Discussion
@strypey I dont have the headspace to get into your meta analysis here
... however, I fancy lobbing at you some weird clip from Russian television programming I came across (which is equally above my paygrade):
https://www.reddit.com/r/lazerpig/comments/1p51r8i/nothing_tells_more_about_moscovia_than_russian
congratulations
@strypey I dont have the headspace to get into your meta analysis here
... however, I fancy lobbing at you some weird clip from Russian television programming I came across (which is equally above my paygrade):
https://www.reddit.com/r/lazerpig/comments/1p51r8i/nothing_tells_more_about_moscovia_than_russian
@indieterminacy
> some weird clip from Russian television programming
I have zero context for this. Could be real. Could be real TV footage with made up translation text. Could be generated by a Trained #MOLE. Who knows? The fact it's posted on dReddit with no reference to its source inclines me to assume the latter.
If you have a problem with someone joining your workplace because they look like they do, or they have a "weird" name", or they don't speak the language properly (even if they're fully fluent), that's about their ethnicity.
If you have a problem with someone joining your workplace because it's a core part of the US government, and they're from China, and explicitly loyal to the CCP, that's about their nationality.
The first one is bigotry. The second one is politics.
(2/?)
Only one of these is racism (the first one), but even the more serious kind. Which is not about the attitudes one individual has about others, or the things one does to others as a result.
The more serious kind of systemic. It's patterns show up in data about whole populations (or at least representative samples of them). But behaviour that may or may not be part of it can appear to be *the same behaviour* from an individual perspective.
We can't guilt trip our way out of this kind.
(3/?)
Systemic racism works mostly on implicit bias. So people can't easily tell whether they're doing it or not. Which means conscientious individuals trying to fix our own behaviour - while it can and does reduce bigotry - cannot fix the systemic stuff.
Once, I firmly believed that the world was merely an accumulation of millions of individual actions. But what about network effects, and other ways the social background radiation can change and warp individual choices, without our awareness?
(4/?)
Aren't you utilizing implicit assumptions to conclude that strange names, strange looks, or strange ways of talking are related to ethnicity?
You and I don't speak English the same, even if we made an argument we came from wasp stock.
Moreover, again assuming wasp stock, there are lots of strange names. One of the characters in Future Sepsis is named Niamh (pronounced neev), which seems like a strange name, but it's Welsh, and even an English person might choose to name their child that despite not being directly Welsh.
Even the way someone looks, a lot of things can affect that I. The genetic side, the environmental side, or the cultural side without ethnicity entering the picture.
Then there are categories that the contemporary left believes are ethnic that actually aren't. Mexico, for example, is not an ethnicity. It is a state with a number of different ethnicities do the historical happenstance.
The left in fact often claims the same ethnicity is good and evil in their heuristic: an evil conquistador Spaniard European is now (without any real changes to genetics) a poor subjugated Mexican. The contradiction makes sense if it's not about ethnicity at all, but moral and power based.
Intersectionality at first glance looks like it makes certain groups more or less oppressed, but if you take it seriously, taken to its conclusions it actually means every human is unique and to make decisions solely on one or a couple attributes is to flatten them into something they are not.
If systemic racism can be fixed - and I genuinely hope it can - it can't be done through peer-to-peer moral persuasion. It has to be done through politics.
Politics that might includes systematically discriminating against countries known to introduce both bigotry and systemic racism into others. Being cautious about allowing their nationals to play any significant role in our social institutions. So addressing racism might involve stuff that looks superficially like racism.
(5/?)
Which means we have to be able to have open-minded conversations about what is and isn't racism. We need to seriously consider the possibility that someone's actions that smell like racism are actually anti-racist or orthogonal. They need to seriously consider the possibility that is is.
On both sides of any given conversation, we need to avoid starting from assumptions and mutual condemnations. Starting instead with questions that start with "why?", and replies that answer them.
(6/?)
I explain all this as context before I mention that I notice a lot of changes going on, in the power positions that determine the direction of large Open Source projects and organisations. Given the Patriot Act and the Snowden revelations, I've never been entirely comfortable with how many of these orgs plant their flag in the US. Nor how many of the power positions are held by USAmericans. Particularly those with corporate affiliations.
(7/?)
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