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A comment on Facebook to ban white nationalist content. Parent comment

Re:Facebook to ban white nationalist content by mrtesthah on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @02:10PM (#19504034)
Chinese nationalism probably should be banned in China (but not the US) for the same reason that white nationalism should be banned in the US: the racial designations "white" and "black" are completely arbitrary terms, not grounded in any scientific fact, and are social constructs based around an in-group (whites) wielding political, economic, and cultural power over an out-group (blacks). "Irish" is an ethnicity. "Lithuanian" is an ethnicity. "White", on other hand, is most definitely not an ethnicity, and identifying as such implicitly supports the present racist status quo, because the white in-group already wields overwhelming power in American society[1]. White nationalism asserts that only those Americans who identify as white are "real Americans", and therefore explicitly advocates for the exercise of white cultural and political dominance at the expense of all other out-groups. And at its most extreme, it advocates genocide as a means of accomplishing its vision.

1. http://www.mdcbowen.org/p2/rm/reports/cerd.pdf

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Re:Facebook to ban white nationalist content by randyrand on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @03:23PM (#19504914)
That seems incredibly arbitrary.

1. a Chinese nationalist can post about China while living in the USA.

2. You don't need institutional power in order to do harm to other people.

3. How do you handle cases where power is evenly split? 60/40? 70/30? Who gets to be racist?

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Re:Facebook to ban white nationalist content by mrtesthah on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @04:09PM (#19505454)
Try to stop thinking like an engineer and read my comment as the elucidation of a philosophical position on race rather than a Facebook policy rule.
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Re:Facebook to ban white nationalist content by justaman on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @05:42PM (#19506371)
Why can't China be for the Chinese? Sure don't kill anybody. Don't hate them. But why can't German's want their German ancestry to be Germany?

The USA is a unique case in the world and should be exception, not the rule.

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Re:Facebook to ban white nationalist content by mrtesthah on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @07:22PM (#19507288)
Chinese nationalism is behind the cultural genocide of the Uyghur people (over 1m in camps)[1], brutal suppression of Tibetan political movements[2], and mass murder of political prisoners for the purpose of organ-harvesting[3]. The CCP uses cultural nationalism to get away with brutal suppression of non-Han ethnic minorities. This should not be overlooked, but it should also be obvious that this doesn't exonerate or excuse American white nationalist movements in any way.

   1. https://theglobepost.com/2019/01/17/cultural-genocide-xinjiang/
   2. https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2016/02/04/chinas-oppression-of-tibetans-has-dramatically-increased/
   3. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/the-reality-of-human-organ-harvesting-in-china/news-story/14d3aa5751c39d6639a1cc5b39f223b7
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Re:Facebook to ban white nationalist content by SamReidHughes on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @02:29PM (#19504302)
It's taxonomically arbitrary but not completely arbitrary, and in fact is grounded in scientific fact.
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Re:Facebook to ban white nationalist content by mrtesthah on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @02:39PM (#19504420)
The terms attempt to classify people based on an arbitrary collection of visually distinct phenotypes rather than fundamental genotypes -- however, the One-drop Rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule) works only on the basis of the latter. This inconsistency alone makes the terms scientifically irreconcilable.
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Re:Facebook to ban white nationalist content by SamReidHughes on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @09:45PM (#19508346)
Well, that straw man is obviously useless, which is why the bad old days had an intense vocabulary for all the different proportions of mixed race. Research today shows that people's classifications generally lines up with genetic ancestry. So, for example, doctors are well served to judge racial/genetic makeup by appearance when diagnosing and treating patients. Likewise, if you want to make an ethnostate or the opposite, it's certainly a useful concept. (American immigration laws by design do the opposite, using national quotas as a proxy for race.)
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