Haha...the USA does not hold the one-drop theory. If it ever did, that was long ago. A pasty-white Brasilian with one black great-grandmother is white to himself and everyone else.
975 karma · joined January 20, 2020
Racial categories are very, very easy to back out from genetics. They correspond almost perfectly: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000292970...
"Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity."
That's not to say there aren't better systems. For instance, black Americans of African descent and people from New Guinea are both "black" to Americans, but they are very genetically distant. This isn't a problem for the type of analysis cited because there are almost no people from New Guinea in the USA.
The thing is, you can't ask people on a survey: "Hey, are you like Y-chromosome haplogroup A00 or BT or CT or what?" because people don't know. You can ask them, "What race are you?"
The concept of "race" captures a very large amount of information.
Race is real. U.S. race categories are not the same as used elsewhere in the world. U.S. Census categories map quite well to genetics. They capture a lot of variance. Ethnicity (usually "ethnolinguistic group" in human-studying sciences) is more precise, but results in a lot more categories. You can capture all the variance with infinite categories. This is the bias-variance tradeoff. This is how things are.
Several things:
> Walz was never part of the Biden administration.
I made a claim about the scarequotes(left), not about the Biden administration specifically. You asked about Biden. They were going for succession, you know!
> Are you similarly bothered by the actual First Amendment violations the Trump administration has carried out?
Yes
> AP reporters not allowed
The executive has leeway here, it's not clear exactly how much. Biden wasn't inviting Breitbart in, for example. That a judge found something doesn't mean much, supremes finding something would be meaningful.
> Targeted pro-Pal students
Specifically, pro-Pal foreign students. The Americans are right now in the process of figuring out when their rights apply to foreigners and when they don't. Often, the fed's tack is: we ask you at the border if you support terrorist organizations. If you say "yes", we don't let you in. Turns out you support HAMAS. That's a terrorist org, it's on our list. You lied. Goodbye! So in many cases it's not about speech per se, but rather whether you lied to the feds. And if the "unconstitutionality" thing here holds up, well then...I guess USA decided free speech applies to foreigners in the country. But until very recently that was a murky issue. Maybe still is, idk.
> Perkins Cole
"Liberals" do the same thing. Look at Biden pressuring for debanking of crypto people [https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonyaevans/2025/12/06/feds-bowm...]. Or jawboning Meta. I think it's less salient when left does it because they have captured the majority of institutions. So it looks like business as usual. It looks "legit". Except...it's just Blue enacting its will through e.g. the Fed, or whoever it is that regulates banks.
>Canceled grants
Here, I'm an expert! I'm an academic who has been negatively affected by all this. What some district court judge found is irrelevant, so I'll ignore that (just in case: district court judges are small potatoes and their rulings do not have precedential value). What I will say is: the situation had gotten WAY out of hand. The feds were funding a bunch of batshit crazy stuff that was CLEARLY just fraud and woke virtue-signaling. A lot of good stuff got canceled too, which is sad. That good stuff probably had batshit crazy woke signaling in their grant write-ups because that's the only way you could get funded! Which is sad. Should the admin have used a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer? Yes. Should the humanities be getting much less funding and producing far fewer graduate students? Yes. Even graduating from a top (~Harvard) program, humanities graduate students have something like a 10-25% chance of a "real" (professorship) job. And that might be Northwest Arkansas State Community Daycare College.
> Harvard
Harvard was made an example of. Fair? No. Did they break the law A LOT, just like everyone else? You betcha! Did they definitely discriminate in favor of Pal against Israel? Yes, certainly did. Did the admin handle it in the smartest way possible? Definitely not.
> Trump actually did bad things, not "might"
You have to understand: the "speech" climate in academia has been so, so bad for ten years - and that's because of the "liberals", not Trump and co. It's been insane. The speech restrictions were REAL. People got FIRED. Many more people KEPT QUIET ABOUT REAL SCIENCE THINGS FOR FEAR OF PUNISHMENT. Things are better now, crazier but better. You can talk kinda. The institutions are still >80% captured by Team Blue, but there is a breath of fresh air. A waft. One needn't be fearful all the time.
And I should say as well: the "thou shalt speak the wokeness" thing is, for most disciplines, merely an academic exercise. Lip service. You're a physicist: so what? "Trans women are women". Okay, fine, whatever - I believe it, I don't, I support it, I don't, it has nothing to do with fermions.
But imagine you study humans, and human behavior: suddenly, everything has real stakes. "Black people and white people are different!" --> fired. "Evolution is real and it affects behavior systematically" --> fired. Carole Hooven, for instance (driven out, not fired - cheaper that way).
One final word:
There is an extremely important difference between the tantrums of the present administration and the tack that Biden and Friends were taking. The present administration shows no signs of trying to make its infringements permanent and systematic. The previous group was trying to do precisely and exactly that. Which is much, much scarier to me.
Biden: The Biden Administration's promulgation of a Title IX interpretation that, among other things, would have compelled certain kinds of speech:
https://speechfirst.org/case/title-ix/
One example of many: it would have been a punishable offense to refuse to use someone's preferred pronouns. This is what's called "compelled speech", and it's when someone says to you, "Say $THING or else". It's very reasonable for governments to prohibit saying certain things (like national security secrets, for instance, or other people's bank account login info), but thus far forcing people to say things they don't believe has been a bridge too far.
And, happily, compelled speech is a bright line the Americans have, so far, managed not to cross. Everyone should be trying as hard as we can to not cross that line.
You may not see the harm in this particular instance, but establishing "we'll just force them to say it and punish them if they don't" as a tool in any government's toolbox is a very, very bad idea.
Ah, and I should mention Biden's new Title IX rules became law on August 1, 2024 so they weren't "would". Thankfully, we only had a few months under this particular imposition on our basic rights and push never came to shove.
Harris: https://nclalegal.org/opinion/kamala-harris-free-speech-task... Clearly wanted to criminalize speech she didn't like
Walz: https://www.cato.org/commentary/actually-tim-walz-first-amen... Same
When the "left" (Democrats) had power recently in the U.S., they were very happy to try to criminalize the protected speech of their enemies. Their tack was to define speech they didn't like as "hate speech", which luckily isn't actually a thing in the U.S., legally. But they were trying to make it happen.
I don't mean to defend one or the other side, merely to point out that this is a non-partisan issue.
Nope, that's just what some grapes taste like. There's a Korean variety, and Concord at least. Wiki says it's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitis_labrusca
I think the Americans should push for a constitutional amendment that protects one's right to privacy.
I get where you're coming from, but there's a big problem: our laws did not evolve to be enforced effectively. They are appropriate when they are enforced selectively, with discretion. Many are wholly inappropriate if simply enforced 100% of the time to the letter of the law.
That's not to say we couldn't change laws to work if enforced near-100% of the time, but it would take our legal institutions quite a lot of time to adapt.
Europe is nice to visit but a giant pain in the ass to do business in. Certainly don't even consider aspiring to anything. If you can manage that, then yeah...France, Spain, and Italy are cheap and have good food and weather :-)
I've been forced to give to two of them that were basically just political cosplay by children (well really the $ was taken without consent before it was even in my hands, so it was stolen)
And I've had the displeasure of working in a factory environment that was unionized. Perhaps there was a time when this made sense, but I think those instances are rare now.
See e.g. https://www.voanews.com/a/dockworkers-join-other-unions-in-t...
Dockworkers deliberately making everything worse because they want to keep their employment exactly as it has been.
"On 3 September 2026, the WWU–US NLRB election was successful, with 158 of the 172 ballots cast supporting unionisation"
My read is this is privileged kids play-acting their political fantasies. You could just...get a job that pays 2-5x as much elsewhere if you actually want fair exchange of labor for money?
I would be shocked if anyone but the janitors was working at WMF in an "exchanging labor for money" sense.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Workers_United
This is a measure of perceptions of corruption. Among regular Americans who have little to no first-hand information about it. While there may be some correlation between this measure and corruption, Gallup doesn't show that. It's mostly a measure of what's in the news cycle.
ITT: people playing right in to Gallup's hands.
Make me late to the airport will ya?
The British (until recently a civilized people) will throw you in jail for refusing to unlock. Or for a tweet the powers that be don't like. Not to mention China, India, Russia...
A very strong immune response, like the one we see in this topic, is exactly what the Americans need to preserve their robust understanding of and de facto access to their rights. But let's not pretend they're doing a bad job. They're doing a great job, and they could be doing better.
2) I believe the U.S. is willing to go to greater lengths to save people. So they will spend obscene amounts of resources keeping a cancer patient alive for an additional six months, or saving a borderline case of a premature baby, etc.
"Complete and total global nuclear exchange" is not so bad when there are 50 100Kt nukes, and is really, really bad when there are 10,000 10Mt nukes. And we've drastically reduced both the number of nuclear weapons and their average yield since the cold war (https://fas.org/initiative/status-world-nuclear-forces/). Which is great news!
I'm no expert, but from a little reading it seems all-out nuclear war would be not just survivable for the species, but not even that bad for most of humanity comparing to disasters of yore. South America, Oceania, much of Asia, and Africa would be ~fine.
And there's Android.