"New" diseases are a problem. Whether AFM is totally new, or newly recognized, don't know. The CDC page I looked at listed well known viruses as the cause.

Epidemiologists have predicted (correctly or not, don't know) that we will see more new diseases over time, as a result of increased human/wild animal contact in rain forests, and so on. Ebola is an example of a new disease emerging from human/animal contact. In addition old diseases are getting moved around more -- like West Nile Virus's jump to North America, or Zika virus's appearance in South America.

The other thing is that as old diseases fade into the background (mostly not disappearing) diseases which might have been similar to epidemic diseases (like polio) might become identifiable. Cancer, for instance, is more common now because more people live long enough to develop it. Prostate cancer, for instance, probably wasn't a common problem until many men started living long enough to develop serious symptoms and metastases.

You don't know what the external physical world looks like... — dukkha

I think you misuse the word "see". According to common usage, we see objects. We do not see the light which reaches our eyes, that's not a conventional use of the word "see". — Metaphysician Undercover

I would argue that we don't see objects. We see shapes and colors, which are merely representations of objects. — Harry Hindu

According to Hank Williams, we do see light:

Now I'm so happy no sorrow in sight
Praise the Lord I saw the light

It is interesting to hear reports about the world from someone who has had damage in the visual cortex. A friend had had a stroke. Most of her visual field was missing, and the way her brain processed signals from the retina was disrupted.

What she was "seeing" in her hospital room were horizontal lines, and not much else. As far as I could tell, her room had ordinary painted walls; no posters, pictures, shadows... just plain walls and the usual furnishings. The window in her room was not visible to her. Apparently her brain was no longer able to assemble an image that had vertical lines, shapes, color, brightness, and so on. Of course this was very upsetting to her.

My understanding is that our brains don't receive "pictures", they receive information about vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and circular lines; edges, solid planes, color, movement, and so forth. Some animals receive a good deal less. Frog vision, for instance, is tuned to movement and edge lines--just enough to coordinate a long sticky tongue.

The brain assembles edges, solids, lines, colors, and so forth. "We" do not "see" this process; "We" receive the finished image--at least until something goes haywire.

Apparently brains have evolved to do this without much training. Newly hatched chicks "imprint" on the first animal they see which in a natural setting is their mother. Babies start recognizing their parents very soon (of course other senses are involved in this recognition). We don't have to teach babies how to see. (Teaching people "how to see" usually happens years later in art classes, when students are challenged to look at the world as if they had not seen it before.)

Learning how to photograph is a lesson in seeing, as is a drawing class. The film or digital receptors sometimes capture the world in unfamiliar ways. Many people (me, for instance) find it very difficult to capture an image of any sort with a pencil and paper.

It is the brain which interprets all the different neuronal impulses and builds this experience of depth. — dukkha

How would the brain do that if the only neuronal impulses it had EVER received were 2-D? This is like supposing that we have only ONE EAR and the brain presents us with stereo sound that it creates. How would it know what stereo sounded like if it had the input of only 1 single ear?

So take colour for example, physicalists don't generally believe physical things actually 'look' yellow or red in the physical world (and our brain internally generates a representation of how the objects 'look' which for us are colour experiences. — dukkha

I have here a lump of 24 caret gold, a ruby, a sapphire, and an emerald. the lump is yellow, the ruby is red, the sapphire blue, and the emerald is green. If these 4 objects have no color, how do they reflect light at a particular wave length? If sun light passes through the emerald, how do the molecules composed of 4 or 5 elements absorb and re-emit green light that lands on your retina and triggers neuronal impulses that your brain decides is green IF there is no color there to start with?

One of the elements you are leaving out of your scheme is "experience". From experience we know that there is something behind the glass (milk, the yard, the road, fish, etc.), whereas there is nothing behind the television set except wires and dust which don't look anything like what is on the screen.

Also, how does the brain generate color? It's never "seen a color" it just get's impulses. How does it know that a ruby is red and a sapphire is blue?

(I didn't and won't read your post on the brain not being in its brain pan. In 25 words or less, where is it hanging out?

How sensory input arrives at the outer doors of the brain, and is then passed inside is one issue. What the brain does with sensory input is something else altogether.

Personally, I just don't see images on the surface of glass windows. Maybe you see things that way. If you do, and it works for you, fine.

I don't think there is any one here who supposes that his brain is in direct contact with objects. The brain has no direct contact with any object or the sensing of it (though the sense of smell is pretty close to direct contact). The brain isn't in direct contact with the world outside the skull.

The brain constructs a complex model of the world that accounts for things like windows, twigs that appear bent in the water but are not, and so on. The process of model building starts in infancy, and progresses throughout life. If the model is wrong, we may get hurt, embarrass ourselves, or damage something. Feedback tells us whether our model of the world is right or wrong.

The world seems real to me, though what it would actually look like if we were in direct mental contact with the world I do not know. Our senses are limited, and though we have experience to help, some things we can not sense. I can not hear the high pitches of a bat. Bats are silent, as far as I am concerned. Some people say they can hear them.

Towards the end of the campaign, small pox was not eliminated by vaccinating everybody in a country. If somebody got sick with small pox, all the people that might have come into contact with the infected person during the previous 2 weeks or so were vaccinated. This prevented the virus from spreading beyond that person. At this point, most people were never vaccinated against smallpox. As the cases became more and more isolated, there was less and less reason to vaccinate large numbers of people. Eventually there was one last case, then no more -- for over 35 years, now. I'm 70; the last time I was vaccinated against small pox was 1964.

The same strategy is being used on polio, except that polio is shed by the gut, which means fecal contamination can transmit the virus. So, when a case occurs, everyone in a village, county, or city needs to be vaccinated, whether they had contact with the person or not. Polio has been eliminated from the western hemisphere, most of Asia (excepting Pakistan, and maybe a few other small areas), Europe, and much of Africa.

You said, "If vaccination rates drop below 95% in a community it's well on the way to being as dangerous as no vaccinations at all." — Terrapin Station

"Herd immunity" would certainly apply at 94%. By and large, the "herd" is protected. If the 6% get sick, that could be a significant--even dangerous--loss, but that would depend on who got sick. Unless the 6% unvaccinated all live together, they aren't likely to all become infected.

<50% vaccination rates don't produce much herd immunity. It's important that "vectors" of disease get vaccinated. For instance, if you have only enough measles vaccine for 30% of the population, give it to the most socially active children (they being the ones most likely to mix and spread the virus). Isolated children living with immune parents aren't likely to get infected -- until they come in contact with an infectious child. If 90% of socially active children are immunized against measles, for instance, there would be a good chance that no large epidemic would occur.

Its critical to get health care workers vaccinated against a readily contagious disease that will bring people into hospitals. They might compose only 5% of the population, but health care workers make a great vector for transmitting influenza.

Right. A specific photon doesn't travel from a light source to your eyeball directly, unless you and the light source are in the same vacuum with no barriers in between. In an atmosphere, or in a room with windows, or when looking at the stick in the swamp water, photons are absorbed atoms of silicon or H2O or N, O, and CO2, etc. and re-emitted, one after another, until they reach your retina and are finally absorbed by your tissue.

I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to physics. My guess is that photons passing through the air encounter far fewer atoms than they do in water or glass.

When you look at a stick in the water, you are seeing the stick, the water, and anything else that is dense enough, reflective enough, and non-transparent enough to change the light that reaches your retina. I can't see the air in this room because there are not enough atoms to refract light enough to see refraction. When I look out the window, the sky is blue because between me and the upper atmosphere there IS enough gas to refract light waves.

How would a conservative end slavery, if not with the death of hundreds of thousands of people? Well, I'm not a miracle-worker, but here is a suggestion: buy out the slave owners' trade and release the slaves. It'd be a lot less expensive than a war, too. Then destroy the infrastructure that makes holding slaves economically viable, and once the whole institution has atrophied, sneak legislation in that outlaws it. — The Great Whatever

Like we could end the world drug trade by buying out cannabis, opium, and cocaine farmers, and closing down all the factories that make the precursors to methamphetamine? Supposing that this could be done, we can't overlook the fact that there is a demand market that pulls these substances in. How does a conservative solve that side of the problem?

Slavery couldn't be 'bought out' like one railroad could buy out a competitor and thereby get rid of it because...

The value of slaves was the largest asset in the pre-civil war country. There wasn't enough cash in the US to carry out such a maneuver.

The production of a high volume of raw cotton at a low price depended on slavery (at the time, in the US south).

The economics of slave production were deeply entangled in England's textile industry, and northern banking, shipping, and wholesale interests.

Slave states (the Confederacy) were not only pro-slave, they were also against centralized government, any kind of governmental regulation, industrialism, and social mobility. (For instance, southern states didn't want to cooperate with each other even on railroads; each state built short, non-connecting lines.)

The Civil War was not just about ending slavery; it was also about denying states the prerogative of leaving the union (California secessionists, take note).

War is preferable to a financial solution IF you have a lot of disposable men (the North had more than the South), and if war will be profitable to manufacturers, bankers, financiers, etc. (it was very profitable).

The North intended to pursue a Hamiltonian future of strong central government, large infrastructure investment, industrialism, and social development. The South liked it's Jeffersonian agrarian, conservative values, ideas about chivalry, personal honor, personal independence, and so on. The secessionists departure was a watershed, make-or-break moment.

Leftism is in principle committed to deep reality denial, in my view, and generally demoralizes people by telling them to revel in being weak, ugly, victimized, self-abasing, and trapped in victimhood. It's a philosophy of resentment and isn't compatible with self-respect or maturity. — The Great Whatever

It seems to me that Kurt Vonnegut wrote a story satirizing this. (OK, here I did a Google: it was "Harrison Bergeron", published in a sci fi magazine in 1961.) Vonnegut wrote...

In the year 2081, amendments to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, radios inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic. — Vonnegut

There is a sub-culture of resentment out there, no doubt--self-centered people whining and nattering about the various impositions they have to suffer under.

You are quite right that this posture is not compatible with self-respect or maturity.

Is this leftist? I suppose it is, if you call the reformers who wrote the Americans with Disabilities Act leftists. By extension, I suppose, you could arrive at the view that the whole business of being handicapped, deficient, victimized as a way of life is "leftist". "Leftist" serves you as a bucket into which you are tossing a lot of unpleasant stuff. I'd prefer you get a different bucket to collect all this stuff in, because my "leftist" bucket has different stuff and it gets confusing to me as to which garbage we are talking about.

We real leftists do complain a lot, that is true, but mostly it's about the deep institutions of the economy and politics.

What I meant was simply that white people literally see a half-white half-black person as black. That's the reflexive reaction. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that they don't see them as devoid of desires and fears. — csalisbury

If one faces a forced choice, then I suppose--yes, a half & half black-white person would be sorted into the black group. But people are not always in forced choice situations. The people that I grew up among were concerned about a lot less than 50% black, even though there weren't any actual blacks around for them to worry about -- mostly just television screens.

But the times are changing. White working class and middle class people (whatever the terms mean) are becoming much more accepting of mixed-race couples and mixed-race children, right here in 83% white Minnesota, even. "More accepting" isn't color blind, of course, nor (IMHO) should people be color blind. That's a kind of erasure of one of one's and others' real characteristics.

The times are changing, but progress isn't as swift, sure, and final as we would like. Patience, patience. We'll get there.

Dear God.

Ok, you have a liberal/leftist picnic basket full of sour tomatoes, bitter melon, rancid olives, spoiled meat, and other delicacies. Some of it I recognize, some of it is a bit too chewed up to identify with.

I won't, but my liberal/leftist picnic basket would have some unappetizing items in it too.

The leftism I was first exposed to was, merciful god, old-fashioned. It focused on Marx and some early 19th/20th century American socialists like DeLeon. It was not flavored by the University marxism of the 1980s-present which frankly doesn't smell at all like the Marxism I like.

This means that leftism fundamentally privileges representation over reality in a certain systematic way. — The Great Whatever

This strikes me as the phony marxism of POMO.

The leftist has an a priori idea of how the world ought to be, and is outraged that it is not that way. — The Great Whatever

The leftist has an a priori idea of how the world ought to be, and is outraged that it is not that way. The leftist proposes that the world ought to be changed to be that way, preferably as swiftly and with as little compromise as possible. — The Great Whatever

It seems to me that Marx (who I use as the anchor of "leftist") was pretty well historically informed and viewed history as a process involving contending forces and interests. Yes, in the end he saw a world in which Man came into his own, no longer a wage slave, no longer a master, but in a classless society (a nice big thick hunk of shining glittering idealism for you). My belief is that Marx and Engels can not be the source of quick-perfection schemes. Historical processes take their time, and their time is not our time. Sure, I'd like to see a socialist approach to health care, to full employment, to basic income, to the diet farm for the 1%, and so on, but being in a hurry is a recipe for leftist despair.

Wherever the leftist sees something that isn't perfect, where the empiricst of conservative impulse is to change oneself to match the world, the leftist impulse is to change the world to match oneself. Rather than meeting a pre-existent standard, like the conservative, the leftist protests that the standard is wrong, and ought to be place elsewhere. Hence the leftist generally does not seek to be beautiful, but to redefine the ugly as beautiful, because he believes, at bottom, that there is no substance to the world other than what he places on it, and so there is a kind of delusion or fantasy of power and control, reflected in the desire for central planning in government and statism generally. — The Great Whatever

Don't get carried away here; it's not good for your blood pressure.

The currently victorious conservatives are finding plenty that isn't "perfect" and do not seem poised to fit into the world they see. Rather, they seem poised to do some major league changing.

there is no substance to the world other than what he places on it Right. Well people who think there is no substance other than what they place on it, whatever their political views, are chock full of shit. If they are leftists, then they need to be taken away and drummed out of the leftist movement.

All of these, I believe, are features of childhood. The confusion of representation and reality (lack of object permanence), the belief in the malleability of the world to one's desires, the refusal to face unpleasant truths, the insistence that everything ultimately be molded to one's wishes. This creates a desire for childlike narratives and a liking for comic books, superheroes, and so on, along with simplistic moral axes of oppressor-oppressed that create a sort of identity-based template for knowing who is in the wrong when, to emphatically and uncompromisingly support the side that is being hurt by the ones in the wrong. This in turn leads to the basic oppressor/oppressed distinction, which has no fundamental way of being questioned, but only multiplied and complicated by infinitely expanding axes of oppression based on increasingly minutely defined representational categories... — The Great Whatever

I agree that these are characteristics of childhood persisting into adulthood (sometimes into senescence, even). I don't think this has anything to do with left-center-conservative politics; it has to do with delayed personal intellectual and social maturation. You know, a lot of the stuff you are talking about is spouted by college students. If neuroscience is correct, and the brain isn't fully developed until around 25, that means even graduate students are still spouting immature texts. In the case of severe developmental delays one may find some tenured professors babbling this way. (In fact, one does.)

I get where you are coming from. Thank you for the thorough response. I appreciate it. Reading is hard work, and I don't want to tire anyone's brains out too much here, so... that's that.

My wake-up moment with the whole classic self-flagellating white guilt thing was William T Vollman's Argall. — csalisbury

Haven't read the book so I can neither praise nor criticize it. But perhaps your source of knowledge about self-flagellating white guilt should come from experience and first hand observation rather than from Vollman's (or anybody else's) book.

In your life experiences, do you find white people who flagellate themselves about their white guilt? Have you witnessed ordinary white people engaging in behavior toward blacks, asians -- whoever -- that would merit self-flagellation?

Certainly white people spontaneously, reflexively view mixed white-black children as black. — csalisbury

Maine you say. I grew up in a rural 99.9% white county in Minnesota. I knew 1 black person by the time I graduated from high school, and he was from Uganda (exchange student). There weren't many blacks at the state college I graduated from, either. In 1968-69 I spent two years living and working in the black community of Boston. Shock immersion moving from Winona, MN to Roxbury, MA. I found that the black people I lived and worked among were not different than the white people I had grown up with. Oh sure, different food, different accent. Perhaps I was too stupid and naive to notice actual differences, but over the 40 years since then as I have worked with other black people, had black and white lovers, and so on, I haven't found significant cultural differences related to race.

Biased? Sure: my bias is that people are pretty much all alike. (in a 99.9% NW European descendent rural community, they would be.) Yes, trivial differences, especially comparing one individual to another. In the mass, no. The same things make people tick. Love, sex, desires, wishes, fears, the importance of their parents, and so on. People all seem nourished by the same thing: good work, enough income, decent environment, social connections, rich cultural life, all that. And people are starved by the same thing: bad jobs, poverty, crappy surroundings, isolation, impoverished cultural life, and so on.

The older I get, the more suspicious I am of other people's writings, whether it's books, NYT columnists, New Yorker authors, leftish magazine writers, etc. It isn't that I'm getting anti-intellectual in my old age, it's just that so many writers seem wrapped up in a package of such very narrow and specific ideas. They are tendentious, pretentious, etc.

I find that books published quite a few years ago (like 40 or more) have better balance and reflect a clearer understanding. It isn't that people thought better 40 years ago; it's just that if the book survived, it was probably pretty good to start with. Though a current book that I think is quite good is Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (it's a good review for a lot of history that I have forgotten if I ever knew). White Trash: The 400 year Untold History of Class in America is good too.

liberalism — The Great Whatever

Could you briefly explain what you mean by "liberalism"? I'm putting you on the spot, but not uncharitably. You said "adulthood" and "liberalism" aren't compatible. How so? Why?

(A lot of people dislike liberals: radical leftists, conservatives, people who don't know what else to accuse somebody of being, and so on.

dukkha isn't responding. Mission control, fire the mission abort bomb. He must be dead or unresponsive. Might as well blow up the capsule. I want to go to the bar now.

dukkha do you understand what I wrote?

Earth to dukkha? Come in dukkha. Dukkha, are you receiving? Dukkha?

all the light striking objects outside your window is reflected and then propagated through the your window with more or less fidelity.

Never mind whether its a particle or a wave. The light from the sun that bounced off the billions of points on the body of the naked woman sitting on (and denting) your car roof encounters silicon atoms in your window which absorb and re-emit the light in a 'forward' direction. What you are seeing is a stream of light from the sun, bouncing off objects, and (some of it) continuing on to be absorbed at last by the cones and rods in your retina, blah blah blah.

Why do you think this? Are you unfamiliar with any of the physics facts of life that darthbarracuda pointed out?

Here is an explanation you might find useful and which you might also find (and I found) to be a bit too much information.

What the science blogger says is this: A light wave passing through glass is absorbed and re-emitted as it passes through the substance.

That it passes through on a straight line is the effect of destructive interference on the waves to the left and right of the center point. The center point is preserved by constructive interference.

Some materials (plastic overlays for windows) are designed to scatter the light. Ordinary clear glass does not scatter the waves, so it appears to be clear.

When a wave of light is interrupted by an opaque object -- like your shoe, for instance -- the light is absorbed and NOT re-emitted.

Don't want to get vaccinated? Fine. Here is what you may get:

The WHO lists 25 diseases for which vaccines are available:[2]

Anthrax
Measles
Rubella
Cholera
Meningococcal disease
Influenza
Diphtheria
Mumps
Tetanus
Hepatitis A
Pertussis
Tuberculosis
Hepatitis B
Pneumoccocal disease
Typhoid fever
Hepatitis E
Poliomyelitis
Tick-borne encephalitis
Haemophilus influenzae type b
Rabies
Varicella and herpes zoster (shingles)
Human papilloma-virus
Rotavirus gastroenteritis
Yellow fever
Japanese encephalitis

The government has a vital stake in protecting the health of the citizenry. It fulfills a responsibility to promote public health by providing disease-prevention services such as:
sewage disposal,
clean water
garbage removal
rat and mosquito control
quality health care facilities
vaccination against preventable diseases
disease tracking and intervention (like it does for syphilis, tuberculosis, AIDS, etc.)
etc.

what right does the government have to force you to get vaccinations — darthbarracuda

Sometimes the government has to protect people who are too stupid or pig headed to protect themselves.

'd be in favor of requiring them even more broadly if there's good evidence that not requiring them actually does increase the prevalence of certain diseases. — Terrapin Station

The measles vaccine is a good example of effectiveness: Look at the graph showing a plunging incidence of measles after the measles virus vaccine was introduced. The rubeola virus, a paramyxovirus, causes serious disease. Sure, anyone who has had measles is immune, but that is immunity gained the hard way. Measles can be fatal. 5% of children with measles develop pneumonia and/or encephalitis. Either can lead to death. Anyone suffering from the measles virus is infectious for quite a few days, and the virus is readily transmitted (especially among children).

The effect of vaccines on most illnesses (for which it is used) is similar to measles. They work.

The influenza vaccine is not always effective. Because influenza is a rapidly changing disease, and because it takes months to manufacture vaccine, a mis-match sometimes develops between the time the likely strains of next year's epidemic are identified and the time the vaccine is injected. A mis-matched vaccine doesn't harm anyone directly; it just doesn't do a lot of good.

The other cause of ineffectiveness for the influenza vaccine is age. People older than 65 (give or take a little) no longer respond as vigorously to the influenza vaccine as they would have when they were younger. Their immune systems just aren't quite as capable as they used to be. (BUT... even if the influenza vaccine is 60% effective rather than 90% effective for the elderly, that's a lot better than no protection at all.

Do you think Sanders is done with politics now? — darthbarracuda

He's still Senator and has two years left. He's 75; he might be willing to run again as Senator -- I don't think 79 year olds make good presidents because the job is so demanding. The Senate is important but it's demands are much less grueling for it's members.

My guess is that he will not run for President again.

Another "Bernie Sanders" is probably not on the assembly line. His history isn't solitary and unique, but there are a limited number of people who would be like him. That said, he wasn't the last energetic, clear-headed progressive in the country. There are probably a couple of hundred idealistic clear-headed ambitious very progressive people who could run for President on the Democratic ticket. (No, I do not have a list.) A few of them might have a chance to win.

The problem is keeping out the ambitious, energetic, opportunistic pragmatists who would, if elected, deliver more of the same. The two Parties are always prepared to deliver more of the same. Democrats and Republicans institutionally embody "more of the same".

The kind of sweeping political changes that could call forth high-quality leftist-progressive politicians might be constructed in the next 4 years. It depends on how intense the reaction to Trump is, and how soon it jells into an effective movement. Demonstrations of the sort we have had for the last 2 or 3 days are a good start, but that would have to turn into an mass organized campaign within a few months if it were to have a political chance in the next biannual and quadrennial election. If it's BS as usual for the next three years, and then somebody pops out of the woodwork in 2020 to run on a reform platform, nothing much will change.

Goddammit, why couldn't Bernie have won — darthbarracuda

Because the Clinton campaign and the rules of the Democratic Party (like the use of super delegates) prevented him from winning.

May I join you in a howl of lamentation that Sanders is NOT the President-elect?

If the OED and Google Ngram are at all accurate, then nobody though of themselves as "white" until January 1, 1800. They thought they were Swedish, Welsh, Sicilian, Greek, if that.

When People say:
I am Han Chinese
I am North African
I am Native American
I am European
I am South American
I am Arabian
I am Russian
I am Norwegian
I am East African
I am yellow, black, white, red, brown, beige...
I am -- any number of geographically located adjectives -- they generally are identifying as something that is good in their experience.

We derive our meaning as persons from many layers of experience, including religion, language, race, ethnicity, diet, altitude (sea side to alpine), landscape, education, music, and a few dozen other factors. If people want to claim that one of their layers is race, I think they are entitled to that, and they are entitled to think positively about it.

I would not appreciate you, WOD, or anybody else telling me that my religion, diet, clothing (or lack thereof), sports, or anything else -- including race and ethnicity -- were actually negative factors that I should apologize for or remain silent about. I would be inclined to invite you to go fuck yourself in some politically incorrect way.

Some people say "I am Black and Proud" because they are or wish to be. Their ancestors may have been a slave, they may be the progeny of a white slave owner somewhere along the line. They may have been a poor sharecropper; they may have been in jail; they may have been screwed by every guy in the cell block; they may be illiterate; but they now claim Proud Black Man because that is how they think of themselves, and perhaps that pride came at a high price. Who are you to say "Well, that's not what black means!"

But the point here is it doesn't. In the situation I was pointing out, "European heritage" or "white" is a social identity category. The one of the various European societies who came to dominate the globe in the last few centuries. It doesn't mean "my ancestors were European." It means: "I am of the ethic group which colonised the world between the 16th and 21st century." — TheWillowOfDarkness

This is an extremely tendentious usage. One has to go out of one's way to think that more than a handful of your friends use "white" in that way.

When I say "I am white" I definitely do not denote the meaning ""I am of the ethic group which colonised the world between the 16th and 21st century."" I mean that my ancestors came from Britain. The ruling class of Britain colonized the world, not the peasants of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, or England, for Christ's sake. My ancestors were not ruling class, either -- not in Britain and not in the US.

It is true that some non-ruling class subjects of the various colonizing crowns of Europe served in their majesties' armed forces (willingly or not) and were sent hither and thither to back up the colonial forces. Most of them didn't have much choice in that service. For the most part, the shat upon in Britain were not a lot better off than the shat upon in Nigeria or India.

Your usage of the word white (and the meaning you load into it) is as lazy and stereotypical as you think racist language is.

Was not, is not, he.
Absent from eternity.
Dead infinity.

being nagged for lists of harms

Next time let's all do 5 syllables
antinatalist haikus, 7 syllables
schopenhauer 2. 5 syllables

Internet troll holes
Hell's bells calling home sick souls
antinatalists

Fucking Autumn leaves!
Brown red yellow sickly beige:
Burn baby, burn them all.

Die my darling, croak.
get it over with! Don't hope.
Deep in earth, dead bloke.

Dove to earth then splat
Meow come the kitty cats
for kidneys and brains.

The "evilness" of white people is a description of how social relations have been expressed in our societies more or less since colonialism and after. — TheWillowOfDarkness

This is why some people say "white people can't be subject to racism" in the West. Not because people of the white ethnic group cannot be discriminated against, but because the don't live is a society which defines their ethnic identity as a second class citizen. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Various European groups did not colonize other peoples to prove that they were better than colored people. They colonized other people because it was economically, militarily, and politically advantageous to subjugate other peoples and extract their wealth from them.

Many of the elites that profited from a lot of the colonialism that occurred are still in place, still benefitting from their acts of exploitation, still exploiting fresh people. It is entirely possible for the rich, white, elite to discriminate against poor, white, people -- and to do so just as viciously as they would exploit colonialised brown people.

Exploitation, colonialism, subjugation, and so forth is primarily an economic process -- not a racist, sexist, white-run social operation.

It's not the idea of ethnic origins, of which there are many in Europe, it's the idea of race that is the issue. — Marchesk

It seems to me (provincial that I am) that actual races do exist side by side with race-used-as-a-vehicle-to-suppress-those-groups-and-elevate-these-groups. Blacks, after all, are black because of their recent place (last 25k years) of origin, and whites are white for the same reason. Aboriginals have been separated from other groups long enough to take on some unique characteristics. NONE of the characteristics that different groups feature are bad. The features are just different. NONE of the groups are superior in significant ways. Each group has some metabolic features (on the level of detail more than anything else) that are unique to that group -- just as males and females have metabolic differences.

Personally, I like the existence of people who look consistently different, who have characteristic skin tones, differences in hair, and so on. I think we are more interesting as different than if we were all coffee-with-cream colored with tightly curled hair.

One of the confusions that occur that make race much more problematic than it would otherwise be is that people link particular cultures to race. Black/violent; white/smart; blacks easy going; whites uptight; asians/smart; Indians/drunk, and so on. Of course these cultural stereotypes are harmful, because most blacks aren't violent. Blacks, whites, asians, and indians are all represented similarly on a distribution of basic intelligence and a long list of other variables.

It IS the case that many blacks in America do poorly in academics, from the get-go. We have good reason to think this has nothing to do with basic intelligence and everything to do with more cultural factors like the impoverished language culture of poor people (in this case, blacks). Poor people living in a culture of impoverishment do not express themselves the same way that better off people living in
a cultures of sufficiency or advantage. Poor American Black children arrive in kindergarten having heard perhaps 20-30 million fewer words spoken by parents or caregivers, and have heard far more negative and command language than children from cultures of sufficiency or advantage. These deficits appear to be lifelong -- not readily remediated after the age of 7 or 8.

Because language is formed early and is difficult to change, some people have assumed that differences in school performance was genetic. It isn't, of course. It's cultural.

↪Marchesk Nah. The idea of being white is the idea of roughly being from Europe ancestrally. — The Great Whatever

There was an interesting lecture from the BBC Reith Lectures series on the radio -- something like 3:00 in the morning in the US. Don't remember who was speaking, but he was pointing out how "white people" pride themselves on having "European heritage" and being inheritors of "Western Civilization", while actually knowing almost nothing about it.

The idea of being white is the idea that you're skin color determines your status in society — Marchesk

This is true, but I would add especially in the context of radical change. The radical change in Anglo-American culture was the rise of abolition, the end of the slave trade, and the events preceding (and following) the American Civil War.

The English ended their participation in slave trading in 1807. They didn't do this because it was unprofitable. The Anglo-American Abolition Movements began within the Quaker and Evangelical Christian groups on the grounds that slavery was un-Christian. A concern for civil and human equality followed later - quite a bit later.

"Whiteness" and "Blackness" wouldn't be so intense a concern in a settled, enforced system of slavery. Racial difference would become a hot issue once the settled enforced system of slavery was blown open and former slaves suddenly were presented as equals. Racial distinctions would now be critical in establishing a new social order.

I would guess that many Europeans--who hadn't previously thought a lot about racial and ethnic differences--suddenly became sensitive to these differences with the sudden arrival of waves of refugees. People having difficulty making accommodating too much too fast change aren't necessarily racists.

Good questions. Wiki claims it was late 17th century for the term modern use of white, but I suppose you would want a more substantial source. — Marchesk

I've been reading that "white" as a racial term has a short history for a couple of decades now, and hadn't checked any references.

I did a quick (separate) search of "white" and "racial" in the OED (on-line) and found that "white" as we apply it to race does indeed have a relatively short history. ("White" describing a color of course goes back to Old English and further.) "Racial" has a shorter history.

Google Ngram charts words by the frequency of their appearance in texts which are part of their corpus of printed books (it's big). Here is a result.

Note that in 1800, the incidence of the two terms (black race and white race) was extremely low. The term "black race" was used for 200 years at about the same, fairly low rate, while the term "white race" was much higher and fluctuating.

Of course, just because Chaucer, Spencer, or Shakespeare didn't describe any characters as "white" doesn't mean there wasn't an appreciation of differences that we would call "racial" prior to the 19th century. In the eponymous play, Othello (1604) is described as “the Moor” (I.i.57), “the thick-lips” (I.i.66), “an old black ram” (I.i.88), and “a Barbary horse” (I.i.113)."

Making racial distinctions doesn't make sense where there is little regular inter-racial contact. Americans are predictably indifferent to the ethnic (dis)similarities of central African or Siberian peoples, because we have no regular contact with peoples from these areas bearing differences. In reverse, the residents of Central Africa or Siberia would likely have little awareness of differences between the Ojibwa and Navaho Indian peoples, or Incas and Aztecs.

Scientific classification probably had a role in highlighting racial differences and similarities.

↪Bitter Crank You ever read Edward Said's Orientalism? Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth?

Or how about this. Leopold II's letter to missionaries:
http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/~luarnaut/Letter%20Leopold%20II%20to%20Colonial%20Missionaries.pdf — discoii

No, I haven't read either of those books (could've, should've, would've). Why do you ask? Did I inadvertently step on a sore toe?

(I do know something about who the two people are, and I have read bits and pieces about them.)

the English, Welsh, Irish and Scottish, just in that little small area. — Marchesk

Or consider the long history of ethnic conflicts in Palestine which is even smaller and littler. Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, Samaritans, Judeans, Israelites, etc. Twelve tribes of tiny Israel?

Who has some specific references for when the categories of 'white', 'black', 'yellow', and 'red' were constructed and became common? Also, when were the Irish not considered 'white' and by whom? When were the French or Greeks or Jews (like, Russian Jews) not considered 'white' and by whom?

According to the Guardian, "Neither she nor her campaign seemed to foresee that American voters would resoundingly reject a plea to hold on to unity in favour of division, and choose fear over hope."

American Voters didn't do anything "resounding'. Clinton (seems to have) won the popular vote, and though she lost the Electoral College race, it was by 50 votes, not 200. She won a good share of what was needed, but close doesn't count, of course.

American voters were split down the middle. Trump didn't earn the mandate of a landslide and Clinton wasn't cast aside by a landslide.

It's all a good example of why Plato said democracy is a bad form of government. — Metaphysician Undercover

Poorly functioning systems of government are all bad.

An efficiently run and relatively humane dictatorship beats a scatter-brained and cruel dictatorship. A failed democracy would not be better than a failed dictatorship.

Democracy in the US or UK is not failed. It is hobbled, at least in the US, by several factors: the way politics are financed, the way primaries are tallied (winner take all), the way the electoral college works, and so forth. Having money fed into the campaigns by a high pressure hose doesn't help either. All of these, and other factors, could and should be reformed.

Au contraire, BC, I think they've tried 'smart' and it hasn't worked. Trump won by trying 'dumb' - slogans, fear, hatred, 'the other', anger, doubt, and appeals to greed ('Look how rich I am'). So 'smart' is what has failed. Dumb is the new smart. — Wayfarer

Dumb may be the new smart but I'll stand by what I said. Redistricting is a critical process, because it enables the party in power to tailor districts to suit. This might not affect the vote on a Trump or a Clinton, but it makes a lot of difference for who will occupy the US Congress and the state houses. Trump would be less of threat IF the Senate was controlled by Democrats.

I hope that above all else, every pollster, media station, and complacent liberal who is 'surprised' right now takes a long hard look at themselves, and realizes 'I am completely out of touch with reality, with my country, and the desires of the people, and have little conception of the way that people think or what they value.' — The Great Whatever

Yes.

And people reading the polls (like me) need to be more careful. For instance, many of the polls I read have a "margin of error" of say, 3%. That means that there is a 6% range that can not be known. If the poll says Clinton is 3% ahead of Trump, it may be that they are actually tied. In a 3% MOE poll, a 2% lead may mean that the Clinton is actually behind Trump.

Early on, the distance between the candidates was very large and the MOE didn't matter very much. But as they came closer and closer, MOE mattered more and more.

The other thing people (like me) need to remember is that A POLL RESULT IS NOT A FACT. It may be that 2000 of 3000 people polled said they preferred Clinton. That doesn't mean they are definitely going to vote for Clinton, especially when the election is weeks or months off. It doesn't mean they are going to vote at all.

quoted Michael Moore saying last summer that "Donald Trump is going to win." Moore isn't the Oracle at Eleusis, but one does have to use "gut response" in prognostication. And one needs to watch out for crowd bias. Everyone I hang around with liked Clinton. If I suspected that somebody liked Trump I shied away from them. My siblings live in the small town America that grooved on Donald's affronts to good taste. We avoided the topic.