MTG Salvation

Quote from bakgat

How is saying I'm religious and I would like society to conform more to the tenants of the religion I believe in not justifying it?

That's justifying your support of one thing or another, but not the thing itself. As a justification for the thing itself, it's basically "because I want it." Again, fine for justifying support, but you need to use different reasons to convince other people.

Nobody's saying you need to abandon your principles, it just may be that other people won't find your principles convincing when it comes to supporting stuff.

Quote from Essence

Ecological argument: You can't eat local and be vegan at the same time.

Your point about local foods is a bit off, I think. Or rather, it works individually but not in aggregate. Brian Dunning has a few good pieces about this. But you're definitely right that there is a tension there.

Quote from Essence

Moral argument: This is based on the arbitrary and completely made-up notion that somehow plants are special in their inability to suffer. There is no scientific evidence to back up the notion, period. There IS scientific evidence to back up the notion that mollusks and other brainless, spineless creatures CAN'T suffer. There's also absolutely no scientific evidence to back up the fact that a creature killed instantaneously DOES suffer.

My thoughts exactly, I just wanted to make sure I correctly understood the framing of the argument.

Quote from Essence

Preferential argument: Tastes change over time, and with necessity.

Oh, sure. But all other things being equal, "I don't much like the taste" is a good reason to not eat something. If things change, they change.

Quote from Essence

The sheer amount of effort you have to expend to develop a vegan diet that nets you a complete set of vitamins, EFAs, EAAS, enzymes, minerals, co-factors, and other micronutrients seems overwhelming and silly when you can get the same spread in almost any non-desert environment on Earth if you're willing to eat what grows there naturally.

Yeah, I prefer all food groups in moderation myself.

Quote from bitterroot

Dude, it's a debate forum. People are debating with you. They aren't saying you should stop being vegan, they're saying one of your reasons (reducing/preventing the suffering of animals) doesn't make sense.

Exactly: well, for some of us I find it disturbing that all the vegetarians/vegans are claiming possible health risks from this thread, though.

Quote from bitterroot

Ok, let's compare how many animals die in the process of making a veggie burger versus a conventional burger.

Veggie burger:

* First, you have to till a field to plant grain. There's a tiny puddle in the middle of the field that you have to drain or fill in order to plow. The puddle is too small to have fish, but it contains dozens of mosquito larvae and water bugs. All of these are animals that will die. The pond water also contains thousands of microscopic animals like rotifers (yes, they're in the kingdom animalia) that will die when the pond is filled. Kill count: 1000+

* You have to till the soil, which contains many worms, burrowing bugs, and other microscopic animals. Tilling the soil will kill some of these, either by directly smashing them with the plow, or by upsetting the soil and allowing them to dry in the sun. Kill count: hundreds to thousands

* You're all-organic so you never use pesticides, but you still need to kill the bugs that want to eat your crops. Probably the best way is to use predators like ladybugs, each of which will slaughter around 5,000 aphids in its lifetime. Technically the ladybug is doing the killing, not you, but I'm sure you would have a moral problem eating chicken even if we used trained dogs to slaughter them rather than killing them ourselves. "Outsourcing" the killing doesn't absolve any moral responsibility, does it? Kill count: ~5,000 per ladybug.

* I'm not sure how many veggie burgers you can get out of a small field of grain, but any way you slice it we're talking at least a few hundred kills per burger.

Conventional burger:

* If we just graze cows on the field without tilling and without draining the pond, the cows might accidentally step on a few bugs or swallow a few rotifers, but nowhere near the scale of the bug-holocaust that we would be wreaking by planting crops.

* Slaughtering the cow yields around 2,000 burgers, so even if the cow killed a few thousand bugs in its lifetime, we're still at around one kill per burger, not hundreds or thousands like with veggie burgers.


So the point here is: if you're going to talk about animal suffering and death and say all life is valuable, you can't ignore life just because it isn't easily visible or isn't cute and cuddly. You need to be consistent.

On the last point, apparently some vegans/animal-rights activists think that beekeeping (e.g.) is slavery, so there's that. But anyway, I think you're taking the best-case scenarios here. Not every farm uses "organic" practices, and not every cow is grass-fed. So I could see someone adopting vegetarianism-in-practice unless and until the system changes.

***

Okay, while I'm at it, does this seem like a good rundown of the various arguments for veganism presented so far in this thread?

Ecological argument: The meat and dairy industry leave huge carbon, nitrogen, and methane footprints, and contribute to deforestation and loss of biodiversity. Therefore the environmental costs outweigh the possible of consuming meat and dairy.Moral argument: It's morally wrong to kill animals for one's own sustenance, or subjugate them for (lack of a better term) the fruits of their labor. Therefore the social or ethical costs outweigh the possible benefits of consuming meat and dairy.

Preferential argument: I don't like the taste of meat or dairy products. Therefore I'm a vegan.

Nutritional corollary: I can obtain all the necessary calories, vitamins, and nutrients from plant-based food sources, without recourse to meat or dairy products. Therefore I can stay healthy on a vegan diet. (Note: If this weren't true, the other arguments alone wouldn't be sufficient justification, IMO.)

I think the nutritional corollary is pretty solid, and the preferential argument is basically unassailable. The ecological argument is a fair reason to be vegetarian or vegan in practice, while the moral argument is a reason to be vegetarian or vegan in principle.

Quote from Senori

So if an all-white town--and these are very common, because our nation still has de facto segregation in terms of housing--has an all-white Veteran's Day parade, and no-one thinks that's strange, that's normal?

A charitable interpretation says that Veteran's Day celebrations would include the veterans of that particular locality, so if the population is entirely (or almost entirely) one ethnicity, you would expect only that ethnicity represented among its veterans. If a local parade or whatever doesn't represent the national reality, no big deal, as long as everyone knows it.

So it's just a symptom, not a cause.

Quote from Iso

I spoke to a Wiccan a couple of weeks ago and she described her beliefs to me as such:

Each element in nature has a spirit or deity associated with it.

So... there's a God of Bismuth?

Knowledge might be considered a subset of belief. So you don't have to have a lot of supporting evidence to believe something, but it helps to have good reasons.

Nothing can be proven with 100% certainty (though you might get 100% disproof) so belief without proof is pretty much the only way to go. One should probably weight beliefs based on the preponderance of supporting evidence, though.

Believing in spite of a lack of any evidence is a bit suspect, depending on how much weight you put on that belief. (For example, I believe there's probably life on other planets, but that's just sort of in the back of my mind, rather than up front sitting-on-a-mountaintop-to-greet-the-mothership kind of stuff.)

Believing because you want to believe, or belief-in-belief, isn't always bad, but it can often act as a barrier to critical examination of the belief you believe in. So if that's the main (or first) reason you believe something, it's probably a sign that you should dig a little deeper.

Quote from ljossberir

I'll always find it interesting re: the 'war on women' that it's an awful lot like the 'class war', wherein many, if not most of the group(s) that are supposedly "under attack" are actually on the side of their alleged attackers.

Considering the substance of the attacks---not just the Planned Parenthood stuff, but "legitimate rape" &c.---I don't know how many women buy into that. I don't know how many people buy into it.

Quote from ljossberir

Believe it or not, many women are simply not interested in free contraception or abortion on demand, or else they have higher priorities.

I don't think that's what it's about. It's about the availability of such things. For many low-income women, that threshold is $0... though they'd surely pay for contraception if they had the money. The point is that few women want to be told No, you ****, you lost your bodily rights when you got all ****ty and had sex. (In so many words, of course.) Not to mention the ridiculous non-medical procedures to make abortion an even more emotionally traumatizing experience than it already is. That's the war.

Quote from Surging Chaos

The one WTF moment for me was when Romney said China was manipulating their currency. The Fed does that on a daily basis! How can you have a debate about the economy and not bring up the Federal Reserve a single time?

He meant that China manipulates their currency's exchange rate. I don't think the Fed does that.

Quote from Surging Chaos

Here's the thing. The Federal Reserve is incredibly powerful. It controls our monetary policy without consent from the government, it controls the interest rates, and it's supposed to control inflation. The Federal Reserve has done an abysmally poor job at controlling inflation. The dollar has lost ~95% of its value since 1913. The Fed has been printing the dollar into oblivion, and with QE3 running, we are going to have money printing with no end in sight.

The value of the dollar can go down because the economy grows. That's part of inflation: prices going up because people want to buy more stuff. By the way, losing 95% of original value in 99 years is consistent with only a ~3% inflation rate, which is not a big deal and is in fact even healthy.

Finally, the central bank shouldn't need "consent from government." The last thing we need is politicians mucking with the money supply. There's some strong data that positively correlates inflation with government control over the central bank. Unsurprisingly, inflation tends to follow election cycles in these cases, because cash injections are popular.

Also I think the reasons for gun violence aren't as strong in Australia as they are in certain parts of the United States. I mean, are there any cities with street gang problems?

Quote from Stabulous

And yes, the government, if sovereign, must be above the laws. There are charter of human rights and other stuff to simply state what a lawmaker shouldn't do, but those rules have no practical value. It is a promise to itself and it can be held, but if it is broken, it doesn't have anyone to answer to. Look what God did to Job.

But we've worked out a way around that problem too: by requiring reciprocal accountability between the government and the governed. If the government acts against a higher law which we define, the governed are justified in rising up against that government.

Quote from Stabulous

Fortunately, God is infinitely good and omnipotent. He wouldn't make people suffer for fun, for example. That he has the possibility to do so without fear of retribution (lol retribution on God himself) doesn't mean that he will.

Although, being infinitely good, one might presume God wouldn't make people suffer at all, let alone inflict indefinite punishment on anyone.

Quote from _

Second: As far as that rationalwiki page goes Spreading is NOT a tactic of deploying as many ad-hominem and lies as is possible. It is a strategy of getting in the most arguments possible given time constraints, bad debaters are bad no matter how quickly they are speaking. And, since everyone in the debate community can spread and understand spreading it is a terrible tactic to just try to "out-spread" an opponent.

Fair enough, I was actually calling it a "Gish gallop," which is spreading with ad hominem and other fallacious arguments. A tactic shared by both Swazi and Romney, coincidentally.

Quote from erimir

Jobs report today... 114,000 jobs added in August, unemployment rate drops to 7.8% - in spite of more people searching for work.

The combined numbers for July and August were revised 86,000 jobs upwards.

This is not what Romney needed to land a one-two punch.

Ergo, the right-wing media sphere is claiming the numbers were made up. You can predict this stuff like clockwork by now: good for Obama? It must be a lie.

Quote from Swazi Spring

Already covered this earlier. Obama has a very "anti-colonialist" view of the world, he views everything in a black-and-white "the oppressed and the oppressor." He also thinks that America is "too powerful" and that it is unfair to other countries, and that all countries should be equal in terms of international power. You would be surprised at just how much his "oppressed and oppressor" mentality affects everything, from his opposition to capitalism to his apologizing to Muslim countries to his support for Palestine to his support for Argentina to his constantly insulting Great Britain, and more.

So many scare quotes, so little evidence. Not to mention the squicky implications of saying that Obama hates America because of Kenyan anti-colonialist tendencies. Without strong evidence to back this up, such a claim casts its proponent in a very negative light.

Quote from Timothy, Mimeslayer

So Romney wanted to stand by his remarks about the bottom 47% until it became difficult to do so, then he backtracked...John Kerry 2.0 methinks.

It's the standard campaign strategy: deny Romney meant the words he actually spoke, or say he misspoke. But don't ever say he changed his position on anything.

And just because it happens on both sides does not mean it happens to the same magnitude on both sides. Equivocation does nobody any good.

Quote from StephenMeansMe

See also Iain Banks' Culture setting, where the society is pretty darn kickass but also has its various problems. Similarly it helps that the Culture is almost entirely spacefaring (so it behooves one to be polite when there's hard vacuum on the other side of the wall, yet there's lots of room if you want to leave), and governed by godlike machine intelligences (not that they're perfect).

What's more, Iain M. Banks was quite explicit that he was writing about an advanced society that he'd like to see, not necessarily one that he thought was actually possible. I find it amusing that, freed of that limitation and allowing his imagination to run wild, he created an anarchist-ish society that actually reads as much more plausible than all those writers who've taken their utopian fantasies seriously. An author is at his best when he's being an author, I guess.

I'm a minority, why should I believe in something that someone wrote in a book about a hypothetical reality whenever I know, from other people that look like me who lived in the past and some are still alive today, that some people will treat me like garbage and try to destroy my life for being "uppity." I have seen racism, I have seen other forms of evil from humanity. And I married a white woman, produced 2.5 kids, and continue to have relations with the same woman. I would be hanged for even looking at my wife in the right time and place. From a very, very basic security concern the government has kept me safe from certain sectarian violence groups with long histories of racism.

I am educated, safe, productive, married, working, and comfortable. You're asking me to completely change my way of life to commit towards an ideology because some people don't like the government? Then risk my family's life and my own personal safety from a nation that has had a long history of hating foreigners and people of color.

1. Show me where this has worked, specifically in the modern age

2. Where evidence is available, data on per capita violence is higher in places like the Wild West with a lack of government than modern New York City. I'm safer as a "colored" in the middle of modern NYC than I am walking around in some random western town.

What self interest do I have in this experiment, considering the past socio-cultural influence would consider me to flee to Canada if we would embark on such an experiment?

If you have failed to achieve min-anarchism, why should I trust you on anarchism? I'm all for a small area to try this out and to see if a city could live like that, beyond that it would take physical hard evidence of that nature to even begin to approach reforms towards that level.

I look at people that look like me, and thanks to the federal government our quality of life has gradually, gradually, gradually very much improved.

I hate to bring race into a point about this, but I just don't see people of color really embracing this philosophy en mass. Whether that's the tribes, who would just continue to be tribes. African Americans are largely sided to liberal, at the very least statists. Most Hispanics, black or white, aren't anarchist at all and with ideologies like Peronism quite the opposite. Whites are a more varied group, however most of the massive clusters are quite statist.

I just do not see anywhere you can justify embarking on a project without the necessary leadership coming from rich people to colonize a particular, peculiar place. However, when you consider city-states that run off of capitalist ends like those in the Middle East. We must take the basic axiom, that there will be fundamentalist natures within to their governance structure with Islam. And if we talk about city-states, one must comply that there would be Jewish, Christian, and other such states cropping up very quickly for safe havens.

Then we have to consider colonial history in the Americas... which basically meant these experiments didn't last and led to splintering and border conflict and inevitable conquest.

You are denying your own cultural inheritance bent on a scheme that someone thought up over a few decades. Government is a tool, much like the gun, and to prohibit government, like drugs, would just have government pop back up in a "black market government." Or otherwise known as clans or gangs.

Black market activity in the US, as well as what is called the darknet are all a shadow of what occurs in anarchy.

As for the historical portions, Blinking_Spirit studied Icelandic history and is a historian-philosopher. He had multiple arguments against Icelandic "anarchism." The "not so Wild West argument" we debunked fairly quickly over a Mises article with simple violence per capita statistics comparisons.

I'm very much interested in this debate, but I want something new. Talk about the actual content out of the Costa Rican Libertarian communes and what really have they achieved? I'm just not really seeing it outside of a small group of hippies that may not achieve results, or end up like the Kibbutz movement and go statist.

Quote from Bitsy

I suspect the banning of some Debate regulars and the fact that few people here understand that arguments are a part of debates and not the entirety of a debate may have played a role in the rise of the left in the Debate forum.

A few of them were also pricks that got banned. The anarcho-capitalists tended to suck at debate for some of the others when they came here en masse, came, debated for like a month, then left. I actually liked a couple of them, as they brought in some new forms of debate and were genuinely intellectual. Some of the resident ones like Surging Chaos and ijosspiere have been here for years, but tend to be opinionated yet good people.
I tended to find the worse ones ideological debaters either dogmatic like Shining Blue Eyes debating BS, myself, and others about the reasons for the Civil War and basically had the biggest piss poor debate I've seen in years to the point where I have used it as an example of "how not to debate online" with a link to that thread. The other worst offenders tended to be extremely preachy or too far reaching with thin skins having a small held opinion. You just don't see SBE here debating anymore. People like to win, and when you keep losing like that you get discouraged and leave. The surge in AC'ers I think were connected to SBE, got discouraged, and left when they failed to convert people to "true capitalism" and founded their own debate forum. Which in retrospect I think was a tactic to try build their own website than anything by attracting followers/converts. However, to find that out I would have to trace their user names to other boards and see if the tactic was repeated on other such forums.

There are also some of the conservatives that tended to be equally dogmatic, got into massive personal arguments, and then left.

My own suspicions for the "left creep" has more to do with more people taking liberal or anarchist view points as a matter of fact since the crash. You have the Ron Paul revolution and Mises Institute both act as an indicator for reaching young minds with free materials to support their conclusions and view points with a community to exist within. Equally the decline in the appeal of the Republican Party outside of rural areas is another major factor as well as people who once held those views switching to a more moderate Republican stance and being labeled RINO's and becoming independents.

People saw the cult of the colossal and the inflection point with the crash when it comes to crime, corruption, and money. Rather than a socialist reaction, people mostly blamed government not for failure to prosecute but rather that getting rid of government altogether would have prevented the problem and advocating for a laissez faire approach in vein of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Yet, what has left to be desired as to how such a framework works without major hiccups. As the Canadians never experienced such a financial crisis as us with stricter banking laws, which is a part where the New New Left has come from.

Equally the attempts to disrupt and destroy the legacy of the New Deal coalition in tandem with the lack of wage growth and failed promises of Reaganism have also thrown young persons into a pickle.

Zeitgeist to put it into a word, rather than censorship.

But, yea I'm a small government conservative with civil libertarian belief structure and min-anarchist sentiments. And by small I mean efficient with supporting institutions built around the people to help them grow as a culture. I prefer private experimentation in house first, looking at other nation states how they solved a problem, and only after decades to use the government when all other options and patience has been expired.

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Quote from Jay13x

White privilege is only a means for describing certain statistical differences that, even when you account for race as a proxy for poverty, don't make sense unless there is a racial factor. Unless you have a better mechanism for describing a large number of trends that all skew along racial lines, I think the privilege argument is pretty adequate.

Unfortunately, this is simply not a description of what privilege theorists are actually up to. If you feel that privilege theory constitutes mere empirical observation of certain racially-grouped statistics and nothing more, then congratulations, you're not really a supporter of privilege theory. Welcome to the dark side, privilege denier. We have some things they don't, like cookies. And brains. But I think it's important to address the argument at the real problem, even if you aren't actually fully representative of it.

• Privilege theorists don't really seem concern themselves overmuch with actual data when it comes right down to it. Pick your favorite "privilege list" and look at it closely -- you will find that most of the entries read like "You can be pretty well sure that maybe, sometimes, like, often possibly, in my experience occasionally white men will not never always sometimes fail to be catcalled by an Elvis impersonator, mostly on Tuesdays inside of a 3 mile radius of downtown Chicago plus or minus 7 light years, but not before roughly 7pm, give or take 24 hours."
Can you imagine what it would be like if what you are saying here were actually true? How far the discourse of privilege theory would be elevated if we struck from all of those lists every foolish and inane entry that was not accompanied by an actual statistical analysis of the corresponding phenomenon? I mean, privilege theory would still have problems, but at least it could be taken a little more seriously.




• Even if it did confine its priors to the results of actual statistical analysis, privilege theory would remain a farce. It falls far short of actual science because of the responses of its proponents to dissent and rebuttals. Privilege theorists (and postmodern leftists more generally) simply run out of town anyone who publishes information that might countervail their theories, thus making it impossible to weigh evidence against interest. See e.g. attempts to measure differences in racial IQ. It goes without saying that privilege theorists regard these investigations as being automatically wrong if the conclusion does not support them, and indeed the conclusions could even be actually wrong, but in real sciences there's a proper way of handling these controversies.
However, instead of engaging in the scientific process and publishing rebuttals refuting these people, a Reddit lynch mob of uninformed grievance-mongers gathers with torches and pitchforks to ruin their careers. There is now an unspoken rule in brain science and biology that certain empirically true results are not to be talked about, and promising young scientists are simply refusing to study certain phenomena for fear of figuring out something that is true, yet displeases the gender studies "professors" signing their paychecks.

This means that there is effectively no way to contest the unexamined assumption of privilege theorists that the cause of all their grievances results from nothing more than social construction. Anyone who suggests that it might not be entirely social and attempts to do any kind of science that might show it is burned at the stake. And the privilege theorist, thanks to his handy-dandy Reddit lynch mob, has a ready answer to anyone who attempts to bring up the science done by the very few brave souls who have actually put their careers on the line and braved the storm of false opprobrium: "Look at the scandal his work generated! He had to resign in shame from the Leftist Orthodoxy Board!"

Well, isn't that a vicious little circle. I, for one, am not having it.




• Even if everything I've said so far weren't the case, there are further problems. If privilege theory just said things like "Average white wealth is greater than average black wealth" and left it there, full stop, there would be no disagreement. Nobody is contesting naked empirical observations like that.
The problem is that privilege theory doesn't make mere observations -- it uses those observations to underwrite moral claims. A privilege theorist doesn't merely want people to believe it's true that average white wealth is greater than average black wealth -- he wants people to believe it's evil that average white wealth is greater than average black wealth.

Morality, however, is concerned as much or more about individuals than it is about averages smeared out over enormous aggregates of unrelated people. No matter how much you lower the average murder rate, each individual murder is still morally wrong.

Similarly, if you think you are addressing the evil of white privilege by doing something like creating racist scholarships that only black people can access -- think again. Because when you do this, it's not the rich, powerful, well-educated, suburban elite white kid who is discommoded. It's the inner city white kid who's fatherless and supporting his family by working full-time in high school who is going to lose his shot, because the money that should have been available to him and that he desparately needs has a racist rider attached to it. (As someone who sits on admissions board, I can assure you that this happens all the time. The victims of racist scholarships are poor white kids who entirely lack all of the privileges that their skin color is theorized to confer upon them.)

It's the individual white person who is way below the average and has none of the privilege that these delusional theories assign to him who gets bludgeoned by the butt end of the insane moral guidance that results from this racist nonsense. So before you erase every individual from existence with a cute little averaging process, please spare one single thought in consideration of the actual moral effects on those individuals as a result of what's being done in the name of privilege theory.

Now, I get that you're saying you don't buy into some of this stuff. And that's great. And I really don't want to straw man your position, but given some of the other things you've said, it seems like you might be talking out of both sides of your mouth.

Take your anecdote about the shampoo aisle. Surely you agree that you have ticked none of the boxes that would elevate that story to a level where anyone could give it serious consideration in the context of privilege, even by your own lights. There's no statistical analysis. There's no allegation of actual harm suffered, or any other piece of information that could allow any moral conclusion to be reached. There is this unstated notion that we're all supposed to gasp when we find out that different products are in different aisles. Like we're supposed to believe that the "Ethnic" aisle is somehow worse or more evil than the "Shampoo" aisle.

Well, I don't buy it. My grocery store has an "Italian" aisle that's actually a lot better than most of the other aisles as far as I'm concerned. Am I angry that I have to shop for my spaghetti sauce by ethnicity? No, and why should I be? The point of sorting products by location is so that you know where to go to get stuff and you can get a lot of your stuff in one place, and the Italian aisle helps me do just that. I can get my sauce, pasta, herbs, and spices all in one place.

If I were a postmodern leftist grievance-monger, I would have skipped over that reasonable analysis that resulted in the inescapable conclusion that having a lot of the products I need in one aisle doesn't harm me or anyone else in any way but actually helps me greatly, and I would instead have gone straight to Reddit to complain about racist food sorting -- and put myself clearly in the wrong, I think.

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Quote from Valros

Do you regularly paint your face with woad and engage in warfare with rival clans...?

The funny thing is that an Iron Age Celt would find himself more at home in the mountains of Afghanistan than modern Edinburgh.

Quote from Valros

That said, I'm with you with regards to hate-speech laws (there's another epic thread in this forum about that in itself) and other such stuff that makes my radical American free-expression sensibilities tingle. Then again banning minarets or burqas or whatever is equally iffy.

Same thing. Minarets and burqas are freedom of expression. (Though the traditional call to prayer is a disturbance of the peace in a multiconfessional society. 5 AM? Muhammad was a sadist.)

Quote from Drawmeomg

"a group which is already legally or practically disadvantaged"

So is the first act to put the group at a disadvantage not racist?

So many people on the left have spent so much energy and tortured so much logic to try to define "racism" such that prejudice against white people cannot be racist, and for the life of me I can't understand why. It's not like they actually want to excuse such prejudice: if you ask them, "Is it okay to dislike white people because of the color of their skin?", I'm confident that most would say "no". Nor would calling it "racism" have to imply that it is a problem on a level equivalent to racism against black people, any more than calling a barfight "violence" implies that it's equivalent to a shooting. Heck, we already call prejudices on many different levels "racism": in America prejudice against, say, Yakuts is a nonissue, but if I were to say, "Man, I just hate the Yakuts with their stupid little hats!", we can hopefully all agree that I would be expressing a racist sentiment.

It is as if people, having lived through the Jim Crow era or read histories about it, have had it crystallized in their minds that that is what all racism must look like, or else it's not "racism". Which makes about as much sense as looking at World War II and deciding that every other conflict that doesn't fit the same pattern isn't a "war".

And really, what is so complicated about "Racism is a negative evaluation of a person or people based on their race"? What's wrong with it? Why not have an inclusive definition? It is all, at root, the same problem. All our brains are the same color. Members of empowered groups and members of disempowered groups have the same kinds of thoughts, feelings, and motives. The same mental process leads to white people making judgmental generalizations about black people and to black people making judgmental generalizations about white people. So let's try to tackle this problem. Not just specific manifestations of the problem.