Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 03:25:01 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: "f.johan.beisser" <jan@caustic.org> Cc: Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.ORG>, David Greenman <dg@root.com>, "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@highperformance.net>, FreeBSD Chat <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Political Correctness on -chat (was: Why no Indians and Arabs?) Message-ID: <3C1DD60D.A0263D82@mindspring.com> References: <20011217010244.I16958-100000@localhost>
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"f.johan.beisser" wrote: > i've found it's mostly motivated by people feeling guilty and offended for > noticing someones ethnic background. Foo. I have never felt guilty about noticing anything; noticing things is one of the things I do. I generally do get offended when there are attempts at demographic categorization of any kind, particularly with regard to ethnicity, but I have a firm philosophical basis for being offended, I think. IMO, most human problems come about because of self-identification into groups. I would prefer it be illegal for even government forms to ask ethnicity, including but not limited to census forms. > there is a certain amount of paranoia about race here in the US; > after all, it's only relatively recently that the "Separate but > equal" laws have been repealed or made unconsitutional. This is partially true (the laws were always unconstitutional), but forced notice of race has driven most issues of race based violence, predominantly as a result of self identification. > i have to admit, this thread did catch me off guard, not so much because > of the reactions to it, rather the fact that this came up at all. while i > don't doubt your intentions with this (how could i? this would be > interesting data), i can see how some people would take this badly. It would be interesting data if it were anyonymously collected, so as not to tag individuals by label. One of the benefits of a semi-anonymous forum like this one is that the only basis you have to judge someone by is intellect, domain name, and personal name, and, because the U.S. is what it is, any assumptions based on name or surname are not verifiable, and any assumptions based on domain name are similarly masked by the nature of the Internet. In other words, you have to judge people, if you insist on judging people, by their statements and actions. One thing that I've been happy to note in recent years is that people on these lists are being judged less and less on their method of expressing their ideas, and more on the content and context in which those ideas are raised. That is, IMO, a big breakthrough: the validity of an idea is not based on formal credentials, and, if you can't tell a Japanese person with a PhD in Molecular Biology who has imperfect English skills from a native English speaking 14 year old in Sydney Australia, and have to judge their ideas on their own merits, well, that can only be a good thing. > > Why should that mean there's nothing to talk about? I now know of one > > representative each of the groups I'm talking about. Why so few? > > right now, it may be a bad time to ask this kind of a question, being a > mere 3 months since septemer 11th (i wish there were a better set of words > for this, since naming something after a date is just odd). there is still > quite a bit of racist reactions going on around here, and honestly, i > can't blame anyone for not telling about their background or ethnicity. It has nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and everything to do with forcing people with comfortable little sterotype-based world views to have to evaluate people on the merits of their expressed ideas, rather than the clues they would use to prejudge them in day to day person to person interaction, otherwise. I pride myself on being able to call a jackass a jackass or a genius a genius, regardless of how "political correctness" dictates that I should temper my words "out of sensitivity for their situation", as if someone's situation had any damn bearing on the validity of their ideas or statements. There is no such thing as contextual validity when it comes to the laws of the universe, and I'll be damned if I'll act as if there were, or even assist in any way in establishing the context by which such a theory could successfully operate. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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