Racism

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IpseDixit
Re: Racism

Postby IpseDixit » 2017-09-03, 8:48

I don't have time to answer right now, but vijay, I think there's some difference between saying that a culture is bad (or good) and saying that it's worse (or better) than another. And yes, I do realize things are not static, thank God.

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Re: Racism

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-09-03, 8:57

Okay, well, I'll let you say your piece, but first, I want to clarify that I don't think Indian culture is worse than American culture or anything like that, either, even though Americans have much more progressive attitudes about the rights of such people overall. I love tons of things about Indian culture I don't see in American culture. I don't care much for American food, but I could eat Indian food every damn day. I don't care much for American music in general, but I've gladly listened to all sorts of Indian music my whole life. I don't find American history (unless you count Native American history, which no one ever does) all that fascinating compared to the long and highly diverse history of India. And so on and so forth.

In general, I self-identify more strongly as an Indian than I do as an American and always have.
Last edited by vijayjohn on 2017-09-03, 17:40, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Racism

Postby Car » 2017-09-03, 14:00

Yasna wrote:Cultural racism? :lol:

What's next... culinary racism? :roll:

"Food racism"
Please correct my mistakes!

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Re: Racism

Postby Yasna » 2017-09-03, 19:17

So as far as I can tell, any ignorant or insensitive actions or thoughts that are even tangentially related to race or ethnicity are now RACISM™.
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Re: Racism

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-09-03, 19:19

They're not "tangentially related." They're directly related.

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Re: Racism

Postby OldBoring » 2017-09-03, 19:56

My culture is the best. Fuck the rest.

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Re: Racism

Postby Car » 2017-09-03, 22:11

OldBoring wrote:My culture is the best. Fuck the rest.

Italian? Chinese? Chinese-Italian?
Please correct my mistakes!

IpseDixit

Re: Racism

Postby IpseDixit » 2017-09-04, 7:23

So, some thoughts:

- I realize that this is really my personal yardstick, I can't prove that this is the objective way to "rate" a culture. And btw, I'm not just interested in women and LGBT+ people, but in other minorities as well and in general I care about equal rights and opportunities for everyone, and also freedom ('cause I don't care about equal rights and opportunities if you're under a brutal dictatorship).

- I'm not saying that I would always be able to decide if a culture is better or worse than another one and I'm not saying that I don't have exceptions. For instance, would I say that an extremely egalitarian society which is stuck in the Neolithic science-wise is better than one which is extremely advanced in science but has sexism and homophobia? Probably not.

- I believe that any culture can change for the better (or for the worse).
Last edited by IpseDixit on 2017-09-04, 7:33, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Racism

Postby Saim » 2017-09-04, 7:33

Yasna wrote:So as far as I can tell, any ignorant or insensitive actions or thoughts that are even tangentially related to race or ethnicity are now RACISM™.


I don't understand. What's wrong with using a broad definition of the term racism, especially if we specify each subtype so as to avoid ambiguity and confusion? This seems to be a common thread with a lot of your commentary on racial politics. Is outright white supremacy the only kind of racism in your view, or am I missing something?

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Re: Racism

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-09-04, 7:34

IpseDixit wrote:I don't care about equal rights and opportunities if you're under a brutal dictatorship.

I don't understand what this means.
I'm not saying that I would always be able to decide if a culture is better or worse than another one

And I'm saying it never makes sense to say one culture is better than another, because every culture has things that are good about it and bad about it.

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Re: Racism

Postby Saim » 2017-09-04, 7:40

IpseDixit wrote:- I realize that this is really my personal yardstick, I can't prove that this is the objective way to "rate" a culture.


I'm glad to hear that because you can't be sure that everyone understands the subjective nature of their comments when they say things like x culture is better (without any further qualifiers or clarification). That's why I'd suggest framing the issue in a different way (i.e. avoiding the idea of better or worse cultures altogether and focusing on specific aspects that may be better or worse given a framework of progressive values) or alternatively making sure you put in these caveats to eliminate ambiguity. I think the fact that far-right movements in the West now often use an at least theoretical defense of homosexuals and women as a way to attack Muslims (and when you show examples of progressive Muslims or how different the mainstream social values are in say Azerbaijan compared to Afghanistan, they ignore you because they're only interested in propaganda) should give us all pause for thought.

IpseDixit

Re: Racism

Postby IpseDixit » 2017-09-04, 8:05

I don't understand what this means.


Not very important, I was just being fussy. Basically I meant that, for example, I don't care if gay people can get married, as long as they live under a brutal dictatorship. I know this is purely hypothetical as no such dictatorship has ever existed so far.

Saim wrote:
IpseDixit wrote:- I realize that this is really my personal yardstick, I can't prove that this is the objective way to "rate" a culture.


I'm glad to hear that because you can't be sure that everyone understands the subjective nature of their comments when they say things like x culture is better (without any further qualifiers or clarification). That's why I'd suggest framing the issue in a different way (i.e. avoiding the idea of better or worse cultures altogether and focusing on specific aspects that may be better or worse given a framework of progressive values)


I'm sorry but I'm not very satisfied with this approach. I think there are moments in which you need to give and overall judgment of a culture (in a given moment in history), you can't just say "oh this aspect was good and that aspect was bad". I mean, Third Reich's culture was batshit crazy, it didn't simply have "bad and good aspects", such an approach would be diminishing and insulting.

Moreover, whilst I've said that that was my personal yardstick, I don't think there is total relativism among people when it comes to the scale of values and things that are more important in a culture.

Now, no offense but I don't want to lose more time with this. I have long since passed the time when I would engage in endless debates on this forum.

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Re: Racism

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-09-04, 9:15

IpseDixit wrote:I have long since passed the time when I would engage in endless debates on this forum.

Then why did you engage in it in the first place? :?

IpseDixit

Re: Racism

Postby IpseDixit » 2017-09-04, 9:33

vijayjohn wrote:
IpseDixit wrote:I have long since passed the time when I would engage in endless debates on this forum.

Then why did you engage in it in the first place? :?


Because I was so naive as to believe that my post wouldn't engender such a debate.

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Re: Racism

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-09-04, 15:06

IpseDixit wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:
IpseDixit wrote:I have long since passed the time when I would engage in endless debates on this forum.

Then why did you engage in it in the first place? :?


Because I was so naive as to believe that my post wouldn't engender such a debate.

But it did, and then you didn't back out of it when it did; you engaged in it (I count five posts after it stopped looking like a question-and-answer session), so why now and not then?

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Re: Racism

Postby Saim » 2017-09-04, 16:31

Ipse, if you're still willing to talk to me about this: I just can't see what the point of establishing one culture as being "better" than another is. What could you possibly hope to achieve other than strengthen xenophobic discourse (in a weird way making our "superior" culture worse!)? Do you think telling "non-Western" people that Western culture is better than theirs is going to make them less patriarchal and homophobic?

I'm honestly asking, not trying to score points in a debate or anything. What's your endgame?

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Re: Racism

Postby Luís » 2017-09-04, 18:33

Playing the devil's advocate here, but wouldn't most people from non-Western countries say exactly the same? I mean, if you ask a random Chinese or Iranian, I'm sure most would say their culture is better.

I'm not sure how this became a West vs the rest of the world debate, because going back to what IpseDixit said, I can think, for instance, of several non-Western countries with a good record of LGBT rights, and vice-versa.

About the survey... considering most people 1) tend to prefer things they know well 2) don't really know much about other countries, it doesn't really surprise me that so many people answered "No" when asked "Are all cultures equal?". But I also don't think people who answered "No" are all going around telling foreigners how much better their culture is either.
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Re: Racism

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-09-04, 19:11

Luís wrote:Playing the devil's advocate here, but wouldn't most people from non-Western countries say exactly the same? I mean, if you ask a random Chinese or Iranian, I'm sure most would say their culture is better.

I don't know about "most people" (I seriously doubt this about South Asians, for example), but even if they did, that still wouldn't mean people (Western or otherwise) should do it.
I'm not sure how this became a West vs the rest of the world debate

It never did. It's just that Saim and I brought up specific examples that happen to contrast Western and non-Western people.

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Re: Racism

Postby Yasna » 2017-09-04, 19:16

Saim wrote:I don't understand. What's wrong with using a broad definition of the term racism, especially if we specify each subtype so as to avoid ambiguity and confusion? This seems to be a common thread with a lot of your commentary on racial politics. Is outright white supremacy the only kind of racism in your view, or am I missing something?

There are a number of problems. I would say the worst problem is how needlessly divisive it is. Being a racist, as the term has been traditionally understood by English speakers, at some point became a mark of ignominy, and rightfully so. Racists were publicly shunned and not welcome in polite company, and the KKK was pushed to the absolute fringe of society. By the late 20th century, most American whites were no longer "traditionally racist". That is to say, there were invincible majorities in support of legal equality and against segregation, and even interracial marriage was widely tolerated, if grudgingly in some quarters. Americans had pushed traditional racism to the fringe, and were rightly pleased with it. Then the identity politics brigade descends from their ivory towers to tell white America, hold on a second there, not only have some of you not overcome racism, but actually you are ALL racist, simply by virtue of growing up in your racist white supremacist society. And moreover, we are going to define racism such that ONLY you white people can be racist, and any bigotry or insensitivity displayed towards you by people of other races is just too bad, but stop whinging since you and your white supremacist society have been fucking over other races for 500 years.

If you had started out with the goal of exacerbating racial division, you could not have come up with a better strategy than the identity politics brigade did. And predictably, it's created a catastrophic backlash in my country personified by Donald fucking Trump. And what's the radical left's answer to this backlash? Racism did it.

Another big problem is that the expanded racism sits on intellectually decrepit ground. The implicit bias tests which underpin much of the evidence for racism being everywhere are highly disputed in the psychometrics community, to put it generously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test#Criticism_and_controversy

And as you nicely demonstrated in our previous discussions, there is little interest among the identity politics brigade for exploring alternative explanations of "racist" behavior. It's racist until it's been proved not racist, never mind that you can't prove a negative.

Some people saw this insanity for what it was a long time ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6cxRYgqfHY
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Re: Racism

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-09-04, 19:30

Well, that escalated quickly.


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