Mildly Infuriating
Home to all things "Mildly Infuriating" Not infuriating, not enraging. Mildly Infuriating. All posts should reflect that.
I want my day mildly ruined, not completely ruined. Please remember to refrain from reposting old content. If you post a post from reddit it is good practice to include a link and credit the OP. I'm not about stealing content!
It's just good to get something in this website for casual viewing whilst refreshing original content is added overtime.
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means: -No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
7. Content should match the theme of this community.
-Content should be Mildly infuriating.
-At this time we permit content that is infuriating until an infuriating community is made available.
...
8. Reposting of Reddit content is permitted, try to credit the OC.
-Please consider crediting the OC when reposting content. A name of the user or a link to the original post is sufficient.
...
...
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
Reach out to LillianVS for inclusion on the sidebar.
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules.
view the rest of the comments
It's a social construct that didn't exist until the 1600s, but it's a real social construct.
Outside America and other former plantation economies it can be a bit different, and less in-your-face, but it's almost always still there.
It's not purely a social construct, I hate this stupid idea. It's a phenotype. Babies do not have a randomized skin color at birth, it depends on their ancestry. Calling that a "social construct" is arguably racist in itself.
Skin colour is a complete continuum, and one which doesn't very in any uniform way based on geography, aside from the darkest people coming recently from Africa.
By this logic, ear size is a race.
Yes! You're getting it. Ear size is an aspect of race. As is hair texture and height and all the other inheritable phenotypes. Skin color is just the most visibly obvious one.
Well, words can mean whatever you want, but usually race refers to the discrete-ish social categories that have been constructed based roughly on specific phenotypes. For example Black people were a discrete legal category for most of America's history, and were nominally 3/5 of a person and treated as much less. Now, they have equal legal rights on paper, but the category remains informally.
That's an academic ivory tower definition that they invented and no one else uses. Even the blatant racists who sorted races into these social categories did so based on physical appearance. You didn't see any dark skin people allowed to use facilities that said "whites only".
It's based on physical appearance, which is based on phenotype.
That's what I said!
THAT is not a race. That is treatment of a race. That is 100% a social construct.
Race itself is a real biological thing that exists. Not a pure social construct.
Stop conflating them.
I really don't think most people use this definition. Like, would you say "what race are you" is a grammatically incorrect question, then? And what about "hispanic" as a racial descriptor? How do you be hispanic-er than someone else?
No? That question is totally in line with the definition of race I gave.
The census says "hispanic" is an ethnicity rather than a race. I disagree; I think that's splitting hairs.
I'm 1/4 Hispanic. My mom was half Hispanic (Mexican mother, European father...not saying the country = race before you get your panties in a twist, it's just a fucking shorthand, everyone knows that most Mexicans are Hispanic and most Europeans are not). My mom is more Hispanic than me. Fairly simple concept.
Right, so what's the Hispanic phenotype? As far as anyone can tell it's a language, which isn't a phenotype, and until someone brown opens their mouth they could just as easily be an Arab or a particularly tawny Italian. Or are Arabs Hispanic, too?
Phenotypically? Yes, they're very close. The whole Mediterranean is which shouldn't be terribly surprising. I guess the reason USians use "Hispanic" and not "Greek" is because Mexico speaks Spanish.
The reason Europeans can reliably tell Sicilians and Arabs apart is not because of phenotype, but because Arabs tend to look like they visit the barber five times a day. Probably because they do.
Yeah, but to be a phenotype, and not just a social construct based partially on a phenotype, it has to go the other way. If having the phenotype isn't enough on it's own to guarantee a race, it's not just about phenotypes. Kind of like how having wheels doesn't make a suitcase a car.
(Also, FWIW Spaniards are mostly pale-skinned - I know because I've actually been there. The brown in Latin America comes from admixture with other local and imported populations)
No category is absolute. By your logic, it's impossible to call anything a car, because cars have wheels but suitcases ALSO have wheels, therefore the entire idea that cars exist is just a made up social construct.
Or for a less ridiculous example: is a battery-powered bicycle actually an electric moped? Or the ever classic, is a hotdog a sandwich? We can discuss these questions without questioning the validity of concepts such as bicycles, mopeds, hotdogs and sandwiches. Categories exist. They are useful descriptors despite the existence of edge cases and blurry boundaries.
And we're back!
Yes, categories are useful but (outside of mathematics) imprecise. A car needs to be motorised and able to carry at least one passenger. Arguably, it also needs at least 4 wheels or to be 3-wheeled and enclosed, to include Reliant Robins. There’s still probably edge cases, but it’s fair to say it’s a subset of wheeled objects that generally applies and is needed both in economics and engineering, as well as everyday life.
Racial categories aren’t useful for science, though. Did you know, for example, that most human genetic variety occurs within Africa, because of the common out-of-Africa ancestry everyone else has? Phenotypically, I have less information, but you have tiny pygmies as well as the Maasi (with an average male height of 6’4), and every skin colour from Sudanese literal black to Egyptian/Berber olive, so I’m guessing it’s the same.
Maybe that’s the point of contention here. They’re relevant socially, but biology has moved on.
Au contraire
https://www.healthline.com/health/sickle-cell-anemia-black-people
That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there's many other examples. Health care for Black vs white vs Asian etc is slightly different. And it's not due to social conditions alone - the same mechanisms that made people whose predominant ancestry is sub-Saharan African have darker skin, also caused this decreased resistance to sickle cell anemia.
Another one that just came to me was lactose intolerance. White people have higher tolerance for lactose, so a milk-heavy diet is worse for other races.
Ignoring race is not only problematic societally, but is bad science.
Yeah, Healthline is a source for laymen. That information is provided that way because people won't know what Y-DNA haplogroup they're in, but will generally know if they're considered black. There's public health research by race too, but again that's related to social outcomes and data availability.
Except the other highly tolerant cluster is West Africans, with smaller ones in places like Pakistan and Arabia.
Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the scientific consensus:
And here's what the World Medical Association has to say:
I tried to find something from the AMA, but it's so well established all the recent stuff takes the non-biological nature of race as a granted, and talks more about the ethics of handling the social categories.
Yeah but it's still obvious bullshit. Bad science is bad science no matter what level of authority does it.
So? Instead of "race" you're saying "Y-DNA Halogroup". Performative bullshit just to avoid the fact that race is real. You could call it "Mario Kart" instead of race, it's still the same damn thing and it's still real.
According to who? At this point unless you're a genetics expert yourself it's starting to sound like a conspiracy theory.
Y-DNA haplogroups in no way correspond to race. They look a bit like the lactose map: Interesting, and unrelated to the traditional social categorisations. Pretty much all genetic maps are like that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup
That's race! That's the definition of race! Fucking university types just don't like the word!
They are describing race! It's super fucking obvious if you get rid of whatever white guilt stupidity makes you get the ick when you hear the word "race".
You'll notice letters appear more than once, and there's more than one letter for every group. Also, that's mtDNA, and if you actually cared about biology you'd know that's only one type on DNA, inherited one way, and you can completely mix and match with the Y haplogroups.
I get it, you hate wokes. I don't really think cultural disgruntlement is a good basis for defining "science", though. I suspect there's no more useful information to exchange here.
I hate people who push bad science in service to an agenda. Especially when it's doublethink levels of blatantly, obviously wrong bad science.
And I just don't think that's happening. Science moved away from race long before it was cool. The first steps happened over a century ago; Hitler was already doing pseudoscience. (I guess there is actually something to add)
Science moved away from phrenology, but we're not going around claiming that skulls are a social construct. It's ridiculous. Just because something has been misused by bigots, doesn't mean we should pretend the thing doesn't exist.
Phrenological propensities ~~are~~ were a social construct. Skulls and variation within them exist. Ditto for human biological variation in other things. You can call that race, but nobody else thinks of Senogambia when you say "the milk drinking race", and words don't have fixed meanings independent of how they're understood.
Sorry if I came off as a little abrasive there, that wasn't my intention, I was basically just saying we should agree to disagree at some point.
I'm afraid I can't settle for that. This idea that race is some made up thing is offensive to me. I have to correct people who say they agree with it.
There it is. That's actually what this entire discussion turns on, every time I have it. First, I have to get the other person to admit that inherited physical characteristics exist, which can be a chore for some people. Then, when they admit that, they say some variation of "but that's not the definition of race / that's not what people mean when they say race".
This is actually the more important thing that you have to shake loose of. Certain academic institutions claim this, but they are overwhelmingly wrong. When people talk about race, they do not talk about some vague abstraction. They almost always are referring to specific inherited characteristics usually tied to the physical place a person's ancestral group is from.
The irony is, the only people who could be operating under the delusion that when people talk about race they're referring to some vague social thing are people who don't interact with a lot of different people. This idea that race is a social construct is quarantined to one very specific social stratum, because anyone who gets more worldly experience very quickly realizes it's bunk.
It's pretty intuitive when once you realize it. It's very basic, very "what you see is what you get". When people talk about race, they talk about the very surface-level, most obvious, simplest definition. No deeper meaning. People are not subconsciously philosophizing. People are not closet racial supremacists. They're just describing what they see. "Inherited physical characteristics" is the simplest definition of race, and trying to find some deeper meaning of the term is a red herring.
To go back to the phrenology example, the existence of race does not require bigotry. Which is probably why academia came up with this absurd idea, they were scared of bigotry. The existence of skulls does not require phrenology to be true. It's bunk, and it's racist.
Racism is bullshit.
Race exists.
Well then, I guess I break this off unilaterally at some point. Debate doesn't work, you can't browbeat someone into believing something (well, on soft topics anyway, you can with math). Most people just know that, I had to learn the hard way. Maybe you will eventually too.
I personally am neither rich nor fancy. I live in the country; I've never lived anywhere else as an adult. Believe me, specific races are a real thing where I live, and probably in the city too. It's not some thing made up by a spooky cabal of academics. It's strange you could even think that, with all the evidence from recent history to the contrary, including laws referencing the separate races, and how much mixing of them was acceptable. You could argue I'm not worldly enough, but my family is rather international, which should count for something. I'm kinda academic now, but that's because I just was born an egghead. If it's class that's the issue, I'm not in the picture.
Debate is for the audience, not for your opponent.
I don't think the audience cares either, past a point. The shit that gets a response is factual, and getting facts out is, along with basic respect for you, the reason I'm here.
Upvote/downvote totals matter. Seeing a ton of push back in the comments matters.
Well, you pushed, and I pushed. We're deep in enough most people have stopped reading anyway. Goodbye, nice chatting with you.
Fair enough, have a great day.