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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29009 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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"Historically". This ain't the 50's.

Or, you know, any of the dozens of other times and places where racial and ethnic hatred have resulted in death and destruction from Rwanda to Kosovo twenty years ago and from Syria to Donetsk in the past decade.

That America has gotten lucky and mostly avoided communal violence for a spell of 50 years seems like a silly prior to update.

racial and

Is incorrect. All your examples are of trivial-to-outsiders ethnic difference within the same race, whether you define race using the American folk racial categories or the mostly scientifically accurate ones (as confirmed by modern DNA testing) developed by the Victorian biological anthropologists that academia teaches you to denounce as "scientific racists".

Huh, never thought I'd see the Woke-Wignat crossover game include "New, technical definition of Racism that excludes most historical and colloquial uses of the word, including most of the uses that made it popular."

Huh, never thought I'd see the Woke-Wignat crossover game include "New, technical definition of Racism that excludes most historical and colloquial uses of the word, including most of the uses that made it popular."

"Racial and ethnic" strongly suggests that the two words have different meanings, otherwise why use both. If you accept that the two words have different meanings, then per common usage "racial" refers to the major subgroups of humanity like "black" and "white", and "ethnic" refers to more granular groups.

The use of "racism" that made the word popular related to the black/white situation in the US, which falls squarely within my definition of racial as opposed to ethnic conflict.

"You can't be racist against Irish/Jews/Poles because they are white" is an argument that gets trotted out from time to time in the UK, and although it doesn't get taken particularly seriously it isn't treated as cancellable heresy unless it is directed at Jews.

it doesn't get taken particularly seriously it isn't treated as cancellable heresy unless it is directed at Jews.

If you're in a social situation that you don't really care about your reputation in, playing and poking with this inconsistency is a lot of fun, especially if you feign ignorance. "Look, I'm an antiracist activist - I don't care if the white people oppressing muslims in the middle east are wearing funny little hats, they've got white skin and benefit from white privilege."

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