[ExI] very informative

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Dec 28, 2020, at 5:45 PM, Anton Sherwood via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> On 2020-12-28 17:11, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote:
> > Let's look at the question of how many races are there?  A nuanced
> > approach fails, for that answer is either 1 or more than 1, and it
> > is presumably an integer.  I go with 1 on that.
> 
> Now I'm thinking about how to count fuzzy sets.

Race as commonly used is, again, a social construct. That’s why the number is kind of arbitrary. (Of course, since people do engage in racism, this means the social construct is sadly very powerful in many situations. Ditto for gender, sexual orientation, and the like.)

> > Is nationalism a good thing?  I will go with good on that.
> 
> Why?
> How do you define it?

Nationalism is strange here because it’s probably one of the most deadliest ideas in history. It’s been used to justify ethnic cleansing, wars of unification, and mass killings from the 19th century onwards. (I don’t mean you here. I’m not saying you’re guilty of being a nationalist.)

> > I favor immigration, assuming legal immigration.  To have legal
> > immigration, there must be some means of defining legal immigration.
> 
> Do you trust politicians to make a good definition?
> We got along for a century without one.

You my stance is open borders. I find hard to believe that folks who identify as libertarians (again, not you) or liberals — both of which share of underlying belief in universal rights or don’t see national origin, race, ethnicity (or sex, gender, orientation) as determining different classes of individuals in terms of their legal freedoms — seeing a national border as sacrosanct and seeing (some) for people inside the nation as having special powers to exclude those outside the nation.

Regards, 

Dan