What is “racism”? Why is the belief that the appearance and origin of a desk has a good correlation with the desk’s value and usefulness not known as “deskism”, and why is “deskism” unlikely to to destroy one’s career, whereas the belief that the appearance and origin of a human has a good correlation with various desirable or undesirable characteristics is a horrid and unthinkable sin.
Use of the word racism
Racism, sexism, and so forth, is the act of using the same kind of reasoning to make inferences about people, as one would use to make inferences about anything else.
Thus in all of history there was never such a word, until the twentieth century, for in the twentieth century, various thoughts about this world have been prohibited, in much the same manner, and for much the same reasons, as various thoughts about the next were prohibited in earlier centuries.
Now some people will say that racism is irrationally making inferences from someone’s appearance and origins, but in practice, no application of Bayes theorem to particular individual cases that includes this kind of information will ever be accepted as rational, thus no application of this information in any real life situation will ever be accepted as rational – though of course those crying “racist” will make an unprincipled exception for themselves. Knowing that visiting certain parts of the city will surely get them assaulted, they don’t go there, and they spend stupendous amounts of money to ensure that their kids do not go to school with blacks.
Tags: anticoncept, racism
A 8 years old post worth reading. Libs would say you do not have to be empathic with a desk, but you do have to be empathic with a human.
For not noticing this, they would denounce you an evil autistic sociopath who has no empathic ability. Indeed they would say thinking about humans like thinking about desks is automatically a sign of pathological thinking.
They would be wrong. Their ideological ancestor is Kant who said it is wrong to treat humans ONLY as means, they should ALSO be treated as ends. That is, Kant said, it is entirely OK to treat a doctor like a pill of medicine, a mere object, a mere mean to the end of your healing. To use him. To use him like one would use an object. To dehumanize him that way. But you ALSO have to treat him like a human being and thus, for example, not enslave him but pay for his services. That is the humanizing part.
Libs talking about dehumanizing goes all down to Kant, to treat someone as and end is to humanize him, to treat him as a mere mean is to dehumanize him. But Kant had sense. He never sed you cannot treat humans as means. He just said you ALSO have to treat them as means.
Back to the problem of desks vs. people. This is all about different kinds of desks, and different kinds of humans having different levels and kind sof utility. We DO have to use people as means. And as such, there will be differences.
While accepting Kant’s dictum to also treat people as ends does NOT mean to ignore their differences of utility, but it means to treat that in a humane way, like not to kill everybody who has low productivity but to find a way to employ them.
The performance “artist” and the Swedish bureaucrat are merely ahead of the curve.
If everything is racist, then nothing is. Taken by itself, that might be okay. The problem is that earlier they redefined indecency as a subcategory of racism, so now nothing can be indecent anymore, either.
The art of not hurting people’s feelings is where accusing someone of “Racism” was spawned.
I’ve argued other places that to accept “Racism” as is usually accused in many cases, is to abandon true rationality and observation.
What you now call inference. I now call logical and rational observation.
There are no losers; therefore there are no true winners. Every single person is capable of what every other person is capable of. To say otherwise requires an aroma of rationality, and thus exudes an aroma of truth, and thus is racist. Why is it racist? Because someone doesn’t like it. Thus the truth must be filtered through a lens than finds everything acceptable to most if not all of the populace. If not logically acceptable, then acceptable through explanation with true meanings hidden and strict logical meanings, false.
The truth hurts, and insofar as it hurts, it is probably true.
Now some people will say that racism is irrationally making inferences from someone’s appearance and origins, but in practice, no application of Bayes theorem to particular individual cases that includes this kind of information will ever be accepted as rational
Yes, this is absolutely maddening. Economists have the term “statistical discrimination.” This term just means using Bayes Rule in the context of race/sex/etc. I would say a substantial majority of economists think that statistical discrimination is a social ill which we should work to destroy.