@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Jews could be anti-Arab

That would be language / cultural discrimination or prejudice.

You are mistaking ancestry, ethnicity, culture, religion, nationality, and linguistic group with race.

Race is a categorization based on shared physical traits. (black, white, asian, indigenous)

Exactly. Jew and Arab differ only on DNA, not on anything else. I think you are thinking of Judaism and Islam. Those are not traits of the DNA.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

That would be religious / cultural (ethno-religious?) discrimination or prejudice.

It's also a race. MANY Jews are not culturally or religiously homogenous.

A great example of intra-racial racism is in common slurs. For example...

In Quebec, to be someone stupid is to be a newfie. Newfie is a racial slur against the slightly different racial group from Newfoundland. But it's been a slur so long, many people don't realize that that is what they are saying.

Or you might use the term vandal or vandalize. A racial slur against some Germans. But it is mostly used by other Germans. It's used by northern Germans as a slur against ones from the south. But as racial groups, they are separated by many thousands of years.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

You may identify by your ethnicity (Scottish for example), but your race may be White.

Most people identify by their race, not their ethnicity. Or some combination. For example by race my wife is Italian and Irish. But by ethnicity she is just Italian.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

I think that it's important to clarify that what you identify as and race are not the same things.

I can identify by nationality, ethnicity, or race. They are not same things.

You may identify by your ethnicity (Scottish for example), but your race may be White. (as an example, I don't know you)

Nationality is wholly different.

My nationality is American. That's clear cut. Your passport tells you this. It says nothing about you as a person. It's a legal thing.

Race is based on your DNA. It's who you are that no one can control. My race is predominantly, by no small margin, Swiss German. You can identify that by DNA. The chart you showed from 23 & Me or Ancenstry or whatever, is your racial information and nothing but racial. It can't determine anything else.

Ethnicity is your upbringing and culture. So for example, I was raised in a heavily Dutch influences, Swiss household. So my ethnicity is more heavily skewed towards Dutch than my DNA would suggest. But my ethnicity is also Swiss and Dutch.

Your race can never be changed. Your ethnicity is influenced by your life. So if I had been adopted by a family in Bogota and I was raised there as a local. My ethnicity would be Colombian. but my race would always be Swiss.

My kids are Swiss Italian by race. But heavily hispanic by ethnicity. Not fully, but partially whereas I am not.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

But I consider my race to be White -- not German, English, or Scottish.

I assume it's because I've grown up in the U.S. and have learned to base my race off of that.

Right. You grew up in a German dominated country and are mostly German (Scottish is celtic, all the rest are Germans) that reclassified German as white about 80 years ago and has tried to make a point of making their white population unified (mostly, we suspect, as a means of banding together to retain a majority of more closely associated races as other races are more racial "distant.") That's a standard cultural trend over time.

If you lived in those individual countries, you'd see things probably a bit differently. But I also grew up in America and my background is shockingly close. however, I grew up one generation outside of a Swiss enclave and my family definitely didn't see ourselves as any closer to British as to Hispanic. Both were "other races". Not in a negative way, just "not Swiss". I grew up as Swiss German (not Swiss French as many are) with some Dutch and Scottish as "seasoning."

Both approaches exist commonly in the US. You get loads of people who see themselves as "American." But my wife's family is Italian and they'd never say American, they are absolutely Italian in every sense. Even though some of her family has been here since the Mayflower.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

I don't know you personally, but I'd assume that I would say you are one of the 7-ish major races. None of which are Swiss, Dutch, or Scottish.

I agree that most people see a few racial top level categories. I don't agree that racism doens't exist between those categories. If you try to do that you dismiss the idea, for example, that Arabs could be anti-Jewish or that Jews could be anti-Arab at a racial level since they are the same "race" both top level and sub level group. Yet clearly, the world sees them as racially different.

The world has always seen Europe alone as having about seven major races... Celtic, German, Slavic, Hellenic, Latin, Iberian, and Magyar plus the tiny race that is in Finland, Estonia and the Basque country.

When we were kids the world was like "four major races". But who is in which one keeps changing and everyone has different opinions. But essentially everyone considered like Irish and Polish to be two different races (and they are in every meaningful way) and groups that have recently all been labeled as white have had millennia of racism between them.

You can't just wash away the responsibility that companies or people have for being racist by attempting to wipe away the human concepts of racism. You and I can have nice, logical discussions as to whether races are real, imaginary, useful, etc. BUt what matters for racism to exist is for people to perceive and detect a race to which they belong and races of other people. Race is a perception. So for most people, "other people" are another race even if they are genetically the same. Meaning, the average American knows no more about the average Canadian or the average Afghani or the average Somali and may easily equally see all as "not American" because they have racism from afar.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Do you honestly think Hulu is racist to the entire world except the U.S.

If it isn't clear...

Both I and the customer service rep at Hulu are saying... "Hulu sees America as a race and everyone else as inferior and blocks more than their licensed content, but violated the law to act as if they have gone out of business to both foreigners AND to Americans who travel and associate with foreigners." That Americans who we know see American as a race will then be racist should be the assumption and never a surprise.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

I'm sure there are other ways to do it, like confirming real credit cards and addresses, but that can also be faked easily or just use someone else's to sign up, etc. Official country IDs (passport, drivers license, etc), but that'd be expensive to suppor

The degree to which one is trivial and the other is super hard for most people is extreme. There's no comparison. I bypass geo ip blocking by accident, constantly. ANd get blocked by accident, constantly. Easy to bypass is when someone bypasses it without even thinking. No intent, just... doesn't do the job it is meant to do.

Passport, driver's license, credit card... those all require legal fraud to work around.

You can't compare them.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

So they implement geo-blocking, I'm assuming as a way to check a box to show the content owners they are actively doing "something" to prevent breaching their contracts, agreements, etc.

No, no semi-competent technical person could ever use geo blocking for that reason. Even if someone was that dumb, and all their management was that dumb, all they have to do is look at Netflix, Amazon, Disney (that owns them), BBC, Pluto, and on and on and go "oh shit, tha'ts NOT how it works, doh!"

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

That's not how it is at all.

Hulu doesn't own every show or movie they have available. They license them from the content owners which give them the right to stream that content but often come with restrictions, including where the content can be shown.

It's exactly how it is. Netflix, Amazon and all the other streaming services have the same licensing issues, often with the exact same programming, and not one does geo blocking. Only Hulu. ANd they restrict customer service, not just streaming. There's no possibility of making the argument you are trying to make because it goes far, far outside of their licensed content. And Hulu owns much of it, so licensing doesn't count either.

Legal and tax laws work off of what country banking or activity is in, never the "nation of association with a network address at the time of request." Ever. I work in international business, no government or business could ever use IP in that way. That's instant jail time. If you allowed tax or other violations and tried to claim you used an IP address, you can't even claim you tried to do the right thing. If you, like Hulu, breach your contracts and refuse to do business because you detect the wrong place or just use it to ignore legal requests, you are in hot water too.

Nothing with tax or legal can ever, will ever, ever has been able to use geo IP. That's clear cut. I'm open to being wrong, but I'm telling you logically it's so far out there it's like trying to argue that you don't have to pay taxes on leap years because the IRS automatically forgives all your debt. It makes no sense, and no entity would ever be so crazy.

LIcensing is a different animal and that's never using geo blocking that we've seen. Whether or not licensing by country is racist is a question on its own, but isn't about geo blocking. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But no one uses geo blocking for that. Nor would they, as it would be terrible business. Just throwing money away.

Example: Hulu is racist because they are willing to risk their customers who travel thinking that they are technologically incompetent (which is true, even if you don't travel, their service sucks at a tech level, fails constantly) and possibly out of business and cancel out of confusion rather than just inform them that the content isn't available where they are. Geo blocking isn't about restricting service, it's about hard stopping communications.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

No this is about products and services being restricted geographically due to licensing, legal, tax, etc reasons, and that it's never, if not rarely, due to racism.

Name any product restricted in that way for that reason? Legal, tax, etc. I've never heard of any case, ever, where that applies. Literally never one. I can't think of how it ever could.

LIcensing is different and doesn't include geoblocking in any example we know of so does not apply until we come up with an example. Hulu blocks access, not licensing so is clear cut racism. Netflix does not block access, only customizes licensing by what they are limited to provide. Seems non-racist. Nothing suspicious.

The two are polar opposites and are perfect examples of my point. One is out to hurt and trick. One is honest and helpful. They couldn't be more different.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

@scottalanmiller said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

That specifically correlates poor immigrants with low income schools to perpetuate the divide.

Oh yeah, I'm just confirming how it's done in the US.

I think it's the stupidest way to go about school funding in the entire world. You don't get that kind of problems elsewhere. I've lived in other countries too, and there are so many aspects the US just does completely stupidly wrong.

Right, it's horrid. And Texas then layers on other things to magnify it.

For example, they only offer certain extra curricular activity in rich districts. Then the public colleges only give scholarships based on those selected activities, not the ones broadly available at all schools.

The schools and the colleges are all the same political entity. They literally make a policy where poor kids are banned from scholarships based on zoning trends!

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Yes, generally speaking, Canadians are the "same race" as Americans, in that you consider that race as predominantly White/Caucasian.

This fails on many levels. Even inside Canada they don't see their white population, as you see it, as a single race. THey are HIGHLY divided.

Second, the US and Canada rarely see each other as the same race.

Third, we made many points that covered all of this including the concept that many Americans see "American" as the race. NO matter what race you and I see, matters nought. It only matters that they are identifiably different racial groups and people making racist actions will generally see that AND be able to identify that. Our personal opinions as to what should or shouldn't be a race isn't a factor, ever.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Yes, generally speaking, Canadians are the "same race" as Americans, in that you consider that race as predominantly White/Caucasian. Now, I don't know the percentages these days, but if you want to get a little more accurate, "Canadians" consist of every "race", just as "Americans" consist of every race. There are wite/caucasian, asian, black, etc. races in both Canada and the US. So to say one country is a single race is a flaw in itself.

You have to ignore everything about trends and generalities in order to say this. DO you see why someone reading this sees that you must logically be agreeing but emotionally resisting to make this kind of statement knowing that we already said why this would MEAN it was racist? Obviously to try to say that any amount of mixing means there can't be racism.

You can go lynch of group of black teenagers. As long as their one white friend gets lynched while with them, you can't be racist. How handy. Obviously no one is going to claim that being willing to hurt one person because they associate with a group you like or don't like stops something from being racist. But that's the mechanism you are using to say the US and Canada aren't obviously predominantly one thing (and one thing each, different from each other.)

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Yes, generally speaking, Canadians are the "same race" as Americans, in that you consider that race as predominantly White/Caucasian.

Yes, given post 20th century whitewashing they are. But traditionally, they are not both white.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Firstly, not everyone in a given country is the same race. So now that that is out of the way...

Yup, I covered that any why it doesn't matter.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

I understand "American" to mean a nationality, not a race.

Outside of the US, nationalities and races are intertwined to the point of being one and the same. The entire war with Russia is based on the ideology that Ukrainians are a subset of Russians and that Russia, having the name Russia, is the property owner of all people in that racial group around the world.

Nearly all countries exist on racial lines. Those lines move and shift over time. But the US is extremely unique in how non-homegenous it is. It's literally the most extreme example on the planet. So yes, American means nothing racial on its own, to people who know much about races. But to Americans, who broadly know little of the world, it often is seen as a race. It's said, all the time. So if you geo-blocked teh US and only the US, I'd agree that you could make an argument that you are blocking based on nationality, not race.

But as essentially all other countries exist based on race to some degree. Colombia and Venezuela are one race, split by geographic boundaries. Same with Nicaragua and Costa Rica. But after hundreds of years of geographic divides, they look a little different too. But like, Colombia and Brasil share a border and it's a racial one.

All the European countries are divided by old racial lines that have been there for thousands of years. Africa too. Asia as well. Very few are melting pots and those that are, are generally very specialized.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

That refers to your ancestry or ethnicity, which is more about cultural and geographical origins than race.

Those are my races. What race would you say that I am if not those? If you say American, I don't agree, but that would defeat the point about Canada.