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European Politico-economics QA Mega-thread - Page 23

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Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action.
WhiteDog
Profile Blog Joined November 2010
France8650 Posts
December 08 2014 23:38 GMT
#441
On December 09 2014 07:52 oneofthem wrote:
at a loss on thsi one. communitarianism is usually thought of as associated with catholic philosophers like macintyre. communitarians do not favor identity, racial or sexual, as the defining boundary of community. it's more like a traditional, organic local ties sort of thing.

communitarians are certainly critics of liberal universalism, but idk about using it to standin for identity politics, whcih seems to be the target of the article.

your haikus are difficult to understand btw

In France, when we talk about communautarism, we usually describe any form of ethnocentrism or sociocentrism, any self valorisation associated with tendancies to withdrawal in the public sphere. Part of our constitutions refuse any public recognition to group and minorities (the republic is undivided, does not make any distinction between its citizens, one unique language, etc.).
That the group is based around religious, organic ties, or identity revendications, does not change the fact that it is a group that define itself as different from the rest of the population and that desire a recognition of that difference in the public sphere.
"every time WhiteDog overuses the word "seriously" in a comment I can make an observation on his fragile emotional state." MoltkeWarding
nunez
Profile Blog Joined February 2011
Norway4003 Posts
December 08 2014 23:49 GMT
#442
good. i am obfuscating my ignorance.
conspired against by a confederacy of dunces.
oneofthem
Profile Blog Joined November 2005
Cayman Islands24199 Posts
December 08 2014 23:49 GMT
#443
even so, homosexuals are not an enclave apart from society in that sense. they are cosmopolitain, no?
We have fed the heart on fantasies, the heart's grown brutal from the fare, more substance in our enmities than in our love
L1ghtning
Profile Joined July 2013
Sweden353 Posts
December 09 2014 02:27 GMT
#444
On December 08 2014 09:45 Dapper_Cad wrote:
Show nested quote +
On December 08 2014 04:59 L1ghtning wrote:
On December 08 2014 01:29 kwizach wrote:
On December 08 2014 01:02 L1ghtning wrote:
On December 07 2014 23:48 kwizach wrote:
On December 07 2014 22:51 L1ghtning wrote:
On December 07 2014 11:41 kwizach wrote:
On December 07 2014 10:20 L1ghtning wrote:
On December 07 2014 04:26 kwizach wrote:
On December 07 2014 02:58 L1ghtning wrote:
[quote]
No. Human races are not a social construct. Splitting us into races doesn't mean that we're not related, it just means that our relation is so distant that you couldn't mistake one group with another. A german shepherd is the same species as a dalmatian, but different races.

Since the human population have constantly become more heterogenous throughout history, you can't really split us into races based on regions anymore, unless you draw with very broad strokes. Most likely if you went back very long in time, then there would be around 10 distinguable subraces in Europe. Nowadays, you can see these subgroups only if you look at the general population.

But, it's still viable to divide us into atleast 4 groups, and that's what we typically talk about when we say the word race. Sub saharan africans is one group. American Indians is another. East Asians is another, and Europe, Northern Africa, the Middle East and all the way to India is the last group. The central eurasian ppl are a mix of the latter two.

So, the guy is right in placing Northern Africa under the white race.

Let's make one thing clear. Human races are social constructs. Genetic research has shown that there is no scientific basis whatsoever for determining where to objectively place limits that would distinguish different human "races". Sorry, but your pseudoscientific claims about groups completely ignores the reality of our genetic makeup, which is almost entirely the same and for which the little differences that remain can be just as big, or even bigger, between the members of the same group among those you mention than between members of different groups. To quote Dr. Venter and the scientists who worked on the sequencing of the human genome (source):

''Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,'' said Dr. J. Craig Venter, head of the Celera Genomics Corporation in Rockville, Md. ''We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the same small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.''

Dr. Venter and scientists at the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they had put together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome, and the researchers had unanimously declared, there is only one race -- the human race.

Dr. Venter and other researchers say that those traits most commonly used to distinguish one race from another, like skin and eye color, or the width of the nose, are traits controlled by a relatively few number of genes, and thus have been able to change rapidly in response to extreme environmental pressures during the short course of Homo sapiens history.

And so equatorial populations evolved dark skin, presumably to protect against ultraviolet radiation, while people in northern latitudes evolved pale skin, the better to produce vitamin D from pale sunlight.

''If you ask what percentage of your genes is reflected in your external appearance, the basis by which we talk about race, the answer seems to be in the range of .01 percent,'' said Dr. Harold P. Freeman, the chief executive, president and director of surgery at North General Hospital in Manhattan, who has studied the issue of biology and race. ''This is a very, very minimal reflection of your genetic makeup.''

Unfortunately for social harmony, the human brain is exquisitely attuned to differences in packaging details, prompting people to exaggerate the significance of what has come to be called race, said Dr. Douglas C. Wallace, a professor of molecular genetics at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.

''The criteria that people use for race are based entirely on external features that we are programmed to recognize,'' he said. ''And the reason we're programmed to recognize them is that it's vitally important to our species that each of us be able to distinguish one individual from the next. Our whole social structure is based on visual cues, and we've been programmed to recognize them, and to recognize individuals.''

By contrast with the tiny number of genes that make some people dark-skinned and doe-eyed, and others as pale as napkins, scientists say that traits like intelligence, artistic talent and social skills are likely to be shaped by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of the 80,000 or so genes in the human genome, all working in complex combinatorial fashion.

The possibility of such gene networks shifting their interrelationships wholesale in the course of humanity's brief foray across the globe, and being skewed in significant ways according to ''race'' is ''a bogus idea,'' said Dr. Aravinda Chakravarti, a geneticist at Case Western University in Cleveland. ''The differences that we see in skin color do not translate into widespread biological differences that are unique to groups.''

Dr. Jurgen K. Naggert, a geneticist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me., said: ''These big groups that we characterize as races are too heterogeneous to lump together in a scientific way. If you're doing a DNA study to look for markers for a particular disease, you can't use 'Caucasians' as a group. They're too diverse. No journal would accept it.''


On December 07 2014 02:36 mcc wrote:
[quote]
Read the context. I was not discussing whether races do or do not exist as commonly defined. But I was reacting to someone accusing the original poster of racism against blacks even though he was talking about North Africans, and they are not black and according to the common definition of races are counted as white. Thus person that comments on some issues with North African culture (whether valid or not) can hardly be accused of racism against blacks based on that, no ?

Anyway races do not necessarily have to be social constructs as color of the skin is not a social construct, but that is really quite irrelevant as mostly they are.

EDIT: You can also group humans into "races" based on common genetics and that can have some reasonable applications.

From what I understand, Nyxisto was pretty clearly talking about racism against "the other", the non-white, for which he used the term "black people" to refer to how racists think about those "others".

Color of the skin is not a social construct per se (although you can argue that how color is perceived is), but races, as the arbitrary delimitations of groups based on skin color, still are. The fact that you consider North Africans to be "white" doesn't mean that others can't see them as "black" or "brown" or "mixed" or whatever because there's nothing objective about where to place those limits (or about placing them at all).

You clearly don't understand the concept of race. Anthropology studies, especially studies of Y-chromosomes have clearly shown that europeans and middle easterns, and white indians and north africans have the same heritage, with gradual differences. Gradual differences meaning that swedes may look a bit different on average than poles, but that in the end they consist of the same 10 or so undistinguable subgroups, just at different ratios.
And even if swedes may in fact be almost 100% distinguishable from let's say, egyptians, swedes themselves are not a distinct race, and neither are egyptians. This is why the concept of the german race falls flat, while the concept of the indoeuropean or the white race is valid. In order for a race to be valid, you need to be able to distinguish them from everybody who isn't part of the race. And indeed the indoeuropeans are 100% distinguishable from east asians, native americans and sub-saharan africans, both in terms of certain genetical markers and physical features.

Of course, the races did appear simply because we procreated seperately from eachother, but that doesn't make them less valid.

I understand the concept of race very well, thank you, which is why I'm explaining to you that it is a social construct which is based on the delimitation of groups when those limits have no objective scientific basis. None of what you said even remotely answers what I presented you with. Who is disputing that heritages can be studied, or that traits vary? The point is that on the genetic level the "human races" you referenced make little sense, and that the very traits and characteristics that are used to define "races" in reality exist in spectrums across humanity (or at the very least exist without obvious "breaks"), making any such delimitation arbitrary and socially constructed.

You mention anthropology. Have you read the "Race Reconciled: How Biological Anthropologists View Human Variation" special issue of vol. 39, issue 1 of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (May 2009)? The authors clearly and unambiguously demonstrate that "race is not an accurate or productive way to describe human biological variation" (Heather J.H. Edgar and Keith L. Hunley in the introduction of the special issue, p. 2). You can read a detailed summary of the findings here (this is the page where I initially learned about these papers - I "only" read three of the articles themselves). Here are a few quotes from that summary:

In a discussion of Race and global patterns of phenotypic variation, John Relethford plots human skin color variation: "The result is a continuous straight line ranging from the darkest extremes to the lightest extremes in skin color. There are no identifiable clusters. . . . Researchers are of course free to subdivide this continuum into different groups, but such clustering would be arbitrary and subjective in terms of the number of groups and the cutoff points used to distinguish them. The lack of apparent clusters is a reflection of the fact that skin color shows a classic pattern of clinal variation." (2009:17) [...]

Unlike some textbooks and pronouncements which use this information to declare all physical variation is clinal, Relethford proceeds to consider craniometric or skull variation. [...] Relethford considers racial labels as “a culturally constructed label that crudely and imprecisely describes real variation” (2009:20). Variation is real, exists, and has been structured by geography and migration, but the labels we use are a “crude first-order approximation” (2009:21). Relethford uses the example of how we see height as short, medium, and tall: “We tend to use crude labels in everyday life with the realization that they are fuzzy and subjective. I doubt anyone thinks that terms such as ‘short,’ ‘medium,’ and ‘tall’ refer to discrete groups, or that humanity only comes in three values of height!” (2009:21). [...] Current scientific consensus is that craniometrics yields clustered geographic groupings, but those groupings are subjective and arbitrary. [...]

Skin color, like many other racial measures, is continuously variable. Crania may be structured geographically, but classifications based on geographic clusters would be arbitrary. But what about measuring all the bones? Television shows feature forensic anthropologists easily identifying race from skeletal remains. Does that mean race is real?[...] Sauer explains “the successful assignment of race to a skeletal specimen is not a vindication of the race concept, but rather a prediction that an individual, while alive was assigned to a particular socially constructed ‘racial’ category” (1992:107). Forensic anthropologists have samples of bones from many geographic areas, and can classify bones according to what race society has assigned to people with ancestry in those geographic areas. However, examining the bones provides a probability estimate of likely race assignment: “In ascribing a race name to a set of skeletonized remains, the anthropologist is actually translating information about biological traits to a culturally constructed labeling system that was likely to have been applied to a missing person” (1992:109).

Despite the provocative and sometimes misunderstood title, Sauer pleads for forensic anthropologists to better explain what it means to make racial classifications from skeletal remains. He begs forensic anthropologists not to “sail on” without making an effort to expose people “to the notion that perceived races are not reflections of biological reality” (1992:110). We should “not fall into the trap of accepting races as valid biologically discrete categories because we use them so often” (1992:110). [...] What actually happens is forensic anthropologists match bones probabilistically against known existing assortments. Those assortments can be anything socially relevant. Changing the context of bone discovery could lead to different predictive classification–of the same bones: “The use of different priors also shows the importance of prior information, as ‘Mr. Johnson’ would have been classified as a Pacific Islander had his remains been found on Hawaii and as an ‘American Black’ had his remains been found in Gary, Indiana” (Konigsberg et al. 2009:83). [...]

Even after proving the continuous variation of skin tones, and even after showing how bones and skulls do not confirm traditional race classifications, there is still the sense that genetics offers real proof of race. Genetic testing companies amplify this misconception in a rush to market ancestry, while pharmaceutical companies sell race-targeted medications.

[...] Genetic classifications of races outside of Sub-Saharan Africa are simply subsets of Sub-Saharan African diversity. Moreover, and perhaps most strangely, “a classification that takes into account evolutionary relationships and the nested pattern of diversity would require that Sub-Saharan Africans are not a race because the most exclusive group that includes all Sub-Saharan African populations also includes every non-Sub-Saharan African population” (Long et al. 2009:32).

[...] This evolutionary history is explained in the article The global pattern of gene identity variation reveals a history of long-range migrations, bottlenecks, and local mate exchange: Implications for biological race. Once again, sophisticated techniques reveal a “nested pattern of genetic structure that is inconsistent with the existence of independently evolving biological races” (Hunley et al. 2009:35). The authors confirm greater genetic variation within Sub-Saharan Africa, and all other humans are a sub-set of this variation. Taxonomic classifications of race cannot account for observed genetic diversity. [...]"

In short, and as I said, variation among humans obviously exists (nobody is claiming otherwise), but races are social constructs.

All the ppl who claim that races doesn't exist are just making skewed semantic arguments, by saying things like, although there are certain differences in certain characteristics that are undeniable, there are also a lot of characteristics that are not defined by race. This is true, but claiming that this disproves the race theory shows that the person doesn't understand the concept of race. Races are not completely different from eachother, they are only marginally different in some ways, for instance in facial structure and skin tone. But there are a lot of characteristics that are not defined by race. Height is one of them. Although asians are shorter on average, this is not a rule, and all races have a great diversity in terms of height. What defines a human race is that they have certain features that doesn't exist among other humans, and because the 4 groups that I have mentioned, lived sheltered from eachother for probably over 10 000 years, they gradually developed into races as history passed. I'm well aware that we're all related if you're just going back a lot further in time. This is why we have these different races, rather than different species. We're all the same species, but different subgroups or races, similarly to dog breeds.

I agree that there's no viable reason for why these races should exist, but supporting their existence is merely a question of observation, rather than about justifying their existence.

At this point you are repeating what you already said before instead of addressing my arguments and the thorough debunking of the concept of race that I presented you with through my reference to the scientific findings on the non-existence of objective races with regards to skin color, craniometric variation, skeletons, and genetics. You've also resorted to arguing against strawmen, since the argument is not that races don't exist because we share common characteristics. If you want to bury your head in the sand and ignore the scientific research which debunks your position on the existence of human races that's up to you, but for the people actually interested in learning more on the topic I refer you to my previous post, the "Race Reconciled: How Biological Anthropologists View Human Variation" special issue of vol. 39, issue 1 of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (May 2009) and, for a simple summary of the findings, the page I quoted extensively. As I said, human variation obviously exists, but races are still arbitrary, subjective and very flawed pseudo-delimitations of variations, and thus socially constructed.

You haven't debunked anything concerning race. You just don't subscribe to it, because it doesn't fit your narrative about white europeans being "racist" against the rest of the world, including north africans and middle eastern ppl.

The reason why some white europeans look at brown-skinned, black haired indoeuropeans with distrust is because brown skin and black hair is a proxy for indoeuropeans who was raised outside of Europe. It's the culture that are present in those regions that ppl don't like or are afraid of, not the skin color, or the way they look. This is why greeks and southern italians doesn't get lumped up with the ppl who come from muslim countries, despite the fact that they look a lot more like them generally than they look like the typical person in a germanic country. They don't get lumped up with other mediterranean ppl, because the mediterranean ppl north of the sea is closer culturally to "us" than they are to the middle east. The reason why Christian Europe tends to look down upon Muslim Middle East and North Africa, has cultural reasons. It's about phobia of cultures that we consider lesser than ours. This is also why ppl in protestant countries like my country, tend to have the greatest level of trust for ppl who live in protestant countries, followed by the catholic countries and lastly the orthodox countries. This is because religious heritage is a proxy for cultural heritage.

Race is a observation and that's all it is. You're only afraid of the word, because you have this idea about different races not liking eachother because of racial hatred. This is all bullshit. Do you honestly believe that if the ppl in west Africa were in fact white, that they wouldn't have been enslaved? They were enslaved because of cultural reasons. Because they were so technologically backwards and didn't have any powerful allies, the westerners could get away with enslaving them. This is why they were enslaved. This is why the irish was enslaved too. The irish were sheltered on an island in the middle of nowhere. The english could do pretty much whatever they wanted with them, because they had no prominent allies. The fact that they had a shared celtic genetical heritage didn't seem to matter.

Again, an entire post not addressing what I said in the slightest and arguing instead against a series of strawmen that have no connection to what I actually wrote here and what I linked to in terms of scientific research. Thanks for proving my point.

The page you cited claimed among other things that dividing by skin color is arbitrary, which is nonsense.
If you're going back 3-4 generations, it's impossible to mistake a person of 100% european descent, from a person of 100% sub-saharan african descent. There are no exceptions to this, so it's not arbitrary. Just because there are ppl in Ethiopia who kind of looks like a mix of Egyptians and Kenyans, it doesn't mean that race isn't a viable concept.

The idea that you can't distinguish races without being arbitrary is not true, it's only true if you feel the need to categorize everybody. For instance, if you went to a place like Kazakhstan and tried to categorize everyone as either indoeuropean or east asians, then I get that it would feel very arbitrary, but for those individuals where it isn't obvious, they shouldn't be categorized as either. This is what you do with dogs. They need to fit certain criterias to be called german shepherds or labradors, and if they don't, then they'll generally be called mixed.
This is how we categorize dogs, so why are you so afraid of doing the same with humans? If I told you that I had a german shepherd dog, would that be racist against dogs, to refer to him and thus acknowledge his breed as a viable concept? And if yes, would it be racist against german shepherd dogs or against dogs that aren't german shepherds, or maybe racist against dogs that look similar to them, but don't fully categorize as a german shepherd?

I do recognize that races exists, but I don't claim that some kind of purity should be maintained.
I disagree with you that races are arbitrarily defined, but on the other hand, races were definately arbitrarily created, so the idea of purity is nonsense. The races are the result of small groups of ppl immigrating into new territories and living sheltered from other humans, and eventually emerging as new civilizations founded by the ancestors of the first immigrants.


Ok,

Let's imagine I take a piece of paper and print 7 billion dots on it, each representing one person, I then make 7 billion copies of the piece of paper and hand one out to each person on earth and ask them to shade areas of the paper that they believe define the different "races". At the end of this process I gather up a few billion or so copies shaded by people that roughly agree with me, I scan them into a computer and have it produce map of the races of humanity based on a statistical analysis of those papers.

What I have just described is profoundly more rigorous than your hand waving and yet it is, absolutely clearly, no more meaningful than Astrology.

Let's take that Astrology analogy a little further (perhaps too far, let's see) and look at a situation where "race" is often used as a short hand for a physical description, when a witness describes a crime.

Show nested quote +

So, officer, I was at my computer and I look out my window and I see a white guy shooting a gun.

White?

Yea you know, pale skin, thin pointy nose, his hair was dark and curly, I mean, maybe he was North African or something but... basically white.

North African is white?

Yea, Caucasian. Have you not read Lord fafnfaf's 18th century treatise on the subject of race? North African's count as white.

What time and day did this happen sir?

I'm not sure, I was deep in a 2 week long viagra charged SC2 and wanking marathon. Would have been the beginning of December some time. It was night, I know because I remember he took the shot under stars, Orion's right foot was behind him.

Orion's right foot?

Yea, you know. The star sign with 4 stars sort of in a box that could be shoulders and feet with 3 stars in the middle of them that kind of looks like a belt.

The bottom 2 stars are feet?

Yea, feet. Have you not read madam blackcat's 9th century almanac of the constellations? They're feet.

Well, your physical description of "white" seems to fit a guy we have in custody and consulting my police issue star chart I see that a stellar formation "Orion's right foot" would have been roughly outside your window in the early evening which matches the time we have for the shooting...


Both the race and star sign are, very human, projections onto physical reality. They do correlate with measurable things:

-You can place callipers on someone's nose or on the nasal cavity of a skull or you can measure the wavelength of reflected light from a given person's skin.
-You can map the heavens, measure the distance, speed and direction of travel of stars.

Exactly none of this means that "white" or "Orion" is a real that exists objectively in reality. They are both "social constructs", subjective assessments which may function as a useful shorthand in certain circumstances. "Race is a observation and that's all it is." "Astrology is a observation and that's all it is."

The thing is though, Orion is never going to turn up for a job interview only to encounter someone behind the desk that believes it is "unambitious" and therefore less likely to employ it. But this happens to people all the time because they are "black". If maartendq is ever in a position to hire and fire people and encounters someone who he believes is "North African" he will maintain a bias against them because "North Africa has a mercantilist tradition" whatever it is that that means.

This is exactly what Racism is.

I want to be clear. Nothing that I regularly encounter irritates me more than the shrill howl of the warrior journalist condemning people as evil racists and ending all possible discussion on the matter, primarily because, I believe, they are failing in their stated aim: Reducing racism. All they do is drive people (yes, shockingly, racists are people too) out of the arena of public debate, submerging their voices in such a way that they search of others of like minds and develop an echo chamber constructed of bovine excrement.

I don't argue against racial definitions because they are evil.
I argue against them because they are woo.
They are hocum.
They are bullshit.

I don't really spend time arguing against Astrology because I think, comparatively, the belief that the position of celestial objects can tell us something about people is less harmful and, less othered/submerged and less tacitly encouraged by the news press and politicians than is the belief that a person's personality and disposition can be garnered in a glance. If we lived in a world where your star sign could get you beaten up my priorities might be different.

Huge off-topic warning, but this will be the last post I write.
+ Show Spoiler +

I think I finally understand now what you guys are talking about. To you, the human population is like a rainbow, with different groups of ppl living next to eachother, and gradually "shading" into eachother. Irish -> english -> french -> italians -> croatians, and so on. However, looking at the human population like this points towards a huge lack of knowledge about human history, and that's why you end up with faulty conclusions.

You say that you cannot possible make a distinction on where to put the borders. You don't know if you should cut off the indoeuropean race in Ukraine, Southern Russia or Kazakhstan. You claim that there's no clear borders. In other words you claim that humans are like a rainbow, that populations gradually change at a static pace. This is false and if you actually knew what humans generally looks like in different parts of the world, or bothered to reflect on human history you would realize this. Of course, you can see gradual changes, but in some regions, there's a extreme gradual change, while in some regions you wouldn't even notice it changing unless you stepped back a bit and reflected on where you started.

Why do you think the entire indoeuropean region (with a few exceptions) speaks languages that are related to eachother, called the indo-european language group? The only exceptions that is relevant is Finland and Estonia, which actually most would agree doesn't qualify as part of indo-europe, but that's a debate for another day. In the case of Hungary, Turkey and Azerbaijan, the ppl in those regions used to speak indoeuropean languages, but because of modern invasions from the asian steppes, they adopted asian languages.
The spread of the indoeuropean languages is a sign of a great cultural exchange between the entire region. It gives a strong foundation for a close original genetical link between at the very least, most of the ppl in this region, and it is a sign of trade and human travelling. If you study Y-haplogroups, you can see that the supposed genetical links are substantiated. You can see for instance that the ancestors to the one person who had the R1b mutation has ancestors all across indoeurope, and beyond, into some neighbouring areas, but considering how many ancestors this guy have, that is to be expected, and the vast majority of his ancestors live in the indoeuropean region. This guy lived in the caucasus region, and today he's the direct line paternal ancestor to 80% of all the irish men, and he's the direct paternal ancestor to 50% of the men in western Europe. When one single person can leave so many ancestors, doesn't that make your assumption about the human population being a rainbow, where everybody is equally similar to all their neighbours seem a bit silly? I mean this guy may ultimately be the "inventor" of red hair. I'm not saying that he was, but imagine that everybody in this world who have red hair, is related to this guy. That's a lot of ppl, and that's still a low estimate to how much of his DNA that circulates around today. It's clear that this guy had a huge effect on how western europeans look. If 50% of them are direct descendants of him, and on top of that, have many female ancestors who carried his DNA as well, that would mean that most of the western europeans today have some facial features from him. This shows how incredibly important historical events, and the spread of culture is in deciding what the populations end up looking like.

Let's make an example of how history influences our decisions:
If you're a indian person in 500AD, speaking sanskrit and looking for new opportunies somewhere else, then you would never look eastwards towards the big wasteland that eventually would lead to China. The ppl between you and the chinese wouldn't interest you and the chinese would ultimately be too far away, plus you would have a really hard time understanding them. You would also never look northwards towards the steppes. What you would do, is you would look westward towards Persia, where they spoke a language more similar to yours, and where the civilization was advanced.

What I'm showing with this example is that if you were a indoeuropean, then through your cultural upbringing and the language that you spoke, you would have a much stronger connection to other subregions of indoeurope, compared to regions outside of indoeurope. This meant that the indoeuropean ppl rarely moved outside of the region, which meant that the features of the ppl who lived in the indoeuropean region throughout history (I'm mainly talking about facial features), very rarely got spread to regions outside of indoeurope, and likewise, features from outsiders rarely became part of the indoeuropean collective genome.
You can look up Y-haplogroup research, and then you'll see that the haplogroups that are considered indoeuropean are very rarely found outside of indoeurope, which further backs up my point that indoeuropeans rarely traveled to other regions, and thus was able to maintain their features.

Of course there are ppl who went against the norm, and you can see the traces of this if you plot out the Y-haplogroups on maps, but ultimately, if 1% goes against the norm, it doesn't make a noticeable difference in the facial features of the population.
This is why pakistanis looks somewhat like a mix of northern indians and iranians, whereas tibetans looks nothing like northern indians. Indian sikhs tend to be from the northern Punjab region, so they are good examples of what northern indians looks like.
Although Tibet is much closer to northern India than Iran is, the indians look a lot more similar to the iranians. It doesn't take a genius to know this. This disproves your theory about human features gradually changing at a even pace, and it proves that there is such a thing as a clearly defined division of populations, based on characteristics, which is the definition of race. It's simply not true that humans look equally alike to all their neighbours. If you want another example, then Sweden and Finland is another example. We look very different. In fact I'm almost certain that swedes look more similar to the french.
WhiteDog
Profile Blog Joined November 2010
France8650 Posts
December 09 2014 05:57 GMT
#445
On December 09 2014 08:49 oneofthem wrote:
even so, homosexuals are not an enclave apart from society in that sense. they are cosmopolitain, no?

It's up to discussion.
"every time WhiteDog overuses the word "seriously" in a comment I can make an observation on his fragile emotional state." MoltkeWarding
kwizach
Profile Joined June 2011
3658 Posts
December 09 2014 12:14 GMT
#446
On December 09 2014 08:38 WhiteDog wrote:
Show nested quote +
On December 09 2014 07:52 oneofthem wrote:
at a loss on thsi one. communitarianism is usually thought of as associated with catholic philosophers like macintyre. communitarians do not favor identity, racial or sexual, as the defining boundary of community. it's more like a traditional, organic local ties sort of thing.

communitarians are certainly critics of liberal universalism, but idk about using it to standin for identity politics, whcih seems to be the target of the article.

your haikus are difficult to understand btw

In France, when we talk about communautarism, we usually describe any form of ethnocentrism or sociocentrism, any self valorisation associated with tendancies to withdrawal in the public sphere. Part of our constitutions refuse any public recognition to group and minorities (the republic is undivided, does not make any distinction between its citizens, one unique language, etc.).
That the group is based around religious, organic ties, or identity revendications, does not change the fact that it is a group that define itself as different from the rest of the population and that desire a recognition of that difference in the public sphere.

...except it's almost the exact opposite when it comes to the revendications of homosexuals in the context we're talking about (namely access to marriage, adoption, etc.) - society and government are the ones making a distinction between heterosexual couples and homosexual couples, and homosexuals just want to have the same rights as everyone else with regards to their relationships.
"Oedipus ruined a great sex life by asking too many questions." -- Stephen Colbert
kwizach
Profile Joined June 2011
3658 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-12-09 15:02:45
December 09 2014 14:19 GMT
#447
On December 09 2014 11:27 L1ghtning wrote:
Show nested quote +
On December 08 2014 09:45 Dapper_Cad wrote:
On December 08 2014 04:59 L1ghtning wrote:
On December 08 2014 01:29 kwizach wrote:
On December 08 2014 01:02 L1ghtning wrote:
On December 07 2014 23:48 kwizach wrote:
On December 07 2014 22:51 L1ghtning wrote:
On December 07 2014 11:41 kwizach wrote:
On December 07 2014 10:20 L1ghtning wrote:
On December 07 2014 04:26 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
Let's make one thing clear. Human races are social constructs. Genetic research has shown that there is no scientific basis whatsoever for determining where to objectively place limits that would distinguish different human "races". Sorry, but your pseudoscientific claims about groups completely ignores the reality of our genetic makeup, which is almost entirely the same and for which the little differences that remain can be just as big, or even bigger, between the members of the same group among those you mention than between members of different groups. To quote Dr. Venter and the scientists who worked on the sequencing of the human genome (source):

[quote]

[quote]
From what I understand, Nyxisto was pretty clearly talking about racism against "the other", the non-white, for which he used the term "black people" to refer to how racists think about those "others".

Color of the skin is not a social construct per se (although you can argue that how color is perceived is), but races, as the arbitrary delimitations of groups based on skin color, still are. The fact that you consider North Africans to be "white" doesn't mean that others can't see them as "black" or "brown" or "mixed" or whatever because there's nothing objective about where to place those limits (or about placing them at all).

You clearly don't understand the concept of race. Anthropology studies, especially studies of Y-chromosomes have clearly shown that europeans and middle easterns, and white indians and north africans have the same heritage, with gradual differences. Gradual differences meaning that swedes may look a bit different on average than poles, but that in the end they consist of the same 10 or so undistinguable subgroups, just at different ratios.
And even if swedes may in fact be almost 100% distinguishable from let's say, egyptians, swedes themselves are not a distinct race, and neither are egyptians. This is why the concept of the german race falls flat, while the concept of the indoeuropean or the white race is valid. In order for a race to be valid, you need to be able to distinguish them from everybody who isn't part of the race. And indeed the indoeuropeans are 100% distinguishable from east asians, native americans and sub-saharan africans, both in terms of certain genetical markers and physical features.

Of course, the races did appear simply because we procreated seperately from eachother, but that doesn't make them less valid.

I understand the concept of race very well, thank you, which is why I'm explaining to you that it is a social construct which is based on the delimitation of groups when those limits have no objective scientific basis. None of what you said even remotely answers what I presented you with. Who is disputing that heritages can be studied, or that traits vary? The point is that on the genetic level the "human races" you referenced make little sense, and that the very traits and characteristics that are used to define "races" in reality exist in spectrums across humanity (or at the very least exist without obvious "breaks"), making any such delimitation arbitrary and socially constructed.

You mention anthropology. Have you read the "Race Reconciled: How Biological Anthropologists View Human Variation" special issue of vol. 39, issue 1 of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (May 2009)? The authors clearly and unambiguously demonstrate that "race is not an accurate or productive way to describe human biological variation" (Heather J.H. Edgar and Keith L. Hunley in the introduction of the special issue, p. 2). You can read a detailed summary of the findings here (this is the page where I initially learned about these papers - I "only" read three of the articles themselves). Here are a few quotes from that summary:

In a discussion of Race and global patterns of phenotypic variation, John Relethford plots human skin color variation: "The result is a continuous straight line ranging from the darkest extremes to the lightest extremes in skin color. There are no identifiable clusters. . . . Researchers are of course free to subdivide this continuum into different groups, but such clustering would be arbitrary and subjective in terms of the number of groups and the cutoff points used to distinguish them. The lack of apparent clusters is a reflection of the fact that skin color shows a classic pattern of clinal variation." (2009:17) [...]

Unlike some textbooks and pronouncements which use this information to declare all physical variation is clinal, Relethford proceeds to consider craniometric or skull variation. [...] Relethford considers racial labels as “a culturally constructed label that crudely and imprecisely describes real variation” (2009:20). Variation is real, exists, and has been structured by geography and migration, but the labels we use are a “crude first-order approximation” (2009:21). Relethford uses the example of how we see height as short, medium, and tall: “We tend to use crude labels in everyday life with the realization that they are fuzzy and subjective. I doubt anyone thinks that terms such as ‘short,’ ‘medium,’ and ‘tall’ refer to discrete groups, or that humanity only comes in three values of height!” (2009:21). [...] Current scientific consensus is that craniometrics yields clustered geographic groupings, but those groupings are subjective and arbitrary. [...]

Skin color, like many other racial measures, is continuously variable. Crania may be structured geographically, but classifications based on geographic clusters would be arbitrary. But what about measuring all the bones? Television shows feature forensic anthropologists easily identifying race from skeletal remains. Does that mean race is real?[...] Sauer explains “the successful assignment of race to a skeletal specimen is not a vindication of the race concept, but rather a prediction that an individual, while alive was assigned to a particular socially constructed ‘racial’ category” (1992:107). Forensic anthropologists have samples of bones from many geographic areas, and can classify bones according to what race society has assigned to people with ancestry in those geographic areas. However, examining the bones provides a probability estimate of likely race assignment: “In ascribing a race name to a set of skeletonized remains, the anthropologist is actually translating information about biological traits to a culturally constructed labeling system that was likely to have been applied to a missing person” (1992:109).

Despite the provocative and sometimes misunderstood title, Sauer pleads for forensic anthropologists to better explain what it means to make racial classifications from skeletal remains. He begs forensic anthropologists not to “sail on” without making an effort to expose people “to the notion that perceived races are not reflections of biological reality” (1992:110). We should “not fall into the trap of accepting races as valid biologically discrete categories because we use them so often” (1992:110). [...] What actually happens is forensic anthropologists match bones probabilistically against known existing assortments. Those assortments can be anything socially relevant. Changing the context of bone discovery could lead to different predictive classification–of the same bones: “The use of different priors also shows the importance of prior information, as ‘Mr. Johnson’ would have been classified as a Pacific Islander had his remains been found on Hawaii and as an ‘American Black’ had his remains been found in Gary, Indiana” (Konigsberg et al. 2009:83). [...]

Even after proving the continuous variation of skin tones, and even after showing how bones and skulls do not confirm traditional race classifications, there is still the sense that genetics offers real proof of race. Genetic testing companies amplify this misconception in a rush to market ancestry, while pharmaceutical companies sell race-targeted medications.

[...] Genetic classifications of races outside of Sub-Saharan Africa are simply subsets of Sub-Saharan African diversity. Moreover, and perhaps most strangely, “a classification that takes into account evolutionary relationships and the nested pattern of diversity would require that Sub-Saharan Africans are not a race because the most exclusive group that includes all Sub-Saharan African populations also includes every non-Sub-Saharan African population” (Long et al. 2009:32).

[...] This evolutionary history is explained in the article The global pattern of gene identity variation reveals a history of long-range migrations, bottlenecks, and local mate exchange: Implications for biological race. Once again, sophisticated techniques reveal a “nested pattern of genetic structure that is inconsistent with the existence of independently evolving biological races” (Hunley et al. 2009:35). The authors confirm greater genetic variation within Sub-Saharan Africa, and all other humans are a sub-set of this variation. Taxonomic classifications of race cannot account for observed genetic diversity. [...]"

In short, and as I said, variation among humans obviously exists (nobody is claiming otherwise), but races are social constructs.

All the ppl who claim that races doesn't exist are just making skewed semantic arguments, by saying things like, although there are certain differences in certain characteristics that are undeniable, there are also a lot of characteristics that are not defined by race. This is true, but claiming that this disproves the race theory shows that the person doesn't understand the concept of race. Races are not completely different from eachother, they are only marginally different in some ways, for instance in facial structure and skin tone. But there are a lot of characteristics that are not defined by race. Height is one of them. Although asians are shorter on average, this is not a rule, and all races have a great diversity in terms of height. What defines a human race is that they have certain features that doesn't exist among other humans, and because the 4 groups that I have mentioned, lived sheltered from eachother for probably over 10 000 years, they gradually developed into races as history passed. I'm well aware that we're all related if you're just going back a lot further in time. This is why we have these different races, rather than different species. We're all the same species, but different subgroups or races, similarly to dog breeds.

I agree that there's no viable reason for why these races should exist, but supporting their existence is merely a question of observation, rather than about justifying their existence.

At this point you are repeating what you already said before instead of addressing my arguments and the thorough debunking of the concept of race that I presented you with through my reference to the scientific findings on the non-existence of objective races with regards to skin color, craniometric variation, skeletons, and genetics. You've also resorted to arguing against strawmen, since the argument is not that races don't exist because we share common characteristics. If you want to bury your head in the sand and ignore the scientific research which debunks your position on the existence of human races that's up to you, but for the people actually interested in learning more on the topic I refer you to my previous post, the "Race Reconciled: How Biological Anthropologists View Human Variation" special issue of vol. 39, issue 1 of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (May 2009) and, for a simple summary of the findings, the page I quoted extensively. As I said, human variation obviously exists, but races are still arbitrary, subjective and very flawed pseudo-delimitations of variations, and thus socially constructed.

You haven't debunked anything concerning race. You just don't subscribe to it, because it doesn't fit your narrative about white europeans being "racist" against the rest of the world, including north africans and middle eastern ppl.

The reason why some white europeans look at brown-skinned, black haired indoeuropeans with distrust is because brown skin and black hair is a proxy for indoeuropeans who was raised outside of Europe. It's the culture that are present in those regions that ppl don't like or are afraid of, not the skin color, or the way they look. This is why greeks and southern italians doesn't get lumped up with the ppl who come from muslim countries, despite the fact that they look a lot more like them generally than they look like the typical person in a germanic country. They don't get lumped up with other mediterranean ppl, because the mediterranean ppl north of the sea is closer culturally to "us" than they are to the middle east. The reason why Christian Europe tends to look down upon Muslim Middle East and North Africa, has cultural reasons. It's about phobia of cultures that we consider lesser than ours. This is also why ppl in protestant countries like my country, tend to have the greatest level of trust for ppl who live in protestant countries, followed by the catholic countries and lastly the orthodox countries. This is because religious heritage is a proxy for cultural heritage.

Race is a observation and that's all it is. You're only afraid of the word, because you have this idea about different races not liking eachother because of racial hatred. This is all bullshit. Do you honestly believe that if the ppl in west Africa were in fact white, that they wouldn't have been enslaved? They were enslaved because of cultural reasons. Because they were so technologically backwards and didn't have any powerful allies, the westerners could get away with enslaving them. This is why they were enslaved. This is why the irish was enslaved too. The irish were sheltered on an island in the middle of nowhere. The english could do pretty much whatever they wanted with them, because they had no prominent allies. The fact that they had a shared celtic genetical heritage didn't seem to matter.

Again, an entire post not addressing what I said in the slightest and arguing instead against a series of strawmen that have no connection to what I actually wrote here and what I linked to in terms of scientific research. Thanks for proving my point.

The page you cited claimed among other things that dividing by skin color is arbitrary, which is nonsense.
If you're going back 3-4 generations, it's impossible to mistake a person of 100% european descent, from a person of 100% sub-saharan african descent. There are no exceptions to this, so it's not arbitrary. Just because there are ppl in Ethiopia who kind of looks like a mix of Egyptians and Kenyans, it doesn't mean that race isn't a viable concept.

The idea that you can't distinguish races without being arbitrary is not true, it's only true if you feel the need to categorize everybody. For instance, if you went to a place like Kazakhstan and tried to categorize everyone as either indoeuropean or east asians, then I get that it would feel very arbitrary, but for those individuals where it isn't obvious, they shouldn't be categorized as either. This is what you do with dogs. They need to fit certain criterias to be called german shepherds or labradors, and if they don't, then they'll generally be called mixed.
This is how we categorize dogs, so why are you so afraid of doing the same with humans? If I told you that I had a german shepherd dog, would that be racist against dogs, to refer to him and thus acknowledge his breed as a viable concept? And if yes, would it be racist against german shepherd dogs or against dogs that aren't german shepherds, or maybe racist against dogs that look similar to them, but don't fully categorize as a german shepherd?

I do recognize that races exists, but I don't claim that some kind of purity should be maintained.
I disagree with you that races are arbitrarily defined, but on the other hand, races were definately arbitrarily created, so the idea of purity is nonsense. The races are the result of small groups of ppl immigrating into new territories and living sheltered from other humans, and eventually emerging as new civilizations founded by the ancestors of the first immigrants.


Ok,

Let's imagine I take a piece of paper and print 7 billion dots on it, each representing one person, I then make 7 billion copies of the piece of paper and hand one out to each person on earth and ask them to shade areas of the paper that they believe define the different "races". At the end of this process I gather up a few billion or so copies shaded by people that roughly agree with me, I scan them into a computer and have it produce map of the races of humanity based on a statistical analysis of those papers.

What I have just described is profoundly more rigorous than your hand waving and yet it is, absolutely clearly, no more meaningful than Astrology.

Let's take that Astrology analogy a little further (perhaps too far, let's see) and look at a situation where "race" is often used as a short hand for a physical description, when a witness describes a crime.


So, officer, I was at my computer and I look out my window and I see a white guy shooting a gun.

White?

Yea you know, pale skin, thin pointy nose, his hair was dark and curly, I mean, maybe he was North African or something but... basically white.

North African is white?

Yea, Caucasian. Have you not read Lord fafnfaf's 18th century treatise on the subject of race? North African's count as white.

What time and day did this happen sir?

I'm not sure, I was deep in a 2 week long viagra charged SC2 and wanking marathon. Would have been the beginning of December some time. It was night, I know because I remember he took the shot under stars, Orion's right foot was behind him.

Orion's right foot?

Yea, you know. The star sign with 4 stars sort of in a box that could be shoulders and feet with 3 stars in the middle of them that kind of looks like a belt.

The bottom 2 stars are feet?

Yea, feet. Have you not read madam blackcat's 9th century almanac of the constellations? They're feet.

Well, your physical description of "white" seems to fit a guy we have in custody and consulting my police issue star chart I see that a stellar formation "Orion's right foot" would have been roughly outside your window in the early evening which matches the time we have for the shooting...


Both the race and star sign are, very human, projections onto physical reality. They do correlate with measurable things:

-You can place callipers on someone's nose or on the nasal cavity of a skull or you can measure the wavelength of reflected light from a given person's skin.
-You can map the heavens, measure the distance, speed and direction of travel of stars.

Exactly none of this means that "white" or "Orion" is a real that exists objectively in reality. They are both "social constructs", subjective assessments which may function as a useful shorthand in certain circumstances. "Race is a observation and that's all it is." "Astrology is a observation and that's all it is."

The thing is though, Orion is never going to turn up for a job interview only to encounter someone behind the desk that believes it is "unambitious" and therefore less likely to employ it. But this happens to people all the time because they are "black". If maartendq is ever in a position to hire and fire people and encounters someone who he believes is "North African" he will maintain a bias against them because "North Africa has a mercantilist tradition" whatever it is that that means.

This is exactly what Racism is.

I want to be clear. Nothing that I regularly encounter irritates me more than the shrill howl of the warrior journalist condemning people as evil racists and ending all possible discussion on the matter, primarily because, I believe, they are failing in their stated aim: Reducing racism. All they do is drive people (yes, shockingly, racists are people too) out of the arena of public debate, submerging their voices in such a way that they search of others of like minds and develop an echo chamber constructed of bovine excrement.

I don't argue against racial definitions because they are evil.
I argue against them because they are woo.
They are hocum.
They are bullshit.

I don't really spend time arguing against Astrology because I think, comparatively, the belief that the position of celestial objects can tell us something about people is less harmful and, less othered/submerged and less tacitly encouraged by the news press and politicians than is the belief that a person's personality and disposition can be garnered in a glance. If we lived in a world where your star sign could get you beaten up my priorities might be different.

Huge off-topic warning, but this will be the last post I write.
+ Show Spoiler +

I think I finally understand now what you guys are talking about. To you, the human population is like a rainbow, with different groups of ppl living next to eachother, and gradually "shading" into eachother. Irish -> english -> french -> italians -> croatians, and so on. However, looking at the human population like this points towards a huge lack of knowledge about human history, and that's why you end up with faulty conclusions.

You say that you cannot possible make a distinction on where to put the borders. You don't know if you should cut off the indoeuropean race in Ukraine, Southern Russia or Kazakhstan. You claim that there's no clear borders. In other words you claim that humans are like a rainbow, that populations gradually change at a static pace. This is false and if you actually knew what humans generally looks like in different parts of the world, or bothered to reflect on human history you would realize this. Of course, you can see gradual changes, but in some regions, there's a extreme gradual change, while in some regions you wouldn't even notice it changing unless you stepped back a bit and reflected on where you started.

Why do you think the entire indoeuropean region (with a few exceptions) speaks languages that are related to eachother, called the indo-european language group? The only exceptions that is relevant is Finland and Estonia, which actually most would agree doesn't qualify as part of indo-europe, but that's a debate for another day. In the case of Hungary, Turkey and Azerbaijan, the ppl in those regions used to speak indoeuropean languages, but because of modern invasions from the asian steppes, they adopted asian languages.
The spread of the indoeuropean languages is a sign of a great cultural exchange between the entire region. It gives a strong foundation for a close original genetical link between at the very least, most of the ppl in this region, and it is a sign of trade and human travelling. If you study Y-haplogroups, you can see that the supposed genetical links are substantiated. You can see for instance that the ancestors to the one person who had the R1b mutation has ancestors all across indoeurope, and beyond, into some neighbouring areas, but considering how many ancestors this guy have, that is to be expected, and the vast majority of his ancestors live in the indoeuropean region. This guy lived in the caucasus region, and today he's the direct line paternal ancestor to 80% of all the irish men, and he's the direct paternal ancestor to 50% of the men in western Europe. When one single person can leave so many ancestors, doesn't that make your assumption about the human population being a rainbow, where everybody is equally similar to all their neighbours seem a bit silly? I mean this guy may ultimately be the "inventor" of red hair. I'm not saying that he was, but imagine that everybody in this world who have red hair, is related to this guy. That's a lot of ppl, and that's still a low estimate to how much of his DNA that circulates around today. It's clear that this guy had a huge effect on how western europeans look. If 50% of them are direct descendants of him, and on top of that, have many female ancestors who carried his DNA as well, that would mean that most of the western europeans today have some facial features from him. This shows how incredibly important historical events, and the spread of culture is in deciding what the populations end up looking like.

Let's make an example of how history influences our decisions:
If you're a indian person in 500AD, speaking sanskrit and looking for new opportunies somewhere else, then you would never look eastwards towards the big wasteland that eventually would lead to China. The ppl between you and the chinese wouldn't interest you and the chinese would ultimately be too far away, plus you would have a really hard time understanding them. You would also never look northwards towards the steppes. What you would do, is you would look westward towards Persia, where they spoke a language more similar to yours, and where the civilization was advanced.

What I'm showing with this example is that if you were a indoeuropean, then through your cultural upbringing and the language that you spoke, you would have a much stronger connection to other subregions of indoeurope, compared to regions outside of indoeurope. This meant that the indoeuropean ppl rarely moved outside of the region, which meant that the features of the ppl who lived in the indoeuropean region throughout history (I'm mainly talking about facial features), very rarely got spread to regions outside of indoeurope, and likewise, features from outsiders rarely became part of the indoeuropean collective genome.
You can look up Y-haplogroup research, and then you'll see that the haplogroups that are considered indoeuropean are very rarely found outside of indoeurope, which further backs up my point that indoeuropeans rarely traveled to other regions, and thus was able to maintain their features.

Of course there are ppl who went against the norm, and you can see the traces of this if you plot out the Y-haplogroups on maps, but ultimately, if 1% goes against the norm, it doesn't make a noticeable difference in the facial features of the population.
This is why pakistanis looks somewhat like a mix of northern indians and iranians, whereas tibetans looks nothing like northern indians. Indian sikhs tend to be from the northern Punjab region, so they are good examples of what northern indians looks like.
Although Tibet is much closer to northern India than Iran is, the indians look a lot more similar to the iranians. It doesn't take a genius to know this. This disproves your theory about human features gradually changing at a even pace, and it proves that there is such a thing as a clearly defined division of populations, based on characteristics, which is the definition of race. It's simply not true that humans look equally alike to all their neighbours. If you want another example, then Sweden and Finland is another example. We look very different. In fact I'm almost certain that swedes look more similar to the french.

So, instead of going on with your pseudoscientific and anecdotal "analysis" of the matter of physical differences among humans on different levels, how about we look again at the actual scientific research on that very topic that I presented you with and that you have consistently ignored/misrepresented so far? Surprise surprise, it shows that you are utterly and unambiguously wrong in your conclusion that there are "clearly [objectively] defined races". Instead of claiming that we have a lack of historical knowledge, perhaps you should have spent a little bit more time educating yourself by reading the articles I referenced, which show you're the one with serious knowledge gaps on the matter of human variation.

Let me begin by pointing out that you're lumping together three different matters in your "analysis": skin color, facial features and genetic heritage. Let's refute your position with regards to the existence of clearly defined races on all three levels.

1. Human variation with regards to skin color.

You use the rainbow image to claim it is false to assert that people "gradually shade" into each other. With regards to skin color, what does the science say? From p. 17 of John H. Relethford, "Race and global patterns of phenotypic variation", American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 139, issue 1, May 2009:

Figure 1b shows what the worldwide distribution in skin color looks like when all of these separate distributions are overlain on a single line; the result is a continuous straight line ranging from the darkest extremes to the lightest extremes in skin color. There are no identifiable clusters. It is clear that people from the left side of the graph are dark-skinned and people from the right side are light-skinned, but it is also clear that every value in between is represented. Researchers are of course free to subdivide this continuum into different groups, but such clustering would be arbitrary and subjective in terms of the number of groups and the cutoff points used to distinguish them. The lack of apparent clusters is a reflection of the fact that skin color shows a classic pattern of clinal variation.

2. Human variation with regards to facial features.

So, skin color variation does not support your idea of clearly defined races - quite the opposite. Let's analyse this second element through the lenses of craniometrics. From the same John Relethford article (I can't quote the entire analysis on geography and craniometric variation, so feel free to look at p. 17-21 if you want to investigate this further):

What is relevant is that there is an association of craniometric variation and geography. This means that populations that are farther apart from one another will tend to be less similar than those populations that are closer to each other. Thus, when Howells sampled populations from six different geographic regions, he sampled populations that would be phenotypically different to begin with because of the correlation between geographic and phenotypic distance. There are no abrupt breaks in the relationship between phenotypic and geographic distance in Figure 3, indicating that decisions for subdivision into clusters (or races) are going to be subjective. [...]

[If] one defines clusters in such a way that geographical distances among clusters typically exceed geographic distance within clusters, and if one uses enough traits in the analysis, then there will be a high degree of accuracy in classification. These results again stem from the simple fact that people living farther apart in the world tend to look more different combined with a large number of traits. The same results apply when classifying individuals into major geographic regions using a large number of DNA markers (e.g., Rosenberg et al., 2002). Given enough markers, one can easily assign individuals to geographically widespread groupings such as Western Europe, East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. These analyses are simply another way of expressing the correlation between genetics and geography. There is no justification based on classification accuracy for preferring five, six, seven, or eight groups. From the perspective of racial classification, if we take these different groups as equivalent to races, then we see that the number of races, and the geographic cutoffs used to define them, are subjective decisions. [...]

[It] might be more useful to consider race as a culturally constructed label that crudely and imprecisely describes real variation. Elsewhere (Relethford, 2008), I use an analogy of human height to describe students the difference between underlying reality and cultural labels. Adult height in any human population can be described in terms of a normal distribution, where height is a continuous variable ranging from the shortest to the tallest individual in the population. Even given this continuous variation, in everyday use we often use labels such as ‘‘short,’’ ‘‘medium,’’ and ‘‘tall’’ as crude labels that are imposed on the underlying continuous variation. The relationship between the labels and the underlying reality is accurate in the sense that someone who is ‘‘short’’ is by definition shorter from someone who is ‘‘tall.’’ This relationship, however, is crude and imprecise. It is subjective in terms of the number of possible groups (e.g., should we add ‘‘medium-short’’ and ‘‘very-tall’’?) and the cutoffs used to define these groupings. For example, what value separates a person of ‘‘medium’’ height from a ‘‘tall’’ person? 1,800 mm?, 1,810 mm?, or 1806.25 mm? My point is that we tend to use crude labels in everyday life with the realization that they are fuzzy and subjective. I doubt anyone thinks that terms such as ‘‘short,’’ ‘‘medium,’’ and ‘‘tall’’ refer to discrete groups, or that humanity only comes in three values of height! If we consider these questions for the moment in purely statistical terms, then we can see that the cultural construction of race is the transformation of a continuous variable into an ordinal-level or nominal-level variable with the attendant loss of statistical information.


3. Human variation on the genetic level

Although the previous point thoroughly answered your post, let's still take a look at human variation on the genetic level. From pp. 31-33 of Jeffrey C. Long1, Jie Li and Meghan E. Healy, "Human DNA sequences: More variation and less race", American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Volume 139, Issue 1, pages 23–34, May 2009:

Our results show that race, as represented in the TLIM, fits both data sets poorly. Comparisons between raw and model-generated diversity and genetic distance estimates reveal that the TLIM indeed misrepresents both the pattern and amount of diversity within and between populations. [...]

The pattern of DNA sequence diversity also creates some unsettling problems for applying to humans the definition of races as groups of populations within which the individuals are more related to each other than they are to members of other such groups (Hartl and Clark, 1997). This definition essentially encompasses Templeton’s evolutionary lineage definition of race (Templeton, 1999) and Dobzhansky’s gene frequency definition of race (Dobzhansky, 1970). Although it is logically consistent to group populations by relationship, the nested pattern of genetic diversity in the EHM disagrees with the traditional anthropological classifications that placed continental populations at the same level of classification (i.e., race). A classification that takes into account evolutionary relationships and the nested pattern of diversity would require that Sub-Saharan Africans are not a race because the most exclusive group that includes all Sub-Saharan African populations also includes every non-Sub-Saharan African population (Figs. 2B and 4B). [...]

In summary, we find for our own data and for a large published data set, that human populations have much diversity when DNA sequences are considered. We show that simple [racial] partitions of diversity are biased and that they hide the true extent of diversity.


To sum up: as I've been telling you, nobody is denying that human variation exists (and that heritages can be studied), but races are subjective and flawed social constructs that arbitrarily and poorly seek to place limits on these variations.
"Oedipus ruined a great sex life by asking too many questions." -- Stephen Colbert
Oshuy
Profile Joined September 2011
Netherlands529 Posts
December 09 2014 15:27 GMT
#448
On December 09 2014 23:19 kwizach wrote:
To sum up: as I've been telling you, nobody is denying that human variation exists (and that heritages can be studied), but races are subjective and flawed social constructs that arbitrarily and poorly seek to place limits on these variations.


There is objectively no such thing as a human race according to current scientific definition and studies for the global human population. However, for each continuous variation, if you extract a population from each end of the spectrum and get them together in the same room/village/city you have easily identifiable caracteristics for both populations at a local level.

They are not races at a biological level for the global population, but for some time there are objective criteria for the distinction at a local level, for example western african slaves in a western european household in the 1700s.

The social constructs based on these local distinctions keep on surviving until the objective distinctions no longer do and the local diversity matches the global one. Then at each end of the spectrum a group claims "yes, but 300 years ago I would clearly have belonged to THIS group".
Coooot
tadL
Profile Joined September 2010
Croatia679 Posts
December 09 2014 17:11 GMT
#449
well to go back to topic. Yes we are cruising into the same trap as Japan. There are some differences. We have a lot of young people and immigrants. Japan is kind of closed and ageing up.


its kind of interesting that we talk about races. just shows how we are still not able to look at us as one humanity. why we are still stuck on this planet and are ruining our own home. we will destroy us. makes me sad
WhiteDog
Profile Blog Joined November 2010
France8650 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-12-09 18:38:58
December 09 2014 18:36 GMT
#450
On December 09 2014 21:14 kwizach wrote:
Show nested quote +
On December 09 2014 08:38 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 09 2014 07:52 oneofthem wrote:
at a loss on thsi one. communitarianism is usually thought of as associated with catholic philosophers like macintyre. communitarians do not favor identity, racial or sexual, as the defining boundary of community. it's more like a traditional, organic local ties sort of thing.

communitarians are certainly critics of liberal universalism, but idk about using it to standin for identity politics, whcih seems to be the target of the article.

your haikus are difficult to understand btw

In France, when we talk about communautarism, we usually describe any form of ethnocentrism or sociocentrism, any self valorisation associated with tendancies to withdrawal in the public sphere. Part of our constitutions refuse any public recognition to group and minorities (the republic is undivided, does not make any distinction between its citizens, one unique language, etc.).
That the group is based around religious, organic ties, or identity revendications, does not change the fact that it is a group that define itself as different from the rest of the population and that desire a recognition of that difference in the public sphere.

...except it's almost the exact opposite when it comes to the revendications of homosexuals in the context we're talking about (namely access to marriage, adoption, etc.) - society and government are the ones making a distinction between heterosexual couples and homosexual couples, and homosexuals just want to have the same rights as everyone else with regards to their relationships.

Again that is because you are only talking about mariage, when I'm talking about political revendication coming from specific groups. It's not necessarily what they wish for, but how they phrase it.
But that's just a justification, deep down there's many people that are just homophobic.
"every time WhiteDog overuses the word "seriously" in a comment I can make an observation on his fragile emotional state." MoltkeWarding
kwizach
Profile Joined June 2011
3658 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-12-09 18:44:07
December 09 2014 18:43 GMT
#451
On December 10 2014 03:36 WhiteDog wrote:
Show nested quote +
On December 09 2014 21:14 kwizach wrote:
On December 09 2014 08:38 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 09 2014 07:52 oneofthem wrote:
at a loss on thsi one. communitarianism is usually thought of as associated with catholic philosophers like macintyre. communitarians do not favor identity, racial or sexual, as the defining boundary of community. it's more like a traditional, organic local ties sort of thing.

communitarians are certainly critics of liberal universalism, but idk about using it to standin for identity politics, whcih seems to be the target of the article.

your haikus are difficult to understand btw

In France, when we talk about communautarism, we usually describe any form of ethnocentrism or sociocentrism, any self valorisation associated with tendancies to withdrawal in the public sphere. Part of our constitutions refuse any public recognition to group and minorities (the republic is undivided, does not make any distinction between its citizens, one unique language, etc.).
That the group is based around religious, organic ties, or identity revendications, does not change the fact that it is a group that define itself as different from the rest of the population and that desire a recognition of that difference in the public sphere.

...except it's almost the exact opposite when it comes to the revendications of homosexuals in the context we're talking about (namely access to marriage, adoption, etc.) - society and government are the ones making a distinction between heterosexual couples and homosexual couples, and homosexuals just want to have the same rights as everyone else with regards to their relationships.

Again that is because you are only talking about mariage, when I'm talking about political revendication coming from specific groups. It's not necessarily what they wish for, but how they phrase it.
But that's just a justification, deep down there's many people that are just homophobic.

Well, in the case of the specific group composed of gay rights activists, their message, revendications and discourse are, to me, universalistic rather than communitarian.
"Oedipus ruined a great sex life by asking too many questions." -- Stephen Colbert
Nyxisto
Profile Joined August 2010
Germany6287 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-12-09 18:55:19
December 09 2014 18:54 GMT
#452
What I also don't understand, aren't values like secularism and egalitarianism way "more French" than traditional family and religious values? How could the protesters think that they have France's cultural tradition on their side?
WhiteDog
Profile Blog Joined November 2010
France8650 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-12-09 19:06:04
December 09 2014 18:58 GMT
#453
On December 10 2014 03:54 Nyxisto wrote:
What I also don't understand, aren't values like secularism and egalitarianism way "more French" than traditional family and religious values? How could the protesters think that they have France's cultural tradition on their side?

I'm not sure most people against gay mariage do it for religious values. Exactly like France universalism and colonialism are linked, France egalitarism can also justify some serious intolerance in the public sphere.
"every time WhiteDog overuses the word "seriously" in a comment I can make an observation on his fragile emotional state." MoltkeWarding
Sub40APM
Profile Joined August 2010
6336 Posts
December 09 2014 19:10 GMT
#454
WhiteDog, I am so glad I created this thread because of you. You have definitely expanded the potential space of what the term "French Left" can occupy in my mind. Would you say you are relatively representative of the French professorial-leftist type or are you relatively heterodox in your views?
WhiteDog
Profile Blog Joined November 2010
France8650 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-12-09 20:31:04
December 09 2014 20:23 GMT
#455
On December 10 2014 04:10 Sub40APM wrote:
WhiteDog, I am so glad I created this thread because of you. You have definitely expanded the potential space of what the term "French Left" can occupy in my mind. Would you say you are relatively representative of the French professorial-leftist type or are you relatively heterodox in your views?

Thanks.
I'm not representative of the professorial leftist. It heavily depend on the discipline : in economic and social science, I'm pretty close to my peer altho I'm more extreme than most (but I come more from sociology and philosophy and not economy). I'm also pretty close to teachers in philosophy, altho they usually lean to the right (philosophy teachers are pretty awesome to talk with, while they're pretty dangerous when they have any kind of power lol).
History and language teachers are just center left (mostly), math teachers just make money (lolz, they work tons of hours and barely ever talk politics).

On December 10 2014 03:43 kwizach wrote:
Show nested quote +
On December 10 2014 03:36 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 09 2014 21:14 kwizach wrote:
On December 09 2014 08:38 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 09 2014 07:52 oneofthem wrote:
at a loss on thsi one. communitarianism is usually thought of as associated with catholic philosophers like macintyre. communitarians do not favor identity, racial or sexual, as the defining boundary of community. it's more like a traditional, organic local ties sort of thing.

communitarians are certainly critics of liberal universalism, but idk about using it to standin for identity politics, whcih seems to be the target of the article.

your haikus are difficult to understand btw

In France, when we talk about communautarism, we usually describe any form of ethnocentrism or sociocentrism, any self valorisation associated with tendancies to withdrawal in the public sphere. Part of our constitutions refuse any public recognition to group and minorities (the republic is undivided, does not make any distinction between its citizens, one unique language, etc.).
That the group is based around religious, organic ties, or identity revendications, does not change the fact that it is a group that define itself as different from the rest of the population and that desire a recognition of that difference in the public sphere.

...except it's almost the exact opposite when it comes to the revendications of homosexuals in the context we're talking about (namely access to marriage, adoption, etc.) - society and government are the ones making a distinction between heterosexual couples and homosexual couples, and homosexuals just want to have the same rights as everyone else with regards to their relationships.

Again that is because you are only talking about mariage, when I'm talking about political revendication coming from specific groups. It's not necessarily what they wish for, but how they phrase it.
But that's just a justification, deep down there's many people that are just homophobic.

Well, in the case of the specific group composed of gay rights activists, their message, revendications and discourse are, to me, universalistic rather than communitarian.

I'll give you an exemple : lately a guy called Jean-Loup Amselle (an anthropologue) wrote a book on the supposed ethnicisation of france. To him, any group fighting against a specific discrimination (against discrimination against jews, against discrimination against homosexuals, etc.) is communautarist : an universalist action against discrimination would fight against all discrimination without distinction. So the simple existence of a group called "Gay for gay rights", or even the idea that "Two men should have the right to marry each others" is communautarist (to him) : a non communautarist view of the subject would be "Everybody should have the right to marry anybody, whatever his sex or religion".
"every time WhiteDog overuses the word "seriously" in a comment I can make an observation on his fragile emotional state." MoltkeWarding
kwizach
Profile Joined June 2011
3658 Posts
December 09 2014 20:43 GMT
#456
On December 10 2014 05:23 WhiteDog wrote:
Show nested quote +
On December 10 2014 03:43 kwizach wrote:
On December 10 2014 03:36 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 09 2014 21:14 kwizach wrote:
On December 09 2014 08:38 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 09 2014 07:52 oneofthem wrote:
at a loss on thsi one. communitarianism is usually thought of as associated with catholic philosophers like macintyre. communitarians do not favor identity, racial or sexual, as the defining boundary of community. it's more like a traditional, organic local ties sort of thing.

communitarians are certainly critics of liberal universalism, but idk about using it to standin for identity politics, whcih seems to be the target of the article.

your haikus are difficult to understand btw

In France, when we talk about communautarism, we usually describe any form of ethnocentrism or sociocentrism, any self valorisation associated with tendancies to withdrawal in the public sphere. Part of our constitutions refuse any public recognition to group and minorities (the republic is undivided, does not make any distinction between its citizens, one unique language, etc.).
That the group is based around religious, organic ties, or identity revendications, does not change the fact that it is a group that define itself as different from the rest of the population and that desire a recognition of that difference in the public sphere.

...except it's almost the exact opposite when it comes to the revendications of homosexuals in the context we're talking about (namely access to marriage, adoption, etc.) - society and government are the ones making a distinction between heterosexual couples and homosexual couples, and homosexuals just want to have the same rights as everyone else with regards to their relationships.

Again that is because you are only talking about mariage, when I'm talking about political revendication coming from specific groups. It's not necessarily what they wish for, but how they phrase it.
But that's just a justification, deep down there's many people that are just homophobic.

Well, in the case of the specific group composed of gay rights activists, their message, revendications and discourse are, to me, universalistic rather than communitarian.

I'll give you an exemple : lately a guy called Jean-Loup Amselle (an anthropologue) wrote a book on the supposed ethnicisation of france. To him, any group fighting against a specific discrimination (against discrimination against jews, against discrimination against homosexuals, etc.) is communautarist : an universalist action against discrimination would fight against all discrimination without distinction. So the simple existence of a group called "Gay for gay rights", or even the idea that "Two men should have the right to marry each others" is communautarist (to him) : a non communautarist view of the subject would be "Everybody should have the right to marry anybody, whatever his sex or religion".

My point is precisely that "everybody should have the marry" was the position and message of the activists and political leaders who supported the law. The very name of the project was "marriage pour tous" (marriage for all). That's why I'm saying I consider their fight universalistic and not communitarian.
"Oedipus ruined a great sex life by asking too many questions." -- Stephen Colbert
WhiteDog
Profile Blog Joined November 2010
France8650 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-12-09 21:07:19
December 09 2014 21:02 GMT
#457
On December 10 2014 05:43 kwizach wrote:
Show nested quote +
On December 10 2014 05:23 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 10 2014 03:43 kwizach wrote:
On December 10 2014 03:36 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 09 2014 21:14 kwizach wrote:
On December 09 2014 08:38 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 09 2014 07:52 oneofthem wrote:
at a loss on thsi one. communitarianism is usually thought of as associated with catholic philosophers like macintyre. communitarians do not favor identity, racial or sexual, as the defining boundary of community. it's more like a traditional, organic local ties sort of thing.

communitarians are certainly critics of liberal universalism, but idk about using it to standin for identity politics, whcih seems to be the target of the article.

your haikus are difficult to understand btw

In France, when we talk about communautarism, we usually describe any form of ethnocentrism or sociocentrism, any self valorisation associated with tendancies to withdrawal in the public sphere. Part of our constitutions refuse any public recognition to group and minorities (the republic is undivided, does not make any distinction between its citizens, one unique language, etc.).
That the group is based around religious, organic ties, or identity revendications, does not change the fact that it is a group that define itself as different from the rest of the population and that desire a recognition of that difference in the public sphere.

...except it's almost the exact opposite when it comes to the revendications of homosexuals in the context we're talking about (namely access to marriage, adoption, etc.) - society and government are the ones making a distinction between heterosexual couples and homosexual couples, and homosexuals just want to have the same rights as everyone else with regards to their relationships.

Again that is because you are only talking about mariage, when I'm talking about political revendication coming from specific groups. It's not necessarily what they wish for, but how they phrase it.
But that's just a justification, deep down there's many people that are just homophobic.

Well, in the case of the specific group composed of gay rights activists, their message, revendications and discourse are, to me, universalistic rather than communitarian.

I'll give you an exemple : lately a guy called Jean-Loup Amselle (an anthropologue) wrote a book on the supposed ethnicisation of france. To him, any group fighting against a specific discrimination (against discrimination against jews, against discrimination against homosexuals, etc.) is communautarist : an universalist action against discrimination would fight against all discrimination without distinction. So the simple existence of a group called "Gay for gay rights", or even the idea that "Two men should have the right to marry each others" is communautarist (to him) : a non communautarist view of the subject would be "Everybody should have the right to marry anybody, whatever his sex or religion".

My point is precisely that "everybody should have the marry" was the position and message of the activists and political leaders who supported the law. The very name of the project was "marriage pour tous" (marriage for all). That's why I'm saying I consider their fight universalistic and not communitarian.

Yeah but that's not how they saw it. The guys against it called themselves the "Manif pour tous" (Manifestation for all).

I'm not saying the gay mariage was not universalist, I'm saying their arguments was that it was specifically for (and by) homosexuals (and also that it would necessarily lead assisted reproductive technology).

Some quick quote from the Manif for all website :
Le « Mariage pour tous », c’est le « mariage » homo imposé à tous ! (The "mariage for all" is the gay mariage imposed to all !)
Le « Mariage pour tous », c’est la fin de la généalogie pour tous ! (The "mariage for all" is the end of the genealogy for all !")
Le mariage civil H/F et la filiation PME, c’est l’égalité et la justice pour tous ! ("The civil mariage man/woman and the filiation father mother child is egality and justice for all !).
http://www.lamanifpourtous.fr/fr/qui-sommes-nous/notre-message
"every time WhiteDog overuses the word "seriously" in a comment I can make an observation on his fragile emotional state." MoltkeWarding
Dapper_Cad
Profile Blog Joined July 2010
United Kingdom964 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-12-09 21:41:00
December 09 2014 21:40 GMT
#458
On December 10 2014 06:02 WhiteDog wrote:
Show nested quote +
On December 10 2014 05:43 kwizach wrote:
On December 10 2014 05:23 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 10 2014 03:43 kwizach wrote:
On December 10 2014 03:36 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 09 2014 21:14 kwizach wrote:
On December 09 2014 08:38 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 09 2014 07:52 oneofthem wrote:
at a loss on thsi one. communitarianism is usually thought of as associated with catholic philosophers like macintyre. communitarians do not favor identity, racial or sexual, as the defining boundary of community. it's more like a traditional, organic local ties sort of thing.

communitarians are certainly critics of liberal universalism, but idk about using it to standin for identity politics, whcih seems to be the target of the article.

your haikus are difficult to understand btw

In France, when we talk about communautarism, we usually describe any form of ethnocentrism or sociocentrism, any self valorisation associated with tendancies to withdrawal in the public sphere. Part of our constitutions refuse any public recognition to group and minorities (the republic is undivided, does not make any distinction between its citizens, one unique language, etc.).
That the group is based around religious, organic ties, or identity revendications, does not change the fact that it is a group that define itself as different from the rest of the population and that desire a recognition of that difference in the public sphere.

...except it's almost the exact opposite when it comes to the revendications of homosexuals in the context we're talking about (namely access to marriage, adoption, etc.) - society and government are the ones making a distinction between heterosexual couples and homosexual couples, and homosexuals just want to have the same rights as everyone else with regards to their relationships.

Again that is because you are only talking about mariage, when I'm talking about political revendication coming from specific groups. It's not necessarily what they wish for, but how they phrase it.
But that's just a justification, deep down there's many people that are just homophobic.

Well, in the case of the specific group composed of gay rights activists, their message, revendications and discourse are, to me, universalistic rather than communitarian.

I'll give you an exemple : lately a guy called Jean-Loup Amselle (an anthropologue) wrote a book on the supposed ethnicisation of france. To him, any group fighting against a specific discrimination (against discrimination against jews, against discrimination against homosexuals, etc.) is communautarist : an universalist action against discrimination would fight against all discrimination without distinction. So the simple existence of a group called "Gay for gay rights", or even the idea that "Two men should have the right to marry each others" is communautarist (to him) : a non communautarist view of the subject would be "Everybody should have the right to marry anybody, whatever his sex or religion".

My point is precisely that "everybody should have the marry" was the position and message of the activists and political leaders who supported the law. The very name of the project was "marriage pour tous" (marriage for all). That's why I'm saying I consider their fight universalistic and not communitarian.

Yeah but that's not how they saw it. The guys against it called themselves the "Manif pour tous" (Manifestation for all).

I'm not saying the gay mariage was not universalist, I'm saying their arguments was that it was specifically for (and by) homosexuals (and also that it would necessarily lead assisted reproductive technology).

Some quick quote from the Manif for all website :
Le « Mariage pour tous », c’est le « mariage » homo imposé à tous ! (The "mariage for all" is the gay mariage imposed to all !)
Le « Mariage pour tous », c’est la fin de la généalogie pour tous ! (The "mariage for all" is the end of the genealogy for all !")
Le mariage civil H/F et la filiation PME, c’est l’égalité et la justice pour tous ! ("The civil mariage man/woman and the filiation father mother child is egality and justice for all !).
http://www.lamanifpourtous.fr/fr/qui-sommes-nous/notre-message


Sorry to but in, but I find this fascinating... If I've understood. Jean-Loup Amselle advocates a struggle for justice that isn't compartmentalised because you effectively stymie the possibility of fundamental change as your struggle becomes exclusive and, arguably, nonsensical. I assume there is an opposing view that once you generalise too much you end up in a swamp where what you're demanding is either too vague or too radical to generate any change at all?

As far as the specifics here... Am I missing something or do "marriage pour tous" and "Manif pour tous" have nothing in common other than certain buzzwords and conceptually they are almost entirely different? Isn't one a description of the "correct" way to tackle injustice and the other a simple fight against the unfamiliar?
But he is never making short-term prediction, everyone of his prediction are based on fundenmentals, but he doesn't exactly know when it will happen... So using these kind of narrowed "who-is-right" empirical analysis makes little sense.
WhiteDog
Profile Blog Joined November 2010
France8650 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-12-09 22:19:56
December 09 2014 22:00 GMT
#459
On December 10 2014 06:40 Dapper_Cad wrote:
Show nested quote +
On December 10 2014 06:02 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 10 2014 05:43 kwizach wrote:
On December 10 2014 05:23 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 10 2014 03:43 kwizach wrote:
On December 10 2014 03:36 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 09 2014 21:14 kwizach wrote:
On December 09 2014 08:38 WhiteDog wrote:
On December 09 2014 07:52 oneofthem wrote:
at a loss on thsi one. communitarianism is usually thought of as associated with catholic philosophers like macintyre. communitarians do not favor identity, racial or sexual, as the defining boundary of community. it's more like a traditional, organic local ties sort of thing.

communitarians are certainly critics of liberal universalism, but idk about using it to standin for identity politics, whcih seems to be the target of the article.

your haikus are difficult to understand btw

In France, when we talk about communautarism, we usually describe any form of ethnocentrism or sociocentrism, any self valorisation associated with tendancies to withdrawal in the public sphere. Part of our constitutions refuse any public recognition to group and minorities (the republic is undivided, does not make any distinction between its citizens, one unique language, etc.).
That the group is based around religious, organic ties, or identity revendications, does not change the fact that it is a group that define itself as different from the rest of the population and that desire a recognition of that difference in the public sphere.

...except it's almost the exact opposite when it comes to the revendications of homosexuals in the context we're talking about (namely access to marriage, adoption, etc.) - society and government are the ones making a distinction between heterosexual couples and homosexual couples, and homosexuals just want to have the same rights as everyone else with regards to their relationships.

Again that is because you are only talking about mariage, when I'm talking about political revendication coming from specific groups. It's not necessarily what they wish for, but how they phrase it.
But that's just a justification, deep down there's many people that are just homophobic.

Well, in the case of the specific group composed of gay rights activists, their message, revendications and discourse are, to me, universalistic rather than communitarian.

I'll give you an exemple : lately a guy called Jean-Loup Amselle (an anthropologue) wrote a book on the supposed ethnicisation of france. To him, any group fighting against a specific discrimination (against discrimination against jews, against discrimination against homosexuals, etc.) is communautarist : an universalist action against discrimination would fight against all discrimination without distinction. So the simple existence of a group called "Gay for gay rights", or even the idea that "Two men should have the right to marry each others" is communautarist (to him) : a non communautarist view of the subject would be "Everybody should have the right to marry anybody, whatever his sex or religion".

My point is precisely that "everybody should have the marry" was the position and message of the activists and political leaders who supported the law. The very name of the project was "marriage pour tous" (marriage for all). That's why I'm saying I consider their fight universalistic and not communitarian.

Yeah but that's not how they saw it. The guys against it called themselves the "Manif pour tous" (Manifestation for all).

I'm not saying the gay mariage was not universalist, I'm saying their arguments was that it was specifically for (and by) homosexuals (and also that it would necessarily lead assisted reproductive technology).

Some quick quote from the Manif for all website :
Le « Mariage pour tous », c’est le « mariage » homo imposé à tous ! (The "mariage for all" is the gay mariage imposed to all !)
Le « Mariage pour tous », c’est la fin de la généalogie pour tous ! (The "mariage for all" is the end of the genealogy for all !")
Le mariage civil H/F et la filiation PME, c’est l’égalité et la justice pour tous ! ("The civil mariage man/woman and the filiation father mother child is egality and justice for all !).
http://www.lamanifpourtous.fr/fr/qui-sommes-nous/notre-message


Sorry to but in, but I find this fascinating... If I've understood. Jean-Loup Amselle advocates a struggle for justice that isn't compartmentalised because you effectively stymie the possibility of fundamental change as your struggle becomes exclusive and, arguably, nonsensical. I assume there is an opposing view that once you generalise too much you end up in a swamp where what you're demanding is either too vague or too radical to generate any change at all?

As far as the specifics here... Am I missing something or do "marriage pour tous" and "Manif pour tous" have nothing in common other than certain buzzwords and conceptually they are almost entirely different? Isn't one a description of the "correct" way to tackle injustice and the other a simple fight against the unfamiliar?

Yeah I badly phrased, the Manif pour tous was the group that fought against the gay mariage.

I caricatured Amselle who is deeper than that (he is an anthropologue, but his political book are obviously lampoonists). He is not against gay mariage at all, I'm just using his arguments against a certain type of anti discrimination movement to share some light on why some far left arguments are used against pro mariage (or any anti discrimination movements). There is a philosopher who would explain better than anything I could say on the subject - Jean-Claude Michéa. He is the big philosopher of the moment for the far left.
But I reiterate : I believe the core reason as to why people are against pro mariage is either because they fear the industrial usage of assisted reproductive technology (and thus the marchandisation of the body, which is something I completly understand) or they are just homophobe plain and simple.
"every time WhiteDog overuses the word "seriously" in a comment I can make an observation on his fragile emotional state." MoltkeWarding
nunez
Profile Blog Joined February 2011
Norway4003 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-12-09 22:41:26
December 09 2014 22:40 GMT
#460
@whitedog
imagine the injustice if only half of france could legally wed whitedog. then consider:
the fight for equal treatment for this entire unfortunate half.
the fight for equal treatment for a subset of this entire unfortunate half.

both are in the special interest of their respective subsets of france.
am i understanding correctly that this is makes both the struggles communitarian or just the second one?
conspired against by a confederacy of dunces.
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