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by wongarsu 1607 days ago
In Germany we learned in school about Hitler's race theory and how ridiculous the whole idea was. But compared to attempts like the one described in the article Nazi Germanys version sounds incredibly well thought out, including rigorous criteria to determine the race of a person (as ridiculous as those were).

Which is by all means not meant as an endorsement of 1930s ideology, more as a "wtf is that, that's backwards in more ways than I'm comfortable with".
2 comments
notahacker 1607 days ago
I think "this is the weird phenotype/culture hybrid people treat this person and their family as" is a less backward approach than "here's some pseudoscience to try to disprove that Jews and Aryan ubermenschen are of intermixed ancestry and actually pretty difficult to distinguish physiologically [at least without looking for specific genetic markers we fortunately haven't the technology to identify]", even before we get onto the why is this being looked into question.

Conceding a socially significant category isn't actually very analytically rigorous and might as well be treated as just a label shows more thoughtfulness than inventing a lot of nonsense to try to give it the appearance of rigour.

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wongarsu 1607 days ago
If you describe it like that it sounds like a classical descriptivism vs prescriptivism argument. Nazi Germany leaned hard into prescriptivism, trying to have hard rules for everything, while the US goes with a descriptivism "whatever the people call it is right".

But that sounds fundamentally incompatible with having a fixed list of categories, with that approach surely it would have to be a free text field (or at least a couple categories, along with either a text field or an "other" category, like with gender nowadays)

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notahacker 1607 days ago
> But that sounds fundamentally incompatible with having a fixed list of categories, with that approach surely it would have to be a free text field (or at least a couple categories, along with either a text field or an "other" category, like with gender nowadays

I agree, but generally it is, in my experience, as well as almost invariably being completely optional.

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ZeroGravitas 1607 days ago
The Nazis literally copied these rules from America. They actually made them slightly more "reasonable" in the sense that they didn't go as far as the "one drop rule".

https://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-...

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