This is not giving me much hope for the general state of scientific advancement in the Russian Federation.
People also think that gender is a biological thing. As opposed to sex. People do all kinds of stupid things, often for political reasons. You can talk yourself into almost anything if you try hard enough or a dumb enough. It’s sad, really.
My experience is that if a word isn’t suitable, you can explain around it. It’s not terribly inefficient and it works in every language. I do it several times in any given podcast when I can’t remember an English word.
Saying “race” when you really meant “skin colour” isn’t efficient. It’s just lazy. People get caught up in group think and propaganda. That’s how that starts.
ROFL. I’m talking international science here.
Of the five templates that include the “race” field, one is of Hungarian origin, one from the UK, one from France, and two from USA. The ones from Russia and Japan are the ones that don’t have it.
Heh. I take it back. You are ahead of the curve. Makes historical sense, too, really.
Well, being careful and precise with language is important. I’ll agree with you that far. E.g. rms’s point about copyright, patents, trade secrets, etc. being fairly distinct topics such that the term intellectual property may lead to incoherent statements, that makes sense to me. Possibly race is like that and you’re trying to lead me out of Plato’s cave with me being blinded by the light, but I’m not seeing it yet.
Eventually, maybe when you stop doing this, if I’m not Fabbed out, I’ll go back to some of the episodes I missed from the first season and listen to the one you did about the black lives matter protests. That must have a fuller treatment of your point of view.
And someday, whether I listen to that episode or not, I’ll have to read the Bernays book.
No, because intellectual property is a real thing. You might not like it, like RMS, but it is something that very definitely exists. You’ll go to jail for violating it in most countries.
Race just doesn’t exist. It’s a bullshit idea.
Well, I don’t mind it so much if the context really is to group the various kinds of intellectual property (though writing that’s at that high a level is usually boring, e.g. this Mark Carney the central banker book my mom got me), but I found rms’s challenge to think with the more particular name – e.g copyright when it is copyright or patents when it is patents – to be useful. There is this question of whether “property” is an apt label for it. I’ve heard the Lessig / rms / question copyright line but it would certainly be helpful to hear a different view if you have one. Might make a good episode, especially if you get a guest to oppose you.
Well, veering off topic as I always do in forums. Not a good medium for me. I’ll at least see if I can’t avoid writing something totally obnoxious to crash out of here as a tactic to avoid forum addiction as I sometimes will strike out with in a seasonal depressive stupor. Fabbed out I may become, but I do like you and don’t want to fuck up what you care about.
Re. race, in the past when I’ve myself presented (in a less sophisticated way) in online venues the argument that race is scientifically nonsense so it’s illogical whoever it was who were hating on each other for these “reasons” (so many better reasons for hate, right?), that sort of sat out there with the crickets. IIRC if anything’s said back to it what’s usually said is that it’s a social construct. I wanted to avoid that term cause I think it comes from this whole area of 20th century philosophy or sociology of which I’m wholly ignorant (critical theory?). But in the loose sense these forumites who presented it to me seemed to mean it, it struck me as having some usefulness for communication, at least within the U.S. context.
Still, “race”, ethnicity, and class are definitely too foreground in my thinking. It might well be good to try to adopt your approach just to have better thought processes when encountering new people.
No, I agree with you. I also think in that case the name is a problem. The difference to the term “race” being that there it isn’t the name that’s the problem, but the very concept. I have no problem with the concept of copyright and neither has RMS since it makes or breaks his invention of copyleft.
Yeah, I think you’re not the only person. Especially in North America. I think education must be at fault for this.