I hate being white!!

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It's not just about the region currently called Xinjiang.
The Chinese core cities of the Tang Dynasty were to some extent international.
The capital, Chang'an, has Zoroastrian, Catholic and Islamic churches.
Of course, there is also a small number of what would now appear to be what might be called the slave trade.

For women with "Western characteristics", there is a proper noun "Hu Ji/胡姬" in ancient Chinese. When the word comes up it's usually an expression of how cute they are.
While there doesn't seem to be a proper noun for men, I remember a piece of literature describing how weird they look.

For the more "black" race, there is a proper noun "Kunlunnu/昆仑奴". Literally means "black slave". Used to refer to all races that are darker than typical East Asians. There are a small number of Africans who followed Arab traders to China, but more are actually brown-skinned races in Southeast Asia.

The above should only apply after the Tang Dynasty. And presumably didn't last long.

Yes I suspect ancient empires in China and India were quite familiar with caucasians. In India for example many of the kingdoms hired mercenaries from Europe. Ancient southern Indian trading ports hired Roman soldiers to guard store houses. Indian kings during the Mughal era "desired" European concubines.

From what it sounds like, Chinese people weren't exactly ignorant of foreigners as western media would like to pretend.

I'm not sure what concept "Chinese" refers to here.

The Silk Road appeared in 202 BC. The Silk Road in a broad sense also includes sea routes.
There are two proper nouns for Rome in classical Chinese. The Romans also called China "Seris". I'd be surprised if this is not mentioned in the sources of information in Rome.

The concept of international law already existed during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD).
"If two foreigners have disputes in Datang territory,
If they are from the same country, the laws of their own country apply.
If they are from different countries, the Tang law applies. "
The Tang Dynasty had envoys from Persia and Byzantium, and foreigners as government officials.
In this era, there is no doubt that a large number of ordinary Chinese people have knowledge of foreigners.

The sea voyage "Zheng He's Voyages" (AD 1405-1433) presided over by the emperor of the Ming Dynasty was as far as the Mozambique Strait.

But if the impression here is from the Qing Dynasty, it would make sense. The Qing Dynasty implemented a strict policy of closing to the outside world. Part of it was to prevent the restoration of forces from the Ming Dynasty based on Taiwan, and on the one hand to prevent Japanese pirates from getting supplies.
This caused a lot of misunderstandings about white people in the late Qing Dynasty.

If this refers to modern Chinese, I don't know what to say.

International trade between ancient Europe and Asia is much older than written records in Europe. The Roman consul Pliny The elder complained that Rome's gold stores were being depleted purchasing luxury goods from India. European merchants entering China long predate Marco Polo. Slavic, Persian, Turkic and Arabic peoples were entering China thousands of years before, Records were never kept of trade with Asia in Europe until the Kingdom of Venice during the European renaissance.

Infact Roman and Greek mariners were quite familiar with the trading ports of sourthern India and Sri Lanka to such an extent that their most cherished god "Dionysius" was infact borrowed from the Tamil god Murugan. Interestingly the hebrew star of david is thought to come from Murugan as well.

Thanks, Kraftie.

Old topic and I keep seeing it pop up so I might as well say something.

If I've learned anything in the past five years of watching 'this' unfold it's been that people are still running from the realization that they're animals, can't stand it, can't stand that we're a predatory species, can't stand that when we as a species (humans) are looking for more resources than what's available we plunder those who can't defend their stuff, and we might very well see that continue just for the sake of domination and assuaging neurosis even in a world of plenty if technology ever delivered hyperabundance peace of mind, especially under the conditions of Darwinian competition, would always be scarce.

I understand, and take seriously, that whatever I am and whatever values I have, I'm sitting on top of an animal who wouldn't understand them. I understand that I'll get stray thoughts of all kinds where that animal sees opportunity. I think everyone does and what we've been fighting with is this notion that we somehow stop being animals if we just radically deny it. That gives us about as much apotheosis as the first photo-accurate paintings were supposed to deliver (ie. zilch).

You have to judge people on what they actually do. You have to judge people on how they actually treat others. If you chase after what the animal in them might be fantasizing about (in this case psychanalysis to find racism) - everything we have as a culture and a species is gone, it's back to the planes and trees with millions, possibly thousands, of us remaining rather than billions because what we're sitting on top of is only reliably in certain ways, we have to fill the rest in and both have to be merciful for what we're individually holding and also continue to hold each other to high enough standards of conduct to ensure civilization continues.

The whole concept of original sin is pre-biology and pre-science but it gets at the intuition that could be expressed nowadays as such: we're sitting on 3 billion year old firmwear stacks. Think about how buggy that is, look around at the world you see yourself living in - does it make sense in that context?

This is where you need thinkers of the sort that John Stuart Mill was in the sense that, to the best of my understanding of his philosophy, he hinged his moral compass around something like Neoplatonism. To do universalist anything, such as universal right to liberty, freedom, free-association, the right to pursuit of happiness or anything of the sort, you have to see the same consciousness, the same 'I' reflecting back at you in everyone else to some degree even if it would make completely different choices than you would (thinking political extremists here) and ask the question - since this rag-tag ape troop is 'us' and most of us, as far as we can tell, are stuck this mystery of 'I exist, I suffer, I feel, my body propels me forward and both it's pains and blisses terrify me' - great, you can now cross yourself off the list of potential philosophic zombies that could exist, admit that some form of the same is present in other people, try to stretch your mind out to encompass the really - really - big picture, and ask the question again - what can we do to play together better and by rules that are more agreeable and yield to better results for everyone?

What we're learning right now is that psychopathy finds niches in populations large enough to hide it. We need to be able to make a social contract with these people of some kind - have them understand that them and politics, them as CEO, is like taking an alcoholic to the corner bar. You don't do it. They can make great air traffic controllers, great neurosurgeons, they can use their advantages in all sorts of pro-social ways really.

What I think is happening with resurgent racism - lets just admit it - we're stomping each other out, every individual against the other, over economics. People hate each other, they virtue signal to each other for small gains, and it has very little to do with caring about the people they're virtue signaling in the name of and everything to do with raising their own status. Our cultural memetics are filled with these Ponzi schemes of 'get cheap or free status by pressing 'x' button' and it's cheap and easy dopamine. It's also a trap and any of the people who are actually making the world a better place for the group involved are either on the outskirts or have no participation in that status Ponzi scheme (quite often despise it as useless, vampiric, and self-serving).


People really need to see the horror of what we are and digest that properly before we can really fix anything. By fix I mean see the capacities for evil that most of us have in us, consider how that plays out across an 8 billion plus headcount, and ask the adult question which is - what's the system and world we can give these people that causes the least intrusion with them being who they are while at the same time gives each person maximum protection from the next person's predatory tendencies. That's 'sort of' what we've been trying to do with liberal democracy since the Enlightenment, had a lot of historical backlog to clear out (like ongoing economics of chattel slavery), we've been pushing hard toward equality for all ever since, and I think where people are losing their minds is - again - no apotheosis, no utopia, just more knock down drag out and this time it's much harder for people to name. If you want me to try taking a stab at that one - it's neoliberal market efficiency without large enough groups, really an asymmetry of power with the economic system itself (ie. really people's collective conveniences and dollar votes) against atomized labor (ie. individuals). Marx was wrong that the state owning things would make it any better but right in that excessive grueling labor and by the same token 24/7/365 economic competition deforms civilizations and deforms civility , this has more to do with us figuring out how to effectively deal with multipolar traps and races to the bottom.


In all of this, unless you're actively gaining a living (personally) by economically or literally mugging people of other races or colors - you're doing something really useless and really unhelpful with the self-flagellation. The self-flagellation won't make you stop being an animal. It also won't fix what your ancestors, whether they were Nazis, soldiers in the Belgian Congo, slave owners, Arabs in the slave trade, Africans selling Africans, etc. did before you were born (and if you're 'just white' without any of that in your direct ancestry then you're making even less sense).

Get that we're a species with great capacity for evil. Then get that the evil comes out more and more as the pain-meter rises and it comes out stochastically. If we have the screws turned to our thumbs for survival - most of us will do the right thing reliably but one out of every ten thousand won't, of those a certain percentage make the headlines. The only way you do that is by loosening the thumb screws but, no one's interested in doing that because the economics work great for us. There's this carving up of liability, almost like derivatives as financial instruments, where the places in which the bad things get done in the economy are technically our money and our convenience funding them. We beat up on a lot of the same people who are giving us maximum convenience (Amazon's a GREAT example). Think about it. Perhaps darker still - without work we have no means of sorting out status and things get even worse, and we live on a finite planet where we can't race with each other forever to earn our right to live or our right to procreate by carving up nature and throwing it in landfills.

That last part is immense but it's what we need to be thinking about.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 15 May 2022, 10:51 am, edited 2 times in total.

I have to consider how lucky I am, even working often enough 60-80 hours a week for 40 hours pay, not to be under the thumb of the kinds of thought police (really Catholic inquisition) that causes this kind of neurosis in people.

It also might tell me why I'm more of a shut-in these days. Almost everything circulating around me seems to be malware, and it's such popular malware that you almost have to cut yourself off from society or large parts of it not to have other people's needs for witch-hunting and defending yourself against it dominating your energy reserves.

!	Cornflake wrote:
	Some posts, along with their creator, have been removed. Racism is not tolerated on Wrong Planet.

PPG Industries has just the right solution. Keep in mind though, that the woke Internet might have an issue with your choice of shade if it represents a minority you don't belong to.

That sub was shut down months ago due to misogyny.

I thought most people here were white American leftists.

Lot of conservatives here left or seldom post here because they couldn't take the wokeness here. I remember when they freaked out over the R word. (racist)

I'm just going by the volume of posts. Moderate conservatives rule here. Kind of like small - "r" centrist republicans and socially conservative right wing democrats.

I've seen a lot of posters in the early days of WP liberally throw around the other r word (somewhat ironic to use that on an autism web page) but that seems to be less frequent now.

Mmmm I used to not hang out in that section because I wasn't into politics then, well Trump sure got me into it and this was the only thing that was great about him.

Unlike what people claim, I'm not actually "active" in politics either. But I see a moral and ethical basis of many social justice and environmental issues that supersede politics. It just so happens these issues have been co-opted by the political left so I tend to vote green and give my preferences to left wing parties (not that my vote matters since I live in a blue-ribbon conservative electorate).

I'm not sure if it is a realistic option but it's not impossible to have a race reassignment surgery. It would be a last resort. There may also a public backlash. Michael Jackson was obviously ashamed of his ancestry and some people hated him for that.