Quote from: deltasigma on May 19, 2012, 03:09 pmYou seem like a very educated and astute person Vlad. I enjoy reading your posts. Likewise, thank you!QuoteTo clarify my position: I do not judge a person by their skin tone or nationality alone. That is racism. I judge a person based on their actions, attire, manners, education and amiability. But I would like to get your views on a hypothetical situation:If I were boating on the shores of Somalia and saw a shanty looking boat with 6 Somalians heading towards me, I'd be fucking worried. They could be fishermen, seeing my boat and coming to offer me fresh fish. Would I be racist for my preconceived idea I was about to be the victim of piracy? After all the preconceptions are based purely upon them being black. If I saw six white people coming towards me in a boat, my first thought would likely not involve them having wooden legs and hook hands. Well at the risk of being facetious what you would probably see is several small, speedboats heading towards you if you were sailing the near the Somali Coast but I take your point!Of course this kind of profiling might be natural but I wonder if it increases your safety? There are advocates of racial profiling at Airport Security checkpoints on the basis that a 72 year old white Grandmother is less likely to be carrying a bomb in her bag then the Middle Eastern young man standing behind her.As one of my idols Bruce Schneier goes on to explain extensively in his blog (see link above), the very idea of having a two track security procedure as it is in itself insecure. The Chechen bombers on the Russian planes weren't searched as they were women. The infamous shoe bomber was not Middle Eastern in appearance (indeed Muslims are to be found in virtually every ethnicity), and so on.When you decide to create that kind of "fast track" be it literal or in your mind, people with cruel intentions only need focus their efforts on getting into that one zone rather than being subject to more general scrutiny.Does this mean that a boat of white people speeding towards you from the Somali coasts are as likely to be pirate as a boat load of black people? What I can tell you is that if I were a Somali Pirate and I knew you'd think this way, I'd simply get together a few white hostages and have them pilot the boats to allay your fears. If you had a more comprehensive policy of viewing ANY stranger boating towards you with suspicion of course this wouldn't work!QuoteI find the subject of racism fascinating. There are so many variables and components to it. Another thing that puts it into perspective are pet fish. Members of the tetra species that are common place in home aquariums will school together, even though their colours are different (for example Neon, Cardinal and Glowlight). They are not sentient beings, yet when the time calls for it they'll swim together to get out of dangers way. Of course, the Cardinals don't have a handful of members that decided to fly a plane into the Neon's buildings. But that's just humans for you.If you find this subject interesting I suggest you read Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel." I think I've posted about this before. It's written by an American Anthropologist who spends a lot of time with the native people of New Guinea who until recently were at the same level of development as Iron Age people in the Americas and Europe.The question he answers throughout his book (hence the title!) is why it is that there are some societies which are splitting the atom and some which have never developed beyond the hunter gatherer lifestyle?Popular conceit amongst Europeans and European-Americans is that people of other races have inferior intelligence and were supplanted by us superior white folk. What Diamond explained is that the answer is actually a lot more convoluted than this - firstly you need to live in a climate favourable to abandoning hunting as a means of gathering food as switching to farming. Having excess food from farming means you can support people who have other uses besides gathering food - like inventors to build boats, and writers to create maps for explorers and pass knowledge on to the next generation, as well as import new ideas from other cultures.Those societies which settled down often domesticated animals like pigs and cows. They soon found many of their germs mutated and "jumped" to humans meaning that European explorers unwittingly became carriers of illnesses to which populations like the Aztecs in South America had no immunities.Naturally the Spanish believed that the disease that cut down over a million native South Americans shortly after they landed was a sign from God that they were free to subvert the natives and colonise their lands - of course we know better these days!An example often cited by racists is that of Australia where the European colonists quickly formed a viable society and displaced the Aborigines, who had not even mastered writing. Indeed the fact that this was achieved in the same country would seem to disprove everything I've just said until you consider that the Europeans were actually importing their own culture and knowledge from elsewhere - they did not (and have not!) found a better way to survive than the native Aborigines and there are numerous examples of explorers and Missionaries heading into the outback and having to be rescued by the supposedly more primitive natives(!)So much for racism.V.