acephal

> In speaking to Africans in the West, in general they share a very traditional view of the situation as many other immigrants do. Namely, to remember who you are, where you come from, who your people are, and many other things from homeland.

The point here isn't to say indigenous Africans are not woke or bear no interaction with (post-)colonialism, but that their cultural circumstances are just too distinct to provide much solace to the specific plight of Black Americans, surprised as some are when they move to or visit Africa and discover a perspective they imagined to be in more alignment with their own, as I mentioned above.

This distance is palpable in your own commentary that immigrants "remember who you are, where you come from, who your people are, and many other things from homeland." - such a sentence has little to offer to a Black American whose ancestors were physically and culturally displaced in an intractable way.

But this also has another edge to it, which the article also wishes to point out, that the "American-ness" of the Black community can lead to notions of whose perspective is more valid, again, highlighted in the substrate of YouTube commentary I've encountered.

It is true that most Black folk, just as in the article wrt Liberia, have zero interest in relocating to Africa and elect to struggle for whats owed to their ancestors' contribution to building this country, however the experience of this smaller community of Black American migrants throws light on an interesting aspect of the discussion from where I'm standing

We see this intersection between the American Black community and Africa again today in the growing sentiment amongst certain Black Americans to not only visit Africa, but consider moving there as well. Many youtube videos you can look at on this, but the biggest issue that comes up is how Africans in Africa share little of the fervent anti-colonial attitude prominent in the American Black community here.

There is genuine shock registered at how much many Africans are simply disinterested in explicitly raising questions around White privilege, how it even continues to be catered to in even typical hospitality settings.

Two articles made the frontpage of HN within the last 4 weeks whereby African writers in Britain and Africa, respectively, write to disparage the export of the Black American anti-colonial perspective, one going so far as to indicate an element of typical American cultural exceptionalism.

It seems the Black American community is alone both in its experience and response to the uniquely intensive and thoroughgoing racism of America, no matter how pervasive its cultural influence in the arts globally.

Too American to ever be (any one of the ethnicities identified as...) African, too "other" to ever be more than a second-class American, left alone with hundreds of years of cultural ressentiment at de facto segregation and disenfranchisement that has only recently found popular expression in the liberation of social discourse and media from establishment institutions.

I'm suddenly reminded of a joke a comedian whose name I can't recall told about how a white person is more comfortable with Africans from Africa than they are with the Black Americans that've been here for over 300 year, something like, to paraphrase, "You tell em your name is DeShawn, that's a wrap, but if you're 'Oluwafemi' they love you".

The Cameroonian Joel Embiid, the famous NBA player for the Philadelphia 76ers, famously recalls being able to convince students at the University of Kansas, where he played college basketball, that in Cameroon he lived near lions and had to fight with them constantly. Joel Embiid grew up in an upper middle-class suburb in his home country.

Why am I not surprised this direction was taken in this thread when the article has much more interesting things to discuss?

As well as Don and Doña

Poland?

We wouldn't be living things

> Race is just a correlation, the causative factor is the culture associated with the race as practitioners of falun gong (who include the Han people) are also targeted.

This also happens in America today

> The tectum is a beautiful piece of engineering. To control the head and the eyes efficiently, it constructs something called an internal model, a feature well known to engineers. An internal model is a simulation that keeps track of whatever is being controlled and allows for predictions and planning. The tectum’s internal model is a set of information encoded in the complex pattern of activity of the neurons. That information simulates the current state of the eyes, head, and other major body parts, making predictions about how these body parts will move next and about the consequences of their movement. For example, if you move your eyes to the right, the visual world should shift across your retinas to the left in a predictable way. The tectum compares the predicted visual signals to the actual visual input, to make sure that your movements are going as planned. These computations are extraordinarily complex and yet well worth the extra energy for the benefit to movement control. In fish and amphibians, the tectum is the pinnacle of sophistication and the largest part of the brain. A frog has a pretty good simulation of itself.

There is actually an immense amount of meditation on this very notion of an internal model, antecedent to the modern concept of consciousness we've been discussing since Kant, which guides a life form, from Aristotle down to St. Thomas Aquinas. See Daniel Heller-Roazen's "The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation"

Likwise with Gorillas, these animals live in family groups, not random groupings of unrelated strangers where the greatest psychopath wins

This.

If you want to know what instantaneous knowledge transfer looks like you just have to look at how ideas commute via Twitter/Facebook memes, which is largely a reification of word-of-mouth.

On a certain level, actual learning requires active participation: you have to want to learn. Learning disrupts your entire world and that's kinda the point. The idea of frictionless learning seems fanciful.

You can say you're shortening the feedback look in a multimedia text, but the desire to learn in my experience starts very early in life and is a fragile thing to cultivate. The author is trying to pour water out of a sinking ship with a bucket. You want people to want to learn, get rid of common CORE with basically tells all the kids who don't have STEM proficiencies or can match pace with its demands, "good luck with life"

There are gigantic swathes of people, the people most in need, who'd already be daunted merely opening the author's marketed multimedia text they wrote at the sight of the math equation.

You're already introducing something terribly new and threatening, threatening to the sureness of the reader's ego, which, again, is why people learn easiest from toxic, context-less memes.

It still blows my mind that people think race in America isn't a caste system. It absolutely is a caste system.

Chicago is only getting more expensive

Yeah really can't behind this idea software engineers are in any way "working class". Kind of an affront in my book.

Only way to outdo China is to outdo China

But they do, many working class communities communicate distrust of middle class white collars

Paul Castellano agrees

I've literally been on a date where I told a woman I was thinking of getting a cat and her exact response, in a public restaurant, was "that's gaaaaaay"; she was a data scientist.

This is the problem with much of the spectrum of political rhetoric in America, they're almost all somehow unrealistic in their basic, shared presumption of a world without some over-determining Other (a black box concept that is somehow causal of all social woes) is the goal: feminists, a world without patriarchy, anarchists, a world without hierarchy, Nazis and White Supremacists, a world without racial degeneration, so on and so forth).

Socio-political issues tend to be more complex in causal factors than political rhetoric can possibly bare.

Look at how conservatives re-evaluate the value of "BLM" at every opportunity since it represents all Black politics to them even though Official BLM is a distinct political group in the Black community of whom not every Black person agrees with the stated manifesto on their website, there being more than enough easily searchable YouTube videos to learn the opinion of various Black commentators.

> In short design by committee might be bad but rule by committee helps.

> So I kind of disagree with the premise - a parliament based market and human rights friendly nation could have been successful at almost any point post 1500. All it took was to wrench power away from the monarch...

Which is exactly what Salvatore "Lucky" Luciano did in the early 30s when he had Salvatore Maranzano, the Capo di Tutti Capi, "Boss of Bosses", assasinated and proclaimed that La Cosa Nostra would be governed by a commission.

This entire thread is completely toxic and predictably so, the fact it hasn't been flagged yet is telling

I love all the replies implying they can obliviously dictate a completely different culture's values to them

Man, organized crime in Italy and Mexico... Cosa Nostra were being extremely polite next to them.

Maybe they can ask Sammy Gravano for recommendations

The sooner we get to Cowboy Bebop names, the better

So in effect this says more about how uncritical modern people are of themselves and others than it does anything about the practice of modern marriage, that many many people blindly march into relationships and commitments they don't fully understand but regardless pursue an abstraction of.

Reifying that from the situation of marriage, this is true in a number of domains in life.

And in a number of different domains in life at that

Then you have the even worse trend of a certain kind of 'hip/urban' non-Black belittling a conservative Black person or a Black person who doesn't represent themself along the lines of what popular culture communicates is what counts as valid Blackness , as if the 'hip' non-Black is _more_ locked in arms with Black experience than the actual Black person they're belittling (I'm looking at you Andrew Schulz!).

Totalitarianism of an individual is one thing, the future will be far more anonymous, you'll hear the name of a state, law, or corporation than an actual, particular individual

Thanks

Paywall