There are no genetic markers that taken together say "this person is black" or "this person is white".
Actually, there very much are.
I think what you're trying to say is that not all black people have all the "black people genetic markers," and likewise for other groups. This is true, but this is not necessary to distinguish well-defined groups.
Family resemblance is a philosophical idea made popular by Ludwig Wittgenstein
It argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all.
Skin color is a relatively minor component of race, race describes the clustering of a whole host of traits and characteristics in a group of individuals.
Yellow-skinned Africans would still be Africans, purple-skinned Asians would still be Asians, and green-skinned Europeans would still be Europeans.
Skin color is a minor component of the actual makeup of race - but most of what "race" is, is political, economic and cultural. And skin color is a major factor in that regard, because it's an obvious way to discriminate between in and out groups.
When Obama was first running, there were discussions about whether or not he was "black enough" to really represent African American culture as President. Part of that was because of his upbringing (because, unfortunately, there is the perception that being educated, well spoken and wealthy is somehow antithetical to "true blackness") but part of it was the lightness of his skin color. It would have likely been easier for some people to accept his "white" background if he'd been physically darker.
You yourself correlated European with "white" in an earlier (probably still flagged) comment, so you know that references to skin color can seem intrinsic to many things to which it doesn't really apply.
I'd probably edit my children to be darker. Having spent a few days on the beach in Thailand, the genetic inferiority of my own fair skin is quite visible and painful.
Is this like reductio ad absurdum of PC signalling? Where do you spend the other 362 days of the year? In an environment that fair skin provides advantages for things like vitamin D production perhaps?
I spend the rest of the year in places that are not Norway or Sweden - places where even the darkest African or Tamil does not suffer vitamin D deficiency.
I find it very entertaining to be accused of PC signalling a few days after being accused of white supremacy.
GP's point was that their friend had to find a place to stay with one day's notice which seemed to be the limiting factor.
A mortgaged house, and short-notice, temporary housing are not in the same category. I was asking if there was some point that the person I was responding to was trying to make that I wasn't seeing.
Except that's not really saying much. If there was nothing more to owning a house than paying a mortgage instead of rent everyone would own a house and never rent.
The cost to live in the hostel when you include all factors is lower even if the daily rates were the same.
i thought it was common knowledge that real estate prices vary around the world. a lot. if Proud Aussie saying anything more than that? and that Proud Aussie has a mortgage?
What is the relevance of the image at the top here of a sub-Saharan African to an article about an ancient European philosophy.
An ancient European philosophy we know of today thanks to written language and a European civilization that developed, preserved and cultivated countless worldchanging ideas.(like the controlled conveyance of photons into your eyes relaying this information)
Written language was never even devised in sub-Saharan Africa!
These agenda driven, Magical Negro juxtapositions are becoming obscene.
The French built 1960's style reactors and have a perfect safety record, 85% of electricity comes from Nuclear.
With i) modern designs and ii) re-investment in the tech, which hasn't seen advancement in 20 years, we'd solve the problem quickly.
Fukishima is avoidable, and Chenobyl ... was insanity, not even really a 'nuclear accident' (they were running reactors out in the open, without any containment or safety measures - like making sarin gas on a campfire).
Obviously it comes along with other complexities and challenges, but most of them - even long term storage of used fuel - can be addressed.
There's enough known Uranium deposits to power us for the next few hundred years - and that's even when we have not been looking for more deposits for 40 years.
Even without any 'new ideas' - we could be CO2 free within 10 years. The entire world.
We could even build CO2 'scrubbers' to pull CO2 out of the air.
Nuclear reactors are not actually as complicated as they seem, they are actually quite basic.
We have the solution in front of its, it just takes the political will, and intelligent information campaigns.
No not really. Going back millennia, there has always been an elite within a society. The difference that is recent to emerge is that there is a growing disconnect between the interests of the elite and the societies to which they supposedly belong.
Nationalist vs Globalist is a pretty good summarization.
The globalists seem primarily interested in using their positions of power to enrich themselves and gratify their egos, and they perhaps feel they are doing something right in their policy prescriptions, but it is driven by complete lack of understanding of human nature.
The nationalists understand that humans have concentric (genetic) loyalties, from self, to family, to nation/race. These are just facts of nature, fighting against them is a losing battle and arranging our societies along these natural lines will produce the best outcomes.
The nationalists want the best for the whole world, not just a tiny trans-national elite.
Trump is a nationalist.
(Yes I know this seems antithetical to the experience of many in SV, elite universities, etc. What these supposedly smart people fail to understand is that they are among outliers of outliers. Exceptions to rules are not unknown, but basing our policy on exceptions is an invitation to disaster.)
There's nothing new about the current 'disconnect' between American elite and others; people pull out the same rhetoric every few years, it seems. And there is no long-term adherence of others to populism (which is being expressed by you as nationalism).
It's not a social truth, despite attempts to raise above reproach its horrible behavior and worse consequences, it's just an old political technique used by some political leaders for their own purposes, as Bob Dylan pointed out, a brushfire they set which now has turn into a raging, out of control forest fire. We can do something about it.
> These are just facts of nature
We can say murder and rape are facts of nature; is it 'elitist' to outlaw them? I don't feel they are 'facts' of my nature, in that they somehow inevitable, and neither is racism.
There are far better angels of our nature, and America was founded on them. 'All men are created equal' and liberty for those men (and women), not just people you happen to like. That has resonated with people's natures for centuries now; I think we can say it's not longer an 'experiment', as Lincoln called it, and it's attracted immigrants from every culture and inspired many more around the world. A lot of those populist 'white' people, as they call themselves, used to hate each other as Irish and Italians and Germans and Poles, Catholics and Protestants and Jews. It turned out those divisions weren't in their natures after all.
Nicely said -- however I would disagree with the claim that our best achievable society is no longer an experiment. To remove beta status and pretend it is an understood phenomenon leads to thinking like the parent's more so than thinking like the rest of your comment ...
>Yes I know this seems antithetical to the experience of many in SV, elite universities, etc. What these supposedly smart people fail to understand is that they are among outliers of outliers. Exceptions to rules are not unknown, but basing our policy on exceptions is an invitation to disaster.
I think you're giving them too much credit even. Their world view is ultimately incoherent, based more in "niceness" than in any consistent belief system. Contemptuous of Middle America for valuing cultural unity[1], they viciously demand adherence to their own rigid moral precepts, while also seeking to import mass numbers from populations that don't share one bit in those precepts.
[1] One of the wonderful aspects of American nationalism is that this unity is not racial, but cultural.
Actually, there very much are.
I think what you're trying to say is that not all black people have all the "black people genetic markers," and likewise for other groups. This is true, but this is not necessary to distinguish well-defined groups.
Family resemblance is a philosophical idea made popular by Ludwig Wittgenstein
It argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance