TranscendentalEmpire

Yeah, I can't tell if that person was intentionally trying to muddy the waters, or if they were really that ignorant. Lemmy seems to be full of oddly specific radicals.

Blackface isn't always about caricature, we see this most frequently in Hollywood, but it wouldn't be the first time I've seen a white person wearing dreadlocks or even a traditional Nigerian outfit.

That's just a person who likes Nigerian culture, it's not someone claiming that they are Nigerian.

Blackface itself is a little rarer, but being tanned to look like someone from the Mediterranean is still very popular

That's just adjusting your skin tone for fashion. If i asked someone getting a tan what they were doing they wouldn't say "I'm becoming Greek".

likewise White-face is an entire make-up industry with various skin lightening products. It's okay to want to make yourself look white but woe betide anyone wants to actually look black, nope, must be a caricature.

Because the cultures whom do that aren't mimicing a different ethnicity, but attempting to lighten their skin because in their own culture light skin typically meant you didn't labour outside.

What do you do if a white kid wants to be a dark elf at a party? Same goes for cosplayers.

Yes, culture identity is the same as playing a fictional game?...

The point Rowling was making, well okay, if it's not acceptable under any circumstances to attempt to change your race, even if you 'feel' like that race, then why is it acceptable to change the gender.

Because the systemic nature of sexism and racism are completely different. You cannot change your "race" because that particular social construct involves actual shared lived experiences particular to each society. Part of belonging to that particular culture is that shared experience. There is no common shared experience that includes every woman in every society. Women of different societies have vastly different shared life experiences depending on their individual cultures.

good faith matters and blackface isn't always caricature

Blackface is definitionally always a caricature....

"Blackface is the practice of non-black performers using burnt cork or theatrical makeup to portray a caricature of black people on stage or in entertainment"

Engaging in black America's culture, or enjoying African culture is not blackface. The fact that you are conflating the two is either very ignorant, or intentionally racist.

The reason I mention prison, is because when someone is convicted of racism, that's generally what happens. Depending on your country blackface can land you in prison.

I think that's quite pedantic, there are very few countries where racism alone will land you in legal troubles, let alone in jail.

Even if we examine the countries where it is punishable by prison time, I doubt the citizens of those countries would "accidentally" dress in black face, and I doubt you could provide me with one incident of someone ending up in jail for "accidental" racism.

Legal issues are Human Decency issues boiled down.

Unquestionably untrue. Legality has no historic basis in morality or ethics, it's simply a means to control/organize social hierarchy.

I think you do have to have intent or some awareness to be racist. Whether you recognize that as racism or not is a different matter.

Your argument is semantic in nature. What's the difference between being a racist and participating in racism? If you are against desegregation because it would negatively your property value, are you a racist? Well what would you typically call someone who is vehemently opposing desegregation?

Is it human decency to want to emulate what you like? I think it is. So I don't mind people wanting to change the color of their skin if that's what they want to do.

Because culture and ethnicity is not just about the color of your skin, It's a shared history of lived experiences. Even if you could genetically change the melanin content of your skin, you did not grow up being treated as a Black American, you did not experience the same institutional systemic racism as the minority group you are aping.

as much as I don't mind them wanting to change their gender, if that's what suits them, great.

Again, this is falsely conflating gender identity with ethnic identity. Women of different cultures have vastly different shared experiences than women of the same culture.

Since race is 100% a social construct much more so than Gender (the difference between the genes are stupidly small).

While race is a human construct, so is law, economics, and government. The implementation of these social constructs creates very real shared experiences that bond a community together in a unique way.

The ethnicity argument is largely one about cultural appropriation: You can't have my skin color because you weren't born with it, you're actually another color, you don't know what it means to be my skin color.

More like, you aren't a part of my culture because my culture is in large part a result of systemic abuse over the color of my skin, and you have never shared that experience.

(Just replace skin color with gender).

Again, gender is not a culture, it's part of of every culture.

You enjoy R&B, love black hair styles, love black skin tones, maybe you believe in your heart you were always black, go right ahead have at. I'm not going to judge you.

I think defining a culture down to pigmentation while ignoring the hundreds of years of systemic abuse is quite upsetting to most minority groups. It really sounds like youre supplementing your idea of your own ethnic identity onto others. Ethnicity tends to be less important to those whom are a part of the ruling ethnic majority, because you haven't experienced what it's like to be a minority. You don't understand what it's like when your ethnicity is how you are judged.

don't think "being upset" should be the bar to determine whether something is racist. I could get upset because someone has decided to put their hair up in a ponytail or something equally silly, this should not give me the right to lock someone up...

I did specify people, not person. I very much doubt there's going to be several members of the public that would be disturbed by the pony tail scenario.

My point was that the person doing the actions that may be interpreted as racist, aren't the person who gets to decide if their actions were racist or not. That is up to the group of people interpreting the actions.

Also, I don't mention prison at all?

So there has to be some kind of intent or even awareness that they might be offending lots of people... an example of this might be wearing coal black face paint with bright red lipstick... otherwise someone who chose the wrong skin tone makeup might have a legal battle on their hands.

You don't have to have awareness or intent to participate in racism. I don't know why you are interpreting this as if it was a legal issue rather than pertaining to human decency?

If you somehow "accidentally" wore enough makeup to look like you were casted in a minstrel show, I'm sure someone would question your actions. If you somehow actually had no idea about the racism implicit in your actions....once informed, any decent person would change their behavior.

I think you are giving a bit too much benefit of doubt to this idea that it's easy to accidentally get mistaken for a racist.

I have similar concerns about "cultural appropriation" as well. Besides, if you're making an honest effort to integrate into that community or accept that community... should you be punished for it?

There's a difference between integrating with a community and claiming that you are a different ethnicity. I don't think that has much to do with cultural appropriation.

actually a fairly solid point and calls out the general hypocrisy. Just because someone paints themselves black and heck calls themselves black and wants to be part of the black community, doesn't make them racist.

I think this up for semantic dispute. While they may not be definitionally racist, they are still partaking in a well known institution of racism. Also, the interpretation of action is more important to determine if something is racist than the person's intent. It doesn't matter if they didn't mean to hurt people's feelings if their actions do in fact cause people to be upset.

I think the issue stems from the fact that black Americans have a fairly unified history of institutional racism that isn't present in something as vague as gender. Have women been historically oppressed in America? Of course, but that discrimination was not measured out consistently throughout different cultural groups.

Rowlings is trying to frame gender identity as something as codified as cultural identity, when that's simply a false conflation. She seems to be crowning herself a representative of all "real" women, as if women throughout history have experienced institutionalized sexism equally.

Imo she is of the same league as "feminist" who fought for suffrage in South Africa in the 30's, the ones who were perfectly happy with black women not being able to vote until the 90's, because they didn't represent the idea of what a woman was to the people in power.

USA is not the most diverse country (its ethnic fractionalization index is below that of Moldova - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-racially-diverse-countries or https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_ethnic_and_cultural_diversity_level

Idk, both of those studies leave a lot to be desired. The first methodology is based on language, which ignores the history of conflict and forms of imperialism that used language as a tool of imperial expansion.

The second study doesn't count any culture that doesn't make up more than 1% of the total population. Which means countries like Papua New Guinea, one of the most ethnic diverse countries in the world, doesn't even register as they don't have a dominant ethnic group.

saying that lower stage communism as marx called it or socialism as we call it today wasnt real communism is meaningless, and at best petty.

The problem is that the Soviet Union couldn't even be correctly defined in Marxist terms to be socialist. Socialism according to Marx was a lower form of communism, one described as a transition from democratic capitalism to communism. The Soviets did not transition from a democratic state to communism, there were no valid democratic election from 38'-89'.

what was said when they said it wasnt real communism was that it wasnt led by communist and that it did not adhere to communist ideals and goals which it did.

I mean I still think there's room for debate depending on who you're talking about. I tend to think that the most simple definitional test whether or not you are adhering to communist ideology is to examine how the means of production is being managed.

Has the state expanded the means of control over the production to the workers in an equitable manor? Is the equity created by the workers being shared to the entire population of workers? By what means do workers negotiate their control over the means of production?

My arguments against Soviet communism is that workers had no meaningful control over the means of production. Groups of workers had no real access to influence the government such as voting as Marx described. The equity created by the workers was not shared equitably throughout the Union, with non ethnic Russians generally acting as a resource to be extracted from.

u would have to be some kind of alien lizard to not understand the context here which is why i know u are arguing in bad faith.

I think the misunderstanding comes from the fact that when Marx was dreaming of a communist nation, he was not thinking it was going to start in Russia. It was an absolute shock when the 1rst country to commit to communism was autocratic Russia instead of Democratic Germany. Meaning a lot of Marxist writing isn't really applicable to the Soviet State, Marx didn't think about revolution occuring in a authoritarian state.

also some idiot lib going around saying that the gdr wasnt real communism because their ancestors had a bad experience with that system (or more likely they were landlords or capitalist and go what they deserved)

Or, they were one of the tens of thousands of leftist that were purged by Beria or Stalin. Pretending that the Soviets only killed landlords is not only academically dishonest, it's harmful to future leftist endeavors. Self criticism is essential to eliminating internal contradictions from arising within the state.

it WAS real communism

I mean, it wasn't, at least not according to the actual people who ran those governments. The USSR and the CCP were/are revolutionary governments, real communism happens when/if the revolutionary governments succeeds and transitions the means of control back to the proletariat.

and ur grandparents probably deserved it.

Really working hard to build those bridges of mutual respect and cooperation I see. This is one of the key reasons the USSR imploded in the first place.

The expansion of Soviet influence happened under the influence of Russian chauvinism, a major contradiction with the more successful maoist ideology today. Instead of allowing communism to be shaped by individual ethnicities or nations they did their best to russify or simply purge the base of power in the country, bolshevists or not.

Stalin and Beria did a whole bunch of purging of leftist to secure their control over the party. If you actually think everyone the Soviets killed deserved it, please go read about the Makhnovist, the Mensheviks, the Georgian bolshevist, hell go read what the Soviets did to the original leftist leader in North Korea.

difference is under capitalism it is constant under socialism it is rare.

Unfortunately that's just not true. Revolutions are highly hierarchical due to their inherent need to react to militant reactionaries. As they begin to solidify their revolution and take over the responsibilities of the state, this hierarchy gets transferred from the the state.

Authoritarian governments are highly efficient, but are extremely hard to get away from once established. Often times the militant leader of the revolution is not the guy you want to be in complete control of the state after establishing a revolutionary government.

Mao was decent enough to accept this after the failure of the cultural revolution, Stalin on the other hand......

if you're a responsible parent that keeps an eye on what their child is doing.

Unfortunately you can't run a society based on how people should behave. That's the entire reason we have a legal system and the means to implement safeguards for our population.

It's probably not that bad, but I wouldn't be surprised just based on anecdotal experience.

I'm a provider at a children's hospital and phones have always been an issue during appointments. Before, it was mostly an issue with getting parents to pay attention or answer questions during the evaluation.

However since COVID, we've noticed a large increase of parents using tablets and phones as a constant babysitter. These children are so emotionally attached to their screens that they will tantrum until they have access to their screen again.

Whatever you might think about the Cybertruck, it is sold through for at least the next year.

Yeah, but that's not really saying anything considering that their production numbers have been awful. They claim that they should be able to reach 125k this year, but there have been reports of them only managing to produce around 80 a day, which is only around 30k a year.

And that was before the recent recalls and qc problems. Stainless steel is just an unforgiving material to work with, it's gonna take them a while to reach mass production while maintaining any kind of quality control measures.

That study's been going around for years in the media, but mainly because it's sensational. If you actually read the article, I'd hardly say it's very convincing, or very accurate. Also, this.

Existing estimates of mortality from cat predation are speculative and not based on scientific data13,14,15,16 or, at best, are based on extrapolation of results from a single study18. In addition, no large-scale mortality estimates exist for mammals, which form a substantial component of cat diets.