--- Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
That may be the point you want to make, Steve, but it was not the reason I asked the original poster to include the definitions that the Israeli equivalent of a Census Bureau uses to define "Jew", "Arab", "Christian", & other catagories.
Ethnicity (if I may use the term to apply to the process of subdividing populations) is a messy business.
This is valid. And I was simply localizing the complexities of this ethnic debate to the area. Albeit summat simplistically, Ill admit.
I'm not making a snide reference to Neo-Nazis who hide the fact that they have ancestors who were Jews or African-Americans; any time one attempts to make a formal catagorization of subgroups in a population, one will find exceptions. For example, there is a group in Oklahoma known as "Black Cherokees", who are the decendants of slaves owned by Cherokee Indians before the American Civil War: they consider themselves Cherokees; Cherokees whose ancestors were in America before 1492 consider them African-Americans.
The point of all this specificity is that its nitpicking -- it overruns secular (meaning 'disregarding religion') humanism (meaning 'of human causes') and other fads like "democracy" to reinterpret conflicts from an strictly ethnic POV, and not a human one.
I'll use myself as another example. My great-grandmother is said to have been part American Indian. That part of my family were New England whalers, & every time I look at her photograph, I have to wonder if she had lied to her husband & children & she was actually Polynesian.
Do you? What a burden. Indeed you should go with the fact that we all come from roughly 5-10K people (in Africa) back to a population bottleneck 75K years ago. The rest is details.
However my full name makes it appear that I am as much of a WASP as anyone in the Bush family. (Even though I prefer the term "Anglo-American", since my father's ancestors were dirt farmers from the East Midlands.)
What I want in the article is an explanation how the Israeli government determines these groups, & how people fall into them.
This is valid. If statistics are used for this purpose --fine. This thread is concerned with the use of a bot to mass-import (possibly) POV statistics en masse to the WP.
Do they self-report? Are they labelled at the time of birth or nationalization? And what groups exist that an Israeli citizen could be catagorized under?
This is all valid again. Agian nothing to do with the bot, and the source for its stats.
I read the rest, wont comment for length.
~S~
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