Discrimination

This is a - sadly - massive topic, one that I have touched on or covered to some degree in quite a few posts, which can be found here.

Nevertheless, I have a few thoughts I want to record - particularly given that I am, above all else, writing these blogs for future incarnations of myself. This ... well, it is more a description of one aspect of discrimination than a "definition", but, whatever it is, came to me partly out of some meditation this morning, and I felt it was given to me for the purpose of recording, so here goes.

Actually, one last qualification before I get into this: this idea has surely been recorded in many other places in many other ways ...

Let's start by looking at a couple of characteristics that are stereotypically attributed to different groups of people. After working through lots of possible ways of identifying these, I decided to go with the colours I use elsewhere: purple and orange. You can, as is appropriate, attribute these to either gender or race or some other group. (More on that later.)

The stereotypical view of the occurrence of these in the two groups is as follows:

Each group has its respective characteristic, which doesn't appear in the other (e.g., all men are ... , all women are ... , or race Z is ... - and that goes for characteristics considered "good" as well as those considered "bad"), their world view is constructed accordingly, and the unevolved people having these views try to enforce them for - ultimately - their own personal comfort, security, and mental/intellectual/emotional laziness. 

If we are dealing with slightly less unevolved people, they may bend to accepting that there is a slight distribution of these characteristics, along the following lines:

Now, the actual TRUTH is that both characteristics are likely to occur on the same axis, and have more of a bell curve distribution:

Furthermore, if we take out the active and malicious social engineering of neochristianity and similar Abrahamic religions over the last couple of millennia, and the other social engineering and patriarchy that went with the development of cities, to some extent, agriculture, and patriarchal social structures of the last five or ten millennia, the original (biological) distribution is probably along the following lines:

In other words, there quite possibly is a difference (this does NOT apply to "race"; the ONLY differences that exist there are as a result of cultural conditioning and the effects of massive, widespread and sustained discrimination/privilege), but it is nowhere near enough to justify the discrimination built up around it.

In fact, the ONLY valid way to view the occurrence of these characteristics is to - as the great Dr Martin Luther King, jr, said ("I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character") -  assume that you don't know, and treat/judge each person on their specific merits/faults.

As a digression, my view is that "the law" tends to take a somewhat haphazard view of such characteristics, along the lines of the following:

Science is little better, if at all, as - in my experience - too many modern academics miss to many obvious, everyday/common sense issues/aspects/consequences. (I also have some cranky thoughts about some of the assumptions scientists and statisticians use, but that is a thought for another post ... )