Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[picklepikkl]

So yes, it's certainly possible to draw socially arbitrary lines around clusters of the human race and group them as one (case in point: Sub-Saharan Africans, which generally gets lumped together as "black," have more genetic and phenotypic diversity than any other human populations), and then do studies to determine ways in which these clusters' averages differ. But variation within groups is much much higher than variation between groups, access to nutrition and safety in early stages of life are massively important to later development, biologists are just starting to tease out the weird intricate ways environment affects gene expression as opposed to everything being read strictly from DNA (epigenetics, it's called), and broad statements like "blacks are better athletes than whites" and "Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs than other people" obscure these very important facts, which is why I think they are not useful statements even if you can show me scientifically-sound studies demonstrating their statistical truth.

[AdrienIer]

Also this list is misleading, because it implies that Paris is way behind the other cities, while for example London is at 33.5hpw (not that much higher) and Milan at 32.5.

Yeah, but they don't work that much either! I'm not sure its a bad thing, there is a saying that Europeans work to live and Americans live to work. At the end of the day what matters is quality of life, after all. I was in Hong Kong working when this list came out, and found it fascinating they ordered in the opposite direction, i.e. #1 was Paris and they were dead last. Believe me, most folks there would trade places in a second (as would I).

Darrell

Good. I hear too often things about how lazy we French people are (often from my own countrymen) and I'm used to sentences like "the French don't work very much" being used pejoratively, instead of as a celebration of the fact that we enjoy our lives more than most people in the world.

[pindicator]

Didn't France just pass the UK to have the 5th largest economy in the world after the Brexit vote?

[Commodore]

Also this list is misleading, because it implies that Paris is way behind the other cities, while for example London is at 33.5hpw (not that much higher) and Milan at 32.5.

Yeah, but they don't work that much either! I'm not sure its a bad thing, there is a saying that Europeans work to live and Americans live to work. At the end of the day what matters is quality of life, after all. I was in Hong Kong working when this list came out, and found it fascinating they ordered in the opposite direction, i.e. #1 was Paris and they were dead last. Believe me, most folks there would trade places in a second (as would I).

Darrell

Good. I hear too often things about how lazy we French people are (often from my own countrymen) and I'm used to sentences like "the French don't work very much" being used pejoratively, instead of as a celebration of the fact that we enjoy our lives more than most people in the world.

Making fun of the French is a bedrock shared value of our civilization, come on man.

[AdrienIer]

Didn't France just pass the UK to have the 5th largest economy in the world after the Brexit vote?

Not really no. But if the British economy dives (as pretty much everyone is expecting) we will.

[Gavagai]

So yes, it's certainly possible to draw socially arbitrary lines around clusters of the human race and group them as one (case in point: Sub-Saharan Africans, which generally gets lumped together as "black," have more genetic and phenotypic diversity than any other human populations), and then do studies to determine ways in which these clusters' averages differ. But variation within groups is much much higher than variation between groups, access to nutrition and safety in early stages of life are massively important to later development, biologists are just starting to tease out the weird intricate ways environment affects gene expression as opposed to everything being read strictly from DNA (epigenetics, it's called), and broad statements like "blacks are better athletes than whites" and "Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs than other people" obscure these very important facts, which is why I think they are not useful statements even if you can show me scientifically-sound studies demonstrating their statistical truth.

The statement about athletes helps us understand why almost all NBA players are black. That along would make it useful.
(Curious counter-point, however, is that, AFAIK, there are very few black players in NHL.)

Anyway, I would grant that usefulness of such statements is marginal - just like usefulness of their opposites. They are deemed important only because of supposed political implications and this is exactly what I dispute.

[scooter]

Yeah, but they don't work that much either! I'm not sure its a bad thing, there is a saying that Europeans work to live and Americans live to work. At the end of the day what matters is quality of life, after all. I was in Hong Kong working when this list came out, and found it fascinating they ordered in the opposite direction, i.e. #1 was Paris and they were dead last. Believe me, most folks there would trade places in a second (as would I).

Darrell

Good. I hear too often things about how lazy we French people are (often from my own countrymen) and I'm used to sentences like "the French don't work very much" being used pejoratively, instead of as a celebration of the fact that we enjoy our lives more than most people in the world.

Maybe a better way of putting this is that different cultures enjoy and prioritize life in different ways. Judging how good/bad another culture is based on your own cultural assumptions is generally not a great idea.

1. My claim is that it doesn't matter if blue people is superior to purple or not. Also, it doesn't matter what is the cause of alleged superiority - biological or social factors. That's why I'm irritated by the argument that races are equal in abilities - because it is implied that it would matter if they weren't.

But it does matter if people believe in a superiority. If blue people believe themselves to be superior to purple people, how do you think they will treat them? History suggests the answer is "very poorly." This is why (unfortunately) merely having equal rights on paper is often not good enough.

Anyway, I don't see anyone in here suggesting that races are totally equal in attributes. I'm not so sure many people really believe this thing you're not a fan of. But many people do think that believing one ethnicity is superior to another is a very dangerous thing, and there's some good reasons to think that. It's also pretty reasonable to believe that much of the apparent differences are easily explained by other factors. For example, the French/English/American work hours things mentioned above. Are the hours work indicative of countries that are "lazy" or "enjoy life more," or do different cultural priorities merely give different results?

[darrelljs]

Maybe a better way of putting this is that different cultures enjoy and prioritize life in different ways. Judging how good/bad another culture is based on your own cultural assumptions is generally not a great idea.

So you don't judge ISIS harshly for their practice of slavery, promotion of religious violence, or other "lifestyle priorities" ?

Darrell

[Mr. Cairo]

2. It is true that people have unequal distribution of starting positions and that such distribution is to an extent purely luck-based. Case in point: you was born in USA, I was born in Russia. You enjoy a tremendous built-in social advantage over me. Not only I need to make to the top ten percent of Russian society to enjoy the standard of living of an average American; there are things, like the right to fair trial, which I wouldn't get in Russia irrespective of how rich I am and you take for granted. So - does that mean that you should transfer a part of your income to me to compensate the inequality? No, this is an idiotic idea.

But it doesn't make it right. If Russia and America were a single country run from Washington, a lot of money would be transfered from the relatively "rich" America to the relatively "poor" Russia to try and make up the disparity. The government would spend a lot of money, mostly made from taxes from "Americans", to rooting out corruption in Russia. That is how countries work, and you would not complain.

In America (and most other countries, but this example is quite specific to the USA) a lot of tax money flows from the rich areas to the poor. In general, black neighborhoods are poorer than white neighborhoods. Yes, they are poor neighborhoods in part because they are predominantly black, but to suggest that it therefore represents some sort of inherent inadequacy in people of African descent is obviously rubbish. It is because of historical circumstance (slavery, segregation, and continued institutionalized discrimination) that black neighborhoods are, in general, poorer than white ones. Do you think that it only takes a few decades of equality under the law for hundreds of years of mistreatment to be undone? 151 years ago, most black people in the USA didn't even own themselves, and yet racist people judge them as inherently lazy or stupid because they aren't as generally "successful" as white people whose ancestors have always been free and comparatively well off. Then they complain that their tax dollars are being spent in black neighborhoods.

The problem with your argument is that it defines "race" as due to genetics, but "race" is far more nebulous than that. It is defined by nationality, ancestry, place of birth, language; and yes, genetics, specifically the genetics that effect skin pigmentation and facial bone structure. But even then definitions of race differ from place to place, they don't always make sense, and they change over time. Frankly it is not a helpful term to use for such an important topic, but it's what we've got so...
for example: is "Slavic" primarily an ethnic or linguistic grouping? Is it a "race"? Or is it a subset of "white/European"? If a black person's ancestors have, without exception, all lived in Europe for 100 years, are they "European" or "African"? What about 200 years? 500 years? Go back far enough and we're all "African".

Maybe a better way of putting this is that different cultures enjoy and prioritize life in different ways. Judging how good/bad another culture is based on your own cultural assumptions is generally not a great idea.

So you don't judge ISIS harshly for their practice of slavery, promotion of religious violence, or other "lifestyle priorities" ?

Darrell

What ISIS is doing is abhorrent by the cultural standards of the vast majority of Muslim/Middle Eastern people.
Should all white people/Christians be judged on the actions of Westboro baptist church, or the Spanish Inquisition, or Anders Behring Breivik? Maybe we should judge everyone who voted Leave by the actions of Thomas Mair?

[Bobchillingworth]

@ Gavagai- I believe you are conflating social, lifestyle & environmental factors with blanket inborn racial qualities. You bring up the example of black athletes, but there are numerous structural examples which easily explain the performance of, for instance, Olympic sprinters. Athletes from underdeveloped nations where motorized transportation is rare will naturally develop greater stamina from everyday life. Many of these same countries take great national pride in competing well in certain sporting events, so potential athletes train at running, etc. from a very early age. Think of diving in China; the Chinese aren't naturally amazing at diving, they just have a very small segment of their population which specializes in training at it for global competitions. Or consider gymnastics in your own country. In this way they're no different than people acclimating to the low oxygen of high altitudes over decades of exposure, a phenomenon that occurs across multiple "races".

Perhaps you could argue that certain African tribes, which until relatively recently led pastoral or hunter-gatherer existences, would be genetically predisposed to have greater physical stamina. There might be some truth to that, I'm not certain, but if so then it's an ethnic trait, not a quality shared by an entire race, similar to lactose tolerance. Environmental factors, to whatever degree they've actually impacted the rather brief period of modern human evolution, are very different between, say, Uganda and Mali.

To go back to cultural factors, you brought up the example of the NBA. It's true that the sport is dominated by people of African descent, but it's also very popular in African American communities. White athletes who could be talented at basketball might instead pursue swimming, hockey, lacrosse, etc., sports which for various socio-economic reasons have far less African American participation (particularly historically a lack of access to the requisite sporting facilities). There are a number of sporting events where U.S. athletes typically don't fare particularly well- that's not because our teams are racially unequipped to compete at the highest level, it's because we don't invest much talent in them as a nation.

Plus all of this isn't even getting into the fact that there's absolutely no scientific evidence to suggest that particular races have natural advantages over others. Which isn't surprising, a "race" is just a mass grouping of potentially hundreds of different ethnicities under a convenient banner based on the most superficial qualities. There isn't even historical or contemporary agreement on the particular membership of any given race- for instance, are Arabs white, or their own race? Or something else entirely? That's what people mean when they say race is socially constructed- that's a fact, not the refusal of liberals to confront an uncomfortable global truth.