It's a hostile attitude towards ethnic/racial/social and probably not religious group (though otoh each civs has their own gods and the demon may be worshipped, so then again...). Ergo, it's prejudice. Pretty clear from "his individual traits do not matter". Though yeah, it's bit more distant. That it one might consider it reasonable or that one might be able to, say, choose to not worship a revered figure matters not; for many consider their prejudice reasonable - or as Runaway_char put it, semantics argument *shrug*
Goblin immigration to dwarf forts is relatively low. Even if a dwarf fort becomes entirely made of goblins, it's still just 200 of them, barring libraries (which tend to favour elves), while in a dark fortress there can be over ten thousand of them. With human towns though, if you take snapshots of 1 hamlet→town, 1 dark fort, ocean inbetween worldgen, you can actually see the population in dark fort substantially decreasing when town starts accepting mass immigration. Pretty cool, though still fairly short period in history. Once the town is full, I'd expect the new births to take priority over immigration.
Hostility is not the same thing as prejudice, even you must understand this at the level of the individual.
It is a not a matter of semantics at all, it is a simple matter of reasoning; your reasoning about this is incorrect and in the exact same fashion that prejudiced people's reasoning is incorrect it so happens, which gives me an opportunity to explain something that I have been wanting to explain for a while now even if you personally do not appreciate it. A group of things is not a group of things based upon their individual traits that they happen to all have; a group is defined by the nature of the relationships of it's units which may be highly diverse as long as they can 'fit together' and not by what common traits the individual units have in common; this is what I mean when I say that individual traits do not matter.
The fact that there are a number of balls that are red does not in itself make all the red balls form a red ball group. Hence if we have a group of balls that happen to be red, their redness is not the thing that makes them a group, it is their proximity and motion that makes them a group. The balls could be of any color at all and they would still form a group, while a separated collection of red balls moving about randomly do not form any kind of group. Here we start to see the actual purpose of prejudice, aside from any sociobiological delusions; if the existence of a group is profitable to the leaders but the group has largely become theoretical (aka the balls no longer move together), it makes sense for them to promote the above fallacy of all red balls automatically forming a group because they want all the individual red balls to think they still must do stuff for the leaders of the group of red balls which said leaders want (stretching the analogy at bit here
).
So that fact that all the members of the Dungeon of Menace happen to be born in a certain area is no more the thing that makes them *of* that group than the fact they are goblins, or they have orange hair or whatever. By simply guessing that the individual Kax Torturedscour comes from the Dungeon of Menace because he is a goblin, the dwarves are not 'necessarily' being prejudiced against goblins provided neither their hostility towards the individual goblin nor towards the Dungeons of Menace is based upon their goblinness. The thing is however if the dwarf entity is only held together by the
"all red balls form a red ball group" fallacy, then they naturally infer that goblins are enemies inherently because the relationship between dwarf-entity and the Dungeons of Menace simply translates into dwarfVSgoblin in their heads, since they are members of dwarf-entity in their heads simply because they are dwarves.
This you see is the secret behind prejudice. It does not come about in it's fully fledged form, nor does it initially even arise from relationships between actual groups at all. It is actually rooted a fallacy which in itself does not directly express itself as prejudice, the prevalence of this fallacy is due to it's promotion of ethno-nationalism, which is a means by which the leaders of a historical group try to give some undead existence to their dying or extinct group and will hence defend this fallacy despite it's ridiculousness. The group is dying or dead because of the increasing irrelevance of it's own institutions, if they still exist to the actual experience of people's lives, it is not a question of the group not appearing on a map as it were.
We all know that no matter what laws and Politically correct doctrines say, everyone is a bit discriminatory, racist, and prejudice.
Recent advances in brain-mapping and active brain scanning have confirmed many theories with biological proof.
Examination of disgust responses and the like, make it clear to me that making something everyone is/does illegal or encouraging people to deny that it exists through outright lies, or just avoiding the subject altogether, is a failure to understand human nature.
Everyone except me.
Undefined and unstated scientific theories confirmed by unreferenced advances and studies. Okay I will be magnanimous here and simply advise you to improve your argumentation style if you wish to convincingly appropriate science.
1. Political Correctness is a joke; you can't avoid offending everyone, and in trying to do so you end up with a dangerously authoritarian set of rules, and a tendency to slide into tyranny very quickly.
So I say don't bother trying to manipulate a complex system like the evolved social dynamic overnight (this kind of change takes generations, probably hundreds of years, unless one is willing to use violence & mass-death as a catalyst),
when not one of our species yet understands that system, much less how our brains work altogether.
Everything ought to slide into tyranny, that is because tyranny is simply a name that means "effective government I don't personally happen to like". A government that is not a tyranny to anyone is either completely ineffectual or has somehow managed the politically impossible; to make all the people happy all the time.
Violence and mass death is also known as war; it is a big part of history you will find and unlike prejudice it is actually a big part of the game at the moment.
We do not have to understand the system, we merely know how to operate the human system. The inner workings of how our brains it is no more necessary for us to know than it is for us to know the exact inner workings of DF in order to play it. We can simply the inner workings of the brain to God and the neuroscientists, if there any any genuine instances of either in existence that is and get on with what needs to be done.
2. When all the emotion related to the subject is bottled up, hidden, and confused through ignorance & miss-information there could be dangerous repercussions later.
-Any law that is created but is not reasonably enforceable also does nothing but weaken the entire system of laws.
-And any doctrine that encourages ignorance & lies is going to create more bad than good usually.
-The same can be argued for freedom of speech; it is better that people are free to say stupid things publicly and be known/criticized rather than force people to hide, stew, brew, and plot until they explode.
If there are dangerous repercussions, we can simply deal with them and those responsible. As above mentioned, nobody pleases everybody all the time and all governments end up having to deal the efforts of those who dissent to thwart the implementation of policy, one way or the other.
-All laws are reasonably enforceable if you have a total mobilization of society, all power holders and the will to back it up. Since power holders are whoever the law says they are, then all power can be placed in the hands of those with the will. The only limitations are society's own self-imposed restraints, which are really a question of morality; but actual comprehension of the enemy's evil will help to make the moral case to society will it not?
-True.
-Here is your criticism; part of me tells me that it is not the best of ideas to respond at all.
3. No matter what anyone wants to believe, modern science has proven that humans are not born equal, and given equal everything will not produce equal results.
History alone can show us the flaw in thinking that everyone was a blank slate and could be molded into anything. Equality was the rally cry of the communist revolutions throughout the Cold War, each and every one of which invariably ended in suffering on a massive scale and genocide-level losses of life.)
Yes Equality = Uniformity. Very Newspeak of you. The idea that the same word may have different meanings in different contexts is apparently beyond your comprehension.
About Communism, that's just propoganda. You take a bunch of wars which involve Communists somehow, count everybody that dies in them and then blame it on Communism. Wars afterall frequently involve massive suffering and genocide-level losses of life; so if your aim is to blame Communism for that then it fits your bill.
TL;DR
Prejudice/discrimination/racism evolved in social creatures for a reason. For much of our species' past it acted as a defense against parasites & infectious disease spread, as well as a sort of "social immune system".
Obviously the key issue is that survival [via natural selection etc] is more likely to breed examples of over-reaction rather than the reverse.
In other words, the default setting for our disgust sensitivity being highly discriminatory towards strangers & those categorized as "other" had minimal negative side-effects...
when compared to the opposite setting which could potentially have side-effect of you and your entire tribe being killed by a plague or some such.
Over-reaction and under-reaction are questions that depend upon the context. Are you really trying to argue that natural selection favours an incorrect response over a correct one, if the sensible thing to do is to react very strongly then it isn't overeacting is it?
It is a strange paranoid past your are imagining for our species though. I think you will find that like everybody else you know nothing at all about the conditions in which our ancestors actually lived and of course there is no reason to think that they were even consistent over time. This gives you and everybody else the wonderful ability to invent any kind of past your like to explain anything that you like.
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Topic: The Importance of Prejudice (Read 36522 times)