Trump by name......

right. that's the way i think of it, as a social construct. all homo sapien sapeins are just that, homo sapien sapiens.

i'm a biology hobbyist though, so maybe philosoraptor can weigh in?

so i would say that it is racist for someone to say that he/she hates jews. or blacks. or methodists. or muslims.

 

Well no that's not my opinion brother it's the literal definitions of the terms. Muslims are not 'race' and there is no social construct that would make them so. The definition of "muslim", and the standard etymology of the word 'muslim', is from 'aslam' or to resign (to the will Allah) and has no genetic or hereditary indication at all.

If you are a Muslim, aside from teachings, there is no hereditary or genetic information passed on to your offspring. In fact in this regard, any association with Islam can be lost within a single generation, if the next generation simply chooses not to follow Islam.

That is different from what 'Jewish' means, of the root Yehudim, which means someone descended from Hebrew tribes of the Levant, and something you can definitely pass down the line (and can be tested for with DNA). Likewise, there is no DNA test that shows anything related to Muslim or Christian heritage.

So again brother there is still no such thing as a genetic or hereditary Muslim. In order to say there is, there would need to be some physical test that could be performed to validate.

The only way to validate if someone is a Christian or Muslim is to give them a religious litmus tests, and there is no physical test possible to determine your submission to Allah or Christ. But your Jewish genealogy is different and can by physically tested, as can African genealogy, or Aluetian etc.

 

And race is still a social construct. And the Jewish people are only recognised as a race because they demand to be recognised as such. The Scots aren't considered a race, but the definition of that group is no different to that of the Jews. Same for the English, the Welsh, the French, etc etc etc.

 

But respectfully, 'Muslim' is not a race in any context. Whether not 'race' makes sense in a Jewish context varies according to a lot of different variables as we've already pointed out, you can be a Reformed Jew and have zero Semitic genealogy, simply by converting and practicing. Of course doing so doesn't really 'change your race', but does result in someone more closely identifying in the 'social construct' context as being Jewish, and accepting socially as Jews. Still in the eyes of other sects, they'd be considered extremely non-Jewish. Likewise, one can't change their race from Caucasian to African origin and so on.

I guess I'm not getting the point across but literally, Muslim is completely different than Scot, Jewish, Aleutian, etc. Muslim is a purely religious term, it has nothing to do with race, world origin, genetics, and so on. Jewish can have a social, racial, or religious meaning but also purely non-social, genetic meaning (that seems to be relatively settled science with what appears to be accurate clinical testing available).

In order to compare apples to apples you'd need to qualify it, for example "Slavic Muslim", or "Arab Muslim", in the same vein as "Coptic Christian", or Egyptian Christian would inform someone of both someone's faith and hereditary origin. You can choose to be Muslim or Christian, even if your parents were both Jewish, you are still Jewish by hereditary factors even if you practice the other religions, and you could even determine via testing whether you share the same genetic diseases your Jewish relatives and ancestors did. This doesn't work the other way, if both your parents were Muslim and you choose to be Christian, you are not Muslim in any way at all. The only way to be a Muslim is to follow the Quran.

Most Scottish or British Muslims have essentially Anglo-Saxon/Germanic ancestry. There is no context I can think of where we would separate British or Scottish folk into separate races based on their religions, even if they demanded to be considered such, it wouldn't make sense.

 

But there's not a whole lot about most religions that does make sense!

 

That's why I hope I'm not being too pedantic about this but just trying to separate one's 'creed', which is a choice (unfortunately not for all, as can be seen in forced conversions through the centuries) from their hereditary background, which is not controllable.

To make it simple, you can't choose your family or relatives, but you can choose your religion. Those who submit to the Islamic creed (sahadatan) are what we call "Muslim" just like Christians are defined by things like adhering to the Apostle's Creed.

To put it all in the context of Trump, any actions regarding Muslims is acting against a religious demographic. Trump's comments on Muslims aren't 'racist' in the literal sense, but a form of religious discrimination/persecution. I think his 'racist' overtones are more accurately represented by his comments about Mexicans/Hispanics than they are about Muslims. But bigotry is bigotry, isn't it? It's fairly clear that bigots often don't differentiate between race and religion, they often conjoin both and treat outsiders of any sort as a threat to their way of life.

If I were a Hispanic Muslim I think I'd be even more frightened of Trump than I currently am, even if I was a US citizen.

 

Awesome brother, thanks for the added information!

 

mtDNA is mitochondrial DNA - mitochondria are these little symbiotic beasties living in all eukaryote cells that are absolutely awesome for energy metabolism. Anyway, they are only carried by female germ cells, so yeah, good way to get to critters like mitochondrial 'Eve'.

RFLP analysis is just a method to cut up genetic passages at certain sites (say something like any passage that read "ATTGAAAAGTT") such that you get very predictable bands along a gel that filters DNA according to size.

It's cool stuff, a lot of molecular biology feels like devising tests for logical puzzles.

I will comment when I review and really know what I'm talking about, cheers :]

 

So I mean, there are definitely tracks of genetics such that you could assemble 'races' of peoples within humanity, but these wouldn't map out very well to the social notions of 'race,' if that makes any sense. For example, white folks have very little genetic diversity in comparison to even very small populations within Africa as they went through several purifying selections and bottleneck events.

I think one interesting thing about the debate on religion and race and homosexuality is the uniformity of response; we see the same things in each case. We distinguish based upon the targets of this hate, but we see the same faces, the same efforts to marginalize and eliminate and we should really be talking about that. Not dividing up victims, or saying, well these are victims of a separate phenomena.

My friend was from India and we were in Denmark. After getting drunk one night we separated, he going on his train, me on mine. At his platform he was accosted by a gang of folks who threw rocks at him and called him a well, you know, muslim terrorist and he should go home. They threw rocks and bottles at him.

I don't know how to distinguish that from other acts against minorities. It seems like there's this certain subroutine in human programming, victimize the other, that gets trotted out at certain times and we need to talk about that as a whole rather than splitting hairs. I dunno.

 

Note that this doesn't mean more evolved so much as more inbred.

 

And it's those much more inbred folks that are the Trump supporters! See, it all comes round in a circle!

 

Some more news about the Clinton email server

http://arstechnica.com/information-...-by-spam-filters-so-state-it-turned-them-off/


On a slightly tangential note, is no else worried about the lack of tech savvy that seems to be present in most major leaders? I think the two issues I'm most concerned about are Climate Change and the future of technology. Genetic engineering, smart drones, AI, the freedom of the Internet and if/how we're going to regulate them.

Maybe it's just me.

 

and so it begins....

hillary has opened up a twelve point lead in the abc news/washington post poll.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/clinton-opens-12-point-lead-trump-thirds-biased/story?id=40114224

fivethirtyeight has the abc news/washington post polling rated as a a+, based on performance.

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/

 

And so, what happened to those polls that didn't see the mid term election drubbing?

 

which polls for which election?

 

All media polls for the 2014 mid term congressional and state elections in the United States.

You might add the Brexit polls as well.

 

i don't know what data you're looking at. this is what i'm looking at.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/interactives/senate-forecast/

or is this just another case of global elitists don't get the average american/brit/etc.

 

I was not intentionally making a racist or religious slander.....it was sarcasm, with the main negative towards the behavior of politicians


(Is there a sarcasm emotion-com)

 

And we know who Trump's VP pic is now:

http://theweek.com/articles/636016/donald-trump-just-tapped-polar-opposite-vp-big-mistake

This article sums up a lot of my views on the subject; I remain convinced that Trump is not really trying to win the presidency so much as launch his own news network.

 

This is what I initially thought, but I wonder now if he really thinks he can win and will go for it.