I never said or thought this was something that should be taught to children.
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Let me rephrase what I said then.
I do believe we should strive, as society, for a world where concepts like “race” and “ethnicity” are not used to categorise people on a day-to-day basis, as is still commonly done today in daily conversations, news, etc… To come back to the origin of this discussion, I do not believe that the words should be removed from common language (as seems to be the current attempt of solving problems), but rather that the concept should be removed from common line of thought.
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I wonder if Orwell would really be against trying to make language more inclusive.
I think he’d be against trying to control it prescriptively, but not very good at coming up with realistic conlangs. (yes, I have a grudge against “Newspeak” for being a terrible excuse for a conlang)
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At least where I live, I don’t think people are categorized by skin color on a day-to-day basis. Which doesn’t mean people’s cultural differences don’t matter.
Distinguishing between black, white and hispanic is a US thing, not something people do around me.
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Are you sure? Wasn’t there a court case about racial profiling by authorities being a problem in France recently?
My guess, not knowing the context, is that it was not racist, but the predictable result of the failure of many European governments to protect their citizens against the high rape commission rate of “refugees” (some of them surely are, but not if they’re coming and commiting rape). If France and the rest of Europe wanted integration of other cultures, they should have been more careful about who they let in and how fast
In the Netherlands I think skin color plays a role in distinguishing people, but I think cultural differences play a bigger role.
A darker skinned person with ancestry from Surinam or Indonesia (former Dutch colonies) or the Dutch Antilles (former colonies and possibly still part of the kingdom today) is likely to have more cultural and religious similarities with mainland white Dutch people, and as such may find it more easy to blend in.
But a person with recent ancestry from the Middle East, North Africa or East Africa may have more difficulty getting an unbiased assessment in education or the job market, independently of the darkness of their skin. Even people from Eastern Europe with very light skin tones may face such issues.
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Perhaps, I don’t remember. What I can say however about France is that
- Statistics mentioning racial/ethnic groups are forbidden. For instance there is no way to determine crime rate among a given ethnic group.
- When police officers control people’s identity in public places, they are supposed to control people randomly, and not people from a specific origin.
It doesn’t mean racism doesn’t exist, or that everyone respects the law of course.
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I believe that restricting demographic information and prohibiting all sorts of statistical collection have, in the long run, caused more racial problems in France than they have resolved.
Nevertheless, a policy like this is far from a solution; it merely further stigmatises particular groups, and it is not as if Individuals are incapable of observing who commits the most crimes in their area and base their agenda on personal experiences.
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Why not para-economy or meta-economy or sideconomy? 
That was surprisingly useful, especially considering that those terms can be used internationally (due to internet terminology) and they usually get translated via their usefulness/meaning and not by literal translation.
You’d be surprised to find that this is considered quite an extremist idea.
Or “under the table monetary exchanges” which is exclusionary because you can hide and pass money over while using other things. Why only a table? Such prejudice. Tsk tsk.
Case in point that American young YouTuber that was insulted by the existence of a country called “Montenegro”. 
No, we came from Deucalion and Pyrra throwing rocks, everyone knows that!
As if anyone has ever agreed on what “the image of God” is. I’d say that’s a discussion that’s even more vague and ambiguous than linguistic semantics.
Fairly impossible, since even God did that quite a lot by picking “His favorite people” 
I am certain that you wouldn’t want me to start quoting scripture on you and how the biblical God is quite racist. So, in the case of discrimination, hey, humans achieved the “image of God” objective quite neatly, eh?
Why did we ever use a patrilinear system is beyond me. Nothing obstuse about my question, but if we are being serious, if a woman gives birth then that is DEFINITELY her child. Who “the fortunate father is” could be anyone’s guess, especially in cases of “royal bloodlines” that had to be filled with a descendant.
DNA (Divine Natal Assignment) tests.
To return to more practical issues, it kind of does. A “black market” refers specifically to illicit trade and it is, sometimes, a physical place. “Underground economy” also includes the very benign case of calling a handiman to fix your broken window and paying him cash (here this is called “black money”, which is a funny coincidence considering this discussion) without getting a receipt, thus tax-evading and engaging in an “underground economical activity”.
Hardly the same thing.
He himself, who knows?
But the people in 1984 would love it since in order to include everything, you have to exclude the specific. An authoritarian wet dream (if you pardon the discrimination against dry dreams).
We are lucky that most English-speaking americans do not bother learning Spanish, else they might find out that word with which all the Chess and Go teaching books are filled with, page in and page out.
This kind of over-simplification reminds me of the tale of how the pro-Brexit proponents went about to normal people and sold them “promises” that “with Brexit we will get rid of the Pakistanis, Indians and so forth” and come Brexit time they realised that Pakistan and India and “so forth” (lovely country) are part of the British Commonwealth and thus most of them got to stay, while they had to kick the Europeans out. Oh, the irony.
" Citizenship of a Commonwealth country affords benefits in some member countries, particularly in the United Kingdom, and Commonwealth countries are represented to one another by high commissions rather than embassies."
Of course that case is also a gross generalisation and an anecdotal tale, but let’s not pretend that the immigration problem is a “black and white” issue. Do I have to say the C word again? ( Complicated. What did you have in mind? )
Yup!
Trying to achieve inclusive language by excluding words is oxymoronic, especially when the basis for doing it is related neither to the meaning nor the history of the word. All that is achieved is an impoverishment of language and the advancement of a totalitarian mode of thought.
Yes! And I wasn’t thinking only of Newspeak, but of Orwell’s great essay, “Politics and the English Language.”
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That’s sadly far away from the truth by my own experience.
I use to go to Italie a few times a month because cigarettes are twice cheaper there.
I can assure you that when coming back by train the train is always and systematically controlled by police officers to bring back migrants to Italie, and they almost never ask my passport (one time maybe?)
That’s illegal but that’s the reality.
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Our 2 latest governments fell over issues related to ethnicity and immigration.
One case (early 2021) was about a longlasting ethnic profiling by our tax authority on fraud suspicion of people claiming tax returns for child daycare.
The most recent case (mid 2023) was a coalition disagreement about reintroducing more strict laws to limit family reunion of recognised refugees.
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I love it 
Would “sideconomy” be 4 syllables or 5? “Sidereal” is 4, at least how I say it.
I’ve heard of stuff like that. To play Devil’s Advocate, they presumably aren’t familiar with the relevant etymologies, but still a cringe take to object to another countries name, or worse, another languages word based on possible implications in one’s own language.
Ah, I knew I was forgetting something!
Can it be something which only applies to some of humanity?
But at the end of the day, let’s be honest, I’m using it because it’s a common Christian way to say that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.
I have recently started reading Heiser, and his view that the “image of God” has to do with us being imagers of God, that is, we have certain duties delegated to us by God whereby we exercise abilities given us by God which ultimately came from Him. But I’m definitely not settled on any one view yet, which isn’t helped by the fact that I don’t know Hebrew, which makes it hard to fairly evaluate certain arguments for and against different positions.
Perhaps a more easily defensible argument against racism would be rooted in that God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance, that God loved the world, that the Gospel came to the Jew first, and also to the Greek, that the gentiles are grafted in, that every ear shall hear and tongue confess, &c…
Of course, one could also take the opposite tack and say, “that which appears to be so is probably so”, “it appears that people of other races are the same Kind as me”, “Therefore people of other races are probably the same Kind as me”, “Therefore the burden of proof is on someone who thinks that one race or another is different in some meaningful way from the others”.
Of course, not everyone accepts the first premise (I do, and so do many others, but others reject it), and presumably someone who thought their race was more metaphysically valuable than another’s would reject premise 2, so I’m not sure how much actual use this sort of argument would be, despite that I accept all the premises and believe the inference from 1 and 2 to 3 is logically sound, and that 4 is a reasonable step from 3.
This probably points to the likely fact that I live in a culture where anything which remotely resembles racism is Wrong, and therefore the path of least resistance is to accept that insofar as I am not forced to amend it by evidence.
To tell the truth, I think preferences are okay. God chose Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to be a nation of priests, to be the conduit through which He would manifest Himself to the world. Jesus had an “inner group” of Peter, James, and John. Preferences need not imply you think someone you disprefer is less metaphysically valuable.
I assume you’re referring to the conquest of Canaan? I’m not sure that qualifies as racism, given that those nations were driven out for the evils they did, not because God just didn’t like their ancestry. Sure, there was collateral damage, but I’m sure you’re as familiar as I, likely more so, with the numerous defenses of that, as it is a common Athiest objection to Christianity: God created Man, so He has a unique right to choose to take away the gift of life, death under Christianity is simply the separation of soul from body, every innocent person (whether innocent by young age, mental incompetence, or justified by the grace of God) killed is in the presence of Yahweh now, we see what a bad influence the pagan nations which were left had on Israel, how much better could history have gone without them?, it’s not unreasonable to assume that God knew information regarding the specific circumstances which we do not, to list a few off the top of my head.
I considered adding “(or matrilinear)”, but decided against it as the primary genealogical information the Bible gives is patrilinear, and last I heard that was what was being actively studied, but that mitochondrial DNA could be used in a similar way to find matrilinear genealogies, so I assume eventually we’ll have a good amount of data on both.
Won’t disagree with you there, I’d list it as one of the advantages of a society that encourages marriage as the proper place for sex and strongly discourages adultery.
Pretty much any Romance language, I would imagine. Esperanto for black is “nigra”, pronounced /'ni.gra/.
It’s definitely a simplification. Philosophically, there’s a tradeoff between on the one hand giving everyone a fair shake, which I hope we’d all want to do in an ideal world, and failing that give as many people a fair shake as possible, and on the other hand benefiting some people, at the expense of grouping a bunch of innocent people in with the bad actors.
At one extreme, you can have completely open borders. It’s a tempting solution as it’s simple, maximizes freedom (depending on one’s definition, would you subscribe to the “true freedom includes restrictions on things such as certain drugs which would ultimately waste one’s freedom” camp?), and gives the free market maximum reign to efficiently distribute resources. This gives as many people as possible a fair shake to make their way in whichever country best suits their preferences and skills.
At the other extreme, you can disallow any male Muslims of fighting age from entering your country, and deport them if caught. This will prevent far more innocent people from entering your country than actual terrorists, because most Muslims aren’t terrorists, but it will prevent a lot of terrorists from entering your country.
Most of Europe tried something close to the first option, and it led to way higher incidences of rape by people of “unspecified national origin” or whatever the politic phrase they use is than the national averages. Could even this amount of open borders have been fine if so many countries hadn’t tried to hide the problem and instead made it very clear in both word and action that regardless of one’s personal feelings, rape is not tolerated in Europe? Maybe, I genuinely don’t know. Or perhaps one might argue that the positives of allowing more freedom of movement outweighed the negatives.
Either way, for better or for worse, I expect Europe to swing the other way now, which will presumably make noone happy.
I am not sure where you are getting your news from, but rape does not appear to be a big issue with refugees (or migrants in general) in Europe, as far as I’m aware. At least, I’ve never read much about it in the newspapers that I’m reading, and it’s not even one of the main things that extreme right parties accuse migrants of.
The main reasons to be afraid of migrants that are brought up, are terrorism and criminality (as in shoplifting, vandalism, etc). But in general, reducing the issue to “some of them are rapists” is not very helpful, I think…
The real issue I see, is that immigration is so clogged up in most European countries, and refugees have so little rights even after arrival, that they end up several months or even years without a home, a job or education. I know several Syrian refugees through my family, and their eagerness to participate in society is definitely not the problem, but it’s the government that does not allow them to participate.
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TIL: Surprisingly the name James is a version of Jacob.
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So yeah, the thing with genetically tracing back migration - there are two markers you can do that with. Mitochondrial DNA, which everybody inherits from their mother, so it’s only matrilieal. And the specific Y-chromosome, which everybody with XY (or also XXY) chromosomes inherits from their father, so it’s only patrilineal. All other lines you can’t get information on (at least not over a longer period of time).
As these two markers are passed on (almost) exactly as they were, you can find out about relationships of whole groups of people thousands of years back. Mutations do occur (= these markers change over the centuries), and they do even help to find out more, because the statistical probability of mutations is known, and thus this can be used to determine when groups separated.
Of course, it’s all a wild mix in most places. But it’s still quite interesting and can be scientifically useful.
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Regarding racism - after the first wild statements I saw here, I didn’t bother to read all that follows. Yeah, sure we’re all very distant cousins and there are no biological human races, but racism is a very real thing that exists everywhere and that makes life hard for many people. I didn’t expect that had to be discussed at all here?! I’d rather spend my time in places online where people get it.
Yep, I can fully confirm this whole paragraph. For a while (10 years ago) I volunteered with teaching German to refugees, and their situation is so depressing. They have almost no rights and are not allowed to work, and in the beginning, they can’t even take proper language classes and kids sometimes need to wait for months before they can go to school. Most European governments made it harder and harder for refugees to be accepted, even though after WWII with the Geneva convention, it was tried to establish a better asylum system - after about 6 million people were murdered in the Holocaust, and many of them could have been saved if other countries would have agreed to take them in, but nobody wanted to have them. I sometimes encounter such stories in my job (I do something history related), and it’s so scary to see how similar they often are to the situation of refugees today. Not much has changed in how refugees are treated. And the reason is just racism in the end. A vague fear of anyone who the majority perceives to be different from themselves.
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Yeah, I just use the common English transliteration of the names