zlacker

> This is just a continuation of “well a lot of people who commit crimes have dark skin, so let’s profile all people with dark skin.”

You aren't born with a GrapheneOS phone and you can't trivially discard or swap your skin color. Born immutable characteristics of humans are a different moral category entirely, even if the statistical inferences are superficially similar to this case... And that's debatable.

I use GrapheneOS, and I think police profiling people based on phone model is bad. But government profiling based on skin color or other effectively immutable, born traits for enforcement of law or policy is so much worse.

>>sfRatt+(OP)
Americans (at least) approach many dynamics with the same zeal (and irrationality) as they do racial issues. Think about the "green iMessage bubble" controversy. Think about sports fandom. It's not that those situations are comparable in their seriousness, but people do use dumb things as alarmingly inappropriate heuristics for how to treat others. They project unrelated behaviors onto things that apparently rise to the level of minor identity signifiers, and then people get genuinely hurt - or, speaking more directly to HNer interests, products fail because markets go underserved as second-class customers (waves at Meerkat).

>>underl+s8
I think about my experiences as an American living in Germany as an exchange student, at an age when the green-bubble nonsense would've been most relevant to my life, and there were also similar socioeconomic status markers in Germany that teenagers took deeply seriously... It just wasn't iPhones. Brands of jackets. Particular surnames that hinted at recent foreign ancestry could invite bullying... Foreign, as in from other parts of Europe. And sports fandom there (soccer/football) is arguably more fanatical than in the USA.

The notes were different but the chord progression was the same.

I don't think wildly inappropriate heuristics for the treatment of others is particularly distinctive of Americans... Even and maybe especially odious racial heuristics are not distinctive of Americans. Everywhere else I've been in the world, the racism that rears its ugly head there is way more blatant and open than what I've encountered at home. It just does so less often because there is more demographic homogeneity in other countries.

Having heuristics derived from evolving in small groups for a very long time (which are inappropriate in the postindustrial environment we have fashioned for ourselves) seems like more a human characteristic than an ethnic or national one.

>>sfRatt+(OP)
I don’t see how you could think I disagree with that. As I said, it’s a continuation like an extension like something connected to, but not the same as.

>>Follow+Rj
I'm saying, even if both things are bad, there's a moral category difference between profiling based on immutable, born characteristics and profiling based on choices (in this case, choice of phone). They are not continuous or connected, but two different categories with a hard break or line between them you have to deliberately cross. That both involve profiling does not connect them, just as shooting a human and shooting a paper target are fundamentally different moral categories which are not made continuous by dint the fact that both involve pulling a trigger.

>>sfRatt+z01
My point is in all cases profiling is stupid.

You seem to think shooting a gun is not stupid in all cases. I think shooting a gun at a person or a paper target are both stupid.

I didn’t bring up the morals, you did.

But besides that point, who says being paranoid, does not have as much genetic roots as having dark skin? I know it’s true for my family, many of us have anxiety and OCD and schizoaffective disorder. And guess what? I’ve owned several pixel phones with graphene OS on them in the past.

>>Follow+Aw1
Fair enough. But I think we're talking past each other:

> You seem to think shooting a gun is not stupid in all cases. I think shooting a gun at a person or a paper target are both stupid.

In the same way I brought up morals and you did not, you've now brought up "stupid," which I did not.

Seeing your initial comment absent any other context looked to me like a casual moral equivalence that I find reflexively, deeply wrong, for the reasons I gave.

If that wasn't your thinking, I apologize for reading into it.

>>sfRatt+Sf
I said that it was at least American. The tendency to link other types of identity with a basic sense of racial identity is probably not uniquely American, but the way that connection links those types of mundane signifiers of identity with American racial violence (social and physical) probably is (tautology appreciated). Maybe wearing the wrong jacket in Germany conjures the ghosts of social dynamics involved in pogroms where a patch was sewn into one's jacket, I don't know. In America, having a "second-class" phone or car or location of residence does seem to prompt people to treat you as we've come to know "second-class" people ought to be treated.

As for whether it's worse in other countries... I don't think you get to make that determination without being a visible minority. Certainly, ethnic violence and racial violence are akin but not the same, just as treating people as second-class citizens based on the color of their skin is akin but not the same as treating customers as second class citizens because you don't like the strength of their OS's security standards, or don't want to hire Android programmers, or whatever.

>>underl+mf5
> As for whether it's worse in other countries... I don't think you get to make that determination without being a visible minority.

Bluntly, I didn't need to be a Turk to notice how Germans treated and talked about Turks, or to compare that to how white Americans treated and talked about minorities.