[Pants-of-dog]

Lol.

@FiveofSwords does not remember that he is the one who brought up human genetic clustering as a way of claiming races are real.

This keeps getting more amusing.

[ingliz]

@FiveofSwords

If you want to dump some random genes or gene segments into a bucket and call it a cluster, of course, you can.

It doesn't tell you much, though. It's always a case of 'suck it and see' and hope for the best in vaccine testing, for example. And that is when you are clustering for a very narrow purpose.

Anyway, all I was asking was, would you dump this section of Neanderthal DNA into your bucket of 'whiteness'?

[FiveofSwords]

@FiveofSwords

If you want to dump some random genes or gene segments into a bucket and call it a cluster, of course, you can.

It doesn't tell you much, though. It's always a case of 'suck it and see' and hope for the best in vaccine testing, for example. And that is when you are clustering for a very narrow purpose.

Anyway, all I was asking was, would you dump this section of Neanderthal DNA into your bucket of 'whiteness'?

So according to you, there is no way that people could generally agree that Morgan freeman is black. They look at him, they see physical features that suggest his ancestry is from sub aaharan Africa. And they say he is black. But you think this is impossible. Woukd you say it is some sort of conspiracy? Are people meeting is smoke filled rooms agreeing to pretend they can tell that Morgan freeman is black just to try and refute your version of genetics? Or do you have sone other explanation?

[ingliz]

Morgan freeman is black

Of course, Morgan Freeman is black. He conforms to the social construct that is 'blackness'. But genetically he could have all sorts in his cupboard. A bit of this and a bit of that. European slave owners were into fucking their property. His great-grandmother twice removed might have married a Chinaman for all we know ...

You just don't know what lurks within.

[FiveofSwords]

Of course, Morgan Freeman is black. He conforms to the social construct that is 'blackness'. But genetically he could have all sorts in his cupboard. A bit of this and a bit of that. European slave owners were into fucking their property. His great-grandmother twice removed might have married a Chinaman for all we know ...

You just don't know what lurks within.

But the vast majority of humans can just look at him and tell he is black. Can you?

[FiveofSwords]

Of course, Morgan Freeman is black. He conforms to the social construct that is 'blackness'. But genetically he could have all sorts in his cupboard. A bit of this and a bit of that. European slave owners were into fucking their property. His great-grandmother twice removed might have married a Chinaman for all we know ...

You just don't know what lurks within.

There are a combination of physical traits which normal people identify with 'black'. For example...darker skin, wide and flat nose, big lips, kinky hair.

I believe these are heritable genetic traits. Do you? Or did society make Morgan freeman have kinky hair somehow?

I think you must be forced to say these traits are not genetic. Because if they are, that means there is some genetic cluster. And it isn't 'society' that is the source of genetic information. It is just the location of matter on a complex molecule.

[Pants-of-dog]

There are a combination of physical traits which normal people identify with 'black'. For example...darker skin, wide and flat nose, big lips, kinky hair.

I believe these are heritable genetic traits. Do you? Or did society make Morgan freeman have kinky hair somehow?

You are confusing phenotype and genotype.

I think you must be forced to say these traits are not genetic. Because if they are, that means there is some genetic cluster. And it isn't 'society' that is the source of genetic information. It is just the location of matter on a complex molecule.

Yes, there are genetic clusters.

And as your evidence shows, these clusters are arbitrary, variable, and cannot be organized into distinct subgroups.

Therefore, you are arguing that race is arbitrary, variable, and cannot be organized into distinct subgroups.

Which makes sense. since race is a social construct.

[Tainari88]

You just don't know what lurks within.

This is why so many people who are into easy racial categories do not like mixed societies where the people who look white then have some grandparent or parent who is black and no one knows what lurks within. Lol.

Hee hee.

I like this song from Pablo Milanes, an African-looking Cuban singing a song in Spanish. Next to him is his daughter Lynn. She does not look African Cuban strictly because like most Cubans she is mixed. Racially mixed.

So what about the people who are racially mixed? Some look European, some look African, and so on.

Sally Hemmings was a slave on Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in Virginia plantation. He had a lot of children with her. Some of them had his facial features and were hard to distinguish from his white children. The only difference was they were serving food to the guests in a servant role. He was manufacturing his own slaves.

Many African Americans have Scottish, English, Dutch, and German DNA mixed with African. Many white-looking Southerners have a good percentage of African or Indigenous ancestry as well.

Mixture is a part of human history for millennia. Egypt was a mixed society as well. If you analyze the DNA of most of the tombs of the Pharoahs, they were filled with people who had DNA from many areas of the Ancient world. The purity theory that civilizations were only about racial purity is a myth. Most port cities for centuries have had people coming in and out of the harbors, having sex with women who were racially different than the men and moving on. Most sailors all over the European world were males and when they landed in Africa, Asia, the Americas they had sex with women who were not European. Resulting in pregnancies. The Spanish and the French did not permit a Frenchman or a Spanish man to have a child with an African or Indian woman and that child was a slave. No. You had to baptize the baby and the baby was not a slave if the father was French white or Spanish white and free. In the Anglo form of it like Jefferson? You could enslave your own children. That is the way they coped with it.

Also, they allowed women from England and the Netherlands to leave in mass quantities to found colonies. That was not the policy of the Spanish crown at all. So most of Latin America had Spanish fathers who were European and mothers who were not. Mixture, for hundreds of years.

In many port cities all over the world you had men on ships without women for months and they hit the port and do you think those men were thinking about racial purity? PLEASE.

Lol.

Lurking in there is the sexual lack of purity of the male gender. Forever and ever.

[FiveofSwords]

You are confusing phenotype and genotype.



Yes, there are genetic clusters.

And as your evidence shows, these clusters are arbitrary, variable, and cannot be organized into distinct subgroups.

Therefore, you are arguing that race is arbitrary, variable, and cannot be organized into distinct subgroups.

Which makes sense. since race is a social construct.

I am not confusing genotype and phenotype. Do you believe that Morgan freeman kinky hair comes from a heritable gene or not? Is this perhaps a gene he shares with Oprah Winfrey and George Floyd? Or do you think this kinky hair is just a social construct and unrelated to genrtics...please explain.

The only sense that anything is 'arbitrary' about categorizing race is exactly the same problem all taxonomy has. We don't actually need to have the 'mammal' label, for example. If we wanted we could just combine mammals and birds and make some new label. That is arbitrary. But it is the categorization focus thst is arbitrary, not whether mammals exist or not. Of course a dog exists and has certain traits in common with a cat and a mouse...this is true whether or not we use a 'mammal' category.

I honestly think that taxonomy is just confusing you because even thinking about such things requires greater philosophical maturity than you are capable of. So you just prefer saying that race doesn't exist for mysterious reasons because everything is mysterious. That means you can dismiss anyone with concerns about the white race.. but you use it tactically. Somehow you will 'remember' that race exists when black people jave concerns about black people. It is all just a game and it is very stupid. It only works on people like you.

[Potemkin]

I am not confusing genotype and phenotype. Do you believe that Morgan freeman kinky hair comes from a heritable gene or not? Is this perhaps a gene he shares with Oprah Winfrey and George Floyd? Or do you think this kinky hair is just a social construct and unrelated to genrtics...please explain.

Having kinky hair does not define anyone as belonging to a specific ‘race’.

The only sense that anything is 'arbitrary' about categorizing race is exactly the same problem all taxonomy has. We don't actually need to have the 'mammal' label, for example. If we wanted we could just combine mammals and birds and make some new label. That is arbitrary. But it is the categorization focus thst is arbitrary, not whether mammals exist or not. Of course a dog exists and has certain traits in common with a cat and a mouse...this is true whether or not we use a 'mammal' category.

Taxonomy is indeed arbitrary, but cladistic analysis isn’t. A clade is not an arbitrary grouping of animals, but represents a real thing - an organism and all of its descendants. In fact, cladistic analysis is the only non-arbitrary way of classifying organisms, which is why it’s almost exclusively used nowadays.

I honestly think that taxonomy is just confusing you because even thinking about such things requires greater philosophical maturity than you are capable of. So you just prefer saying that race doesn't exist for mysterious reasons because everything is mysterious. That means you can dismiss anyone with concerns about the white race.. but you use it tactically. Somehow you will 'remember' that race exists when black people jave concerns about black people. It is all just a game and it is very stupid. It only works on people like you.

This is because ‘race’ is a social construct - it is employed for social reasons in a rather arbitrary manner by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.

[ingliz]

@FiveofSwords

What a professor of biological anthropology has to say ...

Recent studies reveal that the variation between any two individuals is small, on the order of one single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), or single letter change in our DNA, per 1,000. That means that racial categorization could, at most, relate to 6 per cent (Lewontin,1972) of the variation found in 1 in 1,000 SNPs. A study by Ning Yu and colleagues places the overall difference more precisely at 0.88 per 1,000.

Simply put, race fails to explain much.

Genetic variation across Europe and Asia, the Americas and Australia is essentially a subset of the genetic variation in Africa. If genetic variation were a set of Russian nesting dolls, all the other continental dolls would fit into the African doll.

[Tainari88]

Having kinky hair does not define anyone as belonging to a specific ‘race’.


Taxonomy is indeed arbitrary, but cladistic analysis isn’t. A clade is not an arbitrary grouping of animals, but represents a real thing - an organism and all of its descendants. In fact, cladistic analysis is the only non-arbitrary way of classifying organisms, which is why it’s almost exclusively used nowadays.


This is because ‘race’ is a social construct - it is employed for social reasons in a rather arbitrary manner by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.

The reason it matters to the National Socialists is because they want to build a political movement and seize power from the enemy as they kill off the enemy based on this fiction that all white race people have to have a sense of destiny and racial solidarity to create some ideal white race only society. A Master Race where the issues with human beings are eliminated because the threat is DIFFERENCE.

Or some such shitty theory.

He did not know about clades because he said in another bad post to another poster that science is just observation. That is all. What you see with your eyeballs is truth.

Lol. Man, that idea of what science is was thrown out a long long time ago.

They want to classify people for intelligence, cognition, abilities according to race. A specific Aryan or Nordic race that is the ideal in the Gunther document given out to the Hitler Youth. You have the ideal and then you have the not ideal. Everyone who is not that race.

The problem then is how to eliminate the threat of other races with other tendencies that might destroy your ideal breeding society? That is what got the Nazis into creating genetic experiments based on California Eugenic racist stuff from the USA, who also loved the idea of Master Race stuff.

Mass sterilizations of people with genetic defects, mental illness problems, people with bipolar disorder, people who had some inherited diseases. They became mass murderers in their quest for genetic perfection.

Then they wonder why so many of their own 'European' based race do not want to join them. Why would anyone want to join a sect dedicated to mass murderng people due to defect or having some percentage of genes that is not considered racially pure enough? Most of them are losers. They never have PhDs from some heavy duty scientific backgrounds. None of them. Most of them have a hard time getting through college. Their only claim to fame is being white and screaming about white genocide in a nation that is majority white and in a nation with jobs and money flowing compared to nations who have serious problems with infrastructure and in which free community college does not exist.

They have it easy and all the advantages but want to say they are victims and moan because they do not want to admit that the reason the Nazis are not a majority mainstream party in the USA is its PAST is terrible. Crimes galore. Well documented. Ovens, gas chambers, torture, starvation, labor camps forced, killing children, babies, experimenting on twins, experimenting on people using unethical methods. Being cruel, being inhumane, and being invaders looking for land they could occupy because again Germany did not have all the resources to fulfill their ambitions by staying within their sphere. They wanted hypercolonialism and they wanted to control and have power. Kill off the competition. And take over.

Ruthless and ultimately failed at every goal.

They created the lack of enthusiasm for their political philosophy. Race does not magically equate solidarity and altruism.

It never occurs to them that caring, and respect, sharing and working together with many and not being discriminatory and instead being accepting of difference wins you a lot more support over time. In most human societies. Variation is never going away. Your attitude towards differences is or should be about being accepting. Not rejecting people over shit they have no control over like their outward appearance.

[FiveofSwords]

Having kinky hair does not define anyone as belonging to a specific ‘race’.


Taxonomy is indeed arbitrary, but cladistic analysis isn’t. A clade is not an arbitrary grouping of animals, but represents a real thing - an organism and all of its descendants. In fact, cladistic analysis is the only non-arbitrary way of classifying organisms, which is why it’s almost exclusively used nowadays.


This is because ‘race’ is a social construct - it is employed for social reasons in a rather arbitrary manner by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.

I did not say that having kinky hair is what makes people black. I said black people have kinky hair. This is also genetic, not a social construct

[Wellsy]

Taxonomy is indeed arbitrary, but cladistic analysis isn’t. A clade is not an arbitrary grouping of animals, but represents a real thing - an organism and all of its descendants. In fact, cladistic analysis is the only non-arbitrary way of classifying organisms, which is why it’s almost exclusively used nowadays.

Basically, the shift from Linnaeus taxonomy of grouping based on appearences to Darwin's natural selection that at least works to track the real world lineage between species.

We must all work through the appearences of things, but the issue is what is essential or inessential in that.
In even trying to mix Linnaeus taxonomy into modern evolutionary theory might still produce odd results if trying to work from similiar appearences to some speculated common ancestor.
It also points to inadequacy of such an approach as being arbitrary and abstract rather than reflecting concepts with objectivity as it doesn't follow the causal explanation of a thing.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/universal.htm

The way that the word’s interpretation has been proclaimed as “singularly correct” in the tradition of formal logic makes this impossible; in other words, no such “common feature” in the definition of either meaning of the term “common” can be discovered. It is clear nevertheless, and even to neo-positivists, the staunchest supporters of the above tradition, that in the latter case, just as in so many others, we are dealing with relative words, much like human relatives, which may have nothing in common, and still bear – with equal right – the same family name.

Such a relationship between the terms of the “natural language” was recorded by L. Wittgenstein as fairly typical: Churchill-A has with Churchill-B the family likenesses a, b, c; Churchill-B shares with Churchill-C the features b, c, d; Churchill-D has as few as one single feature in “common” with Churchill-A while Churchill-E and Churchill-A have not even one feature, nothing whatever in common, except their name, and their common ancestor, we should add.

In this case it is crystal-clear that the character of the common ancestor and the founder of the Churchill family will be hard to reconstruct by abstracting those – and only those – “common features” which were genetically conserved by all his descendants. These common features are simply non-existent. Meanwhile the common name, the proof of the common origin, is there.

Much the same is true of the very term “common.” The original meaning of the word cannot be reconstructed through a purely formal juncture of “features” into one family, or bringing into one “kin” all descendant terms, for, by way of expanding the analogy, Churchill-Alpha would have to be portrayed as an individual both fair- and dark-haired (= not fair-haired); big and little; snub- and hook-nosed and so on.

But this is where the analogy ends up in all likelihood, for at the sources of the kin-family there are always two genetical lines, so that Churchill-Alpha is not to blame for more than 50 per cent of the family likenesses in his direct descendants. Which ones in particular? That is the question which purely formal means will perhaps fail to answer.

The situation with relative terms is somewhat different. For the ancestor, as a rule, hardly ever dies but continues his life side-by-side with his descendants, as does an individual with other individuals; the question here boils down to finding out, among the available particular individuals, the one who preceded in birth all the others and was able, therefore, to give birth to the rest. This comes about without any contribution on the part of the second, extraneous genetical line and one which could be held responsible for the emergence of “common features” incompatible in any one person; and so their relation to one another will be that of a purely logical negation.

Among the “features” of the common ancestor who continues alive amidst his posteriors, one is bound to suggest an ability to generate something contrary to himself – the ability to generate both, a big man (relative to himself) and, on the contrary, a little man (again relative to himself). Logically, this leads one to infer that the “common ancestor” may well be visualized as an individual of medium height, with a straight nose and light grey hair, i.e., one who “combines,” even though potentially, contrasting definitions; or who contains inside himself as though in a state of solution or mixture – this trait and that, its direct opposite. Thus, grey color can be easily thought of as a mixture of black and white, i.e., as black and white simultaneously, in the same person, and at the same time to boot. There is virtually nothing here incompatible with the “good sense” which positivists like to recruit as their ally in their attacks against dialectical logic.

If one has such an approach, it seems that all our concepts are just creations of the mind with no inherent connection to reality.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra1f.htm

The problem of the relation of the universal to the individual arises in this case not only and not so much as the problem of the relation of mental abstraction to the sensually given objective reality but as the problem of the relation of sensually given facts to other sensually given facts, as the object’s internal relation to the object itself, the relation of its different aspects to one another, as the problem of internal differentiation of objective concreteness within itself. On this basis and as a consequence of it, it arises as the problem of the relation between the concepts expressing in this connection the objective articulated concreteness.

To determine whether the abstract universal is extracted correctly or incorrectly, one should see whether it comprehends directly, through simple formal abstraction, each particular and individual fact without exception. If it does not, then we are wrong in considering a given notion as universal.

The situation is different in the case of the relation of the concrete universal concept to the sensually given diversity of particular and individual facts. To find out whether a given concept has revealed a universal definition of the object or a non-universal one, one should undertake a much more complex and meaningful analysis. In this case one should ask oneself the question whether the particular phenomenon directly expressed in it is at the same time the universal genetic basis from the development of which all other, just as particular, phenomena of the given concrete system may be understood in their necessity.

Is the act of production of labour implements that kind of social reality from which all other human traits may be deduced in their necessity, or is it not? The answer to this question determines the logical characterisation of the concept as a universal or non-universal one. Concrete analysis of the content of the concept yields in this case an affirmative answer.

Analysis of the same concept from the standpoint of the abstract logic of the intellect yields a negative answer. The overwhelming majority of beings that are undoubtedly individual representatives of the human race do not directly conform to this definition. From the standpoint of old non-dialectical logic this concept is too concrete to be justified as a universal one. In the logic of Marx, however, this concept is genuinely universal exactly because it directly reflects the factual objective basis of all the other traits of man which have developed out of this basis factually, historically, the concrete universal basis of anything that is human.

In other words, the question of the universal character of a concept is transferred to another sphere, that of the study of the real process of development. The developmental approach becomes thereby the approach of logic. This approach also determines the proposition of materialist dialectics to the effect that the concept should not express the abstractly universal but rather that universal which, according to Lenin’s apt formula, embodies in itself the richness of the particular, the individual, the single, being the concrete universal.

[Tainari88]

@Potemkin and @ingliz have we discussed what the moral foundation is for your average human being? Lol.


That is the topic eh? This is what moral foundations are about:

https://moralfoundations.org/

Care: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies the virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

Fairness: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It underlies the virtues of justice and rights.

Loyalty: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all and all for one.” It underlies the virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group.

Authority: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to prestigious authority figures and respect for traditions.

Purity: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble, and more “natural” way (often present in religious narratives). This foundation underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple that can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions). It underlies the virtues of self-discipline, self-improvement, naturalness, and spirituality.

In our original conception, the Fairness foundation was skewed toward concerns about equality, which politically left-leaning individuals more strongly endorse in different cultures. In 2011, based on new data, we emphasized proportionality, which is often endorsed by everyone, but is slightly more strongly endorsed by politically right-leaning people. In 2023, based on a decade of empirical work, our team led by Mohammad Atari decided to split the Fairness foundation into Equality and Proportionality, making the case for six main foundations (Atari et al., 2023):

Equality: In our theoretical reformulation of MFT in 2023, we defined Equality as “Intuitions about equal treatment and equal outcome for individuals.”

Proportionality: In our theoretical reformulation of MFT in 2023, we defined Proportionality as “Intuitions about individuals getting rewarded in proportion to their merit or contribution.”

Since MFT was first described in 2004 (Haidt & Joseph, 2004), we have tried to identify the candidate foundations for which the empirical evidence was strongest. We proposed five criteria for foundationhood (Graham et al., 2013): (a) being common in third-party normative judgments; (b) automatic affective evaluations; (c) being culturally widespread though not necessarily universal; (d) evidence of innate preparedness; and (e) a robust pre-existing evolutionary model. We think there are several other very good candidates for “foundationhood,” especially:

Liberty: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor. In 2012, we reported some preliminary work on this potential foundation, on the psychology of libertarianism and liberty (Iyer et al., 2012).

Honor: This foundation is about one’s self-worth based on their reputation and assessment of what others think. In 2020, we made the case that honor (more accurately, “Qeirat” in Middle Eastern cultures) can be an additional foundation wherein a man is expected to protect his kin and family, and under some circumstances, be ready to violently retaliate against anyone who insults his family’s reputation (Atari et al., 2020).

Ownership: This foundation has been on the radar of moral psychologists for a long time, and yet it remains one of the least studied constructs in this literature. In 2013, we maintained the importance of ownership as an additional foundation.Ownership intuitions are “fast” and it is ubiquitous in human societies. Human intuitions about ownership have obvious parallels in other animals, and respect for property is an evolutionarily stable strategy. In 2023, we argued that Ownership may meet the entire set of criteria to be an additional foundation (Atari & Haidt, 2023).

The theory was first developed from a simultaneous review of current evolutionary thinking about morality and cross-cultural research on virtues. The theory is an extension of Richard Shweder’s theory of the “three ethics” commonly used around the world when people talk about morality (Shweder et al., 1997.) The theory was also strongly influenced by Alan Fiske’s relational models theory (see Rai & Fiske, 2011)

To learn more about MFT:

For the most complete and accessible overview of the theory, read The Righteous Mind.
If you just want to read about the foundations themselves, here is Chapter 7 of The Righteous Mind.
For a more academic overview of the theory, including the criteria for calling something a “foundation,” see the review paper by Graham et al. (2013).
To see all of our academic articles, visit our Publications page
To get an overview of MFT and how it applies to American politics, watch the videos below (or view them here and here if they don’t play below)

[FiveofSwords]

@FiveofSwords

What a professor of biological anthropology has to say ...

Recent studies reveal that the variation between any two individuals is small, on the order of one single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), or single letter change in our DNA, per 1,000. That means that racial categorization could, at most, relate to 6 per cent (Lewontin,1972) of the variation found in 1 in 1,000 SNPs. A study by Ning Yu and colleagues places the overall difference more precisely at 0.88 per 1,000.

Simply put, race fails to explain much.

Genetic variation across Europe and Asia, the Americas and Australia is essentially a subset of the genetic variation in Africa. If genetic variation were a set of Russian nesting dolls, all the other continental dolls would fit into the African doll.

You are trying to tell me the genetic variation among black people while simultaneously trying to say that race is just a social construct. This is just a contradiction. If there is no genetic reality behind the category 'black person' then you cannot tell me anything about the variation.

[FiveofSwords]

@FiveofSwords

What a professor of biological anthropology has to say ...

Recent studies reveal that the variation between any two individuals is small, on the order of one single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), or single letter change in our DNA, per 1,000. That means that racial categorization could, at most, relate to 6 per cent (Lewontin,1972) of the variation found in 1 in 1,000 SNPs. A study by Ning Yu and colleagues places the overall difference more precisely at 0.88 per 1,000.

Simply put, race fails to explain much.

Genetic variation across Europe and Asia, the Americas and Australia is essentially a subset of the genetic variation in Africa. If genetic variation were a set of Russian nesting dolls, all the other continental dolls would fit into the African doll.

Anthropologists tend to be owned by a political agenda and are rarely faithful to any objective scirnce.. I think that anything an anthropologist says should be dismissed. In fact, it has been demonstrated that Franz boas, for example, was just lying and making up his data.

Regardless, I have no reason to argue with someone who claims the variation among humans is 'small. Small could mean anything actually. The difference between a human and a chimpanzee is also quite small. But it is somehow large enough that people can identify a chimpanzee from a human by looking at them. The fact that the difference between humans and chimpanzees is small does not imply that it woukd be wise to pick a chimpanzee to rule the usa.

But if I say that there are genetic differences between white peopleand black people...and you disagree eith me...then you are not allowed to then talk about how the differences are 'small. You have to be consistent and say the differences are zero. Black people do not have different genetics that give them black skin, flat noses, kinky hair, etc. None of those things are genetic, according to you.

You are stuck in that position until you finally grant the fact that there do exist genetic differences. So stop jumping ahead of yourself.

[Rancid]

@FiveofSwords, when do you plan to call for a race war?

[FiveofSwords]

@FiveofSwords, when do you plan to call for a race war?

I think it is rather obvious that we are already in one. What I call for is rather irrelevant.

[Pants-of-dog]

I am not confusing genotype and phenotype. Do you believe that Morgan freeman kinky hair comes from a heritable gene or not? Is this perhaps a gene he shares with Oprah Winfrey and George Floyd? Or do you think this kinky hair is just a social construct and unrelated to genrtics...please explain.

The only sense that anything is 'arbitrary' about categorizing race is exactly the same problem all taxonomy has. We don't actually need to have the 'mammal' label, for example. If we wanted we could just combine mammals and birds and make some new label. That is arbitrary. But it is the categorization focus thst is arbitrary, not whether mammals exist or not. Of course a dog exists and has certain traits in common with a cat and a mouse...this is true whether or not we use a 'mammal' category.

I honestly think that taxonomy is just confusing you because even thinking about such things requires greater philosophical maturity than you are capable of. So you just prefer saying that race doesn't exist for mysterious reasons because everything is mysterious. That means you can dismiss anyone with concerns about the white race.. but you use it tactically. Somehow you will 'remember' that race exists when black people jave concerns about black people. It is all just a game and it is very stupid. It only works on people like you.

You looked at Morgan Freeman’s phenotype.

Form that, you arbitrarily selected several variables: dark skin and kinky hair, for example.

Despite the fact that dark skin and kinky hair are also associated with other “races”, you decided that these variable traits are defining features of being “Black”.

The reason you did os is because you and a whole bunch of other people in your society did the same thing and you all agreed that this would be considered real and true. This is what we call a social construct.