What is an interracial marriage? Serious question.
Am I in an interracial marriage? I genuinely don't know. According to 23 and me I'm 100% Northern European genetically. My wife was born in Mexico, where her family has lived for generations, and only moved to the states as a teenager. She attended the same law school as me, and received a "Hispanic" scholarship I would not have been eligible for. Her workplace counts her as a "woman of color" for diversity reporting purposes. According to 23 and me, she's at least 75% European. She has dark hair, but her skin tone is indistinguishable from mine (both pale white).
I'm friends with a married couple consisting of a Korean man and a Taiwanese woman. Are they in an interracial marriage? They're considered the same "race" in the US but if they lived in Taiwan or Korea their marriage would be viewed as something like "interracial." Their backgrounds are quite culturally, linguistically, and genetically different.
I'm friends with a married couple consisting of a Gujrati Indian man and a European white woman. Are they in an interracial marriage? Their skin colors are quite different, but they are both of Indo-European ancestry and not much farther apart genetically than two random Europeans would be.
If Barack Obama is 50% African and 50% European, and if his wife is 80% African and 20% European, are they in an interracial marriage? If Barack Obama was instead 20% African and 80% European would it be an interracial marriage?
Edit: Remembered another example from my own life. I'm friends with a married couple consisting of a white (Northern European) man and a white woman of Sami (aka Laplander) ancestry. Are they in an interracial marriage? Visually they just look like two white people. But Sami do not have Indo-European ancestry, so this couple is more genetically distant than a couple where one partner is Indian and the other European.
guajalote
2yr ago
The short answer is that Musk has positioned himself as red tribe or at least anti-blue-tribe, whereas Chappelle has positioned himself as more like heterodox blue tribe.
The average view I hear about Chappelle from blue tribe people I know is something like "his latest stuff has been in bad taste and his quality has gone downhill lately, but he's still a comedy legend and Chappelle's Show was amazing." This type of person would still go to a Chappelle standup show, in the same way someone might go to a Paul McCartney concert even if they don't like any of the music McCartney has put out since the 70s.
The average view I hear about Musk from blue tribe people I know is "he's a narcissistic rich manbaby whose family owned slaves or something." In other words, just uniformly negative.
So I think there's a decent sized slice of the blue tribe that likes Chappelle but hates Musk.
guajalote
2yr ago
I thought he left the suitcases' contents in hotel rooms but allegedly kept and used the suitcases themselves?
guajalote
2yr ago
I think most of what gets labeled “neocolonialism” is not colonialism and is basically a good thing. Global trade has lifted enormous numbers of people out of extreme poverty in the past few decades.
guajalote
2yr ago
If you hold that consensual transactions are generally good, whereas non-consensual taking is generally bad, then there needn't be any tension between opposing colonialism and supporting open borders.
As you note, colonialism violates people's individual rights by one group subjugating another against their will, expropriating their rightful property and reducing or eliminating their rights.
An immigrant entering a country need not do any of these things. He can enter into entirely voluntary transactions to obtain housing, employment, etc. These are transactions where everyone involved is happy to participate and ends up better off; no one's rights are violated.
It is also conceivable that a group of immigrants could band together into a political bloc and use their collective political powers to "colonize" the native population and take away their rights. But there is no particular reason why such an outcome is inevitable or likely. Moreover, such an outcome can occur without any immigration, such as if a country's native protestant population banded together to oppress its native Catholic population. The free movement of people across borders does not require the formation of group identities nor does it require any group to oppress any other group.
guajalote
2yr ago
I'd argue many of the great enduring works are subversive. The Christian gospels are extremely subversive works in many ways. Everyone thinks Jesus is marching into Jerusalem to take the throne as "king of the Jews," but his real purpose there is to be tortured to death like a common criminal. "The last shall be first, and the first shall be last." The gospels are loaded with stuff subverting the religious and cultural expectations of the time and place.
guajalote
2yr ago
There's nothing wrong with deciding "this person is so aggravating I don't want to have to read their thoughts ever again".
I do think there's something wrong with deciding that. I think it's definitely counter to the ethos of TheMotte, which as far as I can tell basically boils down to: (1) engage with arguments rather than people, and (2) an argument's validity depends on the facts and reasoning used to defend it, not how "gross" or "aggravating" the argument is. You're not obligated to respond to every user, but if you post here I think you should at least feel obligated to read all the non-rule-breaking responses to your post (especially the "aggravating" ones). We're supposed to seriously engage with criticism here.
guajalote
2yr ago
It didn't go away, but it lost its cache after about 2010. When I went to college in the 00s, the way to virtue signal was to bike everywhere on a fixed-gear bicycle, carry re-useable hemp grocery bags, put anti-bush and anti-war buttons and stickers on everything you own, volunteer to plant trees and other "carbon offsets," try (and probably fail) to go vegan, and learn to play the banjo or ukulele. People still do this stuff but it's not considered Very Morally Important the way it used to be. The modern equivalent is pronouns in bios, land acknowledgements, etc.
guajalote
2yr ago
I'd also say re-watch early south park and the stuff they were making fun of.
guajalote
2yr ago
Yeah, if OP is serious about this step one is hiring a lawyer who specializes in this area.
guajalote
2yr ago
Yes, I was extremely anti-cat, now I have three and adore them. One in particular is very dog-like: follows me around, licks my hand, greets me when I get home, sleeps at the foot of my bed, likes being picked up, plays fetch, lets me pet her belly, starts purring loudly when I give her attention. I still like dogs, but cats are awesome and way less work than dogs.
guajalote
2yr ago
Being "green" and anti-war. Driving a Prius with a "no blood for oil" bumper sticker.
guajalote
2yr ago
Maybe it's because I've literally never used the block feature on any website, but I agree. What value is blocking adding in a place like this? If someone is harassing/insulting you then they are breaking the rules and should be banned. If they are not violating the rules, what valid reason could you possibly have for blocking them? Disagreeing with someone or finding them annoying is not a good enough reason, IMO, since this site is supposed to be about open debate where all perspectives are welcome.
guajalote
2yr ago
Can’t say I really understand this system. For example, how is Boston ranked higher than Houston? Houston has either the busiest or second busiest port in the US depending on how you measure it, Houston is just way larger than Boston in terms of population, Houston has a higher GDP than Boston, and it’s a major city for the energy and finance industries.
guajalote
2yr ago
How would such a rule be consistent with the professor's argument? First, many people live in relatively racially homogeneous communities, such that "I don't sleep with strangers" would by default mean "I don't sleep with members of other races." This is explicitly forbidden. Second, the status of a person as a stranger is an immutable characteristic and not a desert-based characteristic, so the professor's argument does not permit discriminating against people based on the fact that they are strangers.
guajalote
2yr ago
If we're talking about racism, may-issue permitting laws have a long history of explicit racism, serving as ways of preventing black people from owning guns. Referring to may-issue laws, Frederick Douglass said "…while the Legislatures of the South can take from him (the black man) the right to keep and bear arms, as they can … the work of the Abolitionists is not finished.”
Stated another way, politicians are doing a great job at convincing us that society is safer, and it's tempting to believe them.
I don't really think the right to own guns is in any way contingent on the safety of society. Rather, as Douglass alluded to, the right is about freedom from bondage and tyrrany. It may well be that gun ownership makes society less safe, but more free, and that is a tradeoff I'm gladly willing to accept.
It’s blatantly obvious that this argument is that it’s immoral not to sleep with trans, and it’s blatantly obvious that that applies to, say, cis men not wanting to sleep with gay men too.
It's obvious this is the professor's intended conclusion, but other (presumably unintended) conclusions also follow from the same argument, and I think it's worth pointing those out as a way of testing the veracity of the argument.
I suspect that most women in practice can come up with non-ugliness related reasons. They probably already say things other than just ‘you’re ugly/short/poor, sorry’.
I suspect it would be surprisingly hard to justify those reasons, and at a minimum the professor's argument implies that such reasons can be wrong in an objective sense if they are not "desert based."
If a "nice guy" walks up to a random woman and politely asks her for sex, what sufficient "desert based" answer can she realistically give? Perhaps she says "you're a stranger and the fact that you would randomly proposition me for sex makes me uncomfortable, so I decline." But being a stranger is not a "desert based" flaw; the man did not choose to be a stranger. And respectfully propositioning a woman for sex does not seem like a "desert based" flaw either. In fact, the professor's argument implies that refusing sex is generally inappropriate except in specific cases, and therefore propositioning a random woman for sex would seem to be a reasonable request in most circumstances if the professor's argument is correct.
This argument would seem to imply that you are entitled to demand sex from anyone unless they can give you a "desert-based" justification for their refusal to consent. Doesn't this argument contradict commonly held beliefs about the importance of consent and bodily autonomy?
To put a slightly starker point on it: doesn't this argument imply that "nice guys" (assuming they are genuinely nice and don't have "desert-based" flaws) are entitled to demand sex from any woman?
guajalote
2yr ago
I've never heard of 50% of the stuff they make on GBBO.
FYI a torta is just a Mexican sandwich served on a sweet baguette-like roll. Basically a taco on bread. At least that would have required some actual baking.
guajalote
2yr ago
If escargot was the technical challenge in "French Week" of the GBBO, I'm pretty sure everyone would call BS since it's a baking show not a cooking show.
They didn't need to do some obscure baked good, it could have been something like conchas which are widely available in grocery stores in US border states.
guajalote
2yr ago
My wife is Mexican and a big fan of GBBO. She isn't woke and wasn't offended by that episode per se, but we were both pretty disappointed at how phoned-in it seemed to be. Mexico has a huge variety of interesting baked goods, yet they chose a taco as the technical challenge? It's an extreme stretch to call that baking, and it felt like they were just too lazy to google "popular baked goods of Mexico."
guajalote
2yr ago
There are two main reasons an organization like FIRE doesn't use arbitration: (1) it does not set any legal precedent and therefore the outcome is basically only relevant to the specific case at hand, and (2) arbitration is often more expensive than litigation because you must pay the arbitrator's fee, which is typically $1000-$2000 per day.
The statistics OP linked appear to consider "Hispanic" a race for purposes of measuring interracial marriage rates.
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