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hydroacetylene
29d ago
Americans understand the one drop rule makes Meghan Markle black, but not the pope. But race-as-a-spectrum is actually literally arbitrary; there are cultures which see mulattos as not-black. There are cultures which see whiteness as a one drop rule. The same is not true for man and woman.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
29d ago
I do simply to save time. It knows my diet and quite a bit about my recent and historical medical results and it's easier not to have to remind it. If I were more cautious about privacy I wouldn't.
hydroacetylene
29d ago
Louisiana's one drop rule never applied that strictly because a large portion of the French speaking white population had a black ancestor somewhere in the family tree, even if you couldn't tell by looking. IIRC the pope identifies as partially creole, which is a catch all term for french-y and not Cajun, but usually is a code word for southern Louisiana black, so it's even more complicated.
But TL;DR is that in 1900 he'd have ridden in the whites section of the train.
Blueberry
29d ago
The way the Masai tribesmen in What is a Woman? do.
Never saw the documentary, but found the scene on yt:
TowardsPanna
29d ago
sips craft beer while googling "how to join conversation at pub"
I wonder if the ability (or lack of ability) to draw has anything to do with what I've heard termed aphantasia? This is not an original wonder, I expect. I was sitting around a table of men and women several months ago, and our host asked everyone to close their eyes and imagine I believe an apple (This was back in November.) I could see an apple in my mind, with a dark background, imagining the color of it from stem to bottom, red to pinkish to green-yellow, the way apples are sometimes mottled, and when we all opened our eyes, of the eight or so people there, I think only two of us said we were able to imagine it. My wife in particular said she just saw black. I was thinking this might simply be an artifact of how the question had been asked--an excess of honesty might produce "I didn't see it" because really there was no apple, I wasn't seeing a real apple with my eyes, it was in my "mind's eye" as it were. But if--and this assumes at face value that the host, his wife, the others there, and my wife simply could not visualize an apple in the way I could--would that have an effect on their ability to, say, draw an apple?
Many Japanese are almost stereotypically talented at drawing (my wife is not). Often however this means that they draw manga-type stylized figures very well, but not realistic objects. Then some of my students who are required by their histology instructor to draw, say, glomeruli in the kidneys can do so with impressive talent. Just with a pencil and eraser. Surely someone has studied this. I should look it up.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
29d ago
Of course. I'm just saying that down the line, that's where it would hang because ain't no way legislators write anything clear enough that it doesn't need maximal amounts of judicial review. I mean look at how many times they had to fuck up software before we landed on the precarious equilibrium we have now. I assume it's going to go that same route.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
29d ago
Breaking into Congressional buildings is different than protesting but (in the context of a mass event that started as a protest) a central example of rioting.
So you're just going to say it's obvious and not actually explain why? Come on.
Is it mere geographic proximity? Are you saying one is more likely to work? What?
I could understand if congressmen were assaulted. Hell, going to people's homes might actually be an escalation. But it's just rioting on some official building we're talking about.
It’s like saying slapping a politician you don’t like the exact same as murdering them, because it’s “political violence” either way.
I can explain the difference for that one, only in one case is the politician removed from play and unable to do anything anymore. Which is how Japan's left wing coalition once collapsed.
I don't really see that clear a difference between causing property damage in fed buildings or police precincts except who has to pay for it.
All I see is people with no power breaking things to make themselves look more intimidating than they actually are. I think your degrees are more aligned to the targets of the intimidation or the symbolism thereof than its actual severity or destabilizing effect.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29d ago
that people who disguise themselves as other races are not really an issue
It is maybe less of an issue, but it does come up from time to time. There have been several prominent fake Native Americans within the last few decades. There are fewer examples, but not zero, for other races.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
29d ago
Except that no such thing happened, the German-Americans are today mostly integrated into mainstream English-speaking society.
I think it's noteworthy that the proximal cause for this was a war waged by America against the mother country, with no small amount of pressure applied to assimilate. We do not really do that at all any more. More likely the opposite, I think: by the undisputed teachings of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-American intellectual output, assimilating to hegemonic values generally and white capitalistic American values specifically is morally wrong.
Not only a Slave, but the first legally enslaved person under criminal law: an African indentured servant ran away with friends and was caught, his European mates got 4 years extra, but he was sentenced to service his master for life.
records suggested that Mr. Punch fathered children with a white woman, who passed her free status on to those children, giving rise to a family of a slightly different name, the Bunches, that ultimately spawned Mr. Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.
Quite an interesting colonial story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Punch_(slave)
Through continued intermarriage with white families in Virginia, the line of Obama's maternal Bunch ancestors probably were identified as white as early as 1720.[15] Members of this line eventually migrated into Tennessee and ultimately to Kansas, where descendants included Obama's maternal grandmother and his mother …. Y-DNA testing of direct male descendants of the Bunch family lines has revealed a common ancestry going back to a single male ancestor of African ethnicity.[15][9][38] Genealogists believe this male ancestor to be John Punch the African. He was probably born in present-day Cameroon in Central Africa, where his particular type of DNA is most common.
That was in the early 1600s and before cattle slavery as an institution though. But cool that Obamas roots are going way back into colonial times.
Edit:
The first black slave “just because” was an indentured servant named John Casor whose (ironically) black master refused to release him: “Although two white planters confirmed that Casor had completed his indentured contract with Johnson, the court still ruled in Johnson's favor.“
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29d ago
Is January 6th the only time that's worked?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
29d ago
FWIW multiple studies have found that on most relevant metrics (English/other language usage, crime, social and vocational integration) Hispanics today are tracking where Italians were.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
29d ago
I don’t get the hate over boomer consumption because it is, generally, much lower than the consumption of working people who criticize them on the basis that their resources should be reallocated. Cruises are, on the scale of vacations, pretty cheap. Retirees aren’t DoorDashing much. And boomer housing wealth isn’t actually something they can do much about.
Their health care counts as consumption as much as those other items do.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
29d ago
Pretty much everything "humorous maybe" was ruined by millenials. We took gross out comedies too far (Freddy got fingered) we took teen comedies too far (Van Wilder sequels) we took sports comedies too far (Baseketball), we took internet absurdism too far (somethingawful), stoner comedy too far (Pineapple Express) meme comedy too far (shit my dad says), political comedy too far (Trump vs Clinton) - I love elements of everything I just mentioned, but each of those killed their genres.
Rov_Scam
29d ago
I'm not sure you're really raising any good arguments here. Most elections feature a major party candidate who has lost a primary. Regan, Bush I, Dole, McCain, Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Biden had all sought the nomination in the past and failed, and that's not counting Harris. I don't see how you could argue that having lost in the past somehow prevents you from getting the nomination. And to my knowledge Gretchen Whitmer never entered a presidential race, so you can cross her off of that list. I don't see what Shapiro not being selected as vice president has to do with anything. Literally every Democrat not named Tim Walz wasn't selected. I'm not going to go through a list of names, but there are plenty of people out there who can be nominated, and I can probably name more moderates than progressives at this point.
I feel like it's trendy now to see the Democrats as a party in disarray, and while those criticisms are valid, the Republicans might actually be in worse shape going into 2028. We've spent the past decade-plus wondering why Democrats have underperformed the polls in the past several presidential elections, which is especially baffling considering that the polls have been more or less accurate in other elections, and have even gone in the opposite direction, with Democrats winning against the apparent odds. This is coupled with MAGA candidates regularly losing any election that isn't a 100% safe Republican lock. While various theories for these phenomena have been proposed, I think the reason for this is pretty obvious at this point: There is a huge mass of traditional non-voters who will only vote when Trump is on the ballot. Since these people traditionally don't vote, pollsters don't get to them, because pollsters have traditionally only been looking for people who are likely to actually vote.
The upshot is that the Republican nominee in 2028 can't expect to get the same amount of support as Trump did in 2024. For instance, suppose it's Vance. Vance is a MAGA creation and Trump's heir apparent, and nominating him is as clear a signal as you're going to get that the party intends to continue riding Trump's legacy. Well, Vance simply isn't going to get 100% of the Trump voters, and it's difficult to see him pulling in enough non-Trump voters to make up the difference. In fact, Vance seems to offer the worst of all worlds politically, considering he'll have been in office just the wrong amount of time by election day 2028. 6 years total, 4 of them completely subservient to the president. He can't run as an outsider, he can't run as an insider with tons of experience, he can't run as a maverick who forged his own path, he can't run as a bipartisan dealmaker, he can't run as a moderate, he can't run as an arch-conservative, he can only run as a continuation of an administration that will undoubtedly enter election season with net negative approval ratings. The only case in which a Vance nomination has a ton of upside is if Trump pulls off some miracle where he gets his approval rating up among Independents and Democrats, but that seems like a longshot. Ronald Regan he is not.
This wouldn't be that bad if the Republicans had enough of a buffer where they could afford to lose votes. But Trump won the "Blue Wall" states by razor thin margins in 2024 and lost all of them in 2020. Winning any of them in 2028 would be a tall order in any election, and they don't have the votes to spare with Trump off the ballot. Of course, the Republicans could always nominate someone else, but that would suggest that Trump's star has faded even within the party, and would probably be an even worse outcome. It would be like McCain in 2008—The Republicans nominated a good-natured moderate war hero who was well-liked by the opposition and had the misfortune to represent a party that was in such disarray pretty much everyone who mattered had stopped trying to defend the incumbent president. Now imagine what would have happened had the Republicans nominated Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld instead, and tried to sell it as a continuation of the Bush presidency. Because Bush at least had the self-awareness to largely sit that election out. Now imagine the party tries to move on with Trump constantly talking about how anyone who doesn't back Vance is a traitor to him personally. Because that is what is going to happen if Trump doesn't get to pick his own successor.
Beyond that, I haven't seen any suggestions that the Republicans have a particularly deep bench. And for all the criticism I see of Harris's performance in 2024, no one seems to realize how close she came to winning. Trump had a 1.7% margin in Pennsylvania, 1.4% in Michigan, and 0.9% in Wisconsin. Take away the Trump Bump. Take away Harris being tied to an unpopular incumbent. And take away it being Kamala fucking Harris (who isn't getting the nomination, though she has a better shot than Newsome), and the Republicans have their work cut out for them.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
29d ago
I'm glad I posted this because the responses revealed a serious flaw in my explanation.
I very specifically do not mean "they don't know what a female is". They get that, for the most part. I'm talking about the internal experience of womanhood, the preference for faces over mechanics, the keen interest in social networks and how much a man makes and the low-key rape fetish. Instead, when they think about the differences between men and women, they think the women are just smaller men. It parses the same way you would consider the differences between The Rock and Kevin Hart. They treat their female friends and girlfriends like a guy, and then don't understand why it backfires. To them, a woman is just a guy with a vagina in a skirt. So if a person with a penis puts on a skirt and claims to be a woman, what's the difference?
And the solution is to have other men explicitly teach them about the differences in perspective. The full Boomer Wisdom.
Or they can just watch Hoe Math videos.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
29d ago
I'm sure all the civil libertarians are just struggling with how passionate they are about norms and standards and the rule of law, and that's why none of them have come around to express outrage at the gangs of foreigner men waving foreign flags and attacking federal agents performing lawful duties.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
29d ago
You've read John Scalzi, I see.
I haven't actually. He never rose high enough on the TBR pile before his antics and personality turned me off. That's not a total dealbreaker for me, but there's a lot of other stuff to read.
But that character trope is a fairly common issue.
Rov_Scam
29d ago
If they're actively in the process of arresting him you'd be interfering. If they were gathering across the street in preparation for a raid, and a group of protestors gathered on the sidewalk in front of your neighbor's house, the police would have to ask them to move before they could be arrested for interfering, and at that they'd only have to move enough to let the police through. In the 7-11 raid the guys would have to let the cops in, but they couldn't be arrested for just protesting outside. The rock throwing would be covered by assault, and may also be impeding, but it would depend on the circumstances. Suppose for a moment that the protestors in LA knew nothing of the ICE raids, didn't know ICE was there, and were having an unrelated protest about environmental policy or something else totally unrelated to ICE. It did, however, make it difficult for ICE to execute the raid. Should all of the protestors in that scenario be charged with impeding official duties?
Quantumfreakonomics
29d ago
I just finished the United States Chemical Safety Board Final Report on the 2005 BP Texas City Refinery Exploision. I vaguely remember as a kid when this happened, but I had never realized it was the same company that caused the massive oil spill just a few years later.
The report hits all the standard beats for this genre, penny-pinching management, shoddy maintenance, "procedures" that exist only on paper and which may or may not even work, but all of it is cranked-up to 11 for 300 pages.
One of my favorite anecdotes is that at one point the call came down from London for all facilities to cut fixed costs by 25%. Most BP refineries realized that this was insane and didn't do it, but Texas City really did cut 25% and ended up running the facility into the ground.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
29d ago
Deconstructionist art, funny quips in serious dramas, political satire, etc.
sockpuppet2
29d ago
How do you know there aren't equally excessive gen-x examples of those things, and that the humor typed weren't ruined some other way?
I wouldn't endorse applying this logic to gender, but "I, an outsider, think a person's face-value claim to group affiliation is of ambiguous merit, but a confirmed member of that group endorses their claim, so I will recognize it" isn't per se unreasonable.
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