I'm trying to figure out what you mean by "white supremacy" because you use it so often it seems like something nebulous.
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So it seems that "white supremacy" is a catchall term for anything that argues a biological basis for group differences. Thank you for the links and for not just being aghast that I didn't know this. :]
RationalWiki has a very opinionated take on things, but that article is very well-sourced (75 linked sources!) so you can read right up.
Now, it could fairly be said that his pro-KKK arguments were more "glib humor" than endorsement and I'd agree. I would also say it's part of the pattern of negative workplace behavior that got him terminated.
In a larger sense, its these "oh, [group A] isn't performing as well as [group B]... must be biological differences" arguments that often form the faux-scientific basis for discrimination. Read any racist literature, and you will find a lot of "science" claiming that [insert racial group] here is biologically inferior. And, yes, that includes much Nazi propaganda.... justifications used by American slave-owners, etc.
Just reading the section you linked, it sounds like he's autistic, not racist. If you didn't know that "Grand Dragon" and "Imperial Wizard" were KKK titles, you'd probably think they were cool - or at least that some nerds would think they were cool.
Hell, those titles being cool without their association to the KKK is why the KKK used those titles.
So it seems that "white supremacy" is a catchall
term for anything that argues a biological basis
for group differences.
(I think you're being disingenuous but I'll play along!)
No, not quite.
It's just that their history is inextricably linked.
We can all agree that there is certainly much valid research to be done here. For example, why is sickle-cell anemia so much more prevalent in African-Americans? What biological adaptations allow some populations (Nepalese, etc) to thrive at high altitudes? Nobody finds that sort of thing objectionable.
However, things get ugly fast when we start talking about the study of why one group is best suited for one task or another, or which group is superior in general.
There is a long and sordid history of biological arguments in favor of the superiority of certain groups of people, typically white European males. It should not surprise you to learn that these arguments come from white European males.
Not all studies of "group differences" have anything to do with white supremacy, but every white supremacy movement that has ever existed has claimed a biological basis for their views.
We sort of fought a world war over this (among other reasons) and a lot of people died. These sorts of arguments have also been used to justify slave ownership (a rather large war was fought over this as well) and the oppression of women.
This sounds exactly like the kind of thing that people who have various other religious conversions say. They have this profound ineffable moral "awakening" and then see fit to start integrating it into every aspect of their lives up to and including trying to "awaken" other people. It's very disturbing to see people go through this process in my opinion as it's a stark reminder that even the most intelligent and thoughtful human beings can essentially have their minds hijacked. It makes me wonder if and when I'll have my mind hijacked, or if it already is (people who have been pwned this way surely don't realize it).
Do you think that it's possible to have your mind hijacked by apathy?
Do you think that it's possible to have your mind hijacked by your identity?
Morality is not what is being pointed to here, morality is relative and a projection of the mind.
It's futile to try to awaken anyone else, because people cannot see past their present level of consciousness. Skeptics in particular often cannot be skeptical of their skepticism which makes them just as ideological about rationality as any religious belief.
But I am open to the possibility that this is wrong, and that politics is just another activity that you can avoid to zero detriment, and that being maximally selfish has plenty of workability in creating a better world for the future. And also it's obviously part of human evolution.
I'm open to participating in politics being for some people and not for others.
At this point it's looking like the potential to kickstart a professional "activism" career is becoming a fringe benefit at Google. Given that, it's probably best to protest things that will win the attention of mainstream [non-tech] audiences so as to position oneself for the maximum possible upside.
> Are you implying that the Googlers involved are doing this to advance themselves?
I'm stating the obvious fact that former Googlers have made themselves notable by engaging in public activism while at the company. Both conservative and liberal. If one dreams of becoming an activist and one happens to work at Google there are footsteps to follow in.
Insofar as personal advancement goes. While there are exceptions, it should be fair to expect that what one does at work may be somehow related to personal advancement. This can be advancement in terms of getting promotions, growing skills, or establishing a reputation.
Wholly selfless people aren't the norm in corporate work environments. That's fine. You can be a good person and not wholly selfless.
While I think on the whole our society is very biased toward a Boasian view of nature versus nurture: "give me a child and I can raise it to have any personality and aptitudes via deliberate rearing techniques." I'm skeptical of some of the conclusions being drawn from this study.
Environment has not been entirely separated out here it seems. And while a comparison of fraternal and identical twins detangles things somewhat it doesn't completely.
My intuition is that a person's personality and aptitudes (around 50% heritable according to many studies) can help them to take advantage of their environment in certain ways. So it's not that environment doesn't matter at all. It's just that people with varying attributes will leverage their environment in different ways, leading to different outcomes.
It would be even more interesting to me to see the personality profiles of the children compared against their future earnings. My guess is there would be a strong correlation since personality -> interests -> career choices.
Then it would just so happen that identical twins have similar personalities. Leading to the results we see here.
Admittedly I'm hopeful that if we could figure out the correlation between personality and environment maybe we could shift our focus away from the unhealthy extremes of 100% nurture (leads to children being pushed by their parents to fit into a mold that may not suit them) and 100% nature (genetic fatalism leads to apathy and hopelessness). Instead what if we took a child's natural gifts and personality profile into account and tailored their environment to maximize their potential within those constraints? Seems like a more hopeful and useful path.
> While I think on the whole our society is very biased toward a Boasian view of nature versus nurture: "give me a child and I can raise it to have any personality and aptitudes via deliberate rearing techniques." I'm skeptical of some of the conclusions being drawn from this study.
Boas was wrong.
> Genetic Influence on Human
Psychological Traits
> There is now a large body of evidence that supports the conclusion that individual differences in most, if not all, reliably measured psychological traits, normal and abnormal, are substantively influenced by genetic factors. This fact has important implications for research and theory building in psychology, as evidence of genetic influence unleashes a cascade of questions regarding the sources of variance in such traits. A brief list of those questions is provided, and representative findings regarding genetic and environmental influences are presented for the domains of personality, intelligence, psychological interests, psychiatric illnesses, and social attitudes. These findings are consistent with those reported for the traits of other species and for many human physical traits, suggesting that they may represent a general biological phenomenon.
I absolutely don't disagree with you. Personality traits and aptitudes are strongly inherited, along with some genetic randomness and some environmental conditioning. What I don't like is full on genetic determinism. Human beings transmit both genes AND memes for a reason. As sentient beings we inhabit two universes. The one made of atoms and the one made of thought and ideas.
Compare, say, humans and ants.
Ants seem to have a ROM of sorts: software embedded in genes and immutable within a single organism's lifetime. They only inhabit the world of atoms.
Humans have a ROM to cover basic functions but also writable memory. We can change our behaviors within a single lifetime and then if that wasn't cool enough we can also TRANSMIT those behaviors without genes via the world of thought and ideas (language).
We ought to never forget that. Fatalism binds us too strongly to the physical world. It's a bad path that leads to nihilism (struggle against nature is futile), cruelty (everyone deserves their lot in life since if they were capable of more they would have achieved it), and despair (self-actualization is impossible, I am an automaton).
> Fascinating to see such clear ramifications of allowing religious beliefs to creep into the outcome of successful product expansion.
Dicks sporting goods recently took a stand against firearms that raised the ire of some of its customer base. Tons of companies go out of their way to support political messages all the time. I'd say taking moral/political positions is very much a normal tactic these days in the business world.
Time will tell how it pans out, but my guess is that it isn't some sort of disaster. Most people seem apathetic to such messaging and for every person who decides to buy a chicken sandwich from Popeye's instead of Chik-fil-a in order to "fight hate" there will probably be another one or two who go out of their way to eat Chik-fil-a in order to "stick it to the man" or whatever.
I'm just curious when this phenomenon started. Has it always existed? It seems like a straightforward tactic for building brand loyalty (staking out a position on some sort of lifestyle issue).
There is a huge moral difference between "I won't sell guns" and "I want the government to discriminate against consenting adults doing something because I personally disapprove"
Not as large a difference as you might hope. Replace "guns" with "phones with freely unlockable bootloaders", and "I" with "7/10 manufacturers" (made up statistics, but it's in the ballpark I think). If that 7/10 trends up to 10/10, then their right to control their own devices effectively disappears, even though the government didn't get in the way. I wager those who value the right to bear arms, don't want to wait until they are barely able to buy guns, at a dwindling handful of companies, before taking action.
You’re really comparing “unlocking bootloaders” to the right for a gay couple to get married, make end of life decisions for each other as the next of kin, be on family insurance, etc?
Trust me, I live in the south. If the chains don’t sell guns, there will always be some local shops that will.
> You’re really comparing “unlocking bootloaders” to the right for a gay couple to get married...
I'm making a comparison to show you don't need the government to restrict rights - a handful of corporations that control a market can do so just as well. Thinking the government is the only threat to your rights is myopic. The specific activity I chose to illustrate this is utterly besides the point. (Though it is worrying that anyone on this site would think control of your own computer is unimportant.)
> Trust me, I live in the south. If the chains don’t sell guns, there will always be some local shops that will.
It is precisely the passionate pro-2nd-amendment attitude (the same attitude that directed ire towards Dicks) that assures this. To repeat myself - they don't want to wait till their backs are against a wall, to start pushing back. "Don't worry, you still have N-1 computing devices not locked-down by the manufacturer. N-2. N-3. N-4..."
The government can legally take away my property (eminent domain), my liberty by putting me in jail, they can force me to join the military, etc. Corporations have none of those powers.
> What law or part of the constitution says that I have a right to an unlocked phone?
Maybe you'll be happier if I call it an "ability", not a "right", since I am not interested in a debate on what rights are.
To answer your question - none. That's what makes it so easy to lose. But do you not see the problem? Suppose all computers, not just phones, become so locked down. Your computing would be completely under the control of a handful of giant corporations - all without any legal right getting infringed.
Of course I don't need hypotheticals. Lets look at another example: Before the Civil Rights act, no rights were being infringed on by segregated businesses either, and people were free to choose non-segregated businesses. The government wasn't stopping anyone - yet it was still a problem.
> The government is the only threat to my legal rights.
If 100% of the phones on the market automatically censored mentions of Tiananmen Square, are your legal rights still not under threat? It doesn't matter if you're able to exercise your rights, as long as you have them?
The Civil Rights act doesn't cover sexual orientation, so in many states, you can still be fired for being gay. Hypothetically, if 10% of businesses refused to hire gays, would your answer still be "The government is the only threat to their legal rights"? What if it was 50%? 90%? 100%? How high would you let that % go before acting?
> you can still be fired for being gay. Hypothetically, if 10% of businesses refused to hire gays, would your answer still be "The government is the only threat to their legal rights"? What if it was 50%? 90%? 100%?
In the Federalist papers, James Madison famously said that it wasn't enough for a government to protect its people from the tyranny of a central authority (e.g., a king), a government must also protect various groups from tyrannizing each other.
> The Civil Rights act doesn't cover sexual orientation
It doesn't by name, but the pre-Trump EEOC viewed sexual orientation discrimination as necessarily involving gender stereotypes and thus being sex discrimination, and established precedent in two federal appellate circuits along that line; at least one circuit disagreed, and case has been heard by the Supreme Court this month (but not yet decided) which will likely resolve the circuit split.
> What law or part of the constitution says that I have a right to an unlocked phone?
The constitution is an important part of the legal system, but it's not the only part. There are also laws that legislators pass in service of the desires of the people the government serves.
For one, anti-trust law can potentially provide an avenue for challenging locked down phones. Providing a platform and then inhibiting open competition on that platform to the detriment of consumers is often an antitrust violation (see, for example Microsoft antitrust battles in the 1990s).
But even if current laws do not provide for unlocked phones, society can make new laws that require them. That's the beauty of democracy, we can choose how we want to live.
You mean the antitrust lawsuit that was overturned and that MS later settled?
And the government forcing business to do what the “people want” is fine until the “people” elect someone who doesn’t share your views - whether it be banning guns on the left or restricting the rights of gay people to get married on the Right or banning interracial marriage up until the 60s because “the people” thought it wasn’t “Christian”.
You should always be worried about giving the government - the one entity that can take away your property, liberty and life more power.
> You should always be worried about giving the government - the one entity that can take away your property, liberty and life more power.
In the day of company towns, your livelihood could be taken away at the whim of the company. A business relying on one of the app stores can be (and frequently is) ruined overnight by getting an opaque, unappealable, unexplained ban. Thousands died in the Bhopal disaster due to lax safety, and people have died being wrongly denied insurance they paid for [1]. Entire governments have been toppled by corporations [2]. "beyond question ... the dominant position of the Standard Oil Co. in the refining industry was due to unfair practices—to abuse of the control of pipe-lines, to railroad discriminations, and to unfair methods of competition in the sale of the refined petroleum products" [3] Oil companies knew their product caused global warming, and that it would have global adverse effects, and actively prevented measures against it to be taken, with lobbying and deception [4].
Thinking the government is the only threat to property, liberty, and life, isn't myopic - it's blind. All of feudalism can be re-cast to just landowners exercising their property rights - if the serfs don't like the terms of use, they can find their own land.
You also seem to be working under the assumption that it doesn't matter what kind of 'power' we give to the government. Just more=bad, less=good. There's a huge difference between expanding environmental protections or social programs, and increasing the length of jail terms, the scope of surveillance, and anti-circumvention laws.
What do you think happens to “social programs” aimed at families if the government defines a family as a man and a woman and not a gay couple? Or less than 50 years ago as a man and a woman of the same race?
These are the same “social programs” that treat drug abuse as a “disease” in rural America but as something to be at “War” with in the inner city. We can even go as far as the same people who hate “subsidies” when it applies to health care love it to prop up farmers.
Even the EPA is more concerned with protecting the affluent neighborhoods than Flint Michigan.
The government has proven time and again that it can’t be trusted to do anything fairly.
> Even the EPA is more concerned with protecting the affluent neighborhoods than Flint Michigan.
And from this your conclusion is to put lead back into gasoline.
> The government has proven time and again that it can’t be trusted to do anything fairly.
...therefore we shouldn't worry about monopolies, and do nothing about corporate abuses? If you're going to say "vote with your wallet", let me remind you this is known not to work [1].
How has voting in the election worked? Neither the Presidential election, or either body of Congress has represented the will of the popular vote in the last few elections.
I’m much more worried about getting stopped by the police because I look like I don’t belong in my own neighborhood and the abuses of the “justice system” than I am about “corporate abuses”. It wasn’t the major corporations that were enforcing Jim Crow laws or that are now trying to take the rights from the LGBT community. They were offering same sex couples benefits before the government forced them to.
How many “Christian Conservatives” would love to “Defend Marriage” now? Yes I know the Democrats don’t have clean hands when it comes to either that or the “War on Crime” which escalated under Clinton.
More recently, California passed a law trying to “help” Uber drivers but ended up making it harder for people who actually wanted to be freelancers and other independent contractors. Whether the government is actively malicious or just incompetent, there are usually unintended consequences.
The “War on Crime” was supported by many Black legislators because they were dumb enough to trust the government.
There's no way that you can form a tally from the sum total of a person's entire lineage in order to equalize them according to their ancestors struggles. Attempts to do this seem mostly to act as a laundering scheme for financial privilege. Now all someone from a wealthy family needs to do to justify their admission to elite institutions is to find some great great grandparent who plausibly suffered a systemic injustice.
I see the good intentions here, but I get the impression that well meaning rule oriented people are being used to further the very injustices they mean to solve.
Now all someone from a wealthy family needs to do to justify their admission to elite institutions is to find some great great grandparent who plausibly suffered a systemic injustice.
Such as being 1/1024 Native American, that technique is known to work at Harvard
> There's no way that you can form a tally from the sum total of a person's entire lineage in order to equalize them according to their ancestors struggles.
Inherited family wealth nominally does this. There wouldn't be a need for reparations after a generation or two of a 100% inheritance tax.
As the namesake suggests, "millenials" are ideally people who were young-adults around the 00's. That generally means born from the early/mid 80's to mid-90's.
Gen z were/are young adults during the '10s. Gen alpha will be young adults during the '20s.
Generally a person's pre-teen/teen/early 20's are very formative so the shared experiences that a generation will have probably do form a real connective tissue within the age cohort that separates them from those with different experiences. A binary (anyone less than x years old is a y) isn't so useful to describe such a phenomenon.
1982 - 1996, that is more than ten years. But the people in that range would have shared formative experiences during the '00s. Thus the moniker millenials.
"Operation Mockingbird is an alleged large-scale program of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that began in the early 1950s and attempted to manipulate news media for propaganda purposes."
I feel like you misread the thread here and jumped hastily into taking an accusatory tone.
The argument in the thread was essentially:
Person One: It's bad to say that one group "took over" an area from another instead of using a term like "demographics shifted."
Person Two: Why is it bad? If someone said that White people "took over" an area it seems unlikely that a negative connotation would be assumed.
You responded with an offhand comment about gentrification being involved with racism, then painted a picture of the person you were responding to as someone who lives in a gated community playing golf with out of touch people.
The thread was already becoming a terrible exercise in whataboutism. This added element of describing commenters as if they were bad guys from 1980's summer camp films made it even worse.
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So it seems that "white supremacy" is a catchall term for anything that argues a biological basis for group differences. Thank you for the links and for not just being aghast that I didn't know this. :]