Really? As in non-primates that respond positively to humorous displays? Mostly I just see people anthropomorphising animals doing accidentally funny things, sometimes including legit pain or fear responses.

On Reddit I once had -200 for being against torture and death penalty (context: child rapist).

Yep, that tracks. I got trashed for criticising (a probably fake story about) a high school kid that beat an 11-year old into unconciousness for hitting his 11-year-old sister after being rejected. Reddit loves a good keyboard lynching. I treasure those downvotes. I sincerely hope it was just a bubble of rage-jerking people, and that’s not actually seen as acceptable or proportionate for a (very very naughty) kid.

It’s not just the US, I’ve heard stories about people bugging closed businesses semi-regularly here in Canada too. That said, I have noticed staff south of the border are surprised when I pick up products I knock over, which is interesting.

Probably true, but humour is pretty human-specific, so that’s a bit like saying we’re the most conventionally attractive by human standards.

My initial instinct is to agree with you, actually, but according to the rest of the thread that’s a bad idea, because most people aren’t as nice as us. I’ve never had the displeasure of that kind of job.

I’m impressed with how downvoted this is. RIP.

Not OP, but sure, I resent myself too.

I have trouble imagining a way I could be impressed with humanity in general, without actual willful ignorance. I’m not a dick about it, though. Kind of the opposite; it makes it a lot easier to refrain from judging any individual person.

I believe that. Like Gab, right? The scum sinks to the bottom.

If I understand correctly, I think I side with the people saying use it anyway. Video hosting is hard, and YouTube is more enshittified every day.

I’m OOTL here. Are we talking about a video hosting site that happens to have cringe on it?

I had a Brazilian friend tell me race is not all that important in Brazil and that he’s tired of Americans assuming it is.

Are you sure this person is Brazilian? This is the country that abolished chattel slavery in 1888, a couple decades after America. They still have whiteness as a standard of attractiveness there, too.

Gypsies may be a counterexample, that’s true. African migrants are an example: America’s very fabric is (traditionally) about black vs. white, even moreso than the things it’s conventionally associated with. Europe, on the other hand, just though of Africa as the colonies for a long time, and Africans arriving in great numbers is a new thing.

It’s not less racist, but it’s racist in a very different way.

I mean, they’re right. The European version of racism is much more inattention and inexperience-fueled. This is arguably an example.

Well, you pushed, and I pushed. We’re deep in enough most people have stopped reading anyway. Goodbye, nice chatting with you.

I don’t think the audience cares either, past a point. The shit that gets a response is factual, and getting facts out is, along with basic respect for you, the reason I’m here.

Well then, I guess I break this off unilaterally at some point. Debate doesn’t work, you can’t browbeat someone into believing something (well, on soft topics anyway, you can with math). Most people just know that, I had to learn the hard way. Maybe you will eventually too.

I personally am neither rich nor fancy. I live in the country; I’ve never lived anywhere else as an adult. Believe me, specific races are a real thing where I live, and probably in the city too. It’s not some thing made up by a spooky cabal of academics. It’s strange you could even think that, with all the evidence from recent history to the contrary, including laws referencing the separate races, and how much mixing of them was acceptable. You could argue I’m not worldly enough, but my family is rather international, which should count for something. I’m kinda academic now, but that’s because I just was born an egghead. If it’s class that’s the issue, I’m not in the picture.

Phrenological propensities are were a social construct. Skulls and variation within them exist. Ditto for human biological variation in other things. You can call that race, but nobody else thinks of Senogambia when you say “the milk drinking race”, and words don’t have fixed meanings independent of how they’re understood.

Sorry if I came off as a little abrasive there, that wasn’t my intention, I was basically just saying we should agree to disagree at some point.

And I just don’t think that’s happening. Science moved away from race long before it was cool. The first steps happened over a century ago; Hitler was already doing pseudoscience. (I guess there is actually something to add)

You’ll notice letters appear more than once, and there’s more than one letter for every group. Also, that’s mtDNA, and if you actually cared about biology you’d know that’s only one type on DNA, inherited one way, and you can completely mix and match with the Y haplogroups.

I get it, you hate wokes. I don’t really think cultural disgruntlement is a good basis for defining “science”, though. I suspect there’s no more useful information to exchange here.

Yeah but it’s still obvious bullshit.

According to who? At this point unless you’re a genetics expert yourself it’s starting to sound like a conspiracy theory.

Y-DNA haplogroups in no way correspond to race. They look a bit like the lactose map: Interesting, and unrelated to the traditional social categorisations. Pretty much all genetic maps are like that.

Yeah, Healthline is a source for laymen. That information is provided that way because people won’t know what Y-DNA haplogroup they’re in, but will generally know if they’re considered black. There’s public health research by race too, but again that’s related to social outcomes and data availability.

White people have higher tolerance for lactose, so a milk-heavy diet is worse for other races.

Except the other highly tolerant cluster is West Africans, with smaller ones in places like Pakistan and Arabia.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the scientific consensus:

Even though there is a broad scientific agreement that essentialist and typological conceptions of race are untenable, scientists around the world continue to conceptualize race in widely differing ways. While some researchers continue to use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits or observable differences in behavior, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is inherently naive or simplistic. Still others argue that, among humans, race has no taxonomic significance because all living humans belong to the same subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.

And here’s what the World Medical Association has to say:

Despite the fact that races do not exist in the genetic sense, in some cultures racial categories are used as a form of cultural expression or identity, or a means of reflecting shared historical experiences. This is one aspect of the concepts of “ethnicity” or “ancestry”.

I tried to find something from the AMA, but it’s so well established all the recent stuff takes the non-biological nature of race as a granted, and talks more about the ethics of handling the social categories.

And we’re back!

Yes, categories are useful but (outside of mathematics) imprecise. A car needs to be motorised and able to carry at least one passenger. Arguably, it also needs at least 4 wheels or to be 3-wheeled and enclosed, to include Reliant Robins. There’s still probably edge cases, but it’s fair to say it’s a subset of wheeled objects that generally applies and is needed both in economics and engineering, as well as everyday life.

Racial categories aren’t useful for science, though. Did you know, for example, that most human genetic variety occurs within Africa, because of the common out-of-Africa ancestry everyone else has? Phenotypically, I have less information, but you have tiny pygmies as well as the Maasi (with an average male height of 6’4), and every skin colour from Sudanese literal black to Egyptian/Berber olive, so I’m guessing it’s the same.

Maybe that’s the point of contention here. They’re relevant socially, but biology has moved on.

Yeah, but to be a phenotype, and not just a social construct based partially on a phenotype, it has to go the other way. If having the phenotype isn’t enough on it’s own to guarantee a race, it’s not just about phenotypes. Kind of like how having wheels doesn’t make a suitcase a car.

(Also, FWIW Spaniards are mostly pale-skinned - I know because I’ve actually been there. The brown in Latin America comes from admixture with other local and imported populations)