posted July 23, 2013 08:55 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by PixieJane:
Because it seems to have been forgotten, Faith originally said

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i think you're cherry-picking.

recap the initial comments...

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Would we ever invade England or Sweden the way we have invaded the Middle East?

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and,

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WWII was largely about race, with the self-styled "Aryan race" attacking Semitic Jews.

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not true, but of course, that is what many movies and pop culture present as to wwii....the holocaust. the end.
japan's role in wwii has disappeared....oh well, except for some american movies about pearl harbor...most of the time with certain historical inaccuracies.

as to your post,
that is not the subject of the discussion. you seem to be debating something entirely different....
her initial argument was of racism (esp. that of whites against non-whites) being the main factor behind armed conflicts such as war....

war is just too much of a complex subject to be attacked from one side....there is economics, demographics, classism...and just so much more. there are wars that have been waged intranationally.

a discussion with some good west african folks, imf and the world bank are parasites, sure but...as they said, nobody is putting a gun against the cameroonian president and forcing him to exploit his own people, then, there is uncultivated fertile land available in some western african countries that are not being taken advantaged of by the population itself, there's also other inequality factors that had been going on, even before european colonization, that continue to have a trickle-down effect....
emphasizing on race will not fix anything. if one really wants to crack down the system, then, one has to consider and attack all of the variables, that is, all of the sums of the parts that contribute to the problem.

posted July 24, 2013 01:12 AM            

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Did anyone catch Obama`a impromptu speech on race relations?

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I was personally glad he said more. I was very disappointed in his lackluster showing on the verdict.

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YES I think the wars are racist and especially Obama's incessant drone bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He's targeting a race.

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The people aren't targeted on the basis of their race, especially not by the "race" standards set up by the U.S. government. By those standards the people would be considered "White" or "Asian," and Obama certainly isn't targeting all people in those categories. By looser standards, there are various ethnicities and religious cultures in play, and it would be difficult to say that Obama is against all people of those ethnicities or religious cultures. The whole premise is a stretch.

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Actually, she didn't. She was pointing out that Obama is a hypocrite for saying we need to wrestle with race while he acts on his own racism (or at least exploits it in others) for his own imperialist designs (or perhaps more accurate to say for his lobbyists and other special interests that he so shamelessly caters to, especially Raytheon).

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Also a stretch. Perhaps, your thinking more along the lines of intolerance, but I personally would even consider that a stretch.

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Lots of different ethnicities with great paying jobs. Well at least where I am.

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Yup.

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some folks seem to think that only racism exists, a person can be prejudiced but not necessarily racist though...and, ethnocentrism and nationalism are also other terms that can be taken into consideration and they do not have the same meaning.

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I agree, and would add a certain religious intolerance is often at play in conflicts as well.

Gotta go. Good night.

posted July 25, 2013 07:37 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by hikoro:
recap the initial comments...

quote:Would we ever invade England or Sweden the way we have invaded the Middle East?

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Notice that I asked a hypothetical question. I did not make a statement.

quote:

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Originally posted by hikoro:
and,

quote:WWII was largely about race, with the self-styled "Aryan race" attacking Semitic Jews.

not true, but of course, that is what many movies and pop culture present as to wwii....the holocaust. the end.

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Again, I said, "largely about." That is a true statement. I did not say "entirely about." That would have been untrue.

And I didn't mean to ignore Japan; it wasn't my intention to deliver a comprehensive analysis here. I could have talked about things like how the Japanese Americans were put away in internment camps and how racist that was...I just didn't.

Edit: Also, note that German Americans and Italian Americans weren't put in internment camps. What explains the worse treatment of Japanese Americans?

posted July 25, 2013 07:41 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by AcousticGod:
The people aren't targeted on the basis of their race, especially not by the "race" standards set up by the U.S. government.

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posted July 25, 2013 08:19 AM            

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Race is a classification system used to categorize humans into large and distinct populations or groups by anatomical, cultural, ethnic, genetic, geographical, historical, linguistic, religious, or social affiliation. First used to denote national affiliations, the term began to be used to relate to physical traits in the 17th century and promoted hierarchies favorable to differing ethnic groups. Starting from the 19th century the term was often used, in a taxonomic sense, to denote genetically differentiated human populations defined by phenotype.[1][2][3]

While biologists sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race often is used in a naive[4] or simplistic way,[5] i.e. that among humans, race has no taxonomic significance: all living humans belong to the same species, Homo sapiens and subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.[6][7]

Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies [8] that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete,[9] and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits.[4][10][11][12][13]

Since the second half of the 20th century the associations of race with the ideologies and theories that grew out of the work of 19th-century anthropologists and physiologists has led to the use of the word race itself becoming problematic. Although still used in general contexts, it is now often replaced by other words which are less ambiguous and emotionally charged, such as populations, people(s), ethnic groups, or communities depending on context.[14][15]

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And here the article discusses the semantics relative to our conversation. Bold mine:

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As anthropologists and other evolutionary scientists have shifted away from the language of race to the term population to talk about genetic differences, historians, cultural anthropologists and other social scientists re-conceptualized the term "race" as a cultural category or social construct—a particular way that some people talk about themselves and others.

Many social scientists have replaced the word race with the word "ethnicity" to refer to self-identifying groups based on beliefs concerning shared culture, ancestry and history. Alongside empirical and conceptual problems with "race," following the Second World War, evolutionary and social scientists were acutely aware of how beliefs about race had been used to justify discrimination, apartheid, slavery, and genocide. This questioning gained momentum in the 1960s during the U.S. civil rights movement and the emergence of numerous anti-colonial movements worldwide. They thus came to believe that race itself is a social construct, a concept that was believed to correspond to an objective reality but which was believed in because of its social functions.[103]

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Yes, this is from crummy old Wikipedia!

posted July 25, 2013 08:39 AM            

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I was personally glad he said more. I was very disappointed in his lackluster showing on the verdict

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Lackluster = safety. He surely didn`t want to show bias . It appears he`s trying hard to avoid controversy yet show he`s on top of the situtation. At least that is what came through to me.

posted July 25, 2013 01:34 PM            

Doing home loans as long as I have, I've had to collect race and ethnicity data as part of the government's effort to ensure that lenders aren't discriminating on the basis of race or ethnicity. There are remarkably few races, which is why Pakistanis and Afghans would be White or Asian.

Here's a link about the discussion to change the race/ethnicity standards in the U.S.:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg_race-ethnicity

Here's race/ethnicity with regard to mortgage lending (HMDA info): http://www.occ.gov/static/community-affairs/community-developments-newsletter/summer05/cd/ethnicityandrace.htm

Here's a wikipedia article on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States_Census

Drone bombing clearly isn't representative of racism. Those bombed are of the same race as the governments that essentially allowed it to take place.

quote:

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Lackluster = safety. He surely didn`t want to show bias . It appears he`s trying hard to avoid controversy yet show he`s on top of the situtation. At least that is what came through to me.

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Yeah. It just seemed overly cautious to me.

posted July 25, 2013 01:51 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by AcousticGod:
Drone bombing clearly isn't representative of racism. Those bombed are of the same race as the governments that essentially allowed it to take place.

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Where do you find the Pakistani and Afghan governments supporting the drone attacks, and to what extent have you researched whether or not those government officials are widely regarded as puppets of the US?

You know there is another side to this story, and that's where I was speculating about racism being an underlying psychological factor.

I was talking about the US government and especially the actual drone pilots, along with the widespread American support/ambivalence that allows the drone attacks to continue without a high, visible level of protest (like what we see in the Martin ruling, for example.)

posted July 25, 2013 07:54 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by shura:
honest confesssion or does she fear retaliation?
http://abcnews.go.com/US/george-zimmerman-juror-murder/story?id=19770659

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She said he got away with it because there wasn`t enough evidence to convict under FL law.

I don`t understand , retaliation from who or what?

posted July 25, 2013 09:01 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by shura:
Would I? Well, you know the answer to that.

This one has shown her face and revealed her first name. Might that have something to do with her damning appraisal of Zimmerman?

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yes I do know

posted July 25, 2013 10:14 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Faith:

Also, I can't figure out what your point is, hikoro. Because you seem to be saying that Americans are very racist but, at the same time, we shouldn't assume racist motivations for many US government actions.

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i think my point was clearly explained, judging from other posters who understood where i was coming from. and, if you dont get my posts, that is fine by me too, im not trying to convince anyone, im dialoguing.
and nope, i meant and i recall writing: racial, which does not have the same meaning as racist.
and it would be ridiculous to assume from the posts that americans are very racist compared to.... when others including myself wrote plenty of examples of people of other continents and countries with issues of ethnocentrism, nationalism, prejudice, religion discrimination, racism, etc. to illustrate that a) racism happens everywhere and by anybody/everybody and, b) racism can be a minor and even a nonexistent factor in societal events, such as armed conflicts, the wars in the former yugoslavia, for example, (most of eastern europe does not follow the USA race standards)
c) that prejudice does not equal racism does not equal ethnocentrism, etc. it is complex.

quote:

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Also, note that German Americans and Italian Americans weren't put in internment camps. What explains the worse treatment of Japanese Americans?

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actually, there were germans and italians who were put in internment camps in the USA...
regardless of the differences in terms of the process, impact, etc. it wasnt only the japanese heck, the japanese were the only ones who even received apologies and reparations, if im not mistaken.

in addition to this, as to the japanese...before you jump into 'race!'
did it ever occur to you that japan bombed pearl harbor (american soil) and was more than ready to destroy the USA as much as possible? i mean, when a country or a people attack (or are presumed to attack) another country, folks go rabid against those people, and your govt. is sure known for not liking to be messed around by anybody. germany and italy....another different story altogether, europe, across the atlantic, faraway, didnt touch the USA directly during the war, big difference.
as a matter of fact, the attack on pearl harbor was one of the factors that urged the USA to participate in WWII...
and by the way, economy! huge factor. usa was trading with china, japan was screwing up with china (there was a war between china and japan already), usa didnt like it and put embargos on japan, japan got angry with the usa and voila! pearl harbor!
and...also, nazi germany interrupting with usa economy too...yes, money...money...money.
usa didnt join out of sympathy and 'poor jews', it was mainly for economic gain, and the usa joined very late too.
just like in many wars; the issue is usually economy or territory.

posted July 27, 2013 10:02 AM            

It is what it is with the verdict but I stand strong on that law needs to be on trial and fixed.

hikoro, I agree. Race wasn`t the motivating factor in either world war.

posted July 27, 2013 11:58 AM            

Of course, the motivations for going into our current US wars are not about racism. I've talked about that at length here: how the neoconservatives effected a coup, how the real motivation for the preemptive wars in the Middle East was outlined many years beforehand by the Project for the New American Century. I've talked about oil, heroin, the enrichment of the military industrial complex, and many other contributing factors. I assume you haven't really read many of my comments of you would have realized my view is NOT simplistic.

But as I've said, I believe racism is a driving factor in keeping up the war mentality amongst regular Americans. Yes, there is an anti-Muslim epidemic. But when it comes to looking at war footage and going cold, I think what's happening is that people look at a person who LOOKS Arab, ie is brown, and see someone who looks like the enemy. And that is how people are branded and subsequently dehumanized: on a VISUAL basis.

posted July 27, 2013 12:00 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by juniperb:


hikoro, I agree. Race wasn`t the motivating factor in either world war.

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posted July 27, 2013 12:11 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Faith:
My argument is not that race was the motivating factor. My argument is, it was a large factor.

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Poo, missed your edit.

Race became a factor yes. Power plays are made using other factors as an intentional blind side. Money and power is always the culprit and it trickles down the line of reasons. Race being one.

posted July 27, 2013 12:17 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by juniperb:
I`m saddened that the stand your ground law hasn`t been addressed further.

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it will be a miracle when that happens...to address this problematic legal stand is just too logical and, i bet there are legal-political interests involved.