I don’t understand why everyone makes this mistake. Feminazi is not a slur against feminists, but a slur against militant feminists. Just like “grammar Nazi” is not a slur against good grammar but those who are militant about it.
This woman is a feminazi because, rather than try to convince people of the feminist idea of a woman’s choice, she committed a crime to try to stop an opposing message.
The OP also explained in a subsequent post that he didn’t even really want to use the term, but couldn’t think of one that more specifically applied to the situation. That’s why the word has an asterisk by it–he originally meant to include a footnote.
The Soup Nazi got his name because he was extremely controlling about how he served his soup. If you didn’t understand that, then there’s no comedy in the term.
People that still believe in the Loch Ness Monster are loons, just as people that still believe in a racially-genetic component of race are racists, for pretty much the same reasons.
Well, you can look to my example upthread for an example of prosecutorial discretion as applied to a white homeless guy. Link:
One example doesn’t prove anything; it’s my impression though that this case isn’t atypical.
Intelligence (or rather, performance on IQ tests) may very well have a genetic component (though the science is fairly dodgy actually). The problem is race is largely a social construct. In the US during the 1800s, people spoke of Irish and Italian races, and during the days of Godwin central Europeans spoke of the German race. Today, Americans think in terms of black and white, while in sub-Saharan Africa people refer to 3 races existing there (not including those with both African and European ancestry). Among biologists, race isn’t really a recognized term: they have species, genuses but they don’t speak of races of finches or bears. The point: the first step in science is to define your terms, and categorization via racial morphologies is pretty flaky.
I think race is a meaningful category defined as follows: race refers to the box you check when asked what race you are. Others know more about this subject than me, so I’m not going to get too deep into this debate. I agree with the poster upthread that this topic in general is a moron magnet.
Certainly - but it is a genetic phenomenon a group of genes that go together. One might find, as you note, that a gene linked to intelligence is one of those genes, just as others like skin pigment are.
That wouldn’t make race less of a social construct or make the discovery of this genetic link relevant to society, but it would mean Magellan’s not a racist for saying it’s possible. Unless you’re a racist for saying it’s possible.:eek:
Well that’s the thing about this topic. You only have to dig six inches or so to find problematic claims.
A single gene for intelligence? Really? Generally speaking performance on IQ tests reflects a pretty narrow aspect of characteristics leading to success in life. And the idea that they measure something fundamental and unchanging has been pretty much disproven. IQ isn’t an entirely pointless metric, but it’s easy (and for some politically convenient) to make way too much of it.
Yes, yes, you can look for associations between race and any number of sociological covariates. But to conclude that racial self descriptions are a good measure for genetics is pretty weak, as your proxies for both your cause and your effect are laden with confounding factors.
ETA: The final problem with this lit, is that it emphasizes means far more than dispersions, though admittedly that’s a general problem in the social sciences. Still pretty striking in this case.
Of course it’s weak. You’re reading way too much into it. The point is that it’s not completely proven to be false yet. It’s still in the realm of possibility, that’s all.
To clarify, I didn’t characterize the relationship as weak. I characterized the drawing of certain conclusions as weak, in the sense that it is lame. If your problem is ill-defined, you are in the realm of asking whether the wind is pink. I trust that sufficiently sharp questions can be posed. But they will be rather different questions.