All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Vakanai]

There was something else Nazis did to LGBTQ+ people, which is relevant for any claim that this is how Republicans are acting.

One doesn't have to actively be committing genocide, placing their fellow human beings into giant ovens as a Final Solution to be like the Nazis. At least I hope that it doesn't have to come to that to make comparisons. Just representing the same kind of hate and bigotry the Nazis were about and seeking to create policies intended to oppress the people that you hate are enough to draw the parallels. If we have to wait until we're in the middle of another actual Holocaust to raise alarm bells, then what is even the point of teaching history? We point out similarities to the Nazis, the Soviet Union, the KKK, and other various monsters of history so that we hopefully never have to repeat this history.

[Gray Lensman]

One doesn't have to actively be committing genocide, placing their fellow human beings into giant ovens as a Final Solution to be like the Nazis. At least I hope that it doesn't have to come to that to make comparisons. Just representing the same kind of hate and bigotry the Nazis were about and seeking to create policies intended to oppress the people that you hate are enough to draw the parallels. If we have to wait until we're in the middle of another actual Holocaust to raise alarm bells, then what is even the point of teaching history? We point out similarities to the Nazis, the Soviet Union, the KKK, and other various monsters of history so that we hopefully never have to repeat this history.

This. So many people forget that the Nazis didn't start by tossing people into gas chambers, they started with a long period of othering.

[CaptainEurope]

This is making headlines here:

German court rules that Twitter has to remove hate speech or be fined €250K per case

After a long trial, a German court has ruled that Twitter has to delete illegal hate speech and defamatory messages from the platform or face hefty fines. The case was brought in part by local group HateAid following the repeated abuse of a local commissioner in Baden-Württemberg on the platform.

According to the news site Hessenschau, a regional court in Frankfurt ruled that if a false or defamatory tweet about someone breaks German law, has been shared more than ten times, and is reported to Twitter, the platform has to remove it within 24 hours and prevent it from being reposted, or face a fine of 250,000 euros per case.

Following mass firings from their overseas offices and Twitter leadership's apparent focus on pending legal challenges in the United States, it's unclear if the company intends to appeal the decision.

The "local commissioner" is actual the regional envoy to fight antisemitism in the state of BW, and he had been repeatedly (you might want to sit down for this) been falsely accused on twitter of being the REAL antisemite and a pedophile, to boot.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

This is making headlines here:

German court rules that Twitter has to remove hate speech or be fined €250K per case



The "local commissioner" is actual the regional envoy to fight antisemitism in the state of BW, and he had been repeatedly (you might want to sit down for this) been falsely accused on twitter of being the REAL antisemite and a pedophile, to boot.

That’s $267,648 American. Hardly a small sum depending on the number of cases.

[Kirby101]

That’s $267,648 American. Hardly a small sum depending on the number of cases.

It's more than the monthly rent in some of the buildings they can't pay now.

[Starrius]

In regards to hate speech on twitter and social media


I am going to counter with things that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said and wrote. It is not just his "I have a Dream." and "I have seen the Mountaintop." His speeches also included "The Other America.", "The Three Evils of Society.", "Where Do We Go From Here." which occurred in his last years before he was murdered before going on 'The Poor People's Campaign.'

I will twit things about Jesus supposedly said according to the Bible.

One was "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." which I believe that majority of Christians have failed to practice throughout history

[Starrius]

If we want to get rid of hatred, bigotry, discrimination of people of different ethnic backgrounds, we need to educate about history and science of us Homo Sapiens.



The following AABA Statement on Race & Racism was written by the AABA subcommittee tasked with revising the previous AABA statement on the Biological Aspects of Race that was published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 101, pp 569-570, 1996. The Committee on Diversity (COD) subcommittee was comprised of (in alpha order): Rebecca Ackermann, Sheela Athreya, Deborah Bolnick, Agustín Fuentes (chair), Tina Lasisi, Sang-Hee Lee, Shay-Akil McLean, and Robin Nelson.
The statement was unanimously accepted by the AABA Executive Committee at its meeting on March 27, 2019 at the 88th Annual Meeting in Cleveland, Ohio.
This statement can be downloaded as a PDF file here.
https://bioanth.org/documents/199/AA...March_2019.pdf


Executive Summary: AABA Statement on Race and Racism

Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination. It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination. Because of that, over the last five centuries, race has become a social reality that structures societies and how we experience the world. In this regard, race is real, as is racism, and both have real biological consequences.

Humans share the vast majority (99.9%) of our DNA in common. Individuals nevertheless exhibit substantial genetic and phenotypic variability. Genome/environment interactions, local and regional biological changes through time, and genetic exchange among populations have produced the biological diversity we see in humans today. Notably, variants are not distributed across our species in a manner that maps clearly onto socially-recognized racial groups. This is true even for aspects of human variation that we frequently emphasize in discussions of race, such as facial features, skin color and hair type. No group of people is, or ever has been, biologically homogeneous or “pure.” Furthermore, human populations are not — and never have been — biologically discrete, truly isolated, or fixed.
While race does not accurately represent the patterns of human biological diversity, an abundance of scientific research demonstrates that racism, prejudice against someone because of their race and a belief in the inherent superiority and inferiority of different racial groups, affects our biology, health, and well-being. This means that race, while not a scientifically accurate biological concept, can have important biological consequences because of the effects of racism. The belief in races as a natural aspect of human biology and the institutional and structural inequities (racism) that have emerged in tandem with such beliefs in European colonial contexts are among the most damaging elements in human societies.

https://bioanth.org/about/position-s...d-racism-2019/

[Starrius]

Black and white races are social constructs that have no scientific basis. If these social constructs weren't created, there would not be any stupid arguments about people being black and white in regards to anything. Human beings are far too diverse to be pinned down to color names. There is a highly great amount of diversity in Africa alone. Africans have the greatest genetic variation. Africa is an extremely diverse continent with over 2,000 ethnic groups. That includes Nigeria with over 400 ethnic groups. These social constructs of races were created out of ignorance. I stopped believing in the social constructs of the black and white races over 7 years ago.


The social constructs of the black and white races and the one drop rule are of White Supremacist ideology which stems from ignorance of human genetics and evolution. 2003 Human Genome Project reported that all us humans are 99.9% genetically similar to each other. There used to be a strong belief in polygenism which posits the view that the human races are of different origins (polygenesis). Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution challenged polygenism. Sub Saharan Africans were thought to have been a different species. They were thought of as being subhumans.




White or Caucasian was not always considered a unified race composed of anyone of European descent.

Whiteness was often considered exclusive to Anglo-Saxon descendants while other European groups were broken into different ethnic categories such as "Celt", "Slavs", "Iberics", and "Hebrews" which were considered separate races from the 1840s to the early 20th Century.

In the 1920s when there was a stemming migration from Europe, different races were subsumed into one category called "whiteness" to shore up a cultural majority against other racial groups and immigrants and this persisted throughout the 20th Century.

Race started as as a marker of kinship, but then we see it shift to become less about familial inheritance and more focused on physical indicators due to the rise of Enlightenment reasoning and labor exploitation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVxAlmAPHec&t=547s

I have been into Genetic Genealogy since 2011. The more I read up on genetics of human populations, the more I am convinced that the social constructs of the black and white races are outdated, racist, and stupid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3BIIIPlahw&t=413s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAWrwexw-To&t=671s

Africans have more genetic variation than anyone else on Earth.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/african...etic-variation


I never believed in the one drop rule which is outdated, racist, and stupid.



According to a 2015 research study, The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States:

From 23andme database

African Americans show average proportions of 73.2% African, 24.0% European, and 0.8% Native American ancestry.

Latinos show average proportions of 65.1% European, 18.0% Native American, and 6.2% African ancestry

European Americans show average proportions of 98.6% European, 0.19% African, and 0.18% Native American ancestry

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25529636/



A little elaboration on history of the social constructs of race

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach divided the human species into five races in 1779, later founded on cranial research (description of human skulls), and called them
the Caucasian race (Europe, the Caucasus, Asia Minor, North Africa and West Asia)
the Mongolian race (East Asia, Central Asia and South Asia)
the Aethiopian race (Sub-Saharan Africa)
the American race (North America and South America)
the Malayan race (Southeast Asia)
These five groups saw some continuity in the various classification schemes of the 19th century, in some cases augmented, e.g. by the Australoid race and the Capoid race in some cases the Mongolian (East Asian) and American collapsed into a single group.

The "three great races" according to Meyers Konversations-Lexikon of 1885–90.
The subtypes are:
Mongoloid race
Caucasoid race
Negroid race

Dravidians and Sinhalese and their classification is described as uncertain
The Mongoloid race sees the widest geographic distribution, including all of the Americas, North Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia, the entire inhabited Arctic while they form most of Central Asia and the Pacific Islands.
Arthur de Gobineau was a successful diplomat for the Second French Empire. He came to believe that race created culture, arguing that distinctions between the three "black", "white", and "yellow" races were natural barriers, and that "race-mixing" breaks those barriers down and leads to chaos. He classified the populations of the Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, North Africa, and southern France as being racially mixed. Gobineau also believed that the white race was superior to all others. He thought it corresponded to the ancient Indo-European culture, also known as "Aryan".
According to his definitions, the people of Spain, most of France, most of Germany, southern and western Iran as well as Switzerland, Austria, Northern Italy, and a large part of Britain, consisted of a degenerative race that arose from miscegenation. Also according to him, the whole population of North India consisted of a yellow race.


In 1939, Charles Coon published The Races of Europe, in which he concluded:
The Caucasian race is of dual origin consisting of Upper Paleolithic (mixture of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals) types and Mediterranean (purely Homo sapiens) types.
The Upper Paleolithic peoples are the truly indigenous peoples of Europe.
Mediterraneans invaded Europe in large numbers during the Neolithic period and settled there.
The racial situation in Europe today may be explained as a mixture of Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans.
When reduced Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans mix, then occurs the process of dinarization, which produces a hybrid with non-intermediate features.
The Caucasian race encompasses the regions of Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, the Near East, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.
The Nordic race is part of the Mediterranean racial stock, being a mixture of Corded and Danubian Mediterraneans.
In 1962, Coon also published The Origin of Races, wherein he offered a definitive statement of the polygenist view. Coon divided humanity into five races and believed that each race had ascended the ladder of human evolution at different rates.
Since Coon followed the traditional methods of physical anthropology, relying on morphological characteristics, and not on the emerging genetics to classify humans, the debate over Origin of Races has been "viewed as the last gasp of an outdated scientific methodology that was soon to be supplanted."

Charles Darwin concluded that the biological similarities between the different races were "too great" for the polygenist thesis to be plausible. He also used the idea of races to argue for the continuity between humans and animals, noting that it would be highly implausible that man should, by mere accident acquire characteristics shared by many apes.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin noted the great difficulty naturalists had in trying to decide how many "races" there actually were:
Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke. This diversity of judgment does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shews that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them.


Charles Darwin's ideas have been discounted by people in his time period because he believed in Abolitionism.
I believe that people that advocate and/or defend the social constructs of the races are part of the problem with racism.


The racial categories Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid are actually considered obsolete racial classification of human beings based on a now-disproven theory of biological race.

[4theEarth]

I'm not sure he's talking laws here.

Just because companies can do something doesn't mean we have to approve it.

It's not illegal for a company to lie, to kick out environmentalists or fans of the Last Jedi or supporters of Womens Soccer and then claim there's no bias, but it's welcome.

Personally, I think it's best for platforms to be honest about what they are. They should be clear what topics are not up for discussion, and where the lines are. It's not illegal to do otherwise, but we don't need to encourage it either.

Thank you for sparing another me another explanation about where I see censorship in private hands. Yes, it isn't illegal and it isn't correct to call them free spaces. What I was intending to point out is the illiberality of supposedly Liberal spaces. Personally, I enjoy dangerous ideas and would like to see them flourish as an expression of our full humanity not some narrow version of it. While it seems that most are convinced here, and I would say in a good-sized chunk of society as well, that there is some kind of slippery slope toward Anarchy/Fascism by letting the most freedom flourish in such a manner I don't believe in being afraid of it to the extent of ceding power to institutions of control in the way we have and continue to increasingly do.

And since people are so ready to reach out to history and not repeating it should be a cautionary tale to them that points to the rise of the Right in Germany was in reaction to the Victory of the Left in the German revolution and al-Qaeda was born out the repression of Qutbism. Keep on truckin.

Americans strength used to be indifference to politics but now that has been turned into a 'moral lapse' to be used for political ends. “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” Those kooky Christians do have a way with words.

[Starrius]

On various social media, I have seen come people use genetic tests to use as analysis and confirmation of particular racial makeup even though the genetic tests aren't for that. Geographical regions have nothing to do with race.

White and black races are social constructs without any scientific basis. Race is a social construct. It has no biological basis. Genetic Research shows that all of us Homo Sapiens are 99.9% similar to each other. The concept of white and black races stem from White Supremacy. Race used to be more about kinship, but then it became about physical traits as the result of labor exploitation and Enlightenment reasoning. I stopped believing in the social constructs of the black and white races over 7 years ago. I never believed in the one drop rule which is outdated, racist, and stupid. Even though I am around half Sub Saharan African, I never identified as black nor African American. I always despised the one drop rule, but I have grown to despise the social constructs of the black and white races.

I am of highly mixed ancestry. Maybe I incarnated as a very mixed person to not only believe that there should be unity and universal love but also to challenge the social constructs of race. Therefore, I don't fit in any of the racial categories. I identified as multiracial/multiethnic for the last 3 US Censuses. I have never believed in the one drop rule. I never identified as black nor African American.



My 23andme Ancestry Composition has me as being

49.7% Sub Saharan African
47.5% European
1.7% Indigenous American
0.6% West Asian
0.3% Chinese/Southeast Asian
0.2% Unassigned


parental inheritance derived from my DNA phasing between my mother's DNA and my DNA

Sub Saharan African: 43.4% is paternal, 6.3% is maternal
European: 43.2% is maternal, 4.3% is paternal
Indigenous American: 1.0% is maternal, 0.7% is paternal
West Asian: 0.6% is maternal
Chinese/Southeast Asian: 0.3% is paternal
Unassigned: 0.2% is maternal


My mother is mostly European (86.3%) with some Sub Saharan African (10.1%) with a little Indigenous American (1.9%). She has peach colored skin that fits anywhere in Europe, and she can tan. My father was mostly Sub Saharan African with some European with a little Indigenous American. He had chocolate brown skin that would fit quite well in the Sub Saharan regions of Africa. My tan skin is like a blending of my parents' skin colors, and I can get as dark as my father if I stay out in the sunlight for a long period of time.



I am so multiethnic that I am related to many of my fellow Americans in many different ways.

My Genealogical family lines
https://diversegenes.blogspot.com/20...ily-lines.html



My Genealogical Ancestry

I am a 4th generation Californian on my mother's side, and my father was a 7th generation Louisianan.


paternal grandfather: African American born in Louisiana

paternal grandmother's father: African American born in Southern Louisiana
other roots in Virginia, South Carolina, and Kentucky

paternal grandmother's mother: African American with English and Acadian (French in what now known as Nova Scotia) born in Southern Louisiana
colonial roots in Louisiana, Virginia, and North Carolina

maternal grandfather's father: American born in California and son of immigrants from Cape Verde (Portuguese and Sub Saharan African)

maternal grandfather's mother: American born in California with a father from Puerto Rico (Spanish, Sub Saharan African, and Taino) and a mother that was a Hawaiian daughter of immigrants from Madeira (Portuguese with Sub Saharan African)

maternal grandmother's father: European American born in Oregon of mainly English ancestry with German, Swiss, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, and Frisian
colonial roots in Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island
other roots in Missouri, Kansas, Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Indiana

maternal grandmother's mother: Ashkenazi Jewish American born in Nebraska with a father born in Romania and a mother born in Courland (in what is now known as Latvia) in Russian Empire


Because of the Transatlantic Slave trade, I don't know anything about my Sub Saharan African ancestry, but I am sure that it's mainly from West Africa. Most of the Sub Saharan African slaves were brought from West Africa. Africa has over 2,000 ethnic groups, and that includes Nigeria having over 400 ethnic groups. My Sub Saharan African ancestry is highly likely to consist of many Sub Saharan African ethnic groups. I don't know what kind of Indigenous American ancestry that I have on my father's side.

[CaptainEurope]

So... I'm usually not a big fan of spreading Trump's online posts around but...
He had announced an announcement... He had... is there a better way to say this? He had let the world know yesterday that he would make a MAJOR announcement today. But his cult like supporters and his critics were speculating: Was he starting his own party? Did he find a Kenyan birth certificate on Hunter Biden's laptop? Was he going to run for Speaker of the House? Had he gotten engaged to someone to replace Melania? Major dirt on DeSantis?

And then we got... pogs?

[AnakinFlair]

For me probably so but for a political leader it is like being disappeared. Governments around the world call them agitators. Iran has executed a second man allegedly involved in the nationwide anti-government protest movement after he was convicted of fatally stabbing two security officials last month, Mizan Online.

First, it's nothing like being 'disappeared'. Trump got kicked off of Twitter, and he STILL won't shut the hell up. Not a day goes by when we don't hear from him via a press release or Truth Social, which of course the news networks like to screencap and show on the 6 o'clock news.

Second, the veracity of that stabbing claim is in doubt. There has been a lot of false information put out by the Iranian government, and the people being executed are getting 20 minute trials.

In the US, only the government can't tell you to shut up.

Private businesses are allowed to have basic standards, which is fitting as they can be held liable for the things that are said or done on their platforms, to a certain degree.

I don't know why you think that responsibility without authority is a good thing, but most would disagree.

And again, they still have a megaphone, just not one developed and built by another company.

*edit*

Trump can make Livejournal or Myspace great again

Doubtful. He couldn't make Twitter great again.

This. So many people forget that the Nazis didn't start by tossing people into gas chambers, they started with a long period of othering.

On a side note- if you are looking for an in-depth look at the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, there is a series of three books by Richard J. Evans- The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War- which gives an in-depth look at the Nazis and what they did. Can't recommend it highly enough.

So... I'm usually not a big fan of spreading Trump's online posts around but...
He had announced an announcement... He had... is there a better way to say this? He had let the world know yesterday that he would make a MAJOR announcement today. But his cult like supporters and his critics were speculating: Was he starting his own party? Did he find a Kenyan birth certificate on Hunter Biden's laptop? Was he going to run for Speaker of the House? Had he gotten engaged to someone to replace Melania? Major dirt on DeSantis?

And then we got... pogs?

Is the entire collection $99, or is each individual card $99?

[Tami]

So... I'm usually not a big fan of spreading Trump's online posts around but...
He had announced an announcement... He had... is there a better way to say this? He had let the world know yesterday that he would make a MAJOR announcement today. But his cult like supporters and his critics were speculating: Was he starting his own party? Did he find a Kenyan birth certificate on Hunter Biden's laptop? Was he going to run for Speaker of the House? Had he gotten engaged to someone to replace Melania? Major dirt on DeSantis?

And then we got... pogs?

<snip>

[CaptainEurope]

Tami, thanks for the laugh! Perfect reaction pic.

I mean... I don't hate many people, but I hate Trump. But right now I'm feeling sorry for him.

[Mister Mets]

This. So many people forget that the Nazis didn't start by tossing people into gas chambers, they started with a long period of othering.

Usually when we say that a group is like the Nazis, the suggestion is that the things they want to do are the things that are unique to the Nazis, and the thing that is unique to the Nazis was putting minorities and political enemies into death camps. Otherwise it's category creep, and makes your argument less effective, since it seems like there isn't much of a sense of perspective.