Troy

Fascinating.

Humans have a great capacity for magical thinking, which why some are genetically predisposed to being religious or believing in conspiracy theories or not. Humanity's great gift is the ability to cooperate at scale. The is the only reason the brilliance of a few geniuses can turn into gummy bears, atomic bombs, TikTok, and space craft. If it were not for technology, we would still be living hard lives and dying at 30 on average. It is technology that is responsible for the number of people on the planet. It took 300K years to reach a billion people. It only took 10 years to add the last billion people to the earth. This is just not the result of horny people this is technology. This is also why I never believed in reincarnation (the math does not work).

Agreed.

First of all, you can’t decide who is black and who is it consistently? Second of all, it will never happen nor should it. Period. Of course there are, but I too doubt there after very many. Sure racism created road blocks in the past but as you might imagine more Black people and best time and energy wrapping and they do conducting a Symphony Orchestra.

Yes, you rejected Barack and James. on what grounds do you justify accepting Colson into the black race while rejecting the other two. Do you accept the author Howard French into the so-called Black race? By the way, I’d accept all of these men as Black men. And by America’s historical standards, these men are unequivocally black. Again this points to how subjective and indeed pointless, it is to group human beings in this manner.

This is a contradiction. So you want Black people to be in charge bestowing the title of D.j. and MC, to decide who can call themselves an MC or D.j.? am I understanding you correctly?

yes, that is true. I’m not sure how much more information that would be. You would still largely be in darkness, trying to understand the nature of the object casting the shadow which itself might be “shadow” of a four dimensional object. The capacity of the brain, which is finite.

what?! lol! please explain that one.

@Pioneer1 i’m not arguing for @aka Contrarian she is perfectly capable of doing that herself however, your statement and the ones you quoted from her are not mutually exclusive they can all be true. My argument with you is that you believe so-called Black people should own hip-hop and prevent other people from creating in the form. I disagree with that.

If it was so easy to determine race, why do we have so much difficulty doing it you don’t think Homer Plessey was black. You don’t think well to white was black. But but the nation, including the Supreme Court the Supreme Court disagrees with you. Do you think Barack Obama is black? How about the authors James McBride and Colson Whitehead? At the end of the day, the fact that there is no genetic test for race should be sufficient proof to you that there is no genetic basis for race. Instead you ignore that fact and come up with the notion that a test is unnecessary,

I agree, but I don’t see it happening. A lot will need to happen, including reworking how our economy works. The money for universal (when I say universal I’m not just talking about Americans) has to come from somewhere right now. None of the wealth generated from productivity gains go to the masses. It all goes to the .01%. And those people aren’t about to relinquish any of the new found riches generated by AI. All those coding jobs being outsourced to India will dry up and what will those people do? this is a global problem. For you vaccine conspiracy theorists here is one for you: the illuminati know that as they accumulate increasingly greatest share of the world’s wealth, the masses will ultimately revolt. The vaccine is one way to get rid of a few billion people and stave off the pitch folks that will surely come.

I don’t know. I don’t think it’s even knowable, by our puny brains. it’s like seeing only an object’s shadow and thinking you understand the object casting the shadow.

Again, no one is arguing against this adding more straw men doesn’t improve your argument.

So why isn’t there a genetic test for race,

To be clear more people did not vote at all than those who cast a vote for Kamala or Trump. Trump barely won the popular vote against Harris. Neither candidate was able to earn a vote of more than 1/3 of the eligible voters.

In 2024, 65% of all searches resulted in zero clicks! That is a staggering statistic. I read somewhere on mobile that figure was 75% in 2024. Of course, this will increase in 2025 as Google continues to increase its use of AI on its "search" engine. The crazy things is the reason that people don't have to click links is that Google's AI is providing answers to visitors from content taken from the website that Google used to send visitors to! Of course, it is far more efficient for the users to get answers from AI -- so users will never complain. However, what incentive do content creators have if Google is just going to pirate everything and give it away? Why buy any music, or pay for any streaming service, if you can play any song ever recorded on Google's YouTube? When Google and a few other companies control access to all media by stealing then gatekeeping, we have a serious problem. The New York Times is suing OpenAI for billions of dollars stealing their content to feed their AI models. Publishers are suing for the same reason. It is a valiant and justified effort, but I'm afraid this will not work. These AI companies are far too powerful, and our administration is far too sympathetic to them. It is actually worse than the problem Google has caused. Google is being used less frequently as Google competitors Open AI, Anthropic, and others provide better answers more quickly than Google. I used to use Google's search engine multiples tomes a day. Today I rarely use it. One reason is that Google polluted their search engine with spammy ads. The real threat is Google use of AI and AI in general. I've even seen my content on ChatGPT responses! They did cite me, but I'm not noticing traffic from ChatGPT. Again, there is no need to visit the site if everything is provided very nicely on the AI site. Search as we know it is practically dead, and websites will follow -- unless people ditch the algorithm and continue to visit websites and engage with humans in the real world. It is really humans versus the computers. Do you wanna be like Cypher, in the Matrix, who sold out his people to make a deal with Agent Smith for a cushy life in the Matrix or do you wanna struggle with real people? We are at a cultural red pill / blue pill moment -- truth versus illusion. I think most people will opt for the Blue Pill ... it is just easier to live in the Matrix.

I have not seen this story yet, but if a sitting President accuses you of treason that should not be taken lightly. Now I'm sure Barry will not be brought up in front of a firing squad but I don't think it is an allegation he can ignore -- and he has done a great job staying out of the limelight.

That is what VPN's are for I watched the documentary last night. It was interesting. I've met some of the people in the video; I've met Ishmael Reed a few times and the slim woman with the close-cropped hair cut at the African Burial Ground, Kanene Ayo Holder, performed at my home years ago. I've also met Danny Simmons, as he is pretty active culturally. I'm not sure if I ever met Darius James, but he is on the site. @Delano, Darius said he left the States because there was nothing here for him. Is that why you left?

Humanity has a short attention span. Millions of people have died from covid globally. People are STILL dying from Covid and we are dealing with vaccine hesitancy and vaccine deniers. You and I may be fine, I'm not so confident about the people coming behind us. My grown kids are living in a much more challenging world than the one I came up in -- despite have hand-held super computers, self-driving cars, and Facebook.

The full documentary is also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mRrD4GMbOE

Thank you. I'm not doing that. Is it so hard to believe that people would disagree with you based upon your statements? Here again you throw up a strawman by writing "...that Black people are the originators and innovators of most music genres..." That was not a point I was addressing you kicked off this conversation off by writing, "Black youth who are into Hiphop need to start reclaiming our titles....tired of seeing Whites, Arabs, and Latinos running around calling themselves "DJ" this and that." @aka Contrarian pointed out the term Dee-Jay predated hip-hop by a generation. I wrote anyone one is free, or should be free, to create any form of art that choose -- including our Latino brothers, who are some of the most skilled hip-hop DJs and MCs.

Yeah, the Internet did promise to do all of those things in terms of bringing different people together. It seems the possibility of that has been hampered by the profit motive. I know I sound like a broken record, but the algorithm behind social media really made social media far worse, eliminating virtually any potential for benefiting humanity. AI will make things worse still. So much of what we see on social media is artificially created, and that is a problem for all of us. The only potential saving grace is that people will come back to platforms where humans are talking to humans. Where the interactions are not mediated by an algorithm. …at least one can hope.

Pioneer, I’m not talking about claiming the creation of an art form. I’m talking about creating within the form. I think anyone should be able to create any art they choose. If a Chinese man wants to make tacos great. If that same Chinese man somehow creates a terrific taco perhaps by infusing his culture into the product even better. This is how our forms evolve and develop. The profit motive generally tends to corrupt things, but we have seen that across all forms of art not just the forms that Black people pioneered. Intellectual property for a specific piece of art is very different than claiming ownership of an entire art form. That is like saying you own the air (though one day Europeans will probably figure out a way to do that too). You can’t tell a Chinese woman not to write blues music any more than you can tell a white boy he can’t perform rap music. Does that make sense?

@pioneer I could have look it up too… @richarch, OK. It is interesting how much verbiage you devoted to explaining why you won’t provide clarification. it seems to me the clarification, would’ve required much less effort.

This presumes I was able to interpret what you wrote. I wasn’t, so I requested a clarification. you rejected the request. So this is not true.