Firstly, they're not even more expensive, just less cool. — Isaac

:chin:

The issue you're talking about is poverty, right? You bought a fairphone because it buys materials from non-conflict zones and uses manufacturers that pay their employees better. If not-buying from non-conflict zones or not having manufacturers that pay their employees well wouldn't cause prices to rise, everybody would be doing it. So your phone costs more than a similarly specced phone from a different brand would. The Google Pixel 3 is quite similar (slightly better) but is 60 euros cheaper.

Now, if I'm poor. That 60 EUR makes a large difference and I probably wouldn't be willing to part with 60 euros to give some abstract Chinese worker a bit more money. It's too much.

I have sincere doubts about the effectiveness of trying to shift consumer preferences as well and suspect there are better, policy driven, approaches to combat poverty. Once out of poverty people will have the time and luxury to worry about the climate impact of their purchases or the effective slavery that exists in those countries to which we've outsourced manufacturing of goods.

How do you propose to change consumer preferences in such a way that people will be willing to spend more on a product because they know the product is sourced more fairly?

There's a market for fairphones, but it's small. There's a market for fairtrade coffee but it's small. What actions, other than what companies are already doing and have dedicated PR departments for, should you and I be doing to get more people on board?

Also reminded me about this: https://www.instagram.com/p/CBKyYVzg0mQ/?igshid=kf2e6mf3o519

I'm sure Bolsonaro has such disdain for the poor, he probably experiences it as culling the herd.

More than that, though: the "resistance to race", as Street puts it, even if it's a luxury, is no less progressive for that. One can hardly advocate for a world in which a black writer is a "writer" and not a "black writer" by self-identifying as a "white writer"--and feeling faux-guilty about it. I think the focus on whiteness here is entirely regressive. — jamalrob

My English is lacking I think because I don't seem to understand this comment. Can you give an example of "focus on whiteness here is entirely regressive"? Or if somebody else wants to be helpful?

Right. So because you're afraid of your opponent you're just not going to stand for anything? Wonderful. No wonder the US needs riots to get some shit done.

How about, I think it's an interesting idea. Defund the police is, in my view, a way of saying that we need to more effectively address social problems.

That means not everything that happens is a police problem. We should have healthcare workers, social workers and other civil servants work more closely with the police and look much closer at prevention of crime and how to do that. If you send the police out for every problem, it's like taking a hammer out for every job... Even when you sometimes need a screwdriver or wrench.

I believe doing this will automatically mean police time and effort will be used much more effectively and efficiently, lead to lower crime in our communities and better living circumstances for everyone.

Acceptable enough for the sensibilities of those poor white middle aged couples?

Cuomo likes to pretend it's a "few bad apples" problem by releasing disciplinary records. That will help. :confused:

So Biden is against defunding the police. Great way of wasting an opportunity to consolidate a lead. Do Democrats want to lose? I mean, at least lie about it like every other politician just to get the goddamn votes.

didn't find anything. I think it was some weird ass advert.

Scanning now. Thanks.

Churchill quotes and the actions of his government with respect to Indian independence aren't hard to find. I've given you the definition of crime against humanity that formed the basis of a lot of convictions during the Nuremberg trials. It's a legal definition. A definition the Allied powers wrote and invoked and had a history already in the 1815 in the Declaration of the Powers, on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, of 8 February 1815. So yeah, plenty of time for Churchill to get with the program.

Droll. You complained about presentism, I set out common declarations of his time on the basic of which he could be considered a war criminal and racist. So no presentism. What other problems do you have with this qualification?

That's not an answer.

How about the standards of 1945 as I just did?

Is it presentism though? What were the prevalent ideas on race, racism and race hatred in the 30s and 40s? It was certainly more widespread but was it acceptable? What were the Nazis accused of with respect to the Jews and their idea of the "ubermensch"?

Who said this?

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

And people around him were aware:

On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane... I didn't see much difference between his outlook and Hitler's — Leo Amery

It's not so black and white in this case. The "crime against humanity" convictions for the Germans were based on: Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

If you look up "Bengal famine" then by that definition Churchill committed a crime against humanity by standards they were only too happy to retroactively apply on the Germans in 1945.

People haven't decided they're not going to tolerate slavery anymore, they tolerate it daily by their very purchases, but by tearing a statue down they get to re-write the narrative in exactly the same way that putting it up did. "We [the protestors] dismantled slavery, we must have done, look at the lack of symbol" — Isaac

Interesting. Many years ago I was struggling with why black Dutchmen were advocating against Zwarte Piet so vocally.


We just had a surge in right wing parties being popular and I was like, "hello, aren't there bigger issues to deal with here?"

So I think symbols are also rallying points. Destroying a racist symbol can in fact be motivating, first in the accomplishment of the goal in itself - see, we can make a difference and second, due to symbols being understood in more ways than the abstract policy, debate or speech. So more people will get it as they don't reach the insight through rational deliberation but through feeling.

What exactly about my questions is sleazy or dishonest?

I'm trying to establish whether we are even talking about the same historic facts and how to classify those. If people keep responding with hand waving and stuff they think implicitly answers those questions it invites miscommunication. If it is dishonest to demand explicit answers, then you really need to explain why, because I'm not seeing it.

So far I think I've been rather mellow about being called sleazy, a racist, dishonest, stupid and a moron. But yeah, YOU guys definitely have the moral high ground here.

Approximately zero white men. Your turn.

I was fine with a ballpark figure.

I take it you agree then that white men, compared to women and black people, were in fact not disenfranchised or discriminated against in any meaningful numbers?

1. I don't know — Judaka

You don't know whether in the past 450 years many white people were enslaved or not based on the colour of their skin?

You don't know whether in the past 450 years white men were not allowed to vote because they were male?

Right. So, you get to ignore my questions, rant a bit, call me names etc.? Just answer the questions. That's all I ask.

Aboriginals.

another dodge. Just answer the questions and pretend I'm too stupid to distill the implied answers in your monologue.

OK, you don't understand what it is either. Read up on it. Systemic racism can and does occur within the boundaries of law. — Baden

It's against the law for systemic racism to exist, I think that for some people, that alone makes it hard to say that it does. — Judaka

Murder is prohibited too. Yet it happens. But then maybe you were trying to say that because it's prohibited, people find it difficult to accept it exists and therefore have problems admitting to its existence.

what you did was go off on a monologue. But let's try again :

What number of white males have been confronted with negative consequences as a result from the colour of their skin or being a man in the past 450 years in the USA?

What number of black people have been confronted with negative consequences as a result from the colour of their skin in the past 450 years in the USA?

What number of women have been confronted with negative consequences as a result from being female?

Should damages be repaired or not?

Who benefitted from the damages caused?

What has been done to address these injustices? — Benkei

"Here's freedom for you homeless, uneducated n*****s. Now be grateful."

thank you for your non-reply to all the rather clear questions I posed. Also thanks for the Orwellian turn of redefining my anti-racist stance as racist. It's good to see how the apologists' mind work.

I wasn't making an argument and your reply wasn't an argument either. But thanks for your opinion. It's also not a leftist argument but a moral one to get there and since I'm white, I'm not really going to personally benefit here. The point being that blacks would be fully within their rights to get revenge and that you and I should be counting our lucky stars that they are only after equality.

And in the end, I'd rather live in anarchy than barbarism.

I'm done with this anyways. For all I care, blacks should just go get revenge if white people don't want to listen. Burn this shit down and take it all.

I'm sorry Unen! I won't talk about racism against blacks ever again! I now see the error of my ways!

You haven't explained why speaking Korean causes you to be suicidal yet. So let's leave it at that, shall we. Nor have you answered why you're so stuck on a hypothesis nobody takes seriously any more.

Uhuh. So animals don't think. And my baby only magically starts to think when he develops a language. The stupidity of the hypothesis is so clear it's difficult to understand why you can take it seriously.

What number of white males have been confronted with negative consequences as a result from the colour of their skin or being a man in the past 450 years in the USA?

What number of black people have been confronted with negative consequences as a result from the colour of their skin in the past 450 years in the USA?

What number of women have been confronted with negative consequences as a result from being female?

Should damages be repaired or not?

Who benefitted from the damages caused?

What has been done to address these injustices?

It levels the playing field because spatial tests don't require familiarity with mathematical rules. Something that has been quite widely communicated as the reason at least in the Netherlands. I have no clue why you would conclude this has anything to do with Sapir Whorf.

And the assertion that no quantitative research is done in sociology is also an outdated notion. There have been plenty of controlled, twin tests, where twins grew up in different environments that prove the environment determines educational and criminal outcomes.

I'm not sure why you're so hell bent on defending a bad hypothesis. Do you want to suggest blacks cause poverty, crime and being bad at maths for speaking a certain way?

I dove in some Dutch slavery past. Apparently all the slave owners were compensated 300 guilders per slave. That resulted in 12 million guilders in 1863, which was about 10% of the government's budget.

Also, I'd like to add, if we'd all stopped using black-white distinction immediately. How does that even address past and current injustices? And how are you going to fix those injustices if you can no longer understand why those injustices came about because you don't know how to speak about them anymore?

Again an assumption I don't share. I can hypothesise vending machines have trained monkeys that give you change. Highly predictive of what happens when you put in your money.

The Sapir Whorf hypothesis, aside from not being testable, has another problem. It's been established for quite some time now that socio-economic background and educational level of the parents pretty much predict academic achievement. So if a certain group of people, from a certain socio-economic background, that widely use ebonics and also test poorly on mathematic tests exists, it is quite frankly very ludicrous to say that their mathematics performance is caused by their language use.

Ockham's razor man.

One can also deduce, from the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis, in exactly the same way, why Western music is heavily metric, but African-American music, like jazz, reggae, and blues, leans on syncopation instead. — ernestm

Uh no, you can't because it's not true. The earliest Western music didn't have metrics (early Greek dances, gregorian chants). After the introduction of meters, Western music has been heavily syncopated since Bach and Händel. Waltzes swing just as much as Jazz does, just differently.

All your cynicism nothwithstanding, deep down you're still an optimist.