Again with the fucking travel advisories. I thought you said (and I would agree):
:dubious:
Meh. Another unabashed “scientific” racist more or less isn’t going to affect my enjoyment of the 'Dope. I’ll avoid this idiot like I avoid Chen and **Pedant **now. It helps that he’s shown his idiocy by repeating such easy-to-refute crap like “Whites invented agriculture” and “Blacks didn’t have cities” and the like.
I don’t believe that “race” is a scientifically rigorous concept to begin with (nod to Sailboat), but even if I did–and further accepted that races had clear average tendencies–how could that be applied except by evaluating individuals “as members of a race”?
I think it’s possible that a cultural group of people who interbreed with their own members over the span of multiple generations might have a higher presence of certain genes than those outside that group.
I guess this is sort of missing my point, however. Let’s say we define the African-American “race” as simply those people who identify themselves as belonging to it. Eminem can join the club too if he wishes. (This would reflect the current definition of “race” that is actually more similar to “culture”. But for my hypothetical purposes, this is still valid, since most people within this culture group also mate within this cultural group, thus become a “genetic group” of sorts.)
Now let’s say 85% of these people who self-identify as AA have the “violence gene”, but only 15% of those who identify themselves as non-AA have this gene.
…then?
Is this an arguement that we should avoid scientfic studies that might find genetic differences between “races”? (With the exception of those necessary for better health/medical treatment.)
“Race profiling” (sic) is considered by many to be a discriminatory practice, a violation of human rights, and ultimately ineffective in practice.
How would you identify who was African-American?
… then *something *will happen.
My questions are posted only a few posts above this one. Only a minor amount of scrolling is required.
I would ask them.
A lot changes in terms of interpreting the dearth of African-Americans in this-or-that position as being prima facie evidence of discrimination.
Then your data would be useless.
I am sure that there are white muggers. What I meant is that I have never heard of one in a conversation. I have friends and relatives who have been victims of violent crime. It is always a black criminal who does it.
I’m in favor of real, rigorous science exploring in every direction anybody can think of.
Rigorous investigations into “race” would have to be predicated on scientifically rigorous definitions of what that was. Certainly we could invent definitions based on genetic differences (you’re this race if you have this genetic characteristic but not that one), but we could not invent rigorous definitions that would actually align with common cultural understandings of race. It’s been tried, and the more we look into it, the more complicated it becomes. Depending on which markers you choose to look at, you can divide the human species into any number of races you like. None of these possible divisions lines up comfortably with anyone’s cultural understanding of what “race” is. Most of them involve grouping people who are commonly understood to be different races together and at the same time separating other people who are commonly understood to be the same race.
That’s an interesting thought experiment. I have another: What if someone has the balls to do more studies on race, genetics, and intelligence, violence, etc. And what if these studies do in fact show that White Americans have genes that result in lower levels of intelligence and higher levels of violence?
And lets also say that I believe so strongly in this claim that I start hijacking threads on this message board too; randomly injecting my beliefs into every conversation that remotely has to do with: the economy, culture, politics, etc. If I’m aggressive enough I can get everybody talking about this topic regardless of the inherent lack of any genetic basis (ex. trolls are fed). If I’m “dedicated” enough I can get an entire country to consider my beliefs, no?
At what point are we debating real facts or **indulging **racists in their delusions by freely disseminating their stupid, 18th century, views. I only say this cus your post really shines through to me as a good example of the exact reason why most people refuse to even entertain racialists.
I, personally, believe that racists should be engaged in conversation, but the first step should be “show me your damn proof.” The first step is not to suspend your adherence to known scientific facts and engage them in racist thought experiments:
“Let’s just say that Blacks are genetically…”
“But what if it’s true…”
Racialists don’t just engage in these thought experiments, they simply live in them. “show me your proof” is only annoying cus the key goal of most racists is not to prove their racist claims with objective facts, but to simply make as many unsupported, stereotyping, bigoted racist claims as possible.
“Blacks are criminals!”
“Blacks are retarded!”
“Blacks are violent!”
“Blacks are genetically prove to fucking!”
“Blacks are disease ridden!”
So if you choose to engage them in discussion the first rule is to keep it grounded in reality, with commonly accepted mainstream science.
I don’t believe so. I am using a cultural definition for “African-American”. Some people would lie, sure… but that’s why I’d ask thousands of them for this study. The results would be LESS ACCURATE, but there might still be enough statistical power to compare between groups.
To put my hypothetical simply: 85% of the people who claim to belong to the African-American culture have the “violence gene”. I don’t think that would be an insignificant finding. And I think it would have huge social consequences.
If there is a genetic predisposition to engage in crime, and I am confident there is, there will not be one crime gene, but a constellation of genes. When they are discovered it will be easy to determine that most convicted felons have a large number of them, and that most people without felony convictions have few or none. It will also be possible to determine which babies are likely to become criminals, and which will be unlikely to develop that way.
Do you realize that the hypothetical you are proposing is so far beyond our ability to understand how genes work that it really makes it useless?
This is interesting. Are there any references you would personally recommend, if I wanted to pursue further reading?
shrug Garbage in, garbage out.