Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Darwin's Birthday

White House

My Facebook study circle was about Racism again, where it came from, where it's going. That BBC documentary sure was powerful. The timing was perfect, seeing how Darwin's speculative science soon became an "ism" as in Darwinism, and in the rear view mirror we see Social Darwinism as a fork, disowned by current science. Or call it Eugenics for old times sake.

I got Lew Scholl involved in the conversation. Some of my comments:
I'd say we have a history of using physiological cues to guess about a person's ethnicity a lot, and ethnicity is in turn influenced by what the physiological cues are. The genetic (hardware) stuff is becoming less and less reliable as a guide to what ethnicity (software) is "running" a person (habits of thought and ethnicity go together). If I see a white skinned person I think "might believe in / think about races" but I can't be sure. Once I learn they're from the US, then almost certainly they think in terms of races quite a bit.

In the US they're always shoving check boxes in your face and asking you to check which one identifies your race. When I see those check boxes, I know I'm home in my racist homeland.

Same pretty much no matter what your skin color: if you grew up watching US TV and reading US media, you're programmed a certain way, with race a big part of that. What I think of as "US bots" are stereotypically racist, as in always inquiring as to what race she might be, and is that a mixed race child and so on, all core to their homeland soap operas.  
I've been talking with a Process Institute guy about my Global U exchange truck driver program. We don't have to worry about the visa situation yet as we're still working in tandem with Hyperloop planners / testers to understand what the traffic flows might be.  I'm not a transportation engineer but did work with a master, albeit briefly, Jim Hauer. We both used Visual FoxPro to cut our teeth.

I trouble-shot a Windows 10 not working with HP 5510 all-in-one today, for a neighbor. Speaking of which, the little white bungalow house next to ours, slated for demolition, has won a reprieve and today was repainted (street facing side). The for sale sign is up already, people visiting. We're in a real estate bubble in my area code (97214).

The US went out on a limb putting so much stock in anti-communism, when history shows ideologies have a relatively short half life. With Russia re-grounding as Eastern Orthodox, a lot of calories have gone out of the NATO thing. With Trump's feinting to cut it off (the Treasury just passes through borrowings at this point, servicing customers, so Uncle Sam is hardly in a position to be profligate), we learned more about the fracture lines in this somewhat fragile alliance.