Amber Guyger has been found GUILTY

[Batou667]

To use the N word as an example instead of 'fireman', it would be if I said 'Racists use the N word as a slur against black people' and you responded 'How dare you use the N word!'

And Dreiko responded 'Well no one in my country says the N word, so you're wrong'

This was in response to you saying firefighter, police officer, and a couple of others were recognised as the "top 4 MAN jobs" (citation required, by the way). OK, well they were historically male-only professions. As a legacy of this they are still male dominated (but equality would be achieved quicker if there were more female applicants, as opposed to bitching about there not being enough diversity in hiring, but that's another issue). All of those professions are open to females, and have been for a good two generations now. You pointing out that they USED to be male-dominated doesn't help change the perception, in fact it perpetuates it. Isn't that readily apparent?

It's kind of a Streisand Effect. Your intention may be to make the situation more equitable, but bringing up past inequality achieves nothing more than unnecessarily reminding people of it.

 

[Silvanus]

It's kind of a Streisand Effect. Your intention may be to make the situation more equitable, but bringing up past inequality achieves nothing more than unnecessarily reminding people of it.

Bollocks. Pretending discrepancies don't exist doesn't somehow make them fade away, and the only way societal attitudes change is if we discuss them.

These professions were legally opened up two generations ago, but we know that those restrictive laws were in place because of societal attitudes, not the other way around. Its naive to imagine that those attitudes have simply popped out of existence as a result of legislation.

Its just like people believing that racism isn't an issue anymore because legal equality has been reached. It's either naivety, or unwillingness to have an uncomfortable conversation.

 

[Xprimentyl]

Snip.

Your exact reasoning for why women can be rationally fearful in an elevator could be used to justify a man contemplating raping them in that same elevator. I guess due to that it's self-reinforcing but do you honestly think of men as doing that? Would you be willing to explain away a man who felt that in the same way you're explaining this fear? Would you see a man who admitted to holding back his feelings of primitive dominance as anything other than a monster with crazy thoughts?

I posit to you that it's the same in the case of fearing this monstrous response. Neither is rational in a civilized context. Not any more so than fearing thunder or the dark. You have people who fear both things despite being in the safety of their house but it is seen as something they need to overcome as individuals, despite it being ingrained in their DNA, not something you just accept and mold society around.

There are degrees of fear; it?s not binary between calm and utter terror. These women in the elevator I?m sure were not cowering in the corner, snot-nosed blubbering, shitting their panties in horror. We?re likely talking a slight discomfort, base instincts tingling, an involuntary acknowledgement that IF this guy were to be one of the forceful types (or God forbid psycho whack jobs that makes furniture out of human flesh,) they were at a distinct disadvantage. And yes, as a guy who?s been in a 4-years-long, happy, healthy monogamous relationship with a lovely woman, I can admit to having lustful thoughts, looking at women?s butts/breasts, fantasies, etc. Have I ever acted on these thoughts? No, and I never would, but they?re not ?crazy thoughts;? it doesn?t make me a ?monster;? they?re natural.

Civilizing people acts to remove those elements. A rational individual would, if a such instinctual fear arises, wave it off as themselves being irrational. Submitting to this fear and expecting society to bend in its wake is not the way forward. It uses the cage of primitive emotion we've escaped to make shackles and hold us back.

Athletes are prone to abuse drugs that make someone more aggressive to build muscle so that contributes to them acting on their impulses. That goes a long way explaining that NFL stat.

A rational person would wave off/remove their instincts? Do you know how, and more importantly WHY, instincts work? Instincts are the reasons we?re here today and have evolved with us; they?re not some ?primitive cage,? they?re the framework of our rational, civilized society. What you would call ?rational people? are those weeded out by natural selection.

And I like watching random ted talks so sure, I'll watch it. The last one I watched was about this black musician who befriended KKK members and talked them out of being members of the KKK through their commonalities as humans (apparently one of them was the big wizard too), highly recommended.

I actually listened to the NPR story on that guy (Radiolab or This American Life, I think it is a great story. I sure as hell wouldn?t have been the one to do it. Closest I ever came was a couple years ago; I was at my local bar with my girlfriend (who is white) and we were on the patio smoking when a guy (think ?redneck good ol? boy?) started chatting with us. After a few minutes, my girlfriend went back inside back to our table and I lit another cigarette and kept talking with the guy. Immediately, he asked if she (my girlfriend) was my girlfriend; I told him yes. He then admitted that he was a reformed white supremacist; he showed me several swastika and various other ?hate? tattoos, told me some non-violent things he?d done, etc., and how he was now ?cool? with interracial relationships. I listened amiably, but my INSTINCTS told me to end the discourse. He then invited me to bring my girlfriend and join him at another bar in Dallas. I politely refused, gave some excuse about having plans, crushed out my cigarette, and met back up with my girlfriend inside where I informed her of what had just happened and asked her not to go back outside without me. Did I act irrationally? Did I miss out on a chance to make ?just another human? friend, his sketchy history and my survival instincts be damned?

 

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

Here's the thing with the power imbalance elevator situation. The way those women put it is ignorant, as it implies all men are equally strong, or that no men have as much power differential between them as those women did with those men in the elevator. To make it into a woman issue instead of a weakling issue is indeed wrong. The fact that some women are more self-conscious or paranoid about being weaklings, is indeed all in their head. They are just as affected by their weakness as men who are as weak as them are.

To clarify my point about the gulf of incomprehension, some people just need an excuse to be evil to you. That they can get away with using your race as an excuse does NOT mean that it is your race that's the trigger. It's all the other things, the 99.99999% that they draw on that makes them want to be evil to you. What you're describing is a weird form of victim blaming and you're blaming yourself to boot. It's like these people just see black like how a bull sees red and can't help being evil when they're otherwise just calmly grazing.

No, these are just run of the mill evil people who will be cowards and only pick on those whom they see as lower than they. These people would be being evil to someone somehow either way. That's what these people just do. The issue you wanna fix to reduce racism is just overal social morality.

Finally, the UN has been sending some very anti-freedom of expression suggestions to Japan with regards to banning a ton of anime character sexual depictions that would if enacted illegalize about every good show ever (thankfully they reject them always haha) so I have come to doubt they know anything at all.

Alright, this is where I'm coming with this.

Not only do I have personal stories of being not only a source of fear and/or a target due to the skin of my color, I have given facts that were collected by the Government of the United States of America itself that speaks to the systemic racial biases still alive in this culture.

You currently have Saelune, Xprimentyl, Satinavian, Thaluikhain, and myself disagreeing with your viewpoint. People from all walks of life who have experienced the current situation differently and have all arrived at the same conclusion about the inherent racism in America. You have an front page of this very topic of people somewhat even surprised that a white officer was found guilty of murder even though there was a clear case for it (and I pointed out why it wasn't manslaughter in the first page as well).

It might not be us who are misinterpreting the world. It might be you.

And don't get me wrong. I would LOVE to live in a world that I'm just paranoid and people are ready to treat me right. But I have enough real life experience in this nation to know that isn't the case. Not everyone I meet, I know. And I've met some fantastic people from all walks of life. I consider the majority of this forum to be proof of that.

But I've also met a good deal of people who saw nothing but my skin color. Even some people who were nice to me and who might have genuinely liked me couldn't see past my skin color to realize I'm a thinking human being here that have my own ideas and situations that are not lumped into my melanin count. Same thing with my gender and my size. Where the deck is stacked against me and I just have to navigate it. Not only is that tiring and disheartening... we have people who deny our life experiences because they haven't shared it.

That? That is straight up frustrating. And it doesn't speak of "trying to get to know someone" if you don't want to heed their true life experiences because it doesn't fit in your own personal perception.

 

[CaitSeith]

Careful, you can get modded for saying someone is doing that (but actually not for doing that). Unless the code of conduct has been changed again.

I checked the code of conduct. It doesn't mention it. I also did it fairly recently, and no one batted an eye. Maybe things were different when that was first put in place...

 

[Saelune]

To use the N word as an example instead of 'fireman', it would be if I said 'Racists use the N word as a slur against black people' and you responded 'How dare you use the N word!'

And Dreiko responded 'Well no one in my country says the N word, so you're wrong'

This was in response to you saying firefighter, police officer, and a couple of others were recognised as the "top 4 MAN jobs" (citation required, by the way). OK, well they were historically male-only professions. As a legacy of this they are still male dominated (but equality would be achieved quicker if there were more female applicants, as opposed to bitching about there not being enough diversity in hiring, but that's another issue). All of those professions are open to females, and have been for a good two generations now. You pointing out that they USED to be male-dominated doesn't help change the perception, in fact it perpetuates it. Isn't that readily apparent?

It's kind of a Streisand Effect. Your intention may be to make the situation more equitable, but bringing up past inequality achieves nothing more than unnecessarily reminding people of it.

Ignorance advocates for ignorance. And the Streisand effect is about trying to hide something, only to make it more visible. I am not trying to hide the bigotry of the past, I am trying to shine a spotlight on it.

 

[Saelune]

Careful, you can get modded for saying someone is doing that (but actually not for doing that). Unless the code of conduct has been changed again.

I checked the code of conduct. It doesn't mention it. I also did it fairly recently, and no one batted an eye. Maybe things were different when that was first put in place...

People have been modded for suggesting others are tolling. 'Its a personal attack'. I know people have been modded for calling the now banned Lunatic for trolling.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Well, the Code of Conduct, as written, nows says and and is the past said various things, but that's not the Code of Conduct as was experienced on the forums. They had the "Don't be a jerk" rule for years, didn't ban everyone who was a jerk.

Anyhoo, my point is that every time there's a shakeup in leadership/moderators, we have to wait and see how the new group interprets the rules as written. Not meaning this as an attack on mods, but as a natural result of a one page Code of Conduct needing human interpretation to fit the real world.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Snip.

Your exact reasoning for why women can be rationally fearful in an elevator could be used to justify a man contemplating raping them in that same elevator. I guess due to that it's self-reinforcing but do you honestly think of men as doing that? Would you be willing to explain away a man who felt that in the same way you're explaining this fear? Would you see a man who admitted to holding back his feelings of primitive dominance as anything other than a monster with crazy thoughts?

I posit to you that it's the same in the case of fearing this monstrous response. Neither is rational in a civilized context. Not any more so than fearing thunder or the dark. You have people who fear both things despite being in the safety of their house but it is seen as something they need to overcome as individuals, despite it being ingrained in their DNA, not something you just accept and mold society around.

There are degrees of fear; it?s not binary between calm and utter terror. These women in the elevator I?m sure were not cowering in the corner, snot-nosed blubbering, shitting their panties in horror. We?re likely talking a slight discomfort, base instincts tingling, an involuntary acknowledgement that IF this guy were to be one of the forceful types (or God forbid psycho whack jobs that makes furniture out of human flesh,) they were at a distinct disadvantage. And yes, as a guy who?s been in a 4-years-long, happy, healthy monogamous relationship with a lovely woman, I can admit to having lustful thoughts, looking at women?s butts/breasts, fantasies, etc. Have I ever acted on these thoughts? No, and I never would, but they?re not ?crazy thoughts;? it doesn?t make me a ?monster;? they?re natural.

You just conflated being attracted to someone to wanting to dominate them and turn them into furniture.

Clearly I'm not talking about just regular attraction with the term "primitive dominance". Clearly I'm referring to the lack of this primitive instinct to rape everything you're sexually attracted to, and how that instinct is just as irrational as fearing being raped because you presumably are attractive to the male in the elevator with you. (presumptuous much?)

A rational person would wave off/remove their instincts? Do you know how, and more importantly WHY, instincts work? Instincts are the reasons we?re here today and have evolved with us; they?re not some ?primitive cage,? they?re the framework of our rational, civilized society. What you would call ?rational people? are those weeded out by natural selection.

There's various kinds of instincts. There's some that are useful and some that are primitive and obsolete. Civilizing someone is the process of educating them in a way that enables them to seize control over their baser, less useful instincts and allowing them to exert their will over them, becoming someone who is capable of achieving more than what one could achieve if they let themselves be governed by their instincts. I literally would see someone as being of lower will-power and lacking in self-control if they merely allowed themselves to act in this or that way just because their instincts beckoned them when the reality of the situation is one that does not warrant these acts.

In the modern context, we learn to sublimate most of our instincts and turn them into forms unlike their natural state, because that produces order. The instinctual fear we're discussing is something that shows you that you need to work on your self-control and someone with such a deficiency is indeed helped by that instinct but they're helped indirectly, not by the actual purpose it originally had but by what it reveals to them about themselves.

I actually listened to the NPR story on that guy (Radiolab or This American Life, I think it is a great story. I sure as hell wouldn?t have been the one to do it. Closest I ever came was a couple years ago; I was at my local bar with my girlfriend (who is white) and we were on the patio smoking when a guy (think ?redneck good ol? boy?) started chatting with us. After a few minutes, my girlfriend went back inside back to our table and I lit another cigarette and kept talking with the guy. Immediately, he asked if she (my girlfriend) was my girlfriend; I told him yes. He then admitted that he was a reformed white supremacist; he showed me several swastika and various other ?hate? tattoos, told me some non-violent things he?d done, etc., and how he was now ?cool? with interracial relationships. I listened amiably, but my INSTINCTS told me to end the discourse. He then invited me to bring my girlfriend and join him at another bar in Dallas. I politely refused, gave some excuse about having plans, crushed out my cigarette, and met back up with my girlfriend inside where I informed her of what had just happened and asked her not to go back outside without me. Did I act irrationally? Did I miss out on a chance to make ?just another human? friend, his sketchy history and my survival instincts be damned?

These are the things you can't know the answer to and it will depend on if you're an optimistic or pessimistic person and how much you believe in redemption and so on. I do think that someone trying to lure you into a dangerous situation will not really have a reason to first tell you all their dark histories, and that you probably were not in danger in my estimation, but it's your life in the end and your judgement is the relevant one.

You just can't be expecting these people to make themselves disappear though. You can't oppress them. You have to let them do whatever they do and tackle it however you feel comfortable.

Not going with the guy to the other bar is fine, asking him to leave this bar or in any way accosting him cause he's making you uncomfortable, would not have been. The fact that you didn't do that tells me you know this somewhere deep down as well and is a good indication of you knowing that you were in some way being unkind to that guy who probably was just being friendly and that despite it being warranted in your eyes it probably didn't really feel that good to turn him down, the concern just was a lot more compelling at the time so it won out.



Also, let us note that being male is not the same as being a reformed white supremacist. If women were saying they had an issue with being alone in an elevator with a reformed rapist? Sure, that's understandable. We have the sexual offender registry because of how understandable it is. But to just focus on the power differential ends up treating every man as a reformed rapist. In your example it'd be just turning down a hypothetical innocent white guy with no tattoos or dramatic backstory cause white supremacists tend to be white guys. See why it's different?

 

[Agema]

They had the "Don't be a jerk" rule for years, didn't ban everyone who was a jerk.

Yeah, just as well they interpreted that one kindly, otherwise I might have been gone years ago.

 

[Silvanus]

I literally would see someone as being of lower will-power and lacking in self-control if they merely allowed themselves to act in this or that way just because their instincts beckoned them when the reality of the situation is one that does not warrant these acts.

I remember watching a nature documentary a while ago about these exotic birds (birds of paradise maybe?), which showed them dancing and showing off plumage to attempt to attract a mate. My first thought was about how funny it was, how simple and straightforward and transparent it was. My second thought was the realisation that there is no functional difference between that and how humans behave in clubs.

My point being that everybody is influenced in myriad ways by their instincts (some of them pretty base), and those who believe they aren't influenced are just unaware of how their behaviour is affected.

In the modern context, we learn to sublimate most of our instincts and turn them into forms unlike their natural state, because that produces order. The instinctual fear we're discussing is something that shows you that you need to work on your self-control and someone with such a deficiency is indeed helped by that instinct but they're helped indirectly, not by the actual purpose it originally had but by what it reveals to them about themselves.

Is fear really so irrational if the reason behind it is supported by most statistical analyses?

 

[Kwak]

Either way color me surprised. I totally expected her to get off. Makes me wonder though if a white Male officer would have been found guilty? And I say that as a white Male- it's interesting the cop found guilty was a woman.

Looks like we'll get to put that hypothesis to the test.

A Fort Worth police officer checking out a residence with an open door opened fire on a woman inside her home, killing her, authorities said.

The shooting early Saturday occurred less than two weeks after a police officer in nearby Dallas was found guilty of murder for fatally shooting a man in his home in 2018. In both cases the officers are white and the victims were African American.

In the Fort Worth shooting at 2:25 a.m. Saturday, authorities have the officer's body-camera footage.

According to NBC Dallas-Fort Worth, the imagery shows the perspective of the officer outside a home, peering inside a window using a flashlight, spotting someone inside standing near a window and telling her, "Put your hands up ? show me your hands," before opening fire.


https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-police-officer-shoots-woman-death-inside-her-home-n1065451?cid=sm_npd_nn_fb_ma&fbclid=IwAR23novfoH_L2cMXRNJFRNafApBuELudwe6raGT0Oj6aNJL7Md7W2vRJnwA

 

[MrCalavera_v1legacy]

Either way color me surprised. I totally expected her to get off. Makes me wonder though if a white Male officer would have been found guilty? And I say that as a white Male- it's interesting the cop found guilty was a woman.

Looks like we'll get to put that hypothesis to the test.

A Fort Worth police officer checking out a residence with an open door opened fire on a woman inside her home, killing her, authorities said.

The shooting early Saturday occurred less than two weeks after a police officer in nearby Dallas was found guilty of murder for fatally shooting a man in his home in 2018. In both cases the officers are white and the victims were African American.

In the Fort Worth shooting at 2:25 a.m. Saturday, authorities have the officer's body-camera footage.

According to NBC Dallas-Fort Worth, the imagery shows the perspective of the officer outside a home, peering inside a window using a flashlight, spotting someone inside standing near a window and telling her, "Put your hands up ? show me your hands," before opening fire.


https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-police-officer-shoots-woman-death-inside-her-home-n1065451?cid=sm_npd_nn_fb_ma&fbclid=IwAR23novfoH_L2cMXRNJFRNafApBuELudwe6raGT0Oj6aNJL7Md7W2vRJnwA

What a hero, gave her whole 0.5 seconds to comply.

Christ...

 

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

Either way color me surprised. I totally expected her to get off. Makes me wonder though if a white Male officer would have been found guilty? And I say that as a white Male- it's interesting the cop found guilty was a woman.

Looks like we'll get to put that hypothesis to the test.

A Fort Worth police officer checking out a residence with an open door opened fire on a woman inside her home, killing her, authorities said.

The shooting early Saturday occurred less than two weeks after a police officer in nearby Dallas was found guilty of murder for fatally shooting a man in his home in 2018. In both cases the officers are white and the victims were African American.

In the Fort Worth shooting at 2:25 a.m. Saturday, authorities have the officer's body-camera footage.

According to NBC Dallas-Fort Worth, the imagery shows the perspective of the officer outside a home, peering inside a window using a flashlight, spotting someone inside standing near a window and telling her, "Put your hands up ? show me your hands," before opening fire.


https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-police-officer-shoots-woman-death-inside-her-home-n1065451?cid=sm_npd_nn_fb_ma&fbclid=IwAR23novfoH_L2cMXRNJFRNafApBuELudwe6raGT0Oj6aNJL7Md7W2vRJnwA

*sighs*

Another turn on the never-ending cycle.

What a hero, gave her whole 0.5 seconds to comply.

Christ...

This is an amazing fustercluck. It's on video the officer didn't announce himself to be with the police. He shined a flashlight into a house. And the few times that happened to me, I saw the flashlight and nothing of my friends.

And if she had a gun like they are saying... yeah. That's what you do when someone's shining flashlights into your windows at 2:30 in the morning. Because that's what people who mean you harm do.

I'll tell you right now if I walked out of my townhouse and started pointing a flashlight into my own home, people would call the cops on me so quick because that looks suspicious as hell.

 

[MrCalavera_v1legacy]

(I assume you meant to quote Kwak and not me)

Yes, fixed that.

And yes, good point: The cop only shouted "hands up", from behind a window, in the middle of the night, before opening fire.

This probably will gain more traction(as it should) soon, and i'm already morbidly curious how they'll try to weasel him out of this.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

I literally would see someone as being of lower will-power and lacking in self-control if they merely allowed themselves to act in this or that way just because their instincts beckoned them when the reality of the situation is one that does not warrant these acts.

I remember watching a nature documentary a while ago about these exotic birds (birds of paradise maybe?), which showed them dancing and showing off plumage to attempt to attract a mate. My first thought was about how funny it was, how simple and straightforward and transparent it was. My second thought was the realisation that there is no functional difference between that and how humans behave in clubs.

My point being that everybody is influenced in myriad ways by their instincts (some of them pretty base), and those who believe they aren't influenced are just unaware of how their behaviour is affected.

In the modern context, we learn to sublimate most of our instincts and turn them into forms unlike their natural state, because that produces order. The instinctual fear we're discussing is something that shows you that you need to work on your self-control and someone with such a deficiency is indeed helped by that instinct but they're helped indirectly, not by the actual purpose it originally had but by what it reveals to them about themselves.

Is fear really so irrational if the reason behind it is supported by most statistical analyses?

The bird analogy would make sense if primates also had evolved that method of attracting mates and we inherited it. They didn't. Most apes just have some form of red flashing buttocks that attract mates, that and some type of protection/resources being granted to the potential mates. Basically, unlike the birds where the male puts on a show, apes evolved with the female putting on the show for the male and the male offering material benefits. Clubs are just a way of civilizing this and mimicking nature since it's more graceful to have a ritual that's akin to birds than one akin to apes. In this context, having harems is what the instinctual equivalent would be, and we don't really do that in the modern context in civilized countries any more.



If the fear is on par with how much fear is experienced when in similarly statistically dangerous situations, such as when driving for example, it's not irrational. If someone, however, feels no fear at all doing a bunch of similarly statistically dangerous things but only feels fear in an elevator with some random dude, then sure, that's irrational.

Here's the thing with the power imbalance elevator situation. The way those women put it is ignorant, as it implies all men are equally strong, or that no men have as much power differential between them as those women did with those men in the elevator. To make it into a woman issue instead of a weakling issue is indeed wrong. The fact that some women are more self-conscious or paranoid about being weaklings, is indeed all in their head. They are just as affected by their weakness as men who are as weak as them are.

To clarify my point about the gulf of incomprehension, some people just need an excuse to be evil to you. That they can get away with using your race as an excuse does NOT mean that it is your race that's the trigger. It's all the other things, the 99.99999% that they draw on that makes them want to be evil to you. What you're describing is a weird form of victim blaming and you're blaming yourself to boot. It's like these people just see black like how a bull sees red and can't help being evil when they're otherwise just calmly grazing.

No, these are just run of the mill evil people who will be cowards and only pick on those whom they see as lower than they. These people would be being evil to someone somehow either way. That's what these people just do. The issue you wanna fix to reduce racism is just overal social morality.

Finally, the UN has been sending some very anti-freedom of expression suggestions to Japan with regards to banning a ton of anime character sexual depictions that would if enacted illegalize about every good show ever (thankfully they reject them always haha) so I have come to doubt they know anything at all.

Alright, this is where I'm coming with this.

Not only do I have personal stories of being not only a source of fear and/or a target due to the skin of my color, I have given facts that were collected by the Government of the United States of America itself that speaks to the systemic racial biases still alive in this culture.

You currently have Saelune, Xprimentyl, Satinavian, Thaluikhain, and myself disagreeing with your viewpoint. People from all walks of life who have experienced the current situation differently and have all arrived at the same conclusion about the inherent racism in America. You have an front page of this very topic of people somewhat even surprised that a white officer was found guilty of murder even though there was a clear case for it (and I pointed out why it wasn't manslaughter in the first page as well).

It might not be us who are misinterpreting the world. It might be you.

And don't get me wrong. I would LOVE to live in a world that I'm just paranoid and people are ready to treat me right. But I have enough real life experience in this nation to know that isn't the case. Not everyone I meet, I know. And I've met some fantastic people from all walks of life. I consider the majority of this forum to be proof of that.

But I've also met a good deal of people who saw nothing but my skin color. Even some people who were nice to me and who might have genuinely liked me couldn't see past my skin color to realize I'm a thinking human being here that have my own ideas and situations that are not lumped into my melanin count. Same thing with my gender and my size. Where the deck is stacked against me and I just have to navigate it. Not only is that tiring and disheartening... we have people who deny our life experiences because they haven't shared it.

That? That is straight up frustrating. And it doesn't speak of "trying to get to know someone" if you don't want to heed their true life experiences because it doesn't fit in your own personal perception.

See, I'm treating you as an individual by not accepting this monolithic description you put forth pertaining to men and so on. It may not be the sort of way you enjoy being treated as more than your skin color, it may not feel fair to imply that you've just been unlucky despite these stats and that normally people are better than they've been to you personally, but either way, that's what it's like when people don't see your skin color and just treat you like a person.

At this point you have to choose between just accepting you'll be treated as part of a monolith, which should rationally remove your ability to complain about people doing that in different contexts, or you could accept that you were personally unlucky and all those bad things that did happen just happened cause life is chaotic and they don't have any bigger significance.


And to clarify, I really have no way of knowing whether or not they do or don't and I don't see anyone providing me with mind-reading transcripts of the thoughts of the people who were evil to you, so based on my optimistic view of humanity I interpret this information as indicating what I describe. It's not that you're paranoid in the sense that nobody did anything bad to you and you just imagined it. Nobody's denying your experiences. What I'm tackling is the cause you attribute those experiences to.

Everyone who gets hit by a car has had something bad happen to them but the guy who thinks there's a bigger reason (carspiracy?) that targeted them because of something particularly unique to people like him and it wasn't just random is being paranoid on top of being a victim of the car accident.


And people being nice to you but only seeing your skin color are the types I'm actually arguing against the most here, since they see virtue in being kind to a black dude. It's all about themselves and how good they feel.

 

[Silvanus]

The bird analogy would make sense if primates also had evolved that method of attracting mates and we inherited it. They didn't. Most apes just have some form of red flashing buttocks that attract mates, that and some type of protection/resources being granted to the potential mates. Basically, unlike the birds where the male puts on a show, apes evolved with the female putting on the show for the male and the male offering material benefits. Clubs are just a way of civilizing this and mimicking nature since it's more graceful to have a ritual that's akin to birds than one akin to apes. In this context, having harems is what the instinctual equivalent would be, and we don't really do that in the modern context in civilized countries any more.

...OK, you've missed the point entirely. I was not saying we do exactly the same things. I'm saying that many of our own behaviours are rooted in rather base or instinctual roots, even when we're unaware of how those instincts are affecting us. If you believe you're entirely free of instinctual drives, or that you have overridden them entirely, you're merely unaware of how they're affecting you.

If the fear is on par with how much fear is experienced when in similarly statistically dangerous situations, such as when driving for example, it's not irrational. If someone, however, feels no fear at all doing a bunch of similarly statistically dangerous things but only feels fear in an elevator with some random dude, then sure, that's irrational.

Seriously? We go through extensive training in order to earn licenses to drive, and are taught strenuously how cautious we must be and how dangerous a car is. Are you advising a similar level of caution for people who wish to be alone in an elevator with a stranger?

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

The bird analogy would make sense if primates also had evolved that method of attracting mates and we inherited it. They didn't. Most apes just have some form of red flashing buttocks that attract mates, that and some type of protection/resources being granted to the potential mates. Basically, unlike the birds where the male puts on a show, apes evolved with the female putting on the show for the male and the male offering material benefits. Clubs are just a way of civilizing this and mimicking nature since it's more graceful to have a ritual that's akin to birds than one akin to apes. In this context, having harems is what the instinctual equivalent would be, and we don't really do that in the modern context in civilized countries any more.

...OK, you've missed the point entirely. I was not saying we do exactly the same things. I'm saying that many of our own behaviours are rooted in rather base or instinctual roots, even when we're unaware of how those instincts are affecting us. If you believe you're entirely free of instinctual drives, or that you have overridden them entirely, you're merely unaware of how they're affecting you.

If the fear is on par with how much fear is experienced when in similarly statistically dangerous situations, such as when driving for example, it's not irrational. If someone, however, feels no fear at all doing a bunch of similarly statistically dangerous things but only feels fear in an elevator with some random dude, then sure, that's irrational.

Seriously? We go through extensive training in order to earn licenses to drive, and are taught strenuously how cautious we must be and how dangerous a car is. Are you advising a similar level of caution for people who wish to be alone in an elevator with a stranger?

You may be unaware of some instincts but the ones you are aware of it's your job to try to control. Clearly the subject at hand is something people are aware of.

And the training you go to learn to drive is completely irrelevant. There's the same risk if you're a car passenger too and you don't go through training to be a passenger but people are not any more fearful being passengers than being drivers cause they're less trained.

 

[tstorm823]

And the training you go to learn to drive is completely irrelevant. There's the same risk if you're a car passenger too and you don't go through training to be a passenger but people are not any more fearful being passengers than being drivers cause they're less trained.

I would say the passengers are more fearful than the driver only when they have been trained to drive.

 

[Silvanus]

And the training you go to learn to drive is completely irrelevant. There's the same risk if you're a car passenger too and you don't go through training to be a passenger but people are not any more fearful being passengers than being drivers cause they're less trained.

Ahh, ok. Of course, the dangers of driving are also the subject of billions in investment into technology and awareness campaigns to mitigate the risk; would you suggest the same approach?