Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

people in Melbourne regularly ask me where I am from, which causes a slight degree of difficulty if I answer “Melbourne”.

the real question is “tell me your life story and the saga of your ancestors”, but you know I’m just trying to buy socks in this exchange.

[mitigatedchaos]

Having forgotten his Discourse Keyboard, the owl struggled to explain that the native range of Tyto Alba includes all of Australia and Tasmania, but the nuance of his argument was interpreted as little more than a confusing series of hoots by his interlocutors.  After refusing an offer of a small rodent, he retreated to his apartment in frustration, tiny owl socks unpurchased.

People make this assumption at times in the United States as well, depending on accent, frequency of tourists and international students matching the general appearance in the area, local demographics, etc.

I suspect the deeper version will die off as visible race is turned into fashion near the end of the century.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[slartibartfastibast]

I was trying to ask Google why Japanese prefectures are called prefectures and I accidentally a racism:

I think the hilarity comes partly from the fact that when I stop the question at “Why are ___nese…” before I get to a noun, there is still a broken English nounification of the adjective that can happen if your standards are lax enough. And anywhere that you can ask “Why are Chinese smart?” without getting corrected on your grammar is probably also a place where you won’t get corrected on your racism. You have to be extra smart and well educated and enlightened to realize that everyone is definitely exactly the same everywhere.

[mitigatedchaos]

Well, like, is it technically incorrect grammar?

In English, we put the plural status as part of the noun, but the Japanese language uses things like counters and the noun 日本人 does not actually specify whether you are referring to one or more Japanese people, as “neko” does not specify the number of cats, and so on. Japanese also doesn’t have an a/an/the attached to the noun.

So, if we adopt either a descriptivist mindset or some sort of cultural prescriptivist mindset, it could be argued that Japanese/Japanese is valid just as ninja/ninja and German/Germans. That also brings up that there is no simple plural form such as “Germans”, and I don’t think anyone anywhere will approve of “Japaneses”. (Wow, “Japaneses” sounds really racist.)

So I guess it’s down to whether the listeners/readers socially approve of it, much like “Brits” is okay, but “Japs” and “Nps” were both part of pretty damned racist WW2 propaganda and are thus permanently prohibited, even though all three are just shortenings of national names.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

electronconf.com

ElectronConf Seattle 2017

[ranma-official]

Github eliminated gender bias in selecting conference speakers for ElectronConf by using randomized blind review, 100% of selected speakers turned out to be men, so they are cancelling the conference

amazing

[argumate]

now reveal the demographic breakdown of the reviewers

[mitigatedchaos]

For diversity purposes in tech companies, Asians count as white.  So obviously majority white, ofc.

I mean, you think I’m shitposting, but most of my shitposts are not completely groundless - there was a criticism of diversity levels at some Silicon Valley tech company a while back, and they conveniently left out that like 30% of the staff were Asian.

(And from what I’ve read, it’s Asians that take the actual brunt of Affirmative Action policies in schools… overall I’m not sure how long the political alignment will hold out.  The true racists are split on this matter from what I’ve seen.)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

The issue with racism is that it violates the principle of justice as individual. Someone is being made to suffer for something someone else entirely did, united only by surface characteristics. (E.g., being black is not an ideology and does not cause behavior in the absence of a cultural context which makes it ideological/cultural/political.)

So breaking the principle of individual justice to combat racism probably isn’t such a great idea.

However, while race does not intrinsically alter behavior, culture, ideology, and religion do. Some of this is mostly just aesthetics, like architecture or food. But some of it has much deeper consequences, like multigenerational cousin marriage, or “honor” killings.

However, unlike race (currently), culture is fortunately somewhat mutable. There are limits, however, particularly with regard to ideology.

I guess what I’m saying here is that America should limit the number of North Korean refugees it takes after the War, until it can be determined how safe former adherents of Juche coming over in one mass are, but should be willing to take many thousands of refugees from South Korea after Seoul is destroyed. In-kind aid should be delivered instead, and infrastructure reconstruction should proceed with more funding than originally scheduled.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

for a post-racial society Tumblr sure does get heated about whether Armenians count as white or not.

it’s mercifully one of the few debates that feature the Kardashians and genocide as legitimate talking points.

[mitigatedchaos]

I thought Tumblr was all about racial awareness, not being post-racial?

I thought that was the new SJ Left thing - racial awareness, racial consciousness, ethnic experiences - just only for those with enough overlapping categories in the Venn Diagram of Oppression.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

You know, I do think this attitude has contributed to the rise of the Alt Right.  If they’re going to call you racist no matter what you do, then it doesn’t matter if they do.  You might as well think forbidden thoughts, say forbidden things, speak the dark speech they so fear to punish them for their intent to punish you for even the most minor transgressions.

Of course, you could also go by your own conscience and not try to build a racially-homogenous ethnostate, but that lacks the same trolling value.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[silver-and-ivory]

Several people on rattumb have discussed the theory of race as spurred by a class-based desire to divide workers. They’ve been generally somewhat baffled by it, and I’d like to explain more, because I don’t know if they’ve heard the full version.

The theory goes like this.

In the 17th century South, poor whites (mainly indentured servants at this time) and blacks tended to work together and at times had children together. They possessed an amount of camaraderie and solidarity. In fact, they had so much solidarity that they started a rebellion arguing for more land and stronger defense called Bacon’s Rebellion. While eventually put down, the rebellion spooked the planter class.

The planters realized that indentured servants were much too unruly and likely to cause trouble; from this point forwards the percentage of indentured servants in the Southern colonies dropped while the percentage of slaves increased.

Moreover, as more slaves arrived, the color line started to develop. Laws deliberately separated blacks and whites, preventing intermarriage and imposing restrictions on blacks, thereby creating servitude as a racial institution in the American South.

The development of the initial color line in America was likely based on the planter class’s desire to exploit and retain control as a divide-and-conquer tactic. Later capitalists would use the system to their advantage after it had been established.

[mitigatedchaos]

I’ve been thinking about this for a while since I started being more interested in politics again (and more Nationalist).  Bloody Southern Plantation owners managed to cost this country an enormous amount of blood and treasure through their sloth, create an entire ethnic group (with bonus ethnic tension) within the country where one didn’t exist before, and create problems that we’re still dealing with the fallout of over two hundred years later.

I still wouldn’t alter the timeline if I could because this timeline is guaranteed to avoid thermonuclear war until at least 2017 (also because literally rewriting history would constitute mass murder), but if we could fork another one off, I’d love to see what America could become if a few key figures could be prevented from starting the country down this path.

I’m not sure how accurate this representation of events is, though.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[silver-and-ivory]

Every time that I’ve talked about feeling white guilt and in general being seen as a white person, people have said things like, “But… aren’t you Asian?”

And they’re right to say that, to be clear! It’s really shitty to reduce Asians to Basically-White if they disagree with you, and I appreciate everyone who pointed the gross unfairness of this action out.

But at the same time I feel like they’re missing the point. For all intents and purposes, as someone who’s been adopted across racial lines, I am white. I am white-cultured. I am Western-cultured. I’m American in my individualism and my perspectives.

And that feels wrong to ignore as well.

When kyriarchy tries to cleave reality at inexact and ill-defined fault lines, people rightly object. Categories don’t cut neatly; there are always people who queer binaries by their very existence. Forcing them to Choose a Side rarely works out well.

The same applies to sj. I’m racially Chinese and ethnically white-American; you can’t discredit the white part of me without also ignoring and erasing the Chinese part, and you can’t pedestalize the Chinese part without ignoring and erasing the white part.

Under white supremacy, either my white-American ethnicity is celebrated and my Chinese race is “excused” (and erased), or my white-American ethnicity is erased and my Chinese race is denounced. Under the reverse discourse, either my Chinese race is celebrated while my white-American ethnicity is “excused” (and erased), or my Chinese race is erased and my white-American ethnicity is denounced.

Sj must not forget intersectionality. It must not forget that identities lead to complicated intersections that are inseparable from each other. It must deconstruct and replace kyriarchal categories rather than enforcing them.

I’m not American+Chinese. I’m Chinese American.

[mitigatedchaos]

I propose a model in which power is represented and analyzed as a graph of relationships between individuals, where nodes represent individuals and weighted directed edges represent power relationships.

Relationships that effect groups can then be observed and measured without reducing all members of those groups into indistinct blobs where all members are considered interchangeable, or venn diagram intersections.

Edit: May also be of interest to @theunitofcaring.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

You really think that if factories were closing down or firing people all over America, people would stop caring if only China were white?

In the UK they complain about Poles. Poles are white. “But they’re Slavs” - so what? They’re way whiter than the Chinese. People would *invent* something to complain about.

Better argument is needed for 2020.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

huffingtonpost.co.za

Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise?

This redistribution of the world’s wealth is long overdue, and it is not just South Africa where white males own a disproportionate amount of wealth.

[mitigatedchaos]

HoneyBites, the subject of the OP is literally denying people the right to vote based on their race and sex.  If you don’t think that would increase resentment, and that resentment increase racism, for whites, but you think doing the same to blacks would increase resentment by blacks, then you don’t think whites are human.