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Japan has opened its first osmotic power plant – so what is it and how does it work?
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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if you would reread my comment, you would see i said twice that i don't think you are trying to be racist.
however, the impact of harmlessly-intentioned statements is completely determined in the mind of the listener.
if you feel i judged you, that's an example of how my intentions are out of sync with the consequence on your feelings. i apologize. it's also reinforces my point.
to clarify, you might originate a statement, make a comment, then it leaves your mind and your body. the affect on you is done and any meaning in the words is frozen. people, myself included, tend to think our intended meaning is more explicit (denotation vs connotation) in our words than it actually is.
like a pebble in the air, that comment can land in the ground and not touch anyone, not trigger anyone's feelings.
for comments about a person or about culture that's tied to people, it's hard to argue that no one could ever have any feelings about it.
i understand you're implying that comments about funny sounds in languages are abstract and/or unavoidable, and that it's harmless to enjoy. I've also made such jokes, and I'm not immune to my own criticism. and just because this type of joke has happened for generations, that doesn't mean it's an unalterable process of the physical universe. if a human does it, that human can stop it, make it better, make it worse, etc.
just imagine your native language being mocked everyday, by the majority group surrounding you, it started before you were born, over time you can sense that it affects your family members, reduced their confidence, maybe they're highly educated but for some reason they don't achieve "success", whatever that means for your culture. maybe they were bullied in school or at work.
you might think I'm suddenly bringing up fiction and distorting the issues. scientific research has proven that culturally related mocking is linked with bullying and has racialized effects on the targeted people. racialized effects meaning, among other things, giving them the sense that if they try to participate in certain areas of life, like employment, applying for home loans, dating, politics, showbusiness, they might be rejected. that sense has also proven to be accurate in the sense that (in USA) people who have been mocked in relation to their race definitively do get rejected in all fields and endeavors more than non-mocked (majority) people. that's after adjusting for income level, education level, skill gaps, language barriers, etc.
again, to repeat, i know you probably didn't make the comment thinking "hey what's something racist i can do"