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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • The discrimination is real, no question about it.

    The thing that’s not “real” is that this is solely about skin color.

    In the USA race is defined quite closely along the lines of “continent of origin” (or of origin of the ancestors), because the USA Is a country with worldwide immigration. Thus the groups are larger.

    Compare that to Europe, where world-wide immigration only started picking up in the last two decades. Here people can discriminate just as easily within what would be considered the same race in the USA. For example, many people in Austria really hate Serbians. Many Serbians really hate Croatians. Many Croatians really hate Albanians and so on.

    This is also visible in the meaning of the words “race” and “racism”. Before WW2 “race” was commonly used in Europe as in the “German race”, the “English race” or the “French race”. And while the term “race” fell out of use after WW2 and was subsequently re-imported from the USA with the USA-meaning, the original meaning lives on in the meaning of “racism”.

    For example, if a French man hates all the English, this wouldn’t be racism in the USA (since both are from the same “race” by US-definition), it would totally be racism in most European languages.

    The “social construct” part of the discrimination is along which lines discrimination happens. There’s nothing “natural” about discriminating along the lines of US-race. Discrimination can happen just as viciously along any other line.

    And that certainly doesn’t mean people don’t suffer from it. But it also means that making sure everyone is as equal as possible (e.g. by eliminating US-race) won’t stop discrimination.



  • No, you don’t need genetic differences for racism.

    In fact, in most European languages the words “race” and “racism” are talking more about nationalities than about genetically different population groups.

    For example, if you read German articles from the 1920s, they often talk about the “German race”, the “French race” or the “English race”. In most European languages the word “race” fell out of use after WW2 and the American meaning of the word “race” was re-imported later on. But the meaning lives on in the meaning of “racism”.

    For example, in German a white person from Germany who hates everyone from France irrespective of their skin color is still a racist, while in the USA that wouldn’t qualify as racism.

    That’s because neither the word “race” nor “racism” have a clear definition. “Race” is used entirely to discriminate “them” vs “us”. So “race” determines whatever group people in a country want to discriminate against.

    In the USA this was clearly a “we, the while ex-european people” vs “them, the black former slaves” and “them, the asians” and “them, the south americans”.

    So what would happen if suddenly everyone had the same skin color? People would just shift to the next best thing to discriminate.

    Instead of discriminating against black people, just do what has been done in Europe for millennia: Discriminate against slavic people. (The term “slave” comes from “slavic”, because it was so common to keep slavic people as slaves.)

    And if nations, religions, languages and regions of origin would also disappear as things to discriminate against, then it would shift to the next thing: people who went to a different school, have a different education or best of all: other types of poor people.

    The issue is that humans are heuristics-based beings. Prejudices the result of learning. I’ve had 5 crappy HP printers, so I conclude all HP printers suck. Some friends have had terrible experiences with Fiat cars, so I avoid Fiat cars. I read in the newspaper that Nestle is destroying the planet, so I eat something else.

    The problem is that if this is applied to humans, they get unfairly judged for things that are often completely out of their control. The core mechanism that we humans function on happens to be severely destructive in this context. But that’s also why it’s hard to impossible to get rid of racism and similar forms of discrimination because they are so centrally embedded in how we humans function.


  • That’s a bit of a misconception. Life expectancy doesn’t measure the age at which most people die, but the average life expectancy.

    That means, a bunch of different values contribute to the life expectancy and they do so to a wildly different degree.

    Let’s say that without any adverse effects everyone dies of old age at around age 90.

    Someone dieing of pulmonia at age 80 only scratches off 10 years, but someone dieing at age 0 due some childhood illness, bad hygiene, malnutrition or other complications scratches off 90 years.

    In fact, by far the strongest contributor to the average life expectancy is child mortality. In 1800 in the USA, child mortality was at 46.2%.

    If you discount child mortality, most people actually died aged 65-90.

    1000052233






  • Tbh, not even that is guaranteed. Lemmy (or the fediverse in general) are really not that privacy-focussed at all.

    While the people running your instance might not be sifting through your data, nothing would stop anyone from doing so. Everything you post on Lemmy is public, and even if all major instances would somehow block scraping (which they don’t), a scraper would only need to create their own instance and ActivityPub would just deliver all of the data in a nice and easy to process way.

    The big advantage of Lemmy is that it is not controlled by one large corporation (and instead by a bunch of faceless, unknown randos on the internet), not that posting stuff publically visible on the internet is somehow more private.


  • Tbh, getting into lemmy is quite a bit more complex than e.g. into Instagram or other centralized social media platforms.

    Compare this:

    • Choose which social media platform to use and land on Instagram
    • Download the instagram app from the default store of your phone’s OS
    • Create an account
    • Done

    with:

    • Choose which social media platform to use and land on Lemmy
    • Choose which app to use. There’s like 20 of them, some great some not so, some active, some abandoned. There’s no guide or anything, so you’ll have to google and/or try 5 of them to find one you like.
    • Choose which instance to use. There are literally hundreds of them and you don’t even know where to start. You have no information, but this choice is central to the kind of lemmy experience you will get.
    • Google and find join-lemmy.org. Now you got a one-liner for each instance together with user count. So naively you sort by activity and land on lemmy.ml.
    • Create an account
    • Figure out what .ml stands for.
    • Repeat step 3-5 because account transfers between instances don’t work.
    • Repeat step 3-5 because you landed on the likes of lemmy.ee or feddit.de, and the instance closed down
    • Done, until your instance closes down

    Slight hyperbole here, but choosing an app and instance alone is complicated enough to scare away lots of people.




  • Have you noticed that people who work in tech tend to be less excited about cool new flashy tech developments than the average person?

    It’s similar to how people who have worked in fast food aren’t quite as keen on eating out than the average person.

    Same as watching your co-worker who hasn’t washed his hands after his last shit collect the pieces of a burger that dropped on the dirty floor to sell them to a customer isn’t exactly appetizing, knowing what goes on behind the scenes with tech developments doesn’t really get you on board for that either.