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Messages - Erenan
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General Discussion / Re: Big boobed characters in video games
« on: April 22, 2013, 09:20:08 pm »
Quote
It must not be that obvious, or you would not have gotten it wrong so many times.

Count how many posts I've made in response to you. I don't think attempting to reiterate what your point was twice really warrants the use of the word "many."

Look, I don't want to argue about whether I understand your point correctly or if I am stating it correctly or if you are expressing yourself clearly or not or whatever. I want to talk about your point itself. So let me see if I understand you. You are saying that black people tend to be less intelligent than people of other races on account of their genes. And you are saying that this explains why there aren't as many talented black chess players as there are talented white chess players and why the black ones are less successful as chess players than the white ones are.

However, we have been positing that to regard genetic differences as the best explanation is perhaps a bit shortsighted. There are other variables, so unless you can reliably demonstrate that it's the genes that produce racial phenotype that are at fault and not, say, socioeconomic and cultural factors, then we're not simply going to assume what you say is correct.

If you want to stop your end of this conversation, that's fine with me. But I certainly wasn't trying to attack you, and I'd rather you not feel like you have to defend yourself. I might have been less positive in tone than I generally prefer to be, but it's hard for me to say on my end whether or not that's true.

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General Discussion / Re: Big boobed characters in video games
« on: April 22, 2013, 08:03:19 pm »
I said you were asserting a genetic link between being black and poor chess playing ability and by extension intelligence or logical thinking. How is this not the point you were making and are apparently reasserting now? Seriously. If that's not your point, then I'm having trouble seeing what your point is. Please make your point in as direct, clear, and unambiguous language as you can manage so that we can have a conversation.

Also, you appear to have practically ignored most of what I just said. That's kind of annoying.

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General Discussion / Re: Big boobed characters in video games
« on: April 22, 2013, 06:54:36 pm »
I wanted to try to get this thread back on topic, but a cursory search on the Internet for "big boobed chess masters" availed nothing of interest.  :(

I thought this was funny, but I guess not...  :(

The president of the USA is elected. Blacks can vote. The world chess champion is not elected.

I was going to suggest the same thing as ptoing about the US Presidency, but my angle is a little different. To say that there hasn't been a black world chess champion and then imply that this significantly has something to do with race is almost certainly an underinformed stance. The list of world chess champions is a very short list, like the list of US Presidents. It's not a good idea to try to draw conclusions about genetics from either of those lists, exactly because they are populated by such small numbers of people (small sample size).

If there were literally no black grandmasters anywhere in the whole world, then this might be something worth studying and trying to find out why that is. However, there are black grandmasters. This is extremely important because it very neatly discredits your point. You're obviously trying in some way, however roughly or broadly, to link being black with poor chess playing ability (and by extension, presumably intelligence or logical thinking ability or something generic like that), but at a glance the evidence doesn't appear to support what you're suggesting.

It's similar to what Helm was saying earlier about matriarchal societies existing and how that affects the idea that a patriarchy is inevitable on account of something intrinsic to being human. The fact that there have been matriarchal societies at the very least calls the idea into question and very probably discredits it completely.

From what I know about genes and race, if there is a genetic cause for being good or bad at chess, then my guess is that it has extremely little to do with those few genes that produce racial phenotypes.

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General Discussion / Re: Big boobed characters in video games
« on: April 20, 2013, 06:10:30 am »
I wanted to try to get this thread back on topic, but a cursory search on the Internet for "big boobed chess masters" availed nothing of interest.  :(

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General Discussion / Re: Big boobed characters in video games
« on: April 18, 2013, 10:19:14 pm »
Be careful with US Census data. In our census, we don't consider Hispanic to be a racial type, but a separate origin-related classification that you can either check or not check. So you can be Hispanic or Non-Hispanic, regardless of what race you otherwise specify. So you can be White and Hispanic, White and Non-Hispanic, Black and Hispanic, Black and Non-Hispanic, Asian and Hispanic, and so on...

Needless to say, this confuses a lot of people, who quite frankly don't know what race they should then identify as. My wife's whole family (they are Honduran/Mexican) usually goes, "what the hell, you guys?" A lot of people end up just choosing Other and Hispanic, because they don't want to identify as White, Black, Asian, Native American, etc...

Point being that Whites who are Hispanic are still Caucasian.

The other point being that you should take the numbers reported with a grain of salt, because it's largely a messed up system.

Now then...



I live in the US. We definitely have social problems relating to race, but I think they are much, much bigger than a mere "people of color don't appear enough on television" problem.

Blacks and Latinos make up a disproportionate portion of federal prisoners relative to their portion of the country's population. Why this is so is highly controversial.

As for commercials...

Here's a study on racial representation in prime time television advertising:

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic551691.files/Mastro%20and%20Stern.pdf

This is from 2003, so bear in mind this is ten year old information. In any case, to me it suggests a few things:

  • American television commercials are filled predominantly with Whites and Blacks.
  • Blacks are represented about proportionately to their actual representation in the U.S. population, while Whites are a bit overrepresented, and Latinos and Asians are underrepresented. (mostly unimportant side-note: I'm predominantly Scottish by heritage, and my father even regularly wears a kilt for special occasions, but I rarely see anyone wearing a kilt or speaking with a Scottish accent on American television)
  • When elderly people are depicted, they are much more commonly Black or White than Asian or Latino.
  • When Latinos are depicted, they are there more often than people of other races for the sake of filling an alluring/sexy role (i.e. the sexy Latino stereotype) or as the one gazing sexually upon another person.
  • When Latino women are depicted, they are virtually always very thin and of above average attractiveness (as identified by the people doing the identification, so whatever that implies, you can decide for yourself).

Of course, this is focused just on television advertisements. We really need to think about how people are represented in the actual TV programs as well. We have a lot of shows that are targeted directly at Black audiences, but there are also a lot of shows that deliberately feature cast members of different races. The one that keeps coming to mind right now is Grey's Anatomy, but this is mostly because my wife is watching it every single damn day when I get home from work. Pretty much everyone in this show is a talented surgeon, and IIRC generally when there's a violent criminal, it's a white guy.

My point is that major TV producers aren't a bunch of blithering racist idiots. They understand that minority groups now make up a significant part of our population (and a quickly growing part!), and that in order to maximize their profits, they need their programming to appeal to those groups as well as to Whites. I think our programming has been moving in the right direction with regards to racial representation, and I can only imagine it will continue to do so.

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