did want readers to look at the rest...

In recent years, scientists have found evidence of many hunter-gatherer groups that behaved in a violent manner, sometimes even banding together to wage war on other people or groups. That has led to more evidence of the common assumption that humans are inherently violent and that war has generally been the result when two or more groups have different ideas of how things should be done. In this new effort, the researchers suggest such findings might be premature as they have found an example of an early hunter-gatherer culture that did not appear to wage war or even behave in a violent manner.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-03-ancient-japanese-hunter-gatherers-warfare-inherent.html#jCp

So they have found ONE exception ....

macdoc has become used to quote other posters after some time, breaking all the links and deleting the name of the poster, probably expecting the whole thing to go unnoticed.

By the way, there are two links there. Does the second one hit on the nail?

 

[aleCcowaN]

This does a pretty good job of refuting the idea that humans are not predisposed to violence:

https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths/

The interesting thing of course is the data as a whole, for that please go to the link, but to quote the most shocking example:

You'll be told that to be just one example. If you link here a hundred other instances you'd be told those to be just instances.

I haven't read from those posters telling that humans are not prone to violence because if I did I would be still laughing uncontrollably.

I can imagine the education those holding such notions received before coming here to pontificate about the very fabric of human nature: a couple of lessons on evolution, no test taken; history as a list of kings and battles; all done in High School, or maybe a lame padding first year course in a community college.

So they ignore -from ignorance, plain o'le ignorance- that...

• ...humans prone to kill another humans tended to survive and had more offspring prone to kill other humans; while humans not prone to kill another humans ended up killed so they lacked the opportunity to have peaceful offspring that perpetuated their peaceful manners
• ...since the human population was about 5 million individuals, some 8,000 years ago, there was an increasing environmental pressure with periodic famines that made certain tribes attack their neighbours or move large distances and invade other lands to control food resources, so they survived while the invaded people didn't. It seems that the constant invasion of Mesopotamia by Semites and Indoeuropeans, the invasions of the Sea Peoples, the invasions of Hycsos and Nubians, the Aryan invasions in India, the Indoeuropean invasions in Europe, the expansion of the Celts, in turn, the Germanics, in turn, the Slavs and Uralic; the expansion the the Turkish and Mongolian tribes ... a large period of slaughters and genocides ending with Anglogermanics doing the same in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand until some 120 years ago told them nothing

But wait! the descendants of those Anglogermanic murderers and slave exploiters and their rightfully cultural heirs are here to teach us that race is not a biological concept, and the descendants of those who flock to enlist during WWII in such numbers that levies were unnecessary are here to teach us that human beings are peaceful creatures, all because they need to assuage their inheritance and because thinking that way is proper of people going up in the social ladder.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Fair enough. There is this, for example:


So, we have some clusters. And? Is there a point to be made here? Say, what is their role/ importance in strictly biological terms? Does this clash with the socially-derived attributions often made in behavioral terms?

As the minor differences among races are as stated in the quote, related to superficial characteristics, this makes race invalid for most discussion, especially socioeconomic or political, with the glaring exception of how to deal with ignorance and bias. Otherwise, we might as well start talking about how short people come up, well, short. And can sneak more easily. Not to be trusted!

Are you sure about what you're saying? There are lots of genetic variabilities among close groups because they are useful to survival either because they provide useful services or some variability that could trigger changes in the whole population if environmental conditions changed. Are you sure those accounts have filtered them? Do you know where the statistical term "regression" comes from?

We have some unstable characteristics inherited for a very good reason, larks and owls for instance, a treat of primates that allowed survival by providing sentries all night long.

To me the problem here is that Anglospherites not strangely think in an Anglospheric way. For them races are Caucasoids, Negroids and Mongoloids. They invent stupid pigeon holes like "Latino". They claim later that variations among "Latinos" are larger than variations between Caucasoids and Negroids. Not strangely they consider the term "race" to be stupid as they have used it stupidly during generations.

Among Native American there are variations that are well established as genetic differences: Tehuelche people are tall for the same reason Swedish and Norwegians are tall. Aymara peoples have short extremities and large thoracic cages to keep the body warm and breath thin air. They are also dark skinned the Tibetan way, for similar reasons. Those of the Tupi-Guarani race, on the contrary are long-limbed and thin, to lose heat, and pretty light skinned, as they live in the forests, so they can pass as typical Hispanics.

The problem is not races as a concept being wrong but the Anglospheric taxonomies being wrong. That is what the fellow poster above couldn't understand regarding the Basques.

 

[Hlafordlaes]

Are you sure about what you're saying? There are lots of genetic variabilities among close groups because they are useful to survival either because they provide useful services or some variability that could trigger changes in the whole population if environmental conditions changed. Are you sure those accounts have filtered them? Do you know where the statistical term "regression" comes from?

We have some unstable characteristics inherited for a very good reason, larks and owls for instance, a treat of primates that allowed survival by providing sentries all night long.

To me the problem here is that Anglospherites not strangely think in an Anglospheric way. For them races are Caucasoids, Negroids and Mongoloids. They invent stupid pigeon holes like "Latino". They claim later that variations among "Latinos" are larger than variations between Caucasoids and Negroids. Not strangely they consider the term "race" to be stupid as they have used it stupidly during generations.

Among Native American there are variations that are well established as genetic differences: Tehuelche people are tall for the same reason Swedish and Norwegians are tall. Aymara peoples have short extremities and large thoracic cages to keep the body warm and breath thin air. They are also dark skinned the Tibetan way, for similar reasons. Those of the Tupi-Guarani race, on the contrary are long-limbed and thin, to lose heat, and pretty light skinned, as they live in the forests, so they can pass as typical Hispanics.

The problem is not races as a concept being wrong but the Anglospheric taxonomies being wrong. That is what the fellow poster above couldn't understand regarding the Basques.

Taxonomies aside, my point is not that homo sapiens sapiens has no variation and no clustering of traits, rather, that these traits have not been shown to relate to the cultural differences that racism predicates.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Taxonomies aside, my point is not that homo sapiens sapiens has no variation and no clustering of traits, rather, that these traits have not been shown to relate to the cultural differences that racism predicates.

No problem with that.

The problem is that racism is a cultural vice and not a scientific approach. Distorting the notion of race just to weed out racism from our lives not only is useless and foolish, but equals to rejecting pharmacology because someone is against drug consumption and abortion.

Discussing racism departing of the conceptualization of race is the certain baseless thing in all this thread.

 

[Roboramma]

Taxonomies aside, my point is not that homo sapiens sapiens has no variation and no clustering of traits, rather, that these traits have not been shown to relate to the cultural differences that racism predicates.

To unpack that a little: You don't have a problem with the fact that races exist, but only that racists think they differ in some particular qualities that they don't actually differ in.

I agree. But there's no need to suggest that the races don't exist in order to make that point.

Some have suggested that the races as they are usually defined are not particularly useful categories. That is probably true. But a category not being very useful doesn't make it fictitious. If I have a room full of people and I decide to categorise them based on hair colour I'm probably not going to learn anything very interesting about the people in the room through that categorisation scheme, but these are still real categories. I could instead choose to categorise them based on the length of their second toe. Those falling into particular ranges of length are category 1, a slightly longer range puts one into category 2, etc. Again, I probably can't do much of use with this category, but it's still a real category: those people really do vary in their toe lengths.

If someone comes along and suggest that people with short toes are lazy I can engage him on that point. I'll only be doing myself harm by trying to argue that there is no category "short toed people".