History Friday: The Russian Exploration of America (pt 1)

I’ve wanted to learn more about the Russian exploration and colonization of the Americas for ages, and while rummaging around in the attic of a 120 year old house I serendipitously happened across Caughey‘s History of the Pacific Coast, published in 1933, which has an entire chapter devoted to the subject.

One of the interesting things about the exploration of the North Pacific is just how late it occurred–even in late 1700s, we basically had no idea what was up there. Before the construction of the Suez and Panama canals, the north Pacific between modern-day Russia and Alaska was about as far away from Europe as you could get. By sea you might circumnavigate Africa, which offered little in the way of good places to take on fresh food and water–the Dutch had to send their own people to raise cattle on the Cape of Good Hope because the local hunter-gatherer population simply didn’t have enough food to trade for–and then circumnavigate Asia, making your way through cannibal (and probably pirate) infested waters along the way. Just getting to the Indonesian spice islands and back left a great many men dead of scurvy. Alternatively, you could round South America and brave the tumultuous, Antarctic waters around Tierra del Fuego–if you had permission to land at Spanish ports along the way. Alternatively, you could go by land–by trekking across Siberia and then building a boat, or by crossing the Atlantic, Lewis and Clarking it, and then building a boat. No matter which direction you head, it’s a long trek and you’ll probably die–and the Russians did it first.

How they did it is a tale in itself.

As usual, I’ll be using “” instead of blockquotes.

“Up to the middle of the eighteenth century the Pacific Ocean had been a Spanish lake, with English and Dutch freebooters intruding only occasionally. From Panama to beyond San Francisco exploration and settlement had been y the Spaniards, unchallenged and unaided. The opening of the North Pacific, on the contrary, was the work of several nations. Russians led the way under Vitus Bering, the Dane Spain sent expeditions to investigate the Russian activities, to check British aggressions, and to substantiate her ancient claim to the entire northwest coast. British traders came overland and by sea, and Americans likewise used a two-fold approach…

“From our perspective the overrunning of Siberia was a preliminary to Russian expansion in America; from the Russian standpoint Siberia far outweighed Alaska. But whether regarded as the tail or the dog, the eastward movement across Asia must be recognized as an epic achievement, comparable to the American westward march to the Pacific. “A century sable hunt half round the world” labels it succinctly. It was a century more or less; from the Urals to Okhotsk the Russians were only sixty years, to Bering Strait a century and a half. Sables were the chief incentive, but salt works, escape from the czar’s rule and his justice, silver mines, mammoth ivory,and exploitable natives were supplementary attractions. Half round the world is only a mild exaggeration. …

Yermak Timofeyevich, born sometime between 1532 and 1542 – August 5 or 6, 1585

“Stroganof’s salt mines in the Urals served as the point of departure, and Yermak, quondam tracker along the Volga and more recently a river pirate, actually initiated the movement. He came to the salt mines in 1578 with almost a thousand Cossacks, a fugitive from the justice of Ivan the Terrible. For years Trans-Ural tribesmen had been bringing in valuable furs to trade, and Stroganof used this as a lure to speed the departure of his guests. He provided guides to conduct Yermak to the Ob with its reputed riches in sables.

EvX: “Yermak” is sometimes spelled “Ermak.”

“The Tatars resisted courageously. But except that they had horses and fought customarily as cavalrymen, they were at a disadvantage as great as that of the Aztecs against Cortes. Field artillery, firearm, arquebuses, and suits of mail gave the Cossacks victories over forces ten or even thirty times their number. After several battles Yermak captured Sibir, a Tatar village whose name was to be extended over all Siberia. His position was insecure, however, and gift of foodstuffs from non-Tatar tribes were very welcome. A present of sables was sent to the czar, who thereupon forgave these erstwhile river pirates, commissioned Yermak his agent, and sent him reinforcements.

Surikov’s “The Conquest of Siberia by Yermak”

EvX: According to Wikipedia:

The Khanate of Sibir, also historically called the Khanate of Turan,^[1][2] was a Turco-MongolKhanate located in southwestern Siberia. Throughout its history, rule over the Khanate was often contested between members of the Shaybanid and Taibugid dynasties; both of these competing tribes were direct patrilineal descendants of Genghis Khan through his eldest son Jochi and his fifth son Shayban (Shiban). The Sibir Khanate was itself once an integral part of the Mongol Empire, and later the White Horde and the Golden Horde.

The Sibir Khanate had an ethnically diverse population of Khanty, Mansi, Nenets, Selkup and Siberian Tatar people. The Sibir Khanate was the northernmost Muslim state in recorded history.

EvX: “Muslim” probably misrepresents the extent of conversion away from traditional steppe shamanism. The Khanate of Sibir only lasted for about 100 years, from 1490-1580 (khanates come and go.) The last Khan of Sibir, a fellow by the name of Kutchum, (or Kuchum) sealed his own fate when he decided to raid Stroganov’s trading posts, resulting in Yermak’s expedition.

But back to Caughey:

“Old blind Kutchum Khan, in spite of frequent reverses, was still in the field against the Russians. On a stormy August night in 1584 he sent his cavalry against Yermak’s camp on the Irtysh. Completely surprised, this group of fifty Cossacks was annihilated. Yermak fought his way to the river, and seeing no other chance, plunged in, attempting to swim to the boats. His heavy armor dragged him to the bottom, where the Tatars discovered his corpse a few days later. They are said to have inflicted great indignities upon it and then to have buried it with equally great honors.

“Yermak’s defeat and death disheartened the Cossacks. They voted to abandon Sibir and retreat to Russia. A reinforcement met them on the way and they faced about toward Sibir, but Tartar forces prevented its reoccupation, and instead, Tobolsk was founded (1587) as the capital of this frontier.”

EvX: For thousands of years, horsemen have boiled out of the steppes, overwhelming, massacring, and raping the farmers of Europe and Asia. Wave upon wave of Indo-Europeans, (aka Yamnaya,) Tatars, Turks, Mongols, Khazars, and others conquered everything from the shores of Spain and Britain to the coast of China, from the tip of India to the frozen north of Siberia. Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes may have killed 40 million people in a single lifetime.

Finally the Russians conquered them back, and even–during the Soviet era–occupied Mongolia.

To be continued…

So who is White?

“White” is a nebulous category. “Black” is actually easier to define, because there’s a pretty hard boundary (the Sahara) between black Africa and everywhere else. To be fair, there are also groups like the Bushmen (who are more tawny brownish,) and the Pygmies who are genetically separate from other sub-Saharan Africans by over 100,000 years, but these are pretty small on the global scale. But “whites” and “Asians” occupy the same continent, and thus shade into each other.

If we use a strictly skin tone definition (as the world “white” implies) we can just pull up a map of global skin tone variation:

source: Wikipedia

Of course, this implies that either Spaniards and Finns aren’t white, or Chinese and Eskimos are. Either way is fine, of course, though this would contradict most people’s usage. (And I kind of question that data on the Finns:

credit: The Postnational Monitor)

These composites of faces from around the world offer us some more data, though depending on how they were made, they may not accurately reflect skin tone in all countries (ie, if the creator relied on pictures of famous people available on the internet, then these will reflect local beauty norms than group averages.)

(Plus, I wonder why the Romanians are pink.)

J. B. Huang has taken some of the Eurasian faces from this set and gone through the effort of trying to quantitize their shapes, as displayed in this graph (at least, that’s what I think they’re doing):

Interestingly, while some of the faces cluster together the way you might expect–China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan are all near each other, as are Belgium and the Netherlands–many of the groupings are near random, eg, Mongolia, Turkey, and the Philippines. Hungary and Austria are closer to India and Japan than to Poland or Finland. The European faces are all over the map.

Maybe this doesn’t mean anything at all, or maybe it means that there’s a lot of variation in European faces.

This is actually not too surprising, given that modern Europeans are genetically descended from three different groups who conquered the peninsula in successive waves, leaving more or less of their DNA in different areas: the hunter gatherers who were there first, followed by farmers who spread out from Anatolia (modern Turkey,) followed by the “Indo-Europeans” aka the Yamnaya, who were part hunter gatherer (by DNA, not profession) and part another group whose origins have yet to be located, but which I call the “teal people” because their DNA is teal on Haak’s graph.

Oh yes, we are getting to Haak.

From Haak et al.

This isn’t the full graph, but it’s probably enough for our purposes. The European countries show a characteristic profile of Orange, Dark Blue, and Teal. (By contrast, the east Asian countries, which cluster closely together on the facial map, are mostly yellow with only a bit of red.)

Obviously DNA isn’t actually colored. It’s just a visual aid.

Haak’s graph makes it fairly easy to rule out the groups that are definitely different (at least genetically.) The American Indians, Inuit, West Africans, Chinese, and Aborigines are distinctly out. This leaves us with Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, India, and parts of central Asia/Siberia:

The Orange-centric region, which Haak et al arranged to display the movements of the Anatolian farmer people.

The heavily teal Indian section (The middle part, from Hazara-Tlingit, are obviously not Indian).

And finally some Siberian DNA.

Now, I could stare at these all day; I love them. They tell so many fascinating stories about people and where they went. Of the three ancestries found in Europeans, the oldest, the dark blue (hunter-gatherers,) is found throughout India, Siberia, and even the Aleutian islands (though I caution that some of this could just be because of Russians raping the Aleuts back in the day.) The dark blue appears to hit a particular low point in the Caucuses region, which of course is about where the teal got its start.

The orange–Anatolian farmers–shows up throughout the Middle East and Europe, but is near totally absent in India and Siberia. (Not much farming in Siberia!)

At a lower resolution (not pictured,) India, central Asia, and Siberia appear to have a mix of–broadly speaking–“European” and “Asian” ancestry. (Not too surprising, since they are in the middle of the continent.) Obviously the middle of Asia is a big crossroads between different groups–red (Siberian) yellow (east Asian) teal and dark blue, and bits of the same DNA that shows up in the Eskimo (Inuit) and Aleuts.

But this is all kind of complicated. Luckily for us, this is only one way to visualize DNA–I’ve got others!

Credit Robert Lindsay, Beyond Highbrow

If you’re not familiar with these sorts of trees, the basic story is that geneticists gathered DNA samples (from spit, I think, which is pretty awesome,) from ethnic groups from all over the world, and then measured how many genes they have in common. More genes in common = groups more closely related to each other. Fewer genes = more genetic distance from each other.

Since different genetic samples and computer models are different, different teams have produced slightly different genetic trees.

Note that since the tree is constructed by comparing # of genes two groups have in common, a group could end up in a particular spot because it is descended from a common ancestor with other nearby groups, or because of mixing between two groups. Ashkenazi Jews, for example, cluster with southern Europeans because they’re about half Italian (and obviously half ancient Israeli.) Here’s another chart, giving us another perspective:

I totally stole this from Razib Khan–though he got it from here.

This chart also shows us genetic differences between groups, with strong clustering among African and East Asians, respectively, and then a sort of scattered group of Europeans and Indians (South Asians.)

Also credit Robert Lindsay

Neither of these graphs shows Siberians or central Asians in great detail, because they are tiny groups, but I think it’s safe to say the Siberians at least cluster near their neighbors, the other Asians and far-north Americans.

The central and south Asians, though, are quite the interesting case!

Between archaeology and genetics, we’ve been able to trace the path of human expansion, from central Africa to the world:

I think this map came from that recent article I discussed in the post about possibly finding traces of the first out-of-Africa event in Papuans.

Since this post is already image heavy, here is a graph showing finer detail on European and North African groups, Moroccans, (Berbers), Aleut woman, Sardinians, Sami (Lapps), Iranians, Gujarati, (another), Dravidian, Brahmin, Dalits, Altai, Uyghur, Selkup. (Look at the pictures!)

Well, ultimately, there’s no hard division between most ethnic groups or races–you can draw dividing lines where you want them. The term “white” implies dermal paleness, of course, so you may prefer a narrower definition for “white” than “Caucasian.” Greater minds than mine have already covered the subject in more authoritative detail, of course. I merely offer my thoughts for entertainment.

Happy November Open Thread

The German town of Wesel, after Allied carpet bombing

As our planet whirls away on its axis, shedding leaves in the northern hemisphere and growing them again in the southern, it seems as good a time as any to pause and reflect on things we’re thankful for, and maybe come up with something more original than “toilets” and “not polio.”

This morning I saw a man, in a wheelchair, who had no limbs. No arms, no legs.

There but for the grace of God go I.

Every problem I have in life–in fact, every problem faced by everyone on Earth who isn’t imminently dying–pales in comparison to this guy’s.

I have so much to be thankful for. I am alive. I have no chronic or terminal diseases. I have all of my limbs and they all work as they should. I have a warm home to live in and delicious food to eat. A family to love and that loves me back. Good friends.

It’s easy to take these things for granted, but there are so many people who can’t tick off everything in this list. People who are sick, or disabled, or missing limbs, or homeless, or hungry, or just plain lonely.

So remember to be thankful, grateful, and kind to others.

Okay, on to the discussion questions:

1. What are you grateful for?
2. Do you think men and women have different conversation styles? (Explain.)
3. Propose your own question.

And now I don’t remember whom I should credit for finding this graph. My apologies.

Comments of the Week!

There have been tons of comments this week, and I am still reading through/responding to them. So if I haven’t gotten to you yet, it isn’t personal. There are just a lot. There have been some substantial debates among you people.

First, I’d like to direct you to Cord Shirt’s comment/questions last week on Apology Structures and SJWs:

* What (sub)cultures do prefer “I don’t know why I did it”? Why?

* Everyone, what is “the proper apology format” in your subculture, and why?

Since I am a bad representative of whatever culture I come from, I encourage you guys to answer the question, too.

Second, Alex’s response on why POC might not be a terrible term:

I understand you point, but I do think that, at least in the US, there is a meaningful distinction between the white vs. the non-white experience.

For example: Recently in an election debate, Tammy Duckworth, whose background is white/asian, talked about her own and her family’s military service going back to the American Revolution. She herself is a war veteran who lost both of her legs as a US Army pilot. Her debate opponent, a GOP Senator, snidely replied: “I had forgotten that your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington.”

Rule of thumb: don’t be rude to someone who lost both of their legs defending you.

And some interesting links:

Investigating the Genetic Basis of Social Conformity: The Role of the Dopamine Receptor 3 (DRD3) Gene:

People often change their opinions or behavior to match the responses of others, a phenomenon known as social conformity. … However, little is known about the genetic basis underlying individual differences in social conformity. A recent study demonstrated an association between enhanced dopaminergic function and increased conforming behavior. … this study investigated to what extent this polymorphism affects conforming behavior. Methods: We categorized Han Chinese individuals according to the polymorphism and tested them with a facial-attractiveness rating task. Results: We found that individuals with a greater number of the Gly alleles, which are related to an increased dopamine release in the striatum, were more susceptible to social influence and more likely to change their ratings to match those of other people.

According to Wikipedia, “The brain includes several distinct dopamine pathways, one of which plays a major role in reward-motivated behavior. Most types of reward increase the level of dopamine in the brain, and many addictive drugs increase dopamine neuronal activity.”

So, do people get addicted to social approval? But on the other hand:

“Inside the brain, dopamine plays important roles in executive functions, motor control, motivation, arousal, reinforcement, and reward, as well as lower-level functions including lactation, sexual gratification, and nausea. … Dopamine contributes to the action selection process in at least two important ways. First, it sets the “threshold” for initiating actions.^[37] The higher the level of dopamine activity, the lower the impetus required to evoke a given behavior.^[37] As a consequence, high levels of dopamine lead to high levels of motor activity and impulsive behavior; low levels of dopamine lead to torpor and slowed reactions.”

Maybe dopamine just helps people do quick, on-the-fly adjustments, like change a rating in light of new information they’d just received. Lower dopamine people might just be changing their ratings more slowly, or not absorbing the new information at all.

Paleolithic Site in Northern Iran Much Older than Previously Thought:

According to Vahati Nasab, the researchers also traced the cultural deposits of human activity around Hill No. 8. “We found that during the Palaeolithic era the hill labelled as No. 8, had been a lower embankment in a shallow and wide lagoon. The first season of excavations dated the lower strata of the open site as belonging to between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago,” he concluded.

(That is super old for anything outside of Africa!)

How Chimpanzees Cooperate: if Dominance is Artificially Constrained:

Suchak et al. report an observational study replicating a basic finding from experimental research: Chimpanzees are skillful at recognizing situations in which they need a collaborative partner to acquire food and then collaborating to obtain it

However, experimental research has also found that: (i) chimpanzees would rather acquire food individually than cooperatively, (ii) their cooperation breaks down if the outcome is a single cache of resources that must be peaceably divided by cooperators, and (iii) they do not punish free riders or reward contributors asymmetrically.

So chimps are bad at cooperating under anything but highly controlled experimental conditions. However, I should note that chimps do sometimes hunt cooperatively; chimpanzee cooperation is probably best studied in the context of existing chimp social bonds (eg, parent-child, sibling-sibling, or friend-friend,) as these pairs already do cooperate to some extent in the wild.

And finally, “They’re not human”: How 19th-century Inuit coped with a real-life invasion of the Walking Dead:

It was easily one of the most unearthly and chilling visions that had ever struck the land that would soon become Canada.

Eight or nine lurching figures: Their eyes vacant, their skin blue, unable to talk and barely alive.

It was sometime before 1850 at a remote Arctic hunting camp near the southwest edge of King William Island, an Arctic island 1,300 km northwest of what is now Iqaluit, Nunavut. And these “beings” had seemingly materialized out of nowhere.

“They’re not Inuit; they’re not human,” was how a woman, badly shaking with fright, first reported their arrival to the assembled camp. …

The figures, of course, were the last survivors of the Franklin Expedition. They had buried their captain. They had seen their ship entombed by ice. They had eaten the dead to survive.

It’s a fascinating article.

Okay, now I’m opening the floor. Have at it.

What are TERFs?

TERF stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist–feminists who don’t like trans people.

Why?

Well, you know how radical feminists have a reputation for being man-hating Nazis?

That’s basically true, except for the Nazi part. Radical feminists don’t like men all that much and don’t want men at their events or in their conversations.

The three abstracts in this post hail from real, peer-reviewed, academic “papers.” H/T @RealPeerReview

Radfems believe that “gender is a social construct,” by which they mean that the oppressive, patriarchal society made up this idea of “femininity” and then “socialized” young, biologically female people into believing it. (Society also made up the idea of “masculinity” and “socialized” biological males into believing it.) In essence, they think society is gaslighting people into believing that there are personality differences between men and women, with the result that men are taught to be aggressive, rapey assholes, and women are taught to be demure, doormat victims.

I… I am sorry this exists

To radfems, “women” have two things in common: their physical bodies and their oppression by men, and their primary focus is on liberating their physical bodies from male control, as manifest in things like abortion restrictions, rape, body shaming, marriage, or any claim that males and females are different in any way besides anatomy.

So what about trans people?

From the TERFs’ POV, most trans people are either oppressive, patriarchal men pretending to be women, or women who think there’s something wrong with being female and so are trying to become patriarchal oppressors. TERFs don’t want men or wannabe men in their spaces. They don’t want to explain, yet again, that you can never understand what it is like to be female because you were not socialized as a child into believing that “femininity” exists and you were never oppressed by society for being female. Male-to-female transsexuals don’t menstruate, can’t get raped, can’t get pregnant, and can’t be denied an abortion. You cannot become “female gendered” because “female gender” is just a thing society made up to oppress women, and buying into it is only going to further oppress women.

The whole idea of being trans doesn’t make sense within a radical feminist framework. There is no reason at all why you can’t just be an “effeminate” person who is biologically male or a “masculine” person who is biologically female–the only reason you think you can’t is because society lied to you and told you that you can’t.

Even if you are sympathetic to trans people, it remains a fact that women-who-are-biologically-women have different practical concerns than they do. Trans folks have very specific concerns about discrimination, anti-trans violence (especially incarcerated trans people), related medical conditions, and of course hormonal therapies and surgery. (There is of course some overlap–trans people can get raped and some can get pregnant, for example.)

TERFs believe that when trans people enter their spaces, trans issues, instead of women’s issues, begin to dominate the discussion, and the women who originally created these spaces in order to escape male oppression are yet again being oppressed by men. EG: Why we Must Stop Calling Menstruation “A Women’s Issue”:

Ame: People can be more inclusive of trans people who also experience menstruation by talking about the topic in a non-gendered way. Realising that bodies and body parts are not gendered would help to normalise the idea that you do not have to be a woman in order to menstruate, and also that not all women are capable of menstruating. A simple change in language, such as saying “people who menstruate” rather than “women” goes a long way in terms of having inclusive discussions, rather than discussions which isolate certain subgroups of people.

Sapphire: Stop the whole “lady parts” cis feminist discourse.

Teddy: I think better education, and more accessible resources online is going to be the way forward; I think magazines aimed at “men” and “women” should make people aware of health conditions that affect all body types, about health issues in general, and how to deal with them. There would likely be some pushback, but removing strict gendering of health issues is important.

Yes, Men’s Health and Maxim should totally start running articles about male menstruation, and Cosmo can run articles about the importance of getting your prostate checked–I’m sure that’ll send their sales through the roof!

As far as TERFs are concerned, trans people are free to have their own discussions in their own spaces, but they are not having a conversation about how “men menstruate too.”

Note that I have no dog in this fight, as I am neither a radical feminist nor trans. I think radfems are basically wrong–“gender” is primarily a manifestation of genetic differences between men and women–and that most trans folk I’ve met have an actual medical intersex condition. However, I think most trans people would be better off if they believed the radical feminists and declared to themselves that it’s fine to like things culture has traditionally deemed appropriate to the opposite sex instead of going through all the trouble of transition.

Is America Done?

East Liverpool, Ohio–a town with “no jobs” and “no recreation”

In 1969, Niel Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted an American flag on the moon. In 2016, Americans can’t figure out how to not overdose on heroin:

Unconscious addicts are so frequently dumped in the hospital parking lot that administrators developed a special alert system to treat them. Paramedics have plucked overdose victims from roadside ditches, from the Walmart parking lot, and from living rooms across town. It has become routine for children to see a passed-out parent jolted to life with a dose of Narcan.

“Do you know how many houses we go into that the kids are sitting on the couch watching us?” said paramedic Christine Lerussi. …

The despair here echoes across the country. But the opioid crisis is particularly acute in Ohio. Last year, a record 3,050 people in the state died of drug overdoses. Overdoses from the potent opioid fentanyl more than doubled, to 1,155.

Spend a few days in East Liverpool and it’s easy to see why. Drug dealers from out of state flock to the desolate streets, selling powerful highs for $10 or $15 a pop. For too many residents, there’s little else: No jobs. No recreation. No long-term addiction treatment.

No recreation?

The fuck is this shit?

Pardon my language, but I have a tiny computer that fits in my pocket and lets me instantly access almost the entirety of human knowledge, talk to people from all over the globe, and play Angry Birds any time I want to. My TV offers hundreds of entertainment channels 24 hours a day. My kids are so ceaselessly entertaining and cute, you don’t want to get me started about all of the great things they did today. Like the good folks of East Liverpool, I have woods to walk in, rivers to boat in, lakes to fish in, a garden to tend, libraries to enjoy, and neighbors to chat with.

Where, exactly, does “recreation” come from? The magic recreation fairy? Is it dropped from the sky? Does it happen when someone builds a museum and starts showing Broadway musicals? (This is why no one does drugs in NYC, of course.)

Is there something about the soil in East Liverpool that prevents its residents from going on picnics, forming a sewing club, or reading a good book?

OF COURSE NOT.

There was no heroin epidemic here in the ’50s. Was there more “recreation” then?

No, there was far less. We had like 4 TV channels, and they stopped broadcasting at night. People didn’t have microwaves or clothes dryers, so housewives spent hours every day cooking and cleaning. With no AC and no video games, kids ran around outside, climbed trees, or rode their bikes. On Sunday they went to church. They had far less recreation and they still managed not to overdose on heroin in front of their children.

Recreation comes from people. Jobs come from people. Culture comes from people.

The ugly truth of the matter is that people today would rather drug themselves into oblivion than go on living.

From Alabama.com:

South Precinct officers responded just before 9 p.m. to an apartment at Tom Brown Village public housing community on Fifth Court North. Neighbors called 911 after hearing the children crying inside the apartment and checked on them, only to find the mother and father unconscious inside.

When police arrived on the scene, they found the 30-year-old father dead on the kitchen floor. The 35-year-old mother was unresponsive on the couch but did have a pulse. Rescue workers were able to revive her with Narcan, and she was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital.

South Precinct Lt. David Rockett said officers found four children inside, all of whom belonged to the couple: a 7-year-old girl, a 3-year-old boy, a 2-year-old boy and a 1-month-old girl.

The WaPo reports:

For more than a day, the 7-year-old girl had been trying to wake her parents.

Dutifully, she got dressed in their apartment outside Pittsburgh on Monday morning and went to school, keeping her worries to herself. But on the bus ride home, McKeesport, Pa., police say, she told the driver she’d been unable to rouse the adults in her house.

Inside the home, authorities found the bodies of Christopher Dilly, 26, and Jessica Lally, 25, dead of suspected drug overdoses, according to police.

Also inside the home were three other children — ages 5 years, 3 years and 9 months.

IF YOU CANNOT LIVE FOR YOURSELF, THEN AT LEAST LIVE FOR YOUR CHILDREN. If you are unconscious, overdosed, or dead, what the hell do you think is going to happen to you baby? If it weren’t for the police, these children would all be dead. Oh, and by the way:

…authorities told NBC affiliate WPXI that the double overdose at the 7-year-old’s home was the second they had responded to on that block in less than a day. … ” In the past year alone we lost over 3,500 Pennsylvanians — a thousand more lives taken than the year before.” … Nationwide, opioids such as heroin and prescription pain relievers killed more than 28,000 people in 2014, more than any year on record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At least half of all opioid overdose deaths involved a prescription drug, the CDC said, adding that the number of overdose deaths involving opioids has nearly quadrupled nationwide since 1999.

Want to stop the drug epidemic? Put people who’ve overdosed in the stocks and let everyone throw rotten tomatoes at them. For a second offense, lashings. Drug dealers are serial killers and should be publicly executed. Set a few dealers twisting in the wind, and I guarantee that far fewer people will be willing to sell drugs.

Then stop making excuses, go out into the world, and LIVE.

Or you’re going to be replaced by people who do.

 

Cathedral Round-Up #15: Duke

Duke literally looks like a cathedral

For this month’s Cathedral Round-Up, I decided to look beyond the Ivies at Duke University, North Carolina. For my non-American readers unfamiliar with our less famous institutions, Wikipedia states:

Duke is the seventh-wealthiest private university in America with $11.4 billion in cash and investments in fiscal year 2014.^[9]

Duke is consistently included among the best universities in the world by numerous university rankings,^[10][11] and among the most innovative universities in the world.^[12] According to a Forbes study, Duke is ranked 11th among universities that have produced billionaires.^[13][14] In a New York Times corporate study, Duke’s graduates were shown to be among the most sought-after and valued in the world,^[15] and Forbes magazine ranked Duke seventh in the world on its list of ‘power factories’ in 2012.^[16]

Duke’s research expenditures in the 2014 fiscal year were $1.037 billion, the seventh largest in the nation.^[17] In 2014, Thomson Reuters named 32 of Duke’s professors to its list of Highly Cited Researchers, making it fourth globally in terms of primary affiliations.^[18] Duke also ranks fifth among national universities to have produced Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, Goldwater, and Udall Scholars.^[19]Ten Nobel laureates and three Turing Award winners are affiliated with the university. Duke’s sports teams compete in the Atlantic Coast Conference and the basketball team is renowned for having won five NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championships, most recently in 2015.

It’s always good when your college is good at playing keep-away.

From Duke Magazine’s special all-language-articles edition:
The Power of Pronouns:

This past February I was invited to give a lecture at a Duke seminar called “LGBTQ Activism and History.”

[People declared their preference to be addressed with gender-neutral pronouns]

I’ll admit all this seems newish and complicated to me. It was only a few months ago that a neighbor’s teenage daughter explained to their parents and friends that they were “pan-sexual” (the sexual attraction to a person of any sex—male or female—or gender—masculine, feminine, or somewhere in between). Now the request was for us to use gender-neutral pronouns. We tried but flubbed it, until finally the thirteen-year-old exclaimed, “Please respect my pronouns” —and the light went on. What they were saying was, “Please respect who I am.”

Please stop having deep discussions with your neighbor’s barely pubescent teenage daughter about who she wants to bang. It makes you sound like a creep.

We don’t let 13 yr olds drive cars, work, live alone, vote, sign contracts, or have sex, because 13 yr olds are idiots who are still dependent on their parents to take care of them and keep them alive. Children should be treated with kindness and compassion, but we don’t respect their ideas on adult matters for the same reason we don’t let them live on their own.

The Places Words Go:

Intersectionality, a concept that started in academia and became popular among grassroots activists, recently has exploded in broader culture. … So when Hillary Clinton, on March 6, 2016, tweeted that: “We face a complex, intersectional set of challenges…” it signaled intersectionality’s full entrance into the mainstream.

Yet, what does it mean for this discourse, which originated in black feminist circles, to now enjoy popularity in a variety of contexts and uses? …

Clinton’s usage of intersectional language, while maybe well-intentioned, displays the slippage and de-radicalization that attends many popular uses. Intersectionality becomes a matter of drawing connections between multiple problems and multiple solutions. Losing sight of larger structural critiques of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy, the problems become about discrimination and about a lack of opportunities or parity for various identities within our economic system. Instead of challenging neoliberal policies that prioritize privatization and investment, the market—by including everyone and improving the stakes of those already within it—becomes the foundation to break all barriers. …

Daniel José Camacho is a master’s of divinity student, pursuing ordination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

In related news: Can an atheist lead a Protestant Church? A battle over Religion in Canada:

The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a dynamic, activist minister with a loyal following at her Protestant congregation in suburban Toronto. She is also an outspoken atheist.

“We don’t talk about God,” Vosper said in an interview, describing services at her West Hill United Church, adding that it’s time the church gave up on “the idolatry of a theistic god.” …
Ordained in 1993, the 58-year-old Vosper says she began questioning God’s existence 15 years ago and openly came out as an atheist in 2013.

Vosper said that the United Church has a tradition of “pushing the envelope” and pulling down barriers — in accepting the ordination of women, embracing the LGBT community and performing same-sex marriage. She said her views about religion have evolved. After initially rejecting the idea of a supernatural god and the idea of god as “the father,” she moved eventually to rejecting God completely. Instead, she preaches values, including justice, compassion and love. …

Like other mainstream denominations, the United Church of Canada, founded in 1925 as a merger of several denominations, has seen its numbers fall sharply in recent years. It reported having 436,292 members at the end of 2014, less than half the 1,063,951 it had at its peak in 1964.

Long story short, the church is struggling to remove her on the grounds that being an open atheist is kind of counter to the basic founding documents of the church:

“It’s tough on the United Church because we’ve created this mantra of inclusiveness and now it’s been tested. It goes against the grain to tell somebody that you have to leave.”

A Way to Protect All Ideas:

I attended two conferences, interviewed ten women, met another fifteen remarkable women, and produced twenty YouTube videos in eight short weeks just to answer one question: How do we address online hate speech while maintaining free speech?

Well, that certainly sounds like a randomized, large-N, unlikely to be biased sample of people.

I would like to think I began my research as an objective bystander. … As much as I hated the dangers women faced online, I also abhorred content-based censorship. I thought my desire to protect both women and speech online would ensure my objectivity.

Then the interviews began and my objectivity faltered. I listened as women told me how their ex-boyfriends non-consensually shared nude photos of them online; …

Conservatives have been telling women for years that it’s a bad idea to send naked pictures of themselves out into the world. Guess they were right.

I noticed a common theme to these stories: men using online hate and violence to silence women. I could barely fathom why hate speech intended to silence women was acceptable, but censorship of same hate speech is unacceptable. So I used my voice to speak against hate speech; I proudly declared myself a feminist in a YouTube video.

Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), my declaration didn’t end the misogynistic speech. While the First Amendment guarantees protection from Congress silencing my feminist speech, there would be no guaranteed protection against a cyber-mob trying to silence me with rape and death threats. …

It’s not enough to protect freedom of speech from a government violation. We must also protect the freedom of speech of the disempowered from the empowered.

That’s not easy, but I realized that it is marginally easier when we speak together. That was the most rewarding part of my summer research: meeting all the women who, supported by their tight-knit community, courageously and collectively speak out against online hate.

Meanwhile in the real world:

Trump Supporter Beaten with a Crowbar:

Police in Northern New Jersey say a 62-year-old man was beaten with a crowbar outside a restaurant for wearing a T-shirt in support of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. …

The victim was treated on the scene for injuries to his forearms, hands and thighs shortly after 6 p.m., the website reported.

“The motorist inquired why [the man] was wearing the shirt, directing profanities at him,” Bloomfield Police spokesman Ralph Marotti said, the New Jersey Star Ledger reported Tuesday. “The [victim] continued to walk away as [the] motorist followed him.”

Trump supporter sucker punched to the ground by Mexican at Trump Rally in San Jose:

I’ve yet to find any articles in Duke Magazine about respecting people’s right to walk in public without being viciously beaten for their political beliefs.

Why POC is a Terrible Term

In my line of blogging, I refer, frequently and often, to groups of people. This means I spend a lot of time thinking about ethnonyms (perhaps too much time.)

So what’s wrong with People of Color?

Simply put, it doesn’t actually correspond with any meaningful, real-world group.

Whenever we speak of one group of people, we of course imply the existence of everyone else who is not of that group. We can speak of Chinese and non-Chinese, whites and non-whites, Poles and non-Poles. But it is clear from this phrasing that “non-X” is not a group defined by any common characteristic, but by lack of a characteristic–whatever X is. No one attempts to describe what it is like to be “non-Chinese” because there is no such real-life group as “non-Chinese,” and there is therefore no single experience that non-Chinese people have.

The term PoC attempts to imply that there such a thing as a unitary non-white experience, and by contrast, a unitary white experience. Take, for example, this comic, which is supposed to “[explore] a subtle kind of racism many people of color experience”:

Fun personal story time: Despite having been married for many years, doctors and maternity ward staff have assumed I’m single. (There’s special paperwork for single moms.)

Meanwhile, Asians are PoC, and yet these are not questions that people typically ask Asians, because there’s no stereotype that Asians have high teen pregnancy rates and are bad at school. Asians do have to deal with racism and dumb questions, but since Asians aren’t black, their experiences aren’t black experiences.

Indeed, the girl drawn in the comic is clearly not Asian, Indian, or Hispanic, but black! The author purposefully wrote about a black person, and yet the person promoting the comic decided to ignore this and pretend that the comic is about the experiences of all non-white people (and, of course, never the experiences of whites.)

This duality is false.

Whites are not particularly unified. It wasn’t so long ago that Germany invaded Poland and killed 1/5 of the population (not to mention all of the other people who died on various sides during WWII.) In 1932-33, the Soviet Union committed genocide against millions of Ukrainians (also white). During the Second Anglo-Boer war, the English committed genocide against the Dutch-descended people of South Africa. The Irish, Italians, and Jews are still claiming to be exempt from historical “white privilege” arguments due to discrimination against their ancestors.

Jayman’s map of the American Nations

I could go on–the list of European wars and inter-ethnic conflicts extends approximately forever, after all.

In the US, of course, “white” is a more meaningful term than in Europe, but even here, there are major distinctions of class, culture, and genetics. The average white person from West Virginia is not the same as the average white from New York, Texas, or Minnesota. Not only were these places originally settled by different groups of whites–Appalachia received whites from the “borderlands” region of Britain while Minnesota is heavily Scandinavian–but they currently have very different cultures.

Class further complicates matters, with Southern and rural whites generally seen as low-class (and treated accordingly) by other whites. Much of our current political debate can be seen as a fight between white social classes, with wealthy whites using a coalition of non-whites as a cudgel against poor whites.

Ironically, Asian and Indian (not Native American) migrants are wealthier and higher-class than whites (though there are distinctions even among these, as “Asian” is not a single, homogenous group.)

Now, I can hear some of you saying, “but race is a social construct, and yet you use terms like ‘black’ and ‘white’ as though they were meaningful! How are these more meaningful than ‘PoC’?”

Look, “race” is a social construct the way “color” is a social construct. There is no sharp dividing line between “red” and “orange,” but we don’t go saying that the electromagentic spectrum is a myth.

Racial groups are culturally, historically, and genetically real. Sub-Saharan Africans are more closely related to Sub-Saharan Africans than to Europeans. Europeans are more closely related to other Europeans than to Asians. And Asians are more closely related to other Asians than to Aborigines. Here is Haak et al’s full graph of modern human DNA (except for the far left portion, which comes from old skeletons):

The “light blue” portion is found only in Africa. The “orange” is Europe and Asia. The “yellow” is east-Asian.

There’s an entire field of science devoted to tracing ancient migrations via the patterns found in modern human DNA, because the DNA of different ethnic groups is different. Black, white, and Asian are, in fact, fundamental genetic groupings as a result of early human migrations.

There’s another, related field devoted to ethnic variations in responses to medical care. Organ donation, sickle cell anemia risk, and even medications can be significantly impacted by race:

Although organ transplants can occur between races, matches are more difficult to achieve for blacks. Transplant recipients must have similar genes in their immune systems to those of the donor. Otherwise, the body will reject the organ.

G6PD deficiency is protective against malaria

And from Racial and ethnic differences in response to medicines: towards individualized pharmaceutical treatment:

Pharmacogenetic research in the past few decades has uncovered significant differences among racial and ethnic groups in the metabolism, clinical effectiveness, and side-effect profiles of many clinically important drugs.

The interactions between genetics and medication are complicated, and doctors have to know this because it puts their patients at risk not to.

No word is perfect. Every ethnonym represents a compromise between absolute accuracy and being able to make any statements about human groups at all. Not all English are the same, but we can still make some generalized statements that are basically true for most English people. Not all Chinese are the same, but we can still speaking meaningfully about “the Chinese.” There is a huge amount of variation among “whites,” “blacks,” and “Asians,” but even at this coarse level, we can still say some meaningful things.

“PoC” is a political term that corresponds to no real-world culture or group.

Community round-up, Comment of the Week, Open Thread, and Similar Matters

Cognitive Bias Codex–you’ll need to zoom in

I’ve been thinking of doing some form of regular “comment of the week” to highlight particularly good comments, along with “most interesting things I read elsewhere.” And sure, it can be an Open Thread, too, though really, you’re pretty free to treat every thread like an Open Thread. :) This would be in addition to the regular posts, not in place of them. Which day do you think would be better: Wedensday or Saturday?

So this week’s Comment of the Week award goes to Ertuğrul Aşina, for adding yet more information to my post on the Turkic Peoples:

There are Turks in Turkey, like my family, that still uses their Asian family names. Mine are called Aşinas, which probably is a corrupted form of Ashina Clan and Meteçanyus which is likely to refer to Moduchanyu. … My paternal family hails from a pretty isolated town of northern Turkey, where almost everyone looks like blonde Asians and talk in a manner that rest of the Turks don’t really understand easily. …

I encourage you to read the whole comment.

(L-R) Daniel C. Dennett, Napoleon Chagnon, David Haig, Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham, John Brockman, with thanks to Edge.org

In other news, I read a fabulous interview with Napleon Chagnon, Blood is their Argument. (Also staring Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham, Daniel C. Dennett, David Haig, and Richard Dawkins.) Chagnon wrote Yanomamo: The Fierce People, in which he showed–via extensive demographic data–that the Yanomamo tribesmen who had the most children were also the ones who had killed the most other people.

For this significant accomplishment, of course, he has been “vilified by other anthropologists, condemned by his professional association (which subsequently rescinded its reprimand), and ultimately forced to give up his fieldwork. Throughout his ordeal, he never wavered in his defense of science. In 2012 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.”

But back to the interview:

STEVEN PINKER:  You’re one of the last of the classical ethnographers, someone who goes in to study a relatively uncontacted, technologically traditional hunting people.  That’s not the way a lot of anthropology is done these days. I remember a conversation at a faculty lunch with a professor of anthropology, and I asked him what tribe he studied. He said he studied the nuclear engineers of Los Alamos Labs in New Mexico.

I believe he is referring to Hugh Gusterson’s Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, thought it is actually set at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. (That is a really easy thing to mix up.)

… Can you just tell us what’s it like to go out and study an uncontacted people in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest? Do you pack a steamer trunk full of bug spray and peanut butter, and hire someone to drop you off and say, “Pick me up in six months?”

NAPOLEON CHAGNON:  Well, remarkably, Steve, that’s pretty much the way some of it happened. But when I first walked into the Yanomamö village thinking I was going to do the perfunctory one-year field research or maybe less, go back to my university, write my doctoral dissertation, publish a book maybe, after two or three years of thinking about it, then return to the tribe ten years later and do the expected thing about,  “Woe is me, what has the world and technology done to my people?” But the minute I walked into my first Yanomamö village I realized that I was witnessing a really precious thing, and I knew I would have to come back again and again, and I did.

There is too much great information in this interview to excerpt. You’ll just have to RTWT.

Some interesting graphs:

Since this is the first week I’m trying this, I’ll stop here with the links/graphs and open the floor to discussion:

I don’t think it mere coincidence that all of the men in the picture above are, well, men. Aside from Jane Goodall and HBDChick, are there any significant [living] women doing ground-breaking work in anthropology/human evolution/genetics/related fields?

The most racist post on this blog

Jesus loves the little children
All the little children of the world
Red and yellow, black and white
All are precious in his sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world

From a review of Tomie dePaola’s Legend of the Indian Paintbrush:

The story is improperly sourced. Stories are a means to teach lessons for survival. Since this is a European perspective of a fantasy romanticized Indian of the past, this becomes another instance of whites with long lost culture dressing up and playing Indian . We need to know what tribe this story originates, the true setting and purpose of the original story, and the intended audience. The retelling doesn’t reflect the setting, material artifacts or even the specific nation it attempts to depict. The story and illustrations improperly depict native people as a mono-culture. The book makes native dialogue overly mystic. The use of words like “brave” “and papoose” instead of “man” and “child” dehumanize an entire group of people. Reading this to children will definitely perpetuate damaging stereotypes of the distinct cultures still alive and well today.

 

Degeneracy of Type

If “evolution” is a word that comes up a lot in the late 1800s (even before Darwin,) “degenerate” is the word of the 1930s and 40s.

In Kabloona, (1941) an ethnography of the Eskimo (Inuit) of northern Canada, de Poncins speaks highly of the “pure” Eskimo, whose ancestral way of life remains unsullied by contact with European culture, and negatively of the “degenerate Eskimo,” caught in the web of international trade, his lifestyle inexorably changed by proximity and contact with the West.

In Caughey’s History of the Pacific Coast, (1933) he writes:

The Northwest Coast Indians felt the ill effects of too much contact with British, Russian, and American traders. The rum of the trading schooners was one of several factors contributing to the degeneracy of those not actually exterminated.

In Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, (1939) Dr. Price argues that modern foods are low in nutrient value and inferior to many native, ancestral diets, and that the spread of this “white man’s food” caused an epidemic of disease, tooth decay, and skeletal mal-formation, which he documents extensively. Dr. Price refers to the change in appearance from one generation to the next, coinciding with the introduction of modern foods, as “interrupted heredity.” The parents represent “pure racial type,” with strong teeth and bones, while the children, bow-legged and sick, suffer physical degeneration.

(This kind of language that Dr. Price uses sometimes confuses us moderns, because we flinch reflexively at phrases like “racial type” when in fact his argument is the inverse of the racist arguments of his day.)

From SMBC–there’s something wrong with this comic. I bet you can figure out what it is.

Now, there is something twee about anthropologists (and historians) who long for the preservation of other peoples’ cultures when the people within those cultures seem to prefer modernity. Igloos and teepees may seem fun and exotic to those of us who don’t live in them, but the people who do might genuinely prefer a house with central heat and a toilet. Obviously the whole anthropologist schtick involves people who really like studying cultures that are distinct from their own, and if the people in those cultures adopt Western lifestyles, then there just isn’t much to study anymore.

(Imagine if we found out tomorrow that all of what we thought were variations in human DNA turned out to be contamination errors due to local pollen, and vast swathes of this blog became moot.)

It is easy to write off such notions as just feel-good sentimentalizing by outsiders, but these are at least outsiders with more first hand knowledge of these cultures than I have, so I think we should at least consider their ideas.

The degeneracy described as a result of contact with the West is not just physical or cultural, but also moral. A culture, fully-fledged, is one of humanity’s greatest technologies, a tool for the total transmission of a group’s knowledge, morals, and behaviors. Your ancestors, facing much the same environment as yourself, and armed with similar tools, struggled to obtain food, marry, raise children, and survive just as you do. The ones who succeeded passed down the lessons of their success, and these lessons became woven into the tapestry of culture you were raised in, saving you much of the trial-and error effort of reproducing your ancestors’ struggles.

Some people claim to believe that all cultures are equally valuable and important. I don’t. I think cultures that practice things like cannibalism, animal sacrifice, and child rape are bad and I don’t cry for their disappearance. But virtually every culture has at least some good features, or else it wouldn’t have come about in the first place.

Cultural lessons stem from the practical–“Ice the runners of your sled to make it run more smoothly”–to the moral–“Share your belongings in common with the tribe”–to the inscrutable–“don’t eat the totem animal.” (Some of these beliefs may be more important than others.) Throughout all of recorded human history, most of us have passed on bodies of moral teachings under the name of “religion,” whether we believe in the literal truth of mythic stories or not.

Rapid cultural change–not the gentle sort that percolates slowly across generations, but massive variety precipitated by an industrial revolution or the sudden introduction of a few thousand years’ worth of technological advancement to a long-isolated people–outstrips a society’s ability to provide meaningful moral or practical guidance. Simply put: people don’t know what to do.

Take alcohol. People have probably been producing fermented beverages for at least 10,000 years, or for about as long as we’ve been trying to store pots of grain and fruit. The French have wine, Mongolians have fermented horse milk, the Vikings fermented honey and the Founding Fathers drank a lot of apple cider.

Alcohol has beneficial effects–few pathogens survive the fermentation process–and obviously harmful effects. Societies that traditionally produced large quantities of alcohol have evolved social norms and institutions to help people enjoy the beneficial effects and avoid the bad ones. France, for example, which in 2014 produce 4.5 billion liters of wine and consumed 2.8 billion liters of the same, is not a nation of violent, wife-beating, car-crashing drunkards. French social norms emphasize moderate wine consumption accompanied by food, friends, and family.

By contrast, in societies where alcohol was suddenly introduced via contact with whites, people don’t have these norms, and the results–like rampant alcoholism on Native American reservations–have been disastrous. These societies can–and likely will–learn to handle alcohol, but it takes time.

Our own society is undergoing its own series of rapid changes–industrialization, urbanization, post-industrialization, the rise of the internet, etc. Andean cultures have been cultivating coca leaves for at least 3,000 years, apparently without much trouble, while the introduction of crack/cocaine to the US has been rather like dropping bombs on all of our major cities.

The invention of fairly reliable contraception and the counter-culture of the ’60s and ’70s led to the spread of “free love,” which in turn triggered skyrocketing gonorrhea rates. Luckily gonorrhea can be treated with antibiotics (at least until it becomes antibiotic resistant,) but it’s still a nasty disease–one internet acquaintance of mine caught gonorrhea, took antibiotics and thought he was in the clear, but then doctors discovered that the inside of his penis was full of scar tissue that was dangerously closing off his bladder. They had basically cut him a new urethra once they were done removing all of the scar tissue, and he spent the next few months in constant, horrible pain, even while on medication.

And to add insult to injury, everyone in his social circle just thought he was bitter, jealous, and trying to make his ex-girlfriend look bad when he tried to warn them that they shouldn’t sleep with her because she gave him gonorrhea.

Of course, gonorrhea is just the tip of the horrifying iceberg.

By contrast, the Amish look pretty darn healthy.

Degeneracy isn’t just a sickness of the body; it’s a falling apart of all of the morals and customs that hold society together and give people meaning and direction in their lives. You don’t have to waste years trying to “find yourself” when you already have a purpose, but when you have no purpose but to feed yourself, it’s easy to become lost.

I should note that Dr. Price didn’t just examine the teeth of Eskimo and Aborigines, but also of Scots, Swiss, and Americans. His conclusion–nutritional degeneracy due to contact with modern foods–was the same regardless of culture. (Note: nutrition and food production have changed since 1939.) Or as Scott Alexander recently put it:

I am pretty sure there was, at one point, such a thing as western civilization. I think it involved things like dancing around maypoles and copying Latin manuscripts. At some point Thor might have been involved. That civilization is dead. It summoned an alien entity from beyond the void which devoured its summoner and is proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

Well, that sounds a fair bit more dire than Dr. Price’s assessment. Let’s assume Scott is being poetic and perhaps exaggerating for effect. Still: massive cultural changes can sweep the normative rug out from beneath your feet and leave you injured and confused. It will take time–perhaps centuries–for society to fully adjust to the technological changes of the past hundred years. Right now, everyone is still muddling through, trying to figure out what will kill us and what will save us.