3d ago

What hill will you die on?

Fancy cupcakes are 70% icing, really not that nice and a waste of money

397 comments

I posted a comment on Reddit telling about how the word racism really means a person who is a subscriber to the pseudoscience that is race.
Tons of people downvoted me then reddit admins removed the content for harassment, of all things. (None of it made sense to me)
I'm sad that people still think that people are different races, and to not be racist you just have to not put one over or under another, when the crux of the problem is fundamentally that people don't get that race was made up because long ago dumb people thought that people that looked different were a literal different species but couldn't prove it so made up the word race as a subcategory in the taxonomic system, but finally scientists realized it's complete bullshit since it's impossible to define, total bullshit, wildly inconsistent, and massively harmful... and I'm sad that people there literally couldn't comprehend that, and got so mad or offended that they censured the information and thought I was arguing against the existence of systemic racism or something that only a dumb piece of shit would misinterpret.
I linked the Wikipedia page for racism which explains all of it, including history and stuff.
I was triggered for like a week trying to figure out what I said wrong, and honestly still kinda bothered.
But, that is what race is: a bigoted idea that different people are different races and shouldn't/can't interbreed. And that's the stupidest bullshit that MOST people don't understand, and I'll die on this hill, explaining that we gotta stop all being racists. Yeah, fix the problems like systemic racism, but stop thinking of people with darker or lighter skin as different - they're just warm weather humans or cold weather humans, the same way buff or skinny humans are. Fuck. We're all literally just humans, an amazing species, capable of adaptation and survival.
- You are absolutely correct: “race” is a social construct that is created along artificial lines (pigment, facial features, etc).
  The truth is that we share ~99.9% of our DNA with every other person, a gene pool so small that there is more diversity between troops of Chimpanzees.
- I think you're right, but imo the disagreement i feels like really stem from the way you put it, as you talk about race in a biological science while they think you're talking about ethnicity(social science?), and then there's this odd fixation with no compromise which kinda what caused the friction, even though i think both party might agree with each other.
  Also reddit and online forum is mostly made up of weird people so idk.
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
  Read the introduction. It's complicated but mostly race is arbitrary. But that's the whole discussion I want to bring to people for awareness of concept and language.
- If you're smart enough to know all that, you're smart enough to know that being suspicious of differences is how our species survived, and we're not going to evolve out of it anytime soon.
- Man.. I got banned from a kink community sub because I edited my comment with a automagical editor..
  It replaced my text with gobbledygook and then was going to delete it..
  The mod came across the text said something to the extent of "this makes no sense" and banned me under their "because we can" rule.
  I sent the mod a message with links and an explanation.. he came back with your original post is gone. So you are too.
  My reddit account is 14 years old..
  It bothered me for a while too.. and still dones I guess since I'm here talking about it.. but honestly mods are gonna mod.. they are small people with a smidge of "power" you could have said hope "you folks have a great day!!" And gotten banned.
  It happens. Sucks tho
  
  Yeah I'm stopping using Reddit because of how fascist things are now around the world, in hopes of keeping access to my similarly old account because there may be a lot of porn on there, but there's also a ton of good resources and important things.
  Maybe if things turn around in a few years, I'll consider resume using reddit. But the more-intelligent-than-a-rock part of me knows otherwise.
  Too many people getting banned for fascist and sketchy reasons. So instead of participate there, it's now just an archive to me.
- I've been thinking like that for a long time but recently I've been thinking about it in terms of internalized opposition. One of the most pernicious elements of the fight against stupid and bad ideologies is when their framings gain dominance even in the minds of their opponents.
  At some point, someone said 'black people are blah, white people are bleh,' and the person next to them probably said 'What do you mean black people?' because the concept was new but the ideology of race turned into such a common one that people who were oppressed by it were forced to consider what the powerful thought about it, like an atheist prisoner being forced to think about how to convince a Christian jailer to be less awful to them. They internalized it. And now even people who are 'anti-racist' often treat 'blackness' and 'whiteness' as if they were real, and not just conceptually different in the same way you can live in a different country without moving because the lines on a map change. Even as they battle the concept, they try to do it from within the system, prisoners demanding to be free without acknowledging the world outside the prison walls.
- redditors
- Can't see what your original comment was, so missing a lot of context here.
  I agree with what you said, but race as a biological thing is not how most people think of it. Most people interpret race in the context of skin color and ethnic groups, i.e. in a sociological context, and within that context it makes absolutely no sense to claim that race does not exist. It would be nice if it didn't exist, but that's not where we are right now as a society.
- We are all different, I don't know how you can deny that. And some differences can depend on where your ancestors are from.
  If it's not "race" then is there another way of describing it?
  In animals we call it breeds. Sounds weird.
  I think as an advanced species we should be capable of ascending beyond the descriminating behaviour based on origin. I know it's possible as I can. Seeing other people first reactions to meeting people get described with race undertones is alien to me and feels disrespectful.
  
  Well the problem with trying to subdivide humans is that
  A) it's actually really really hard to do, so hard in fact that it's impossible and is a pseudoscience B) it basically always results in comparison. Which gets bad REALLY quickly because suddenly there is a better or worse, an inferior and superior.
  I'm not saying we aren't different, I'm not saying that.
  But, as far as species, we ARE all the same. You, your sister, your neighbor, your great great great grandfather. We all have our differences and generic differences, but they're infinitesimally small, we are just VERY good at telling the differences because we're so used to staring at the same face over and over.
  There's just so much crossover and mixing and volatility. People can change from one to the other or halfway and stuff, there's no clarity. Like, me, for example: I'm a mix that people look at me and get very wrong 95% of the time. And then if I have kids with somebody that doesn't have the exact same mixed heritage with me, it's like... Wtf do you even call me?
  And then if you learn some anthropology and learn that long thin limbs and people are from hot climates close to the equator, and short ratioed people are from further (surface area to mass ratio, keeping warmth) away from the equator where it's cold.
  Like.... You can be vague and descriptive a little about it, but when you realize that reality is just that we're all the same species, with no limits to interbreeding, it makes so much more sense.
  Let's say you take a pale-ass white guy and strand them near the equator for ten years outdoors. Does that guy suddenly become a different breed or race or whatever you want to call it? No.. it's the same person, the same species, even if he looks different - he just adapted and his body is like "holy fuck it's hot and I'm trying my best to not get skin cancer and the right amount of vitamins from the sun".
  And same thing for brown skinned people (let's just say Mexican natives). You take a young couple with darker brown skin, and move them to norway or somewhere cold with VERY little sun (latitude). They are going to lose melatonin in their skin and become paler. Let's say they have kids and you inbreed them for a few generations. They will get progressively more pale, and start to look more adapted to the region, likely even take on regional issues.
  And the reason why is because we're all the same type of monkey. (Not actually monkey because that's a different offshoot, but primate; we're great apes!).
  
  I mostly agree with you. And I commend your principles.
  Some of your examples need improving is all I'll say.
  Like sending a white guy to the equator for a decade. Okay fine, they go dark skinned. But bring him back up north and he is white again. Send a super dark skinned guy far north and he will get somewhat paler, so it works both ways. But they retain that difference because they are different.
  We have developed differences mostly based on our origin in the world, be it Asian, African, Egyptian, Indian, etc, but we are such an internationally mixed people the differences are meaningless.
  
  Actually, yes, and actually, no.
  If you take a white person and put them in the equator for multiple generations, they'll turn brown. If you try to put the result back north, it'll take them multiple generations to get pale again.
  There isn't really an inherent difference between us. There are small mutations or diseases that can kill, like Alzheimer's, but those are all basically incidental. Your genes can change, that's what evolution is.
  We ALL came from Africa, anyway, and then settled down in various places for a while, adapting. The longer people have adapted, the more they've adapted. But it doesn't set anything in stone, and everybody still retains that ability to adapt.
  
  That's basically evolution lol if you go down that route then we are all plankton, animals and all.
  
  There you go the key to all of this is "meaningless differences" justification to divide people, then make one group appear less than human, then exploit, steal from and murder the savages for the profit of the few.
  
  Racism is a taught trait. Children aren't racist until their peers or guardians teach them their racist world view. I think we agree on almost all points, I just don't think it is pseudoscientific.
  
  Yeah humans are actually all pretty close genetically compared to other species. And "race" as defined by society isn't even a good predictor of genetic similarities, so for example if you take random people A and B who are black, and person C who is white, B and C will often be more closely related than A and B.
  Also as a sidenote, we are monkeys. Apes are now considered to be a type of monkey taxonomically.
  
  Whaaaaat... Looks it up
  
  Breeds are defined by organizations that determine breed based on lineage, followed by conformation. They do not align across different countries. Dogs have the AKC, CKC in America. They don't follow the same definitions. It also causes lots of issues to classify things like this and leads to bad decision making by lots of people. Even as it is now, there's no clear definition for things like Pit Bulls. There's also a ton of health issues that arise from defining breeds and trying to follow this logic.
  Humans are not controlled and bred based on these things so a Breed Standard would not be possible. There is simply a continuous line of people.
  Perform a cluster analysis on dogs - they will kind of fall into clusters because we bred selectively for them. But humans, which have not been selectively bred even in smaller geographic regions, would not provide decent clustering results based on race categories.
  Without good clustering, whatever groups you make have more inaccuracies than accuracies in your grouped statements. (Border collies are high energy, greyhounds are lazy > 65% true at best) this is because of the insane complexity of DNA and the lack of selective breeding artificially limiting the DNA diversity. Plus other stuff.
  
  You've never had infants around other infants.
  We all have the same child. They all act the same behavior is the same.. Patterns are the same Etc..
  Humans don't really start to develop in different directions and speed until they are like 18 months old.
  Our coloring and physical features might not be the same.. but the basic operating system and internals are all the same across humanity.
  
  Yes I agree, this is human. Just the same as all dogs wag their tail and bark. Like other posters have said, the differences are subtle and we are all more the same than different.
- Lol so true dogs have hundreds of "breeds". Then you have cate, which are all just cats, The people who will argue about their "mesothelioma short hair tuxedo chocolate" are just weirdos.
  
  Depending on which association you ask there are at least 45 breeds of cat.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cat_breeds
  
  Association of weirdos.
  
  I'm admittedly not a cat person, however there seems to be quite a difference between a Maine Coon and a Sphynx. I agree though that long hair vs short hair of the same breed is negligible and doesn't need to be an entirely separate breed.
  
  So we should make bald men a separate breed of human, and NFL lineman another?
  
  There's another comment in this thread that points out how slippery a slope it becomes when you try to apply breeds to humans, but that is kind of the idea isn't it? You seem to accept it in the case of dogs. Either way, I don't really have a hard stance either way, was just more curious of your reasoning.
  
  You assumed I accepted it at dogs just because I pointed out the irony of all cats just being of the house variety. To me dogs are dogs guess what wolfs are dogs too. You dirty ape. :)
  
  I mean, nobody's saying dogs are different races, there's just dogs with different phenotypic traits. When they match a certain known pattern that's a "breed".
  It's about as real as beer recipes matching certain styles. Race isn't a real thing, it's just sets of traits that people are used to seeing in certain populations.

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