Trying to figure that one out.
Cool video, F4M. Have you seen this one? It seems to make just about as much sense in a fraction of the time.
Diversity is a terrible thing. Case-in-point: New Hampshire is 95% white and it has the highest quality of life of any state, and is the most libertarian by far.
Please make that your sig.
But let’s just see if I get the facts of life straight:
a) Gold always was and always will be. We were born with it. There is no objective value except gold.
b) Freedom is 100% isolation and self sufficiency, because that makes sense. Oh and I need gold
c) Even though I ought to live like a madman out in the wilderness it has to be in a place that is 95% white
d) libertarianism, a cosmopolitan bourgoise philosophy of societal interdependence is the way to go - anarcho primitivism is bad
e) New Hampshire is awesome
a) Gold always was and always will be. We were born with it. There is no objective value except gold.
When did I ever say that?
b) Freedom is 100% isolation and self sufficiency, because that makes sense. Oh and I need gold
For when I have to go into civ in order to trade. Gold always comes in handy.
c) Even though I ought to live like a madman out in the wilderness it has to be in a place that is 95% white
I never said that. I said you can’t deny NH’s lack of diversity and it’s high quality of life. Take a look at Detroit or Cleveland if you want a comparison.
d) libertarianism, a cosmopolitan bourgoise philosophy of societal interdependence is the way to go - anarcho primitivism is bad
Anarcho-primitivism IS anarcho-capitalism. Hunter-gatherers freely traded and had no violent monopolies.
e) New Hampshire is awesome
There are almost 1000 anarcho-capitalists in NH. Have you ever been?
I have lived in both Detroit and Cleveland and am from that region, I love it.
New Hampshire is for pinko socialists
“Foucault desreves more serious attention than I think he has been given.”
I think it is very much a shame that most philosophy departments do not really delve into continental philosophy beyond Kant, maybe Hegel. When I was in school I found that the English department was the one that covered stuff from the second half of 20th century, while the philosophy department had a few radicals that didn’t mind Nieztche. Could have been my uni though.
There’s a lot of stuff here. One thing I would really like to discuss is this idea about using race as a justification for slavery. It is definitely true that this occurred. However, there is nothing inherently racist about classifying things. Obviously there are differences between different groups of people from different areas of the world. This is most obvious in varying skin color, eye shape, and even body size. Where this gets controversial is when you start talking about intelligence. We can postulate, I guess, that among all humans there is a maximum level of intelligence that is attainable. From this we can say that between individuals there are differeing levels of intelligence and a maximum level attainable by each individual. Whether or not this can be generalized to different groups of people based on, say skin color or geographic region, is questionable. Whether or not this is even worthwhile to do is also questionable. However, if, for example, it can be determined that a certain group has a higher rate of some kind of mental illness why is this a bad thing to bring to light? This would help those people and others because you would presumably be able to isolate what it is that causes that mental illness.
Another thing I wanted to discuss is the animosity of leftists/Marxists in this area to science. Whether it’s implicit or explicit is irrelevant. What it amounts to is politicizing a scientific endeavor. The claim is essentially that classification is ideological. This does not necessarily have to be the case. While it can be used, like anything else, to justify ideas or ideologies, it is not itself ideological. To say that one group of people has differences from another group is not to say that one of those groups is superior, that is a value judgment on a fact. Let’s look at linguistics. Is that racist? Is it languist? Obviously that is ridiculous.
The last thing I want to address for now is the idea of a “Chinese” gene. Of course, it’s not a “chinese” gene, but there must be something there that affects development in the embryo. To point that out isn’t racist nor is it implying in any way that they are inferior. It’s just curiosity and fact.
I have lived in both Detroit and Cleveland and am from that region, I love it.
New Hampshire is for pinko socialists
Detroit and Cleveland are too of the poorest cities in America. NH continually ranks high on all the surveys for quality of life. NH has the LOWEST poverty, one of the highest median incomes, and the lowest unemployment. It also has relatively low crime. Not surprisingly, NH is the most free market state by far: NO income tax, NO sales tax (meaning the state is nearly 100% divroced from the market) and low taxes everywhere else.
Give me ONE example of how NH is pinko socialist. It is by far the least socialist state probably in all of North America.
Classification isn’t necessarily ideological, and the link you posted is written by ideologues and not anthropoligists or people with credentials in any field other than being ideologues. So no, classification isn’t necessarily ideological. If that’s the discussion you’re trying to have I can’t see anyone here disagreeing.
Race is another subject. Skin color seems like a pretty arbitrary trait to go by, especially when we consider examples of “passing” for one race or another. So skin color is pretty much out the window. Moreover, people with similar skin colors and hair textures still have a huge degree of variability when it comes to things like size, head shape, etc., etc., and these are just phenotypic traits. There’s all kinds of crazy shit happen genotypically.
Studying populations (as opposed to races) is useful in treating diseases. The important factor there is not so much race as it is the people that are likely to breed and the conditions of their environment. It shouldn’t be surprising that people in Sicily have a higher incidence of genes that can fight malaria, but that doesn’t do much to put them in a separate category since plenty of other people (who are not Sicilian) have the same genotypic trait. So maybe they have this trait, plus similar phenotypic traits. Well, what about the Sicilians that don’t have that trait but have similar appearances? So maybe we bring the shape of some body parts into the mix, in which case we have so much variability we should give up.
The problem with trying to classify discreet groups of races is that there is literally no reasonable point at which to stop. Even studies of a certain homogenous group give vague, probabalistic results. If race is a matter of probability, then I think we’ve turned the modern understanding of racism on its head. Few people wait in the delivery room waiting to see what race their baby will be. Moreover, cross cultural studies of race fail to hold up to any standard. In Brazil, for example, race is wildly different than it is from the US. A non-white here could be white in Brazil, and two Brazilian people can have a child that would be considered a different race. Wikipedia has a nice, but cursory, entry on race in Brazil.
@Porko
BP put it very well, and to go off of what she is saying:
Biology is going to tell you what reproduction is doing and that is about it. And when we go into practicing medicine - it is a practice, the presuppositions and methods are right on the table. It is a utilitarian and pragmatic skill set that serves a purpose while going off of biological narratives. It doesn’t posit race as some axiom or thing initself, nor can science really do that.
The second you start doing that, you start making metaphysical claims, and we have to ask, why are they being made? Science does not say what is smart, beautiful, good, bad, French, etc - it is out of it’s realm.
Also if you start with a syllogysim as “race is a thing in itself”, it is fair to ask what are you doing and why are you doing that?
@F4Me
New Hampshire is pinko because it is 5% non white and they don’t enforce the gold standard. Detroit is pure liberterian because Ted Nugent can hunt dear in his backyard with a crossbow and hunting season is a holliday. Plus we have militas, and people shoot guns off, and do drugs all the time here. Plus Detroit is like 10% white, which is ALOT of white people
Just wanted to add that, by the standards used by many scientists to ‘discredit’ the notion of race, other notions like beauty would also be discredited (there’s no ‘beauty gene’). Yet, if you got a thousand people to rate a series of photos based on attractiveness, there’d be general agreement about what the most and least beautiful faces were; whilst beauty is a subjective thing, it also has an objective component, in that the majority of people would agree that a very attractive person is very attractive, and that a very ugly face is very ugly. Equally, if you got a thousand people to rate a series of photos based on what race they thought faces were, there’d be general agreement upon which face was which race, much as there was agreement upon which faces were the most and least attractive. So whilst things like beauty and race may be seen as subjective phenomena, existing solely in the minds of individuals, they’re also objective in the sense that for obvious manifestations of a certain race or extreme beauty/ugliness, most individuals generally agree in their appraisal of it. The human mind is capable of extremely advanced pattern recognition (such as facial recognition, a task which no computer yet designed can perform as well as a human), so just because science is incapable of recognising a genetic basis for race, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist (there could be a pattern that current software is just not advanced enough to recognise, much as current techniques couldn’t measure a persons attractiveness by analysing their genes).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ-e5XjlmZA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J59sTRqxfwo - Abridged
May be of interest.
I hope I’ve replied correctly. I registered a week or two ago to ask an economics question, but I ended up losing my message.
@F4Me
New Hampshire is pinko because it is 5% non white and they don’t enforce the gold standard. Detroit is pure liberterian because Ted Nugent can hunt dear in his backyard with a crossbow and hunting season is a holliday. Plus we have militas, and people shoot guns off, and do drugs all the time here. Plus Detroit is like 10% white, which is ALOT of white people
Have you ever been to NH? I’ve been to Michigan and I hear its one of the most statist places on the planet. Same with Ohio. There’s a reason businesses have been leaving those states since the 1980s. All while NH is flourishing in business. NH is constantly ranked as the best place to open a business.
NH has a growing gold and silver exchange network (mostly agorist). I suggest going over to Shire Silver website.
Whites have historically been more libertarian. Ron Paul was right when he criticized black voters for supporting more statist laws like higher welfare and higher taxes on businesses. I know it’s because the government has made them that way but it’s the truth.
In Detroit, all the state does is oppress us, welfare is minimal and being cut, the schools are being privatized, the roads are never fixed, and the lights are always out. So we’re actually building a lot of alternatives like permaculture farms, policing our own neighborhoods and such. Also most Michiganders probably know a lot more about hunting and gathering than the average FSP lackey.
Still, we’d rather you stay in NH.
In Detroit, all the state does is oppress us, welfare is minimal and being cut, the schools are being privatized, the roads are never fixed, and the lights are always out. So we’re actually building a lot of alternatives like permaculture farms, policing our own neighborhoods and such. Also most Michiganders probably know a lot more about hunting and gathering than the average FSP lackey.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. NH will be Hong Kong in no time. Every single free stater in NH is active in libertarian causes in some way. Schools are on their way to being privatized, gold and silver are making a huge mark, agorism is everywhere and you can always leave civ for the woods at any time.
Hong Kong wasn’t white, you sure you want that?
Also, there really are parts of Detroit City, like actual houses, you could probably homestead and no one would fuck with you…if you could defend yourself properly.
I believe that it’s a social phenomena; a relic of pre-capitalistc society, where individuals of different races were a real and tangible threat (would attempt to expropriate your property/land and enslave your people). The mechanisms within the capitalist system (what Hayek called the “extended order”) moves society away from such sentiments.
****Of course it depends on your definition of racism. I define racism as hatred of other races.
Sounds like (European) racism is distinct from other kinds of chauvinism in its attempt to link itself to science. Ancient Greeks for example were famous chauvinists but they didn’t try to bring science into their disdain for Barbarians.
It would be interesting to know if racism of the Japanese and Chinese was also “scientific” like that.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. NH will be Hong Kong in no time. Every single free stater in NH is active in libertarian causes in some way. Schools are on their way to being privatized, gold and silver are making a huge mark, agorism is everywhere and you can always leave civ for the woods at any time.
First, Hong Kong is full of Chinese, not whites. Second, Hong Kong is very diverse. Your premises are flawed.
Third, you seem to assume “diversity” is a word for “not white”. North Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sierra Leone are all far less diverse than the United States, Canada, and Germany.
Fourth, whites are absolutely not “more libertarian”, its just that conservatives and pseudo-libertarians often push non-whites into becoming slaves of the state when (a small minority, but a vocal and incredibly irritating one) they claim that whites are biologically superior or that the holocaust didn’t occur. Hell, many of the places moving in the direction of libertarianism are distinctly not-white, in places like Central America and Asia.
Fifth, Detroit is bad because of the state screwing everyone over and creating dependants/slaves with welfare. There are individuals there who are altogether making the best of things, and in some ways things are improving there (though not in the sense that the Michigan government is getting better).