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[louisedennis]

I Helped Create the Milo Trolling Playbook-Stop Playing Right Into It | ObserverA really interesting read. Over the past few weeks I've become increasingly concerned about the culture of outrage. I'm not against it per se, I went on the Women's March and I remain glad I marched. But the hysterical and knee-jerk reactions to anything certain groups

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[daniel_saunders]

Although it's not the same thing as the Al-Jazeera article, I've had trouble listing my ethnicity as 'Jewish' in the past, even though I don't know what else it could be. To me 'white' implies European descent; my ancestors come from the Middle East, even if they did arrive here via Eastern and Central Europe. More precisely, in the UK 'white' often implies Celt, Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian, and I am definitely none of those things even if I do have pink skin. I have ties of family, culture and, to some extent, language with other Jews ergo I consider myself Jewish. But I've been told that Jewish-ness is a religion (which it blatantly isn't, as the number of Jewish agnostics and atheists testifies, even if religion is a strong part of the ethnic culture) not an ethnicity.

EDIT: unrelated, but I have now read the giant pig story and am charmed by it. I think I read somewhere that pigs are the ninth most intelligent animal.

[louisedennis]

Identity is a funny thing. I would have said that 'white' in the UK covered all European identities (including those labelled Hispanic in the US), but my perception may be skewed by having grown up in a University City that was predominantly white but with a lot of non-UK academics. It certainly never occurred to me to consider my Jewish best friend at the time to be anything other than white, though that may also have followed from a much smaller local Jewish population that London (I think, anyway) and possibly that his family came (I think) via Russia and Germany.