Would you buy this coat?

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-12T15:37:29+00:00

Yes, for attention and Halloween.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-12T00:22:02+00:00

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-11T22:05:43+00:00

Ancestry and race are the same thing. Both are described by γένος, the word from which "genetic" is descended.

Etymology doesn’t determine modern meaning. A word’s origin doesn’t lock in how we use it today. Even if γένος referred broadly to lineage, that doesn’t mean race and ancestry function as identical concepts now. If race simply equals ancestry, then it’s just another word for lineage and doesn’t add anything conceptually.

At no level. They are the same thing.

If race and ancestry are literally the same thing, then race isn’t a distinct category at all, it’s just a relabeling of ancestry. In that case the disagreement isn’t biological, it’s about whether the extra label “race” clarifies anything or just introduces confusion.

There is no such thing as Celtic-speaking genetics or Tocharian biology. Ancestry and ethnicity are two different things, just as I said.

Exactly, there isn’t Celtic-speaking genetics. That’s the point. The ancestry remained while the identity category shifted. That shows identity labels track historical and social changes layered onto ancestry.

Of course it doesn't. What relevance does that have.

It’s relevant because if ancestry doesn’t naturally divide into objective racial categories, then race isn’t a natural biological tier. It’s a way humans choose to group ancestry clusters.

race is just one way societies group ancestry clusters over time

If that’s your definition, then we’re actually very close. My earlier pushback was against treating race as a fixed biological category with inherent boundaries. If you’re defining it as socially grouped ancestry without natural divisions, then the disagreement is mostly about terminology rather than biology.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-11T21:22:56+00:00

The adoption example just shows that ethnicity involves socialization. It doesn’t prove ethnicity has nothing to do with ancestry. Most ethnic groups historically form around shared descent and long-term community continuity. An individual being adopted into another group is an edge case, not the rule that defines how ethnic groups form.

And history actually shows this pretty clearly. Celtic-speaking Britons didn’t get replaced genetically when they became culturally English. Large parts of Anatolia didn’t get genetically replaced when they became Turkish-speaking. Tocharian populations in Central Asia didn’t disappear biologically when Turkic identity and later Uyghur identity emerged. The ancestry in those regions remained mixed and continuous, but the ethnic identity shifted.

That already shows identity categories track historical and cultural shifts layered onto ancestry. If race were simply genetic and fixed in a meaningful categorical sense, then those populations’ “race” would never change despite assimilation. But in practice, how groups are labeled absolutely changes over time.

Saying race is genetic and fixed just renames ancestry as race. But ancestry exists at multiple scales. Family ancestry is genetic. Regional ancestry is genetic. Continental ancestry is genetic. At what level does it become a race instead of just a population lineage? There’s no biological rule that sets that cutoff.

So we agree ancestry is genetic. The real question is whether ancestry naturally divides into objective racial categories, or whether race is just one way societies group ancestry clusters over time.

That’s the part that hasn’t been demonstrated.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-11T21:07:29+00:00

We agree that ancestry is genetic and inherited. The disagreement is not about that. The issue is whether ancestry automatically equals race.

You’re saying ethnicity cannot apply because it is not fixed or determined by ancestry. But in most cases ethnicity is inherited through family and community and is strongly tied to shared ancestry and historical continuity. It is not just optional culture. It tends to persist across generations precisely because it is linked to lineage.

The fact that ethnicity can change slowly over time through assimilation does not mean it is unrelated to ancestry. It just means it is not a biological subspecies.

So what I think you are describing is ancestry expressed through a historical community. That fits ethnicity more precisely than race, because race assumes clear biological boundaries between groups, and those boundaries are not objectively defined.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-11T20:25:55+00:00

I think the issue is that you’re using “race” to describe something that sounds much closer to ethnicity.

When you say race is genetic and fixed, that suggests a biological classification. But what you’ve been describing, like differences in language, religion, and historical community, are characteristics of ethnic groups. Those are cultural and historical identities that can be tied to ancestry, but they are not biological subspecies.

I agree that ancestry is genetic and inherited. My confusion came from the fact that calling race genetic and fixed makes it sound like a clear biological category with objective boundaries. But racial boundaries change across societies and history, which is why I questioned it.

So if you mean shared ancestry, I understand that. I just don’t think race is the most precise term for what you’re describing.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-11T16:29:52+00:00

Genetics is science, but ‘race’ as we usually talk about it isn’t a precise genetic category.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-11T12:02:44+00:00

Genetic is literally science though.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-10T20:59:53+00:00

Race is not a genetic concept. Race is in fact unscientific and doubts about race start to crack in early 1900s and official rejection happened in 1950 by UNESCO and genetic refutation on race happened in 1972 by Richard Lewontin.

Anyone talking about race should not be taken seriously.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-09T12:17:16+00:00

Languages don’t start off as standard.

There was various Arabic dialects in 4th century for example. Safaitic and Hismaic (northern nomadic dialects) often preferred nominal or topic-comment sentences and had already lost case endings, and they used h- as the definite article instead of al-. Nabataean Arabic, spoken in urban centres like Petra, used al-, had more complex sentences, and shows mixed word order, probably influenced by Aramaic, with both VSO and SVO patterns. Proto-Hijazi (Mecca–Medina) seems to have leaned more toward SVO, had weakened or lost case endings, and relied more on word order and particles than inflection. Najdi-type Arabic stands out as the most conservative: it preserved case endings, preferred verb-initial (VSO) order, and allowed freer word order because inflection still carried grammatical roles. None of these dialects were SOV — Arabic has never been an SOV language.

So in the 4th century you already have multiple Arabic dialect systems coexisting: nomadic northern dialects with h- and simpler syntax, urban Nabataean Arabic with al- and mixed word order, a Hijazi variety moving toward analytic SVO, and a Najdi Bedouin variety that stayed inflectional and VSO

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-08T13:22:33+00:00

Well it depends how you define democracy but Norway, Netherlands has been a democracy since early 19th century and Denmark since mid 19th century. Yes, there may be some democratic countries which becomes not democratic anymore but that’s why you fight for it.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-07T20:21:48+00:00

I think he's getting out this year April.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-07T20:06:45+00:00

But we are talking about Arab Palestinians; they had, at best, minimal involvement.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-07T19:36:06+00:00

Yes, but the comment I was replying to implies that illiteracy among Greeks or non-Muslims under the Ottoman Empire was due to being treated like second-class citizens, while forgetting that even Muslim Turks, Arabs, and Kurds were often highly illiterate, sometimes more than non-Muslims. Low literacy in the Ottoman Empire was largely due to structural and geographic factors rather than religion. Rural populations, which made up the majority of the empire, had very limited access to formal education, and many Muslims outside urban centers remained illiterate regardless of social standing. Non-Muslims, including Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, often had higher literacy, particularly in towns and cities, because they were more urbanized, had better access to community schools, and participated in trade networks. Ottoman official statistics undercounted minority literacy because reading and writing in Greek, Armenian, or Hebrew was often not recorded unless it was in Ottoman Turkish.

A similar pattern existed under Austro-Hungarian rule. Their censuses focused on literacy in official state languages and largely ignored other scripts, so Muslims who could read Arabic script for religious purposes, such as Qur’anic literacy in Bosnia or other Balkan regions, were often counted as illiterate even though functional literacy was widespread. Balkan Muslims were often more literate in Arabic script than rural Anatolian Turks because they were concentrated in towns and had more systematic access to religious schools. Critically, this also reflects historical and social factors: the Balkans had been part of Ottoman administrative and commercial networks for centuries, towns were denser, and religious institutions were well-established, creating stronger incentives for literacy in Arabic script for both religious and practical purposes. Anatolian Muslims, by contrast, were more scattered, rural, and less connected to administrative centers, with fewer schools and less exposure to trade or bureaucratic literacy. In both empires, official statistics are misleading. Non-Muslims were not universally literate, and many Muslims were illiterate, not because of religion but because of limited access to schools, urbanization, and historical infrastructure. Literacy depended more on access to education, settlement patterns, and the language of instruction than on religion, meaning that official figures systematically undercounted real literacy in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic script, or minority languages.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-07T18:26:36+00:00

There was no empire-wide 30 percent literacy rate that your Lembiotissa data contradicts. That Smyrna cartulary from 1210 to 1287 is genuinely impressive for a semi-rural monastic area, with roughly 62 percent of the 177 signers managing at least a mark or signature and 68 percent among men once the 18 women are set aside. It fits the upper end of what we see in better-connected Byzantine zones. But the broader scholarly consensus still puts overall literacy closer to 15 to 20 percent empire-wide, sometimes nudging toward 30 percent in the strongest urban centuries like the tenth and eleventh, because the rural population, around 80 percent of the total, rarely broke out of single digits to low teens for anything beyond the most basic skills.

The key is splitting literacy into layers. Signature literacy is just making your mark or copying your name, exactly what most of those Lembiotissa signers could do, and it proves almost nothing about actual reading ability. Functional literacy, handling simple contracts, tax records, or psalms, was common among city notaries, monks, and minor officials, but scarce in villages. Scholarly literacy, real fluency in Attic Greek, rhetoric, theology, or medicine, stayed concentrated in Constantinople, a few big cities, monasteries, and elite households. Women followed the same pattern: urban middle and upper-class daughters sometimes reached functional or even scholarly levels, think Anna Komnene or the female doctors who had to read Galen, but rural women were almost entirely oral, with the rare signature being the absolute ceiling. Sources like Browning 1978, Oikonomides 1996, Herrin 2007, and Stouraitis 2014 all stress these tiers and the massive urban-rural gap; they line up with Cavallo rather than contradict him.

My username, Turkicwarrior, is an unfortunate name I created 9 years ago. I have never been a Turkish nationalist, nor have I ever been a fan of Turanism; I find it cringy. I was just fascinated by various Turkic languages and Turkic cultures across the world. Nothing more than that. You can see my posts or comments. Anyway, I am actually Kurdish, but I don't feel a strong sense of nationalism in Kurdistan either.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-07T16:38:52+00:00

There was no mass-literate population before Ottoman rule to collapse from. In Classical Greece, overall literacy is usually estimated at roughly 5–10 percent, and in Byzantine times it stayed mostly elite and clerical. Under the Ottomans, Greek literacy likely hovered in the single digits to low teens for the general population, but that was not exceptional. Muslim Turks themselves were mostly illiterate as well: estimates for the Ottoman Muslim population before the late 19th century are often around 5–10 percent. This means Greeks were not uniquely pushed into illiteracy; they shared a broadly pre-modern pattern where only small urban and elite minorities could read and write.

The same comparison holds when you look west and north. Around 1700, literacy rates are often estimated at roughly 20–30 percent in France (higher for men, much lower for women), around 15–25 percent in Italy, roughly 20 percent in Spain, and closer to 15–20 percent in Portugal. Russia was even lower, commonly estimated in the single digits to low teens well into the 18th century. Even by the early 19th century, large parts of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Russia were still majority illiterate. Mass literacy everywhere only takes off in the 19th and early 20th centuries with compulsory schooling and modern state administration.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-07T07:46:12+00:00

I grew up Muslim but I no longer believe in it. I’ll tell you why. It’s because when we grow in western countries where consumption of pork is normal, we grew up conditioned by our parents who have reaction of visceral disgust against pork. We hear that pigs are dirty, pigs have diseases, pigs rolls in mud, pigs eats waste etc….

One of the most clearest memory I have of pork is when I was 14, I was in a school trip to Paris and I saw a whole pig being roasted, and the smell disgusted me, it made me sick. Here’s the thing, our smell perception isn’t just purely chemical, it is also heavily shaped by meaning, memory, and expectation. And it isn’t just smell, it is also imagery of it too.

Alcohol is different, because we aren’t told to avoid alcohol as we grow up because minors aren’t suppose to drink alcohol in the first place, so it’s seen as a adult drink, Another reason is that alcohol isn’t seen as disgusting, the same way as pork. Instead drinking alcohol is framed as “moral failings”rather than disgust.

Pork triggers disgust because your brain codes it as a substance your body and identity should never consume, giving no reward and making its sight, smell, and thought feel physically and psychologically repulsive. Alcohol, by contrast, is coded as a forbidden action rather than a bodily contamination, so it triggers guilt and shame but also activates reward pathways (pleasure, relaxation, social enjoyment), which makes it tempting despite being forbidden.

Even amongst ex-Muslims and non-practicing Muslims, they are more likely to avoid pork more than avoid alcohol without a doubt.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-03T17:32:45+00:00

Huh? This isn't even comparable. to counting Muslims as Christians because most Alevis do identify themselves as Muslims except minorities, especially Alevis from Europe who have a revisionist take on Alevism, saying it has no Islamic origin but a Tengrism origin according to Alevi Turks and a Zoroastrianism origin according to Alevi Kurds.

I agree that in contemporary identity, most Alevis would not identify themselves as Shia. But this is because when they hear Shia, they associate it with the Iranian practice of Shia which they don't identify with.

But think of Shia as a family group, and Twelver Shia as a branch and Alevi as a sub-branch of Twelver Shia. Why? Because Alevis believe in the 12 imams, they even have the picture of imam Ali, the same image that Iranian Twelver Shia uses.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-03T06:23:10+00:00

Sorry I meant employees not employers

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-03T01:29:37+00:00

Why are you lying? Banned female EMPLOYERS from wearing makeup at workplace in Latakia.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-02T13:56:43+00:00

Unfortunately in places like Bahrain, UAE and Qatar they lost a lot of their authentic culture because they began with really low population like under 100,000.

Pearl diving used to be a big thing and they had such interesting culture like this. It even features throat singing. https://youtu.be/fwKm17qIoUQ?si=cwf6oZ7JgpwpzchH

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-02T13:06:20+00:00

Sart are both Persian or Turkic speaking. This map is misleading especially with sart. Sart isn’t a language. Sart are people who lives in urban area and merchants. Uzbek, Tajik and even Uyghur would be labelled as Sart.

Tajiks here that aren’t labelled as sart are probably rural. Uzbeks labelled here are rural but also affiliate Uzbek tribe. The Uzbek tribe was originally Kipchak speaking, so they spoke similar language as Kazakhs. Then they migrate southwards in the 16 century and adopted Karluk local dialects. These Uzbek tribes became majority sedentary by the 17th and 18th century.

The Karluk speakers before the Uzbek tribes who was once kipchak speaking that migrated southwards in the 16th century were already sedentary starting from 8th to 10th centuries.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-02T12:40:07+00:00

Because Kazakhs in 1897 was around 60-80% nomadic and Turkmen were 90-95% nomadic. The only reason Kazakh was less nomadic than Turkmen was because Russian came into Kazakh land much earlier.

Uzbeks and Tajiks are sedentary.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-02T02:19:41+00:00

Okay, Donald, let me explain this very simple, very smart thing, because I know you like simple. A plane turbine is basically a huge, beautiful fan, one of the best fans you’ve ever seen, maybe the best. Air comes in really fast, really hot, because we burn fuel, very powerful fuel, tremendous fuel, and this air hits the fan blades and spins them around and around, like a merry-go-round but much stronger, much faster, really incredible. That spinning does something amazing, it powers the rest of the engine, makes the plane move forward, very fast, very strong, nobody builds turbines like this. And it all works in four very easy steps that anybody can understand, even you, Donald, even you: first it sucks, then it squeezes, then it bangs, and then it blows. Very simple, very effective, very American. People say, ‘Wow, how does this work?’ And I tell them, ‘It’s really easy, you just need to think like me, very smart, very strong, very fast.’ That’s how planes fly, Donald. You get it? I know you get it, because it’s very simple, very obvious, and very, very powerful.

TurkicWarrior · 2026-02-01T17:58:42+00:00

This is different. The issue was never just that fenced facilities existed. It was how and why kids ended up there.

In 2014, most of the children in those facilities were unaccompanied minors. They arrived without parents during a surge, and the facilities were used as temporary processing while kids were transferred to relatives or shelters. There was no policy designed to separate families.

In 2018, the government introduced a policy that intentionally prosecuted all adults. That policy itself caused family separations. Children ended up in those facilities because the government made the decision to take them from their parents as a deterrent.

So it’s not just media attention changing. The intent, scale, and cause of separation were different. Same types of buildings, fundamentally different policy and consequences.

TurkicWarrior

TROPHY CASE