No, 670k from 42 investors means less than 20k of investment per investor. 670k is already a number ridiculously small for VC funding, but 20k is basically nothing.

Also, after just a few years, 37 employees and 30k users the company became profitable, which is an insanely low period/scale for usual VC funded tech companies.

I am not a fan of some of his ideas either, especially the ones tending towards libertarianism. Some other ideas instead are quite decent, like how he thinks companies should give back to the community. He also built a tech company without VC funding and with a good share of ownership for workers (which I think is nice), without any marketing (which I despise as industry) and generally without the predatory nature that 98% of tech companies have nowadays.

I am sure you are referring to the Brave debacle of months back, and FWIW, I agree with his position on that particular issue. Anyway, considering that I have no ideas about the positions for the CEOs/founders of the alternatives, I think it’s still a very worthy compromise to have a good product (incl. nonfunctional qualities like privacy, ecological impact etc.).

Completely agree, I started seeing business hours popping up lately, I know that they know it’s an area of improvement.

It’s a premium service but it has very nice features and is a good product overall.

I continue to be one of the happiest customers for Kagi, a service that I am so happy to pay (for my family as well).

To be clear, there are some widgets that might be useful in some cases, but it should not be all you see (and it should definitely not include similar stuff as if the focus for any search is just to find more stuff to consume and please advertisers…).

Personally, if I think about reversed roles (I.e. some US newspaper putting an Italian gangster hat - a-la The Godfather to some politician with some offer-related pun) I wouldn’t think of it as racist, I would understand it’s not a statement about Italians in general. This also considering that being a gangster of course has plenty of negative connotations.

The whole thing feels to me like the attitude that is made fun on in Parks and Recreation and the Wamapoke. But anyway, the newspaper is shit and to be honest I find the substance of the article way worse than the image.

Yes, colonial mindset refers to the refusal of accepting other cultural backgrounds and cultural lenses, possibly due to an inherent belief that your own is superior or absolutely correct. This is not so uncommon in people coming from an imperial and hegemonic culture (like US). Edit: the colonial nature results evident from the fact that such position translates to the desire/pretense to impose a specific cultural lens or perspective even to facts, discussions etc. that belong to completely different contexts. The same attitude that colonizers have over the colonized.

I have already discussed the merits of the conversation, you refused to elaborate your thought in any way and you are limiting yourself to meta-comments that do not add anything to the conversation. In fact, you wasted several replies not saying anything but implying that your opinion is self-evident, which is a consistent symptom of that colonial mindset I was talking about.

You have been provided with a different, context-aware interpretation and you refused to engage with it at all, including challenging it, because being different from your own is automatically wrong and not deserving even of consideration. In fact you are still stuck on “racism against black people and indigenous people”, which means you didn’t even take into consideration that your interpretation of something happening in a cultural context you don’t understand might be wrong. Of course you also refused to elaborate on the way this is racist, or better, you did in another comment in this post with an explanation that has to do with how racial stereotypes have historically been used to discard opinions of minorities, which while being true doesn’t apply at all to this particular event and in general is quite tangential in Italian history, due to a completely different history compared to that of the US, especially when it comes to indigenous people.

So yeah, all in all I think you are showing a classic colonial mindset. Quite common in internet spaces where US culture is dominant, if it is of any consolation.

Or Albanians, Romanians and other people with a history of migration (at least in Italy).

That said, the racist dynamics in Italy are still different from those of a country with a much different history, linked to slavery and colonialism (thankfully Italian empire was a ridiculously failed attempt), with a different racial distribution in population. African migrants are for example a relatively new phenomenon. We are now at the 2nd generation give or take, and I have the feeling things will normalize ad they did for balcan people, as long as right-wing governments will not sabotage immigration on purpose to maintain it as a problem and gather votes…

And lord knows Italy has plenty of its own.

Not when it comes to Native Americans though.

Considering that this is a national newspaper meant for locals, I don’t think other culture’s baggage should necessarily be taken in consideration.

The “hunt” for the white man refers to her search for a white guy as a vice-president that can appeal to the “wasp” population. It’s a reference to western movies. The article is fully on her search for a vice-president and the “real” motivations for her choice.

So you refuse to elaborate, because your opinion is self evident, even though it is based on a lack of cultural context, and lack of understanding of the content of this very page.

My opinion, which I shared and elaborated, which is based on understanding the cultural background, the content of this page, knowing this rag, knowing what newspapers use and do in general, is automatically invalid - without argument - because it doesn’t fit your view. It doesn’t matter that I explicitly shared an interpretation that has nothing to do with race, which is plausible, coherent (I.e. matches the content) and context-aware. You are right by default because your cultural lens is the only thing you ever need to interpret the world.

Colonial mindset. That’s what I get from this.

Cya

Sure, I am very well aware of racism towards immigrants and other symilar dynamics. I am also conscious of fascist history and the consequences of African inferiority in general in culture. I understood the general gist of the source you shared.

Still this doesn’t explain to me how a cultural reference to a group of people as per a popular movie genre, that have absolutely no contact point with Italian culture fits into the same dynamic.

This doesn’t answer the question.

You said “it has everything to do with race”, how?

You can replace it with any “asian martial artist in movies”, it is probably a better comparison to “Native Americans in spaghetti western”. I would say both are not really a statement on asian/native american people in general, and it’s a clear cultural reference. Definitely different from a Yellow Face

Thanks, I don’t have the time to read it all.

I checked the abstract and I read:

This tutorial reviews the built-in systems that undermine life opportunities and outcomes by racial category, with a focus on challenges to Black Americans.

(and more). The focus seems to be very strongly on American culture, and on institutional racism against black people in America.

Then I read:

Unconscious inferences, empirically established from perceptions onward, demonstrate non-Black Americans’ inbuilt associations: pairing Black Americans with negative valences, criminal stereotypes, and low status, including animal rather than human. Implicit racial biases (improving only slightly over time) imbed within non-Black individuals’ systems of racialized beliefs, judgments, and affect that predict racialized behavior.

Considering that in this case there is no association of any characteristic with the race, it doesn’t concern American culture nor black people, I am struggling to adapt this point of view to the case being discussed.

“Indians” don’t merely exist as a cultural concept in spaghetti westerns

But this is a referenced to those, specifically. You can’t make a reference and at the same time capture the plurality, can you?

even if they did, fantastic racism is still racism.

You can argue that western movies are racist, but using them as reference now that they are established culture is different.

Not only not meant to be used as an authority, but also unlikely to settle any dispute you might have about the word.

Sure, but you will have noticed that I first provided my own view and you provided yours - which I disagree with - so if we want to have a conversation, we need to have some fixed points, otherwise it’s impossible to understand each other if words mean different things to the both of us. I didn’t use the dictionary definition to build my argument, I have simply shown how the definition I use is consistent in some aspects (the intent, for example) with a formal definition.

At the same time, I asked explicitly to provide your own, and instead you spent all the time to quote a fairly irrelevant (in this context) passage, without ultimately showing why I should accept your definition that to me seems completely arbitrary, way too vague and generic.

So let’s just sit in this pit of ambiguity, in which anything can be anything, if you are creative enough.

a local revealed it was from a grocery store rag, not a legit news paper

Not really, it is a legit newspaper. A shitty one, but still a newspaper.

if an American news paper used Chinese stereotypes or Yellow Face in an article about Japanese politicians

This is more like making an image of some politician who “joins the fight” with Bruce Lee pose, or suit, or something.

Can you elaborate how?

I provided at the very least an interpretation that is coherent, conscious of the cultural context and that makes sense considering the content of the text/article for what the image is used for.

I think I am stopping one step before you. Which is understanding whether something is racist or not. Using purely your cultural understanding to define it is going to lead to misunderstandings. In this case, understanding the context and the real intent of the picture makes it pretty clear that race has nothing to do with it. If you choose not to understand the context and just mark as racist anything that if done in another context would be racist, be my guest, I will just disagree.

In which way this image rolls up every Native American into one group, considering that is a cultural reference to some specific movie genre (so it has to do with the group represented in those movies)?

Can you also point me to how you distilled this definition of racism? I just looked up https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism

And I see:

• a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
• the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another
• a political or social system founded on racism and designed to execute its principles

To me in the definition above seems clear that there is some ideological scaffolding of racial superiority behind racism, or a precise goal of discriminate or oppress based on such ideology.

Could you maybe elaborate how this image is racist? Would have been as racist if they used a western hat instead?

EDIT: Ironically, the top level comment in this thread mentions “Europeans”, compressing many different people and cultures into one single viewpoint. Is that racist?

I would say that racism is not something that exists in a vacuum and instead has intent, has an ideology behind and in many cases has also a goal. So yeah, I disagree with you fundamentally.