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PaperclipPerfector  28d ago (text post)   25144 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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I will refrain from creating mod drama but the comment was clearly against the spirit of the rules, which are opposed to needlessly inflammatory or grossly offensive language in the interests of civility. This was enforced even during the emotion around the BLM protests, so I think it can be enforced now.

As regards the sentiment itself it has always seemed to me to be a very poor hill for white supremacists to die on. If chihuahuas and pit bulls and border collies are the same species, surely the different phenotypes of humans are too. Commonly held animals made up of several species (like Elephants) have major physical differences, separated many millions of years ago, and cannot breed successfully (only one Asian/African elephant hybrid was ever born despite them being held together in zoos for centuries, and it died after a couple of days). Human populations can all have children together.

In any case, it has some amusing implications. If a 100 IQ population can call an 85 IQ population animals, why should a 115 IQ population consider a 100 IQ population anything but? The line being drawn just below the median for Europeans is no more or less arbitrary than the line being drawn below Asians or Jews.

This forum is much better without arguments that belong on message boards with swastikas in the sidebar next to links to buy siege from the e-commerce shop.

If chihuahuas and pit bulls and border collies are the same species, surely the different phenotypes of humans are too. Commonly held animals made up of several species (like Elephants) have major physical differences, separated many millions of years ago, and cannot breed successfully (only one Asian/African elephant hybrid was ever born despite them being held together in zoos for centuries, and it died after a couple of days). Human populations can all have children together.

This is what always bugged me about Star Trek, I understand they have this complicated lore that is basically Raelism before it was cool, but still. By the common definition, the frequency of inter-alien reproduction made it clear that all the humanoid species in the galaxy were one species. Vulcans are humans are Klingons are Romulans. Ignoring the fact that they're all just humans in various kinds of prosthetics, of course.

One thing I would like to see explored in science fiction(maybe as a collaborative project somewhere) is a hard sci-fi future where early human colonization efforts led to speciation and the different species interacting with each other in the distant future after some kind of sea change in frequency of interactions.

You might enjoy All Tomorrows

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