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Well this kinda makes sense, I'm confused. I'm glad your trying to help expose Racism as the cruel treatment that it is, I just don't see how this discussion will go with a topic opener like that.

Who's "we"? ^_^; Please don't tell me you're judging an entire species based on it's minority of jerks. Who'd be the bigot then, hm?


i often see people making sweeping generalizations about how evil/stupid/whatever humanity is because there are many evil/stupid/whatever humans. Ya? Well the vast majority of humans are farmers. Would you say we as a species are an agrarian species? ^_^;

The saddest part is that it's not even true that we're a particularly xenophobic species. Look around. Most of you probly live in the US, which has one of the worst track records for open-mindedness in the developed world... but is it that bad there? Do you have any xenophobic laws left (that would actually be enforced ^_^; )? Aside from a few, isolated backward-a** town populated by uneducated and probly illiterate bumpkins, is really there anywhere in your country where any human cannot go any more? All the cities, which probly have more than three quarters of your population, are all just fine with tolerance. You're basing your judgement on humans as racist based on a tiny minority that have no real power anyway - no one listens to those idiots anymore. ^_^;

Were we bad in the past? Ya, sure, but you can't judge humans today based on the actions of humans 2 or 3 hundred years ago - or more. Modern morality was only invented in the early to mid 1800s... before that all morality was religious, and their track record sucks. In the hundred and fifty or so years since we started actually applying modern morality, we've completely overturned thousands of old, biased laws and patterns of thought. Slavery? Pretty much gone. Denying the right to vote because of race? Not any more. Denying votes because of sex? Gone, too. Those things were around for millennia... and we fixed them all within the last century or so. Don't judge us by the actions of our long-dead ancestors from hundreds of years ago, look around today. We're not perfect, but we're not that bad.

If we encounter an alien species, will we be cautious and wary? Well duh. ^_^; And with good reason, too. The risks of any first contact are enormous. But to say we'd call them animals and hate them - or just not accept them - just because that's what happened to blacks and asians when europeans encountered them six hundred years ago or more is silly. We may not understand them, and we may find them ugly or strange at first... but we won't fly into a panic at the sight of them and go rioting in the streets. If an alien showed up today on the floor of the UN, we'd probably be unnerved and awestruck, and it would certainly force us to reevaluate our civilization and culture... but all hell wouldn't break loose unless these aliens showed up with a show of force. And in that situation, panic is probly the right option.

So? ^_^; It's also true that we treat most devices as machines, and that we treat sand like dirt. All animals that we have ever encountered to date are inferior, if having no awareness at all makes you inferior.

But consider this: even though we don't really believe that animals have any kind of consciousness or awareness, in most modernized parts of the world is either heavily frowned on - and sometimes illegal - to make animals suffer unnecessarily. We don't even believe they have the sense to know or understand what pain is, and we still don't want to hurt them. That ain't bad.


Oh, i grew up all over the world. ^_^; Born in the Caribbean, raised for a couple years in South America and Africa, came to North America as a teenager, spent almost a year in Japan, served in parts of Central and Northern Africa and Eastern Europe. i seen all different flavours of hate, from racial hatred in Central Africa, to religious hatred in Eastern Europe.

What i've noticed is that racism/religiousism/whatever only thrives in places where there is pretty much only one race/religion/whatever - or at least only one race/religion/whatever that has a stranglehold on all the money and power. In areas where everyone is forced to mix, the hate vaporizes in a generation or two. Oh, sure even in the most cosmopolitan places you'll still get loudmouth jerks blaming immigrants or one race or another for all the problems (here in Ontario, they blame Indians and Arabs). But even the biggest jerks will never vote for biasing laws like those that existed only a half a century ago (like blacks have to go to the back of the bus and so on). That is dead. ^_^; Buried. We've moved on from that kind of thinking (in the more modern places - there are lots of places in the world that still have to catch up, of course). As much as idiots piss and moan about brown people in Ontario, no one's starting lynch mobs any more to string em up. Racism is not dead, yes, sure... but it is dying.


Hn, the reason i picked the farmer example is because it's so blatantly wrong. If your impartial alien researcher was half as smart as he should be to call himself a researcher, he would notice the catch.

So let's say 70% of the human race are farmers - hell, let's say 90%. Can you conclude from that that we are an agrarian species. Maybe. However, here's something important you forgot about. Whenever humans have had access to great technology and the resources to do what they want with it, they have always moved away from an agrarian lifestyle - moving into cities with very little greenspace, locking themselves into climate-controlled environments isolated from the natural world, and turning to artificial versions of... pretty much everything. We even invented fake grass to play on - astroturf! ^_^; So are we really agrarian... or are we just forced to be agrarian to survive until we can find some other way to produce all the food we need? Hmmm. ^_^

Same goes for other things, too. If you see two tribes always warring with each other, and always killing each other whenever they come across each other... are they really violent... or are they forced to be violent because there are limited resources and they must struggle to win them to survive?


But haven't you noticed that more bias always exists in those groups that have very little exposure to other groups... and in groups that always deal with other groups there is very little bias? Maybe bigotry toward other races/groups is not our natural state, but just a temporary reaction to culture shock, hm?

Another thing i've noticed too is that the more used people are to dealing with other groups, the less likely they are to react badly to a new group. Whenever i travelled with a group, the people that had the worst time adjusting to foreign cultures (or even just adjusting to foreigners period) were those people who lived in isolated communities back home. The folks from like Toronto (which is like New York, roughly) had little problem with African customs and behaviours and dealing with the locals. The people from like Barrhead, Alberta (pretty much ******** nowhere) had a real hard time. What does that tell me? It tells me that if aliens were really comin to Earth today, they should stop goin to the ******** trailer parks and cornfields in the middle of nowhere and show up in main street in some major city. ^_^;

Oh, and by the way, i travelled all over with a lot of nationalities - mostly French, but also a lot of Canadian and US, and a bunch of others from all around: Australia, couple Koreans, Ghana, Philippines... and my experience was that the US guys always had the worst time adjusting to other countries. s**t, a lot of the time they couldn't even get along with the rest of the team. And i have never been treated worse in any country than in the US (i have a strong French accent - not so much anymore, but i used to). i had people makin fun of my accent, harassin me about how French people always surrender when there is a war, and all kinds of stuff, even when i wasn't in the mood and asked them to stop. And it was worst in those places where it's supposed to be the most polite - the "heartland" of America, as they say. It is the only place in the entire world i have ever been called by a racial slur (frog), and i wasn't the only one (they called the Korean girl i was with a gook or gink or somethin like that). Yeah, other countries are pretty xenophobic - Japan was bad - but i've never been openly insulted in the street in any of them. It is 2008, and you guys still think it's a big deal to elect either a black or woman president (and the biggest dirt in the campaign is that the black guy might be *gasp* a Muslim! ^_^). Sorry dude, but minorly xenophobic? ^_^; i don't think so.


Well, you gotta figure that any aliens that decide to stop by are gonna be smart enough to not do it with a show of force. Even in science fiction, whenever a peaceful first contact has been initiated by aliens, they've pretty much always done it in a small group (the Vulcans in Star Trek : First Contact or Klaatu and Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still)... meanwhile whenever they've intended malevolence, they've always shown up in force (Independence Day, Mars Attacks!, V).

Sure some people will think of them as gods - but then there are people that pray to stains on grilled cheese sandwiches. Luckily, those people are the minority. Most people will do what most people have always done when confronted by something completely new and overwhelming - whether it's foreigners on big ships with big technology or atomic power - they'll be nervous and wary at first, but adjust.

Whoa whoa whoa! ^_^; Don't put words in my mouth unless they make me sound really really smart or otherwise cool.

i didn't say "all" Americans "feel any culture is inferior to the US one", and i certainly didn't say anything about Americans bein loudmouths. Is this somethin we're sensitive about? ^_^;

All i did was describe my personal experiences - i even said clearly that they were just my personal experiences - and then i pointed out that the biggest issue in the presidential election of this "minorly xenophobic" country is... race (and sex, but mostly race). Haven't you noticed no one's callin the other dudes - Hillary and what's-his-name - Muslim... they're only callin the brown guy Muslim.

And the popular culture in this "minorly xenophobic" country is using "Muslim" like it's a dirty word. You say "oh, that's because radical Muslims attacked, so now everyone distrusts Muslims... it's not cause they're xenophobic". i say "really? then if the general public isn't really racist and radical Muslims attacked, how come everyone is down on the 'Muslim' part... and not the 'radical' part?" ^_-


i'd... say it was probly the other way around. ^_^; i'd say the white guys saw the black guys as inferior first, and then enslaved them because of that.


Ya, that's always been true in the past, but you gotta take the differences between people then and people now into account. Back then, you'd have relatively isolated groups of people who - going back like ten generations - had never seen an outsider. Like you have Chinese guys who have only seen other Chinese guys going back thousands of years, then all of a sudden European explorers show up on their doorstep. So of course, you get stuff like 鬼佬 comin out of their mouths.

But that was then, this is now. Nowadays, practically everyone grows up seein lots of different people from different races and cultures. They're used to foreignness, their ancestors weren't. People in big cities even more so than people in bumpkinville. Back then, an encounter with real strangers only happened once every couple of generations... if that. More and more, we're creating a generation of humans who have bumped into strange cultures several times in their own lives. We're conditioning away xenophobia.

And it shows! ^_^ Our generation is the first to have large groups of people openly embrace weirdness. We have heroes that are short, green munchkins with pointy ears speakin broken English (Yoda), and we love em! We think he's adorable! We have stories where the good guys are demons and monsters (like Hellboy) and aliens (like Spock) and vampires (like Angel and Spike) and so on. And we have huge underground cultures that just love furry stuff, or tentacle hentai and so on... and it's ok (within their groups, and slowly becomin more ok with the general public).


Well, technically those kinds of laws are racist, but they are a product of the death of racism. You see, slowly racism is becoming more and more dead, and we think of it as more and more disgusting. And as that happens, we feel more and more ashamed that we were ever like that. So, we react... to try to atone for what we now think are sins (but we thought it was fine at the time). These laws are our atonement... misguided and racist maybe, but we're trying. Slowly but surely, we're improving.


True. ^_^; But unless they're really, really stupid, they would try their best to think like us if they were coming to visit us.


i didn't say classify as "mostly farmers", i said classify as "having an agrarian nature". ^_- Gotta be careful! We may be mostly farmers, but we simply don't have an agrarian nature. If we can find a way to exist without the need for farming, most humans have shown that they'd rather not farm (or be in natural surroundings - we like to visit them, but most of us don't wanna live there).

That was the point. i hear all the time people sayin what horrible monsters humans are because of the terrible things we've done in the past. But it's like the farmer thing. We were like that because of the situations that existed in those days. Nowadays, for the first time in human history, it is possible to have other situations. And we are finding that when we have those situations... we're not really brutish and xenophobic.

Not me. ^_^; i just repeated what you said. And yes, i know you said it's what other people believe, but you tried to pass it off as a good reason to hate Muslims. Even if you don't believe it yourself, you obviously think it's a good reason. It's not.


Your numbers are a little.... ^_^;

Well, let's start with the war of 1812. Check your history, dude. America started it. Britain did not want a war - they desperately didn't want a war because they had just spent years being badly manhandled by Napoleon. Their PM had just been assassinated and was just bein replaced, and they were in the process of sending over a peace treaty, but it got there too late and the US had already started the war. The US figured the Brits were too weak to fight after havin to deal with Napoleon, and they thought they could just waltz into Canada and seize it without a fight. They got their asses handed to them by the Canadian irregulars, who pounded their asses all the way back - even burnt down the fricken White House - which gave Britain time to react, organize, and then the real war began.

But that's just the start of it. Only four times? ^_^; Dude, come on. Off the top of my head i can think of the 9/11 attacks, the bombing of the USS Cole, the 1993 WTC bombing, the embassy bombings in 1998... that's four right there AND THAT'S JUST AL QAIDA! ^_^; What about the Oklahoma city bombing? Good grief man, Oklahoma was only like 1995! It's not even ancient history. ^_^; Only attacked four times? ^_^; Wow, man. The Wall Street bombing in the 20s, the airport and airplane bombings in the 70s, the bombing of the statue of liberty.... Want more?


i'm... not really interested in what happened in 1800. i'm more interested in 2008. i see xenophobia clearly today. i don't need to look at how they behaved in the war of independence or the civil war (or anything in between). ^_^;


And this is a minorly xenophobic country? ^_^ What do you mean you don't know how they would do in the leadership role of the US? Why would you think a woman or a black guy would do any different from a white guy? You never had a president that was born in Panama either. John McCain was. i don't hear anyone worried about that. Never had a president born in Hawaii either - Obama was, but that's not the issue people are concerned with. It's just race, man (and gender, but mostly race).

Just because there is a reason that most Americans say they are goin nuts over the race thing doesn't mean it's not a really stupid reason.


Now you hit the nail on the head! Yes, Americans are really xenophobic, and the reason why is that they live in their own little bubble. The only TV most Americans watch is American TV. The only movies most Americans see are American movies. The only music most Americans listen to is American music. The only news most Americans watch is American news. Remember when i said that the amount of xenophobia in a society is directly proportional to how isolated there are? Well, there you go.

There is nowhere else in the world today where the people are so cut off like that - except for places like North Korea and s**t where they are bein deliberately kept in the dark by the powers that be. You go to any other country in the world, and you'll see theatres that play movies from several different countries, the people listen to music from local groups and international ones, they watch local and foreign TV (usually from lots of countries), and they get their news from several different sources (personally, i get CNN, BBC and CBC, and i check all three for info - and that's not countin the internet).

Think about it - think about how crazy shut in the US population really is. i'll even help you out with an example. You seen the movie The Ring, ya? You know it's a shot-for-shot remake of an identical Japanese move: リング ("Ring")? Why would the US studio spend shitloads of money to remake a movie just a couple years later the exact same way? Why not just sub or dub and go with that? What did they change? Well, lookie there: the only differences between the Japanese movie and the American one are the Japanese actors are replaced with Americans, and the movie is set in American instead of Japan. Well, you know, maybe it was just that one movie... oh, wait a minute... 呪怨 became The Grudge, 仄暗い水の底から became Dark Water... ok, maybe it's just Japanese films... oh... Chinese film 無間道 became The Departed, Thai film ชัตเตอร์ กดติดวิญญาณ became Shutter. A lot of the time these remakes are just senseless (unless it's worth droppin a couple mil just to keep Sarah Michelle Gellar busy) - the originals are not only good, they're usually legendary good. Of all the ones i named, only one of the remakes was better, and it took fricken Scorcese to make it better. You listen to the movie producers and they'll tell you flat out - Americans don't like movies that don't feature Americans. They don't like a hero that's Asian, or anything other than American. You take a guy like John Woo, who made massively awesome movies in Hong Kong (you must see 喋血雙雄 ("The Killer") or 英雄本色 ("A Better Tomorrow")) and who has inspired the entire genre of gun fu - none of his movies got any decent showing in America until he crossed the pond and started makin American movies with American stars (Broken Arrow with John Travolta, Face/off with Nicholas Cage, Mission Impossible 2 with Tom Cruise...), none of which are as good as his original movies... which will never be seen in America except on DVDs. All because - as the studios say - Americans don't like movies with Asian stars unless they're Kung Fu movies. It's a crime man, it's so sad. They even moved Godzilla from Tokyo to fricken New York... you know how awesome it would have been to see Godzilla rampaging through modern-day, all lit up and flashy, Tokyo on that kinda budget!?! Damn it's a crime.


i don't really see what any of that has to do with xenophobia. ^_^;