I think you’re the one who needs to read up. The Corsairs were French.
Yeah but irrational conservative dogma is not called politcal correctness, its called stupid. Noone looks at you funny if you call out the ridiculous claims of supply side economics (as interpreted by Republicans) or creationism, people look at you funny if you say that affirmative action may have run its course because the remaining socioeconmic gap ebtween blacks and white are entirely attributable to an IQ gap.
I think he is asserting that IQ does not correlate with IQ test results because there are too many distortive factors to make IQ test scores reliable indicators of relative IQ.
How the heck did stockbroker get into that list? As far as I know the only requirement to be a stockbroker is passing the series 7/63 (which is so simple that you can study for it in an afternoon).
People do look at you funny if you “mock” religion or bad-mouth the military, etc. Or rather, they’ll look for grounds for accusing you of doing these things.
ISTM that PC manifests itself in two ways:
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A game of “gotcha” where where we try to score political points by accusing our rivals of violating one of a number of political taboos.
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Bouts of hypersensitivity where incidents that are in any way reminicient of past forms of bigotry are treated as though they are just that.
Christians are still freaked out about being thrown to the lions by the Romans, so they seek out evidence that they are “still” being persecuted.
Christians are still being persecuted, now, today. (I’m sure not in the U.S.)
If you actually mock religion or the military then you are either very rude or ungrateful, you deserve a few funny looks.
I think that saying that Christians are persecuted in the US is like saying that Muslims are persecuted in Turkey. Its not exactly an islamic theocracy but the politicans pander to the Islamic vote.
Christians are not persecuted in the western world, and are the least persecuted major religion in the rest of the world. Comparatively speaking, Christians have it better than any other religion, and historically have dished out more pesecution of their own than any other. In the US, they have all the power, all the numbers and absolutely zero persecution. They have it so good here, they are forced to completely invent things to feel persecuted about.
What’s wrong with mocking religion? Religion is just belief. I resepct the right for individuals to believe whatever they want (and to be able to express those beliefs) as the closest thing the US has to a sacred dogma, but that doesn’t mean the beliefs themselves are entitled to respect.
Do you think it would be rude to mock race religions? Should I regard the NOI belief that white people are descended from Satan with respect, or am I rude if I mock it?
Cite? Christians are widely persecuted in the Islamosphere; they aren’t exactly liked in China either.
Cite? Were there any religious aspects to any of the Indian and Chinese civil wars? And let’s not forget the Sunni vs Shi’ite vs Ishmaili conflicts
Its one thing to mock religions that are hateful or that harm people, it is another thing to mock people who have belief in something they cannot prove.
If most of the mocking on this board was the mocking of racism in religion, then that would be one thing but msot of the mocking is towards mainstream religious beliefs, purley bey virtue of the fact that they are religious beliefs.
If I recall correctly, one of the figures on the back of the U.S. $2 bill was “colored in” to show a black or dark skinned man a the signing of the Declaration of Independence when, in fact, there was no such man present. Symbolism more important than accuracy?
???
I’ve never heard this before (and, of course, I haven’t got a $2 bill handy to check), so I’ll have to ask for a bit of proof or a cite to back this up. Back when the $2 bill was designed and issued, they weren’t into putting gratuitous black folks into pictures that didn’t originally have them. So I’m not buying this. At best, I suspect someone in the engraving is being put in shadow.
Here’s the back – I don’t even see which one it’s supposed to be:
What about when they make claims that are provably false?
I haven’t seen that on this board. I see mocking of intolerant beliefs or patently ridiculous ones. Not general, unfalsifiable faith, but creationism and the like.
Sorry, the second was meant to be understood as a continuation of the first–more of my anecdotal understanding of the attitude of black folks I know. As is this: “African-American” isn’t a poisonous word, but it is a euphemism, a politicians’ word for what down-to-earth folks call “black.” (Or in a few distant instances I recall, “colored.” Really.)
But it is not a euphemism. It was an attempt, (not particularly successful, in my opinion), to ge the black community on an equal basis in the language with the various white ethnic groups. African-American was chosen, (by a group of black leaders from Northern industrial cities where such terminology is common), to act as an equivalent to Irish-American, German-American, Italian-American, Polish-American, etc. The point made was that the various ethnic white communities were known by the place, (in this case country), from which their ancestors came to the U.S. whereas the black community was known by a color. In an effort to identify the various groups in the same manner–and since most African nation-states had not been created at the time of the slave trade and the records of the places of origin for imported blacks had generally been destroyed–the choice was made to use the place (continent) of origin rather than any specific nation-state.
Two problems with the idea are/were that outside the Industrial North, (Rust Belt), the hyphenated-American terminology is not that strong and, for many people, there has been such mixing that even in the Rust Belt, many people do not feel that strongly about their ancestry.
It is not a euphemism and it is not a “politicians’” word. It was simply an effort to promote acceptance that was not thoroughly thought out.
Informative post, tom, thanks.
You know, since we resolved our past differences I’ve found myself more and more developing a respect for the depth and breadth of your knowledge and the way you convey which is both thorough yet quick and easy to comprehend. You’ve become one of a handful of posters that I most consistently learn something from.
This is politically correct nonsense.
Any number of studies show that SIRE groups–Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity accurately correlate with “racial” origins.
What modern academia has done, in an effort to advance the perception that the family of man is a single gene pool inside of which each individual draws from the same central genetic library, is to create an arbitrary straw man which defines “race” as some sort of pure, totally-isolated genetic population. It’s then easy to dismiss the concept of race…but ultimately it just revolves around whether one is a splitter or a lumper. Lumpers can easily find genetic arguments to lump people–broadly–into “races” and those lumps do have a genetic basis; inside of those race lumps are consistently varying disparate prevalences of various genes, including the obvious ones coding for assorted phenotypic appearance differences.
It is not correct, however, that the broadly familiar categories of “race” are “biologically meaningless.” Such a position flies in the face of all current science regarding the history of human evolution and population distribution. Moreover, recent evidence such as Neandertal admixture for eurasian groups reinforces the premise that we do not all draw from the same central library of genes.
Races are not purely definable genetically. But to pretend the concept is “meaningless” is ridiculous political correctness, and defensible only by establishing a silly strawman definition which becomes easy to shoot down.