Open Thread

evolutiontheorist Miscellaneous, , , ,

cxhvauwwqaequ17I forgot to add this image to Monday’s post, Infiltration of the Church? but it’s there now.

BabyMed (amusingly) has a table of the ethnic distribution of different blood types (O, A, B, and AB.)

Top O people: The Bororo of Brazil (100%,) Peruvian Indians (100%) Shompen of Nicobar (100%,) Mayas (98%,) Native Americans (79%,) Nicobarese (74%,) Navajo (73%,) Moros (Malaysians (62%,) Sudanese (62%,) Australian Aborigines (61%,) and the Kikuyu of Kenya (60%.)

Top A people: Native Hawaiians(61%,) Grand Andamanese (60%,) Maoris (54%,) Portuguese (53%,) Armenians (50%,) Norwegians (50%,) and the Swiss (50%.)

Top B people: Buryats of Siberia (38%,) Hungarian Gypsies (35%,) India Indians (33%) Burmese (33%,) Chuvash (33%,) Thais (33%,) Ainu (32%,) Chinese of Peking (32%,) Vietnamese (30%) and Arabs (29%.)

Top AB people: Ainu (18%,) Chinese of Peking (13%,) Tartars (13%,) Bombay Hindus (11%,) Kalmuks (11%,) Hungarian Gypsies (10%,) Japanese (10%) and Koreans (10%.)

Anyway, so I finally saw both Zootopia and The Angry Birds Movie. I liked both of them, but I have a soft spot for kids media featuring talking animals.

Zootopia is longer, IIRC, and the animation looks more expensive. It’s quite lovely, really, though of course nothing compares to the opening sequence of Cars 2, which is a breathtaking work of staggering beauty.

My kids like Angry Birds better. It’s sillier, the violence is less scary, and they like the game. Also, I think the plot makes more sense to them–they can understand the concept of an angry bird trying to rescue eggs, whereas I think the complexity of bunny Judy Hopps’s struggles to become a police officer and the intricacies of the mysterious case she is trying to solve kind of go over their heads.

Angry Birds may be “simpler,” but it is still touching and heart warming, and I don’t know about you, but Red’s anger at a society full of inane bullshit is something I can identify with.

Logically speaking, Angry Birds makes a LOT more sense than Zootopia. What happens, in the real world, when pigs are introduced to small tropical islands with flightless birds? They eat the birds’ eggs and destroy their nests. Invasive pigs have actually been really bad for some Polynesian bird species.

Of course, the whole thing with the slingshots and the TNT and the destruction of Piggy City is silly, but comes straight out of the app game. You really couldn’t make the movie without all of that.

By contrast, the predators in Zootopia simply “evolved 1,000 years ago” not to eat meat. How? Why? No explanation. Okay, fine, but why are bunnies afraid of foxes if foxes haven’t eaten bunnies in 1,000 years? Why is there a thriving industry in anti-fox products? Why are some animals even called “predators” when they don’t eat meat?

Consider that a mere 72 years ago, Germany was in the middle of killing millions of Poles, and yet today, Poles do not carry around anti-German spray in fear that the Germans will suddenly attack them again.

I hear Zootopia’s creators originally had a different explanation for how the predators were tamed: shock collars put on at puberty. In this scenario, the bunnies still being wary of foxes makes sense, because how do you know if that fox’s shock collar is still working? Even with a shock collar, he’s still a fox who wants to eat you inside. But the creators decided this was WAY too Clockwork Orange for a kids’ movie and so went with the handwavy “they evolved” explanation.

What about all of the prog? Well, Zootopia is full of Prog jokes. Most of them will probably go over kids’ heads, and I don’t really worry about my kids drawing conclusions one way or another from a movie about talking rabbits and foxes. Or pigs and birds. But that’s just me.

 

Onward! Our Comment of the Week award goes to aureliusmoner:

The Church cannot be infiltrated; or, rather, once the infiltrators go public with their hostility, they automatically cease being members of the Church, since the clear teaching of the Church (i.e., the Catholic Church, which I confess to be the one and only, true Church) is that those who publicly fail to adhere to the magisterial teaching and Holy Tradition, on defined doctrines, are automatically excommunicated by Divine Law, whether Canon Law gets around to making this “legal” or not. …

It’s not just Bella Dodd, who admitted the institutions were being infiltrated. Gramschi called openly for this. The Supreme Pontiffs in the century prior to the victory of the infiltrators, warned that the infiltration was in progress; they took pains to clarify the Church’s teaching on what to do with heretics and heretical claimants to the Holy See (i.e., anti-popes), with the doctrine of St. Bellarmine being advanced by pope Leo XIII “by a special counsel of divine providence.” …

RTWT.

(It’s been kind of a low-comment week due to Thanksgiving.)

Anyway, how are you all doing? What are you wondering/thinking/pondering?

13 thoughts on “Open Thread”

  3. btw there are claims on the internet that Ethiopian jews have suposedly closed the education test score gap with the rest of Israel

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  4. Notice how the movies “Zootopia”, “District 9”, and “Elysium” are brilliantly anti-Progressive throughout, then at the end they say, “just kidding, Progressivism is correct after all!” Or how Michael Moore eloquently explained why huge numbers of Rust Belters would vote for Trump, then followed it up with “but y’all need to vote for Hillary because Trump is racist.”

    Or the Soviet film where a nerdy scientist sends his uneducated friend back to the 16th century, but the time machine breaks, trapping him there. So he goes to an electronics store for replacement parts, but all they have are empty shelves. At the end of the movie, he wakes up. It was all a dream, so please don’t throw me in the gulag for suggesting that shortages are a daily fact of Soviet life! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070233/

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    • I haven’t seen two of those. :) I do think an anti-progressive reading of Zootopia is reasonable (it’s even pro-police officers,) despite the constant prog-jokes. I don’t think the creators were vehemently anti-prog; they just probably weren’t crazy and understood that a rabbit’s fear of foxes is perfectly reasonable.

      I’m still impressed they managed to make a good, feature-length movie out of the Angry Birds app.

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  5. Evolutiontheorist,

    Check out what PP says about Australoids and Melanesians being Negroid.

    https://pumpkinperson.com/2016/11/30/the-autism-schizophrenia-continuum/#comment-39408

    He claims that PCA plots don’t denote racial classification. He claims of we were to test alleles that code for phenotype in Pacific populations and Africans that they would cluster the same.

    I think it’s ridiculous and he’s just watering down racial classification to phenotype, when genotype is what matters most. Pacific peoples don’t even look Negroid.

    Thoughts?

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    • Are you kidding? I’m more concerned about the claim that Japanese are Northeast Mongoloid mixed with Australoid. I mean just look at the genetics. That is nonsense.

      Okay, let’s try to look at this without wading into a big fight…
      1. PP says Australoids have preserved the Negroid phenotype. S/He doesn’t explain exactly what they mean by this, but I think they mean Australoids have dark skin and are adapted to a hot environment. I guess the truth of this depends on what your standard for “looks Negroid” is, but if you just looked at the genes for “dark skin,” then sure, Melanesians and Sub-Saharan Africans probably cluster closer to each other than to Asians and whites.

      If PP just means, “Hey, if we classified people based on skin color, we’d call Melanesians ‘Black,'” well, that’s true enough. I used to know some Russians who referred to people from India as “black;” I hear people in Pakistan refer to Chinese people as “white.” So… this is a thing people do. Obviously it’s not my preferred way of grouping people, though. Good luck matching kidney or bone marrow donors that way.

      2. PP uses this to claim that Australoids are genetically similar enough to Sub-Saharan Africans that a cross between Asian and Australoid would be similar in personality to a cross between Asian and Sub-Saharan, and that both crosses would be similar to a European.

      The problem is that the question is about personality, not phenotype. Do Australasians and SubSaharans have similar personalities? I have no idea. But let’s run with this. Let’s suppose that different personalities evolved to cope with different climates, and the Australasian environment is similar enough to the African environment that not only do Melanesians have dark skin, they also have similar personalities. And, further, let’s assume that whites are “in between” Asians and Blacks personality-wise, and that a black-Asian person would get a mix of personality traits that are similar to a white person’s. Then if Australasians also have personalities similar to blacks, then theoretically you could get the same result.

      But the “Australasian” population living in Japan wouldn’t look Melanesian at all, it’d look, well, Japanese. Or Ainu. And it would have adapted to life in Japan, which gets a lot of snow. So if the Japanese have personalities similar to Europeans (which I don’t think they do,) it’s because they’re dealing with a similar climate, not because Melanesians have a lot of melanin.

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