My wife’s family are Sikhs (some more traditional than others). The problem is that the people who are freaked out don’t know what that is, and frankly don’t care. In her extended family/social network, a few people were harassed after 9/11, and one was killed.
Brown + turban is apparently enough for racist jackholes. Sometimes just being brown is enough, but the turban apparently makes it politically excusable (in their minds) is my guess. Doesn’t help that the media tends to treat certain groups as terrorists, and others as lone nutbags, despite all having the same actions and similar motivations.
I’ve just started referring to them all (Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Baptists, etc.) as Abrahamists- Although it does seem to bother them when I point out that having the same god, same principal text, and the same cosmology makes them different sects of the same religion.
It seems to have escalated since I started referring to anyone following any Biblical law as “practicing islam” (not the capital-I sect known as Islam, but the Arabic word meaning “deference to God’s will”).
In fairness, The Eugenics Wars by Greg Cox established that the rise of Khan Noonien Singh was helped by time travelers, so events that changed the future could also conceivably have altered the past.
ETA: More generally, even for those who don’t consider those books to be canon, in a universe where time travelers can alter the past, there’s always the potential for their alterations to have repercussions on other time travelers who in turn influence events further in the past.
ETA 2: Now one might legitimately protest that such absurdity is a blank check for writers. To which I say, yup, welcome to time travel fiction, where plot integrity is optional!
John Varley’s novel Millennium was basically built on this premise. It features a sound recording made by infiltrating the room where it was initially played, secretly re-recorded and planted in the past.
I absolutely love that book, and everything pre-Lightning Varley
Actually I could even accept Red Lightening if it was a lovingly half-satirical Heinleinian pastiche by a freshman author. Coming from Varley, I wondered if the fella had suffered a stroke.
So you’re not familiar with real time software or truth tables and serious validation? None of my software is bug-free, but I don’t write it under those kind of constraints.
Ethnicity doesn’t exactly have an objectively defined boundary, and all ethnicities are at least partially arbitrary. Sure, you’re going to be able to get most people to agree on the ethnicity of a substantial number of people, but I suspect the fuzzy cases outnumber the well defined ones. Or if they don’t yet, they soon will. In other words, self-identification is probably at least as reliable an indicator of ethnicity as external-identification.
Reminds me on the old story. An airplane is flying in very rough weather and everyone is worried, especially one man, white in his face, looking out of the window at the wing that flexes up and down in the turbulence. A flight stewardess try to calm him down, “It nothing to worry about, the wings always vibrate like this”. The man responds, “Ma’am I work at Boeing, we never designed the wings for something like that”.
What makes you think the code that actually runs aircraft is a “large codebase”? I seem to remember that one model of Airbus is actually run by triple redundant military spec 6809s. This is an 8 bit processor with a 16 bit address. The code is nothing like the bloatware you get on even a phone nowadays.
In the 13th century (and presumably other periods) Islam was regarded by the Catholic Church as a Christian schism. This may be because in those days there was more actual communication between the two religions.
I’m sorry. this is indeed fundamentally questioning how people self-identify. Maybe you need to work on clarifying your meaning as opposed doubling down on how you’re the only person able to define identity properly (as not existing). No one minds if you yourself identify this way, but it can be extremely grating when you deny that there are forces out there which have power outside of the individual, and that building a specific identity can be on of those countermeasures against more oppressive forces.
But since I’ve now been flagged for this stupid tangent, I guess we’re done.
Of course it is questioning, but to me questions are not judgements. Questions are born of uncertainty, whereas judgements are born of certainty.
I am also skeptical about to what extent discussing Sikh ethnicity is off-topic here. Maybe I should go back up and flag all of the posts where people discuss Sikh in general terms, apart from this one guy. /s
Let’s try and keep this post on-topic, please. I don’t think there’s any dispute here that bigoted folks are misidentifying their “foes” because they wear similar garb or look similar. Whether or not bias or prejudicial treatment is, in fact, taking place is pretty obviously true.
This is one of those cases, IMHO, where the truth isn’t as important as the perception. Whether or not you are actually a flight risk (and, by extension, whether or not you identify, or are identified as a specific racial, ethnic, genetic, cultural, or whatever group or not) is not nearly as important as how others see you in these cases. I wish it weren’t so.
