Sweden Has now Higher Crime Rate than USA

[Leo Gura]

3 hours ago, TheAlchemist said:

Do you hold the belief that racism is natural/wired?

Yup. It's basically just tribalism.

Edited September 20, 2022 by Leo Gura

[LSD-Rumi]

21 minutes ago, TheAlchemist said:

. I lived abroad in the middle east as a kid and went to a school with people from all over the world. As children going to school together, being part of the same "tribe" there was not even a thought about someone being different because of their skin color, or any other physical attributes

Middle East is a special case, The Arab "race" is not really a race, it is  a mixture of differnet races with no distinct skin tone or facial features. so you would expect less racism in the Arab world, and yet in my country ( I live in the Middle East) people still in a hidden and sneaky way look down into black people, and they usually have lower economical status. 

Also you can build the US community out of any common feature, like religion, nationalism. But race is also a very common theme and for a good reason. If we weren't racists we wouldn't have survived 

Racism in its lowest degrees is that weird feeling that you have When you see someone with different facial features or darker skin tone, like you are looking at an alien or something 

[TheAlchemist]

5 minutes ago, LSD-Rumi said:

Middle East is a special case, The Arab "race" is not really a race, it is  a mixture of differnet races with no distinct skin tone or facial features. so you would expect less racism in the Arab world, and yet in my country ( I live in the Middle East) people still in a hidden and sneaky way look down into black people, and they usually have lower economical status. 

I mean it was an international school, there were not even that many arabs there. People from Ghana, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, South America, Philippines, Thailand etc. Good representation of most major ethnicities. There was no "weird feeling" among the kids since everyone was part of the same "tribe". Sure, you see the difference in appearance, but if it's not associated with any more sense of "other" than a person that looks more similiar, it won't cause any racist response. That person is just one of "us".

A baby and a 90 year old grandpa look drastically different to each other, you might even say "alien". Yet they can very easily feel part of the same tribe. 

[LSD-Rumi]

@TheAlchemist Most People don't experience multiple races sadly and even if they do, they will still hold on that feeling that they belong to a certain race and that those people are different. It takes a lot of development to wipe out the racist out of you.

[Nilsi]

2 hours ago, TheAlchemist said:

@LSD-Rumi My point is that Us vs. Them is wired, but racism might not be. Us vs. Them is tribalism, but we can easily, and commonly do identify people of different race/skin color as being part of our tribe. The racism is when we categorize some arbitrary physical feature like skin color as being representative of a certain "them" group. 

Racism, just like tribalism, is basically your biological imperative. According to Neo-Darwinism (which is still probably the most sophisticated and robust scientific paradigm), you are just your genes way of creating more genes; Your genes survive by way of you reproducing; Your genes also survive by way of your relatives reproducing (the closer you are related, the more genes you have in common). Skin color is just an easy indicator of relatedness. If you are white, it's unlikely you have much genes in common with a black person, so he's a direct competitor for resources and women. That's why you will hear rednecks complaining about immigrants taking their jobs and wives They are literally acting out their most primitive motivations. 

Of course, the more conscious you are, the more you transcend these knee-jerk survival mechanisms; Spiral Dynamics illustrates this quite well (it's basically the developmental arc from Monkeyhood to Godhood).

Edited September 20, 2022 by Nilsi

[TheAlchemist]

1 hour ago, Nilsi said:

Racism, just like tribalism, is basically your biological imperative. According to Neo-Darwinism (which is still probably the most sophisticated and robust scientific paradigm), you are just your genes way of creating more genes; Your genes survive by way of you reproducing; Your genes also survive by way of your relatives reproducing (the closer you are related, the more genes you have in common). Skin color is just an easy indicator of relatedness.

 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism

Definition of racism:

1: a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

also : behavior or attitudes that reflect and foster this belief : racial discrimination or prejudice

2: the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another

To me it seems tribalism is the symptom of the biological imperative to favor genes that are closer to ones own. Racism on the other hand, as defined above, I don't see an inherent biological imperative for. Any tribal "us" group that goes beyond racial boundaries is evidence that race is not that relevant.

It's a classic situation of correlation not implying causation. Just because tribes have mostly been based around similiar skin color/genes, does not mean that it is inherent to tribal dynamics. Tribal dynamics can easily trump any biological/genetic features of humans, especially since all humans are genetically extremely similiar. Based on the Human Genome project humans are genetically 99.9% the same, and the whole concept of "race" based on a few very minor differences in genes that determin skin pigment and some few other features, puts the whole categorization into races in the first place on shaky ground.

Imagine "specieism" instead of racism. There we similarly (springing off the racism definition) have the "belief that ones species is a fundamental determinant of traits of Life and capacities and that species differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular species.".

Sure it is hard coded in the genes for humans to favor their own species over others, but setting up a system of dominion over other species,  where they are systematically opressed to the social, economic and political advantage of humans as we do, is not "natural" in a sense. I say this because we have examples of societies that operate in a sustainable way, without making other species extinct or locking them up in cages and opressing them in other ways. We are so used to being "specieist" that we assume it is natural to set up and maintain large systems of domination based on ones species. 

So within this analogy between species, the equivalent of "tribalism" might be "humanism", whereas the equivalent of "racism" might be "specieism".

So, humans within the whole of life are naturally humanist, but not necessarily specieist. In the same way humans within the whole of humanity might be tribalist, but not necessarily racist. 

Anyone get what I'm trying to say? ?

 

Edited September 20, 2022 by TheAlchemist

[Leo Gura]

Stop saying racism and start saying ethnocentrism. Much more accurate. People like to live among their own kind, for obvious reasons. It's not merely about race, it's about culture.

Edited September 20, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Nilsi]

33 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Stop saying racism and start saying ethnocentrism. Much more accurate. People like to live among their own kind, for obvious reasons. It's not merely about race, it's about culture.

These dynamics have existed long before human culture though; it's much more about survival and specifically about "selfish genes." Skin color is a way more primordial cue than cultural norms, so in my estimation it's fair to talk about "racism" as a biological imperative (on top of which sits culture). You can argue that culture is what's primarily driving discrimination today, but that's kind of arbitrary and doesn't really explain why we want to live among our kind in the first place.

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, Nilsi said:

These dynamics have existed long before human culture though

There has never been humans without culture.

Culture is not some modern invention.

Culture is older than white people, Lol.

Long before white people existed, black people where killing each other over cultural differences.

Edited September 20, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Nilsi]

10 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

There has never been humans without culture.

Culture is not some modern invention.

Culture is older than white people, Lol.

Long before white people existed, black people where killing each other over cultural differences.

Long before humans existed, monkeys were grabbing each others children as a meat shield to cover their own ass. They didn't know who's kid was who, but they could pick their rivals kid out of a group with very high accuracy, all based on their limited sensory input (which is predominantly visual). All that is to say that these dynamics predate any meaningful notion of "culture."

[Leo Gura]

14 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

Long before humans existed, monkeys were grabbing each others children as a meat shield to cover their own ass. They didn't know who's kid was who, but they could pick their rivals kid out of a group with very high accuracy, all based on their limited sensory input (which is predominantly visual). All that is to say that these dynamics predate any meaningful notion of "culture."

Yes, protecting your family predates culture. Lions do that shit.

But here we are talking about cultural preferences that people hold mostly.

For example, I don't want to live in a neighborhood where everyone smells like Indian spices or kids are driving around blasting rap music out their car. Is this racist? Not exactly. It's just cultural preferences. And to expect people not to have these preferences is astoundingly silly.

Edited September 20, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Nilsi]

Just now, Leo Gura said:

Yes, protecting your family predates culture. Lions do that shit.

Protecting your ingroup and fighting your outgroup on the basis of appearances (as is the case with these monkeys). That's pretty much what racism means. I don't know the statistics, but I bet if you were to control for cultural differences somehow, you would still find significantly higher rivalry between people of different skin color.

[Leo Gura]

3 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

I bet if you were to control for cultural differences somehow, you would still find significantly higher rivalry between people of different skin color

There would certainly be plenty of people who simply don't want to associate with others who look different from them. No doubt nor mystery about that.

You don't want to kiss a cockroach. Why? Simply cause it's different from you.

Edited September 20, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Nilsi]

2 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

There would certainly be plenty of people who simply don't want to associate with others who look different from them. No doubt nor mystery about that.

You don't want to kiss a cockroach. Why? Simply cause it's different from you.

Ok I see your point now. I guess you could just call it xenophobia instead of racism (although I'm not fully convinced that there is no such thing as racism).

 

[Leo Gura]

Of course there is racism!

But most of the issues we're dealing with are better seen as ethnocentrism. I'm not talking about the KKK here, which does exist.

Edited September 20, 2022 by Leo Gura

[mmKay]

12 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Stop saying racism and start saying ethnocentrism. Much more accurate. People like to live among their own kind, for obvious reasons. It's not merely about race, it's about culture.

Kid sees white man for the first time

[Leo Gura]

3 minutes ago, mmKay said:

Kid sees white man for the first time

I have a hilarious story about that when I was a kid. You guys won't believe it.

You'll think it's super racist.

Maybe one day I'll tell it.

Edited September 20, 2022 by Leo Gura

[mmKay]

35 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

I have a hilarious story about that when I was a kid. You guys won't believe it.

You'll think it's super racist.

Maybe one day I'll tell it.

Put it behind a paywall on Patreon ?

[Leo Gura]

7 minutes ago, mmKay said:

Put it behind a paywall on Patreon ?

I'll post it on my blog at some point.

I'll be sharing some outrageous stories soon.

Edited September 20, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Tyler Robinson]

4 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

I'll post it on my blog at some point.

I'll be sharing some outrageous stories soon.

Make it even more outrageous. Embellish it.