Christmas is a slow day on the internet, so our regular update will be on Wednesday.
Those of you who are still around, have you made any New Years resolutions? Mine all involve getting healthier. 2018 is (hopefully) going to be the year of getting fit and feeling good!
If you don’t have any resolutions, feel free to step in and chat about whatever you’d like.
I hope you’re all having a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
I’m starting some new IRL projects (that have nothing to do with the blog and won’t be discussed here.) It’s a big time commitment and if all goes well, I’m going to be really busy for the foreseeable future.
Right now I have no idea how this will affect the blog, whether I’ll be figure out how to balance my time and keep up my regular schedule or will need to cut back. I’ll let you know when I find out.
(Update: hooo boy has life been kicking my butt.)
In the meanwhile, here’s a graph of the incidence of people who never develop their permanent third molars, broken down by continent (I assume N. and S. America are sampled from Native American populations.)
This is not the same as not getting your wisdom teeth, though I’d wager a graph of that would look similar.
(“agenesis”= does not begin; “m3″= third molar.)
And a simple graph of heights in the US, Europe and Sweden over the past … 2000 years.
I propose that the recent increase in heights isn’t just because of better nutrition/more food/more milk and protein in the diet, but also because fewer women die giving birth to large babies now that we have c-sections, and large babies likely grow into large adults.
This is just a joke. It has no deeper meaning.
In interesting news:
Lethal aggression in Pan [chimpanzees] is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts:
Observations of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) provide valuable comparative data for understanding the significance of conspecific killing. … Lethal violence is sometimes concluded to be the result of adaptive strategies, such that killers ultimately gain fitness benefits by increasing their access to resources such as food or mates. Alternatively, it could be a non-adaptive result of human impacts, such as habitat change or food provisioning. To discriminate between these hypotheses we compiled information from 18 chimpanzee communities and 4 bonobo communities studied over five decades. Our data include 152 killings (n = 58 observed, 41 inferred, and 53 suspected killings) by chimpanzees in 15 communities and one suspected killing by bonobos. We found that males were the most frequent attackers (92% of participants) and victims (73%); most killings (66%) involved intercommunity attacks; and attackers greatly outnumbered their victims (median 8:1 ratio). Variation in killing rates was unrelated to measures of human impacts. Our results are compatible with previously proposed adaptive explanations for killing by chimpanzees, whereas the human impact hypothesis is not supported.
Behind the Murky World of Albanian Blood Feuds:
…He produces a list of recent killings he contends are the result of feuding families – not just random acts of violence in a country awash with guns, but the result of continued adherence to an ancient Albanian code of justice known as the “kanun”, or canon.
There is a farmer who was killed after cutting down his neighbour’s tree, a lover who shot both his girlfriend’s brothers after being denied her hand in marriage, and a returning migrant worker gunned down after he went back to his village, reigniting a decades-old feud.
Such are the rules of the “kanun”, a tribal code of 1,262 rules laid down by the 15th-century Albanian nobleman Lekë Dukagjini, which ordains that “spilled blood must be met with spilled blood”.
But while the Kanun stories remain part of Albania’s cultural and historical DNA, they are also a source of growing concern for Britain’s asylum tribunals. Since 2012 tens of thousands of Albanians have migrated to Europe, many seeking asylum on the basis that they are afraid for their lives as a result of “blood feuds”. …
Darwinian Perspectives on the Evolution of Human Languages:
Herodotus, writing in the Histories, Book II.53 around 450 BCE, remarked that Homer “lived, as I believe, not more than 400 years ago.” Many modern classicists and historians prefer a more recent, mid-8th century date for the Iliad. We (Altschuler, Calude, Meade, & Pagel, 2013) decided to try to estimate a date for the Iliad by investigating patterns of cognacy among the 200 words of Swadesh’s (1952) fundamental vocabulary in three languages: Modern Greek, Homeric Greek from Homer’s Iliad, and Hittite, a language distantly related to both modern and Homeric Greek.
We first recorded whether each word in the Swadesh list was cognate or not between pairs of the three languages. Then, we solved for the date in history that was the most likely for the Iliad, given our knowledge of the rates of change of the words and the patterns of cognacy we observed. Our calculation suggested that the original text of the Iliad was released in approximately 762 BCE. This date is in close agreement with classicists’ and historians’ beliefs arrived at independently by studying historical references and the nature of Homeric Greek as expressed in the Iliad.
Staffordshire Strikes Gold with Iron Age Find:
An archaeological find on Staffordshire farmland is believed to include the earliest examples of Iron Age gold ever discovered in Britain.
The collection, which has been named the Leekfrith Iron Age Torcs, was discovered by two metal detectorists just before Christmas.
Unveiling the torcs today (February 28), experts said the unique find could date back as far as 400BC and was of huge international importance.
For Comment of the Week, I’ve been enjoying the conversation between multiple commentators about Fishing and Fish Sauce over on What Mental Traits does the Arctic Select For?
E: … I know in terms of iodine deficiency, pre-modern-transport and storage, distance from the sea makes a big difference. And probably in a well-ordered place with relatively good transport like the Roman Empire at its height, fish sauce must have been the easiest way to get the benefits to the most people, regardless of distance from the ocean. (I wonder if there would be any way to test iodine deficiency in bodies in the Alps before, during, and after the Roman Empire…)
Someone get on testing bodies for iodine deficiency!
So, what are you thinking about?
Some data/graphs/research I came across while researching pastoralism:
And on the subject of hunting, from… oh crud I can’t remember which study this is excerpted from:
Some interesting links:
Cold Winter Theory in Non-Human Animals:
With regards to birds, brain size and ecology, there is a problem. Birds living in the high latitudes must either adapt a migrating behavioral pattern or learn how to survive in the winter. Most birds take the first route, but some don’t. However, to fly long distances, it helps to be lean, so there is strong selection against extra weight such as a larger brain. For this reason, bivariate latitude x brain size comparisons might show the opposite pattern than expected. One must account for the solution to the, well, cold winter problem. Some amphibians have an analogous tactic: hibernation. Many insects have yet another analogous solution: they only live in the summer (single year life spans). As far as I understand, fish do not have issues with the water temperature in the winter, so they don’t face the problem. Except for possibly hibernation (which sometimes does require planning ability e.g. in squirrels), these strategies would not seem to select so strongly for intelligence, and so one would not expect the higher latitude species to smarter, less aggressive and so on.
In general, therefore, it seems best to focus on animals that tackle the cold winter problem head-on instead of avoiding it somehow (migrate, hibernate, or single-year lifespans). Among birds, the smartest birds are of the Corvidae family — in particular crows, ravens and magpies — and they generally don’t migrate in the winter. Of the non-Corvidae, I think the smartest birds are some of the parrot species. These also often don’t migrate. (See also bird intelligence.) …
Exposure to Junk Food is Causing Obesity in Siberian Tribes:
The first-ever cases of obesity have been recorded among nomadic Arctic reindeer herders, after they became exposed to instant noodles and other junk foods.
Russian scientists are warning about the dramatic change in the Nenets and Khanty peoples on the icy Yamal peninsula in northern Siberia, who for centuries had eaten only traditional foods.
A diet based on venison and fresh river fish meant that obesity was unknown among these indigenous peoples, but now outside influences are changing everything. …
Human Behavior as a Long-Term Ecological Driver of Non-Human Evolution:
Due to our intensive subsistence and habitat-modification strategies—including broad-spectrum harvesting and predation, widespread landscape burning, settlement construction, and translocation of other species—humans have major roles as ecological actors who influence fundamental trophic interactions. … Clear examples of anthropogenic effects on non-human morphological evolution have been documented in modern studies of substantial changes to body size or other major traits in terrestrial and aquatic vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants in response to selective human harvesting, urbanized habitats, and human-mediated translocation. Meanwhile, archaeological records of harvested marine invertebrates and terrestrial vertebrates suggest that similar processes extend considerably into prehistory, perhaps to 50,000 yr BP or earlier. These results are consistent with palaeoenvironmental and other records that demonstrate long-term human habitat modification and intensive harvesting practices. …
Comment of the Week goes to BaruchK:
For a personal narrative of what happens when a very refined and compassionate culture encounters such starvation that mothers eat their own children, you can look at our Book of Lamentations.
It makes for very hard, heartbreaking reading, but necessary.
… G-d certainly has compassion. The way we understand the degradation described in the Book of Lamentations is that it is a just punishment and reflection for spiritual degradation we imposed upon ourselves through idolatry (more on this below).
> In Carthage “[child] sacrifice in the ancient world reached its infamous zenith.”
Perfect example of why r/k is not a good model for people. Also see Stove’s Evolutionary Fairytales (available online in pdf for free.) People are not cod fish or elephants.
Allow me to make a counter-proposal.
The Carthaginians, Aztecs etc. were not welfare troglodytes. They were not Russian peasants, who had had their grain requisitioned. And they were not the besieged and starving population of Jerusalem. They were a highly refined society with an aristocracy, literacy, and a high investment in their upper classes. They were also cruel and vile people. They did not sacrifice their children out of physical need, but rather out of idolatry, which is to say, the projection of one’s own egotistic desires and fears upon an external object which represents an imaginary deity, which is supposed to serve you. …
And Jefferson and FlockofLambs left good thoughts on Cost Disease:
J: There is a more explicitly anthropological argument to be made here, as well. All of the institutions, cultural artifacts, and policies that could be conserved grew up over centuries of agriculture. We haven’t really developed solid cultural tools to deal with industrialization, and we’re already done with it. The left plays the “it’s not relevant anymore” game, and discards important tools, but we don’t have anything to replace them with. …
FoL: So i think Scott simplified Baumol’s Cost Disease, and it gets simplified further here. The point isn’t that “the cost of things goes up” but “when the productivity of some things goes up, the cost of things with similar inputs goes up, even if their quality does not.”
Sorry I finished this late, but I hope you guys are having a great week!
Well, I’m glad that series on the distribution of humanity is over. It was fun to write, but I know it is all very elementary to all you regulars. Sorry about that, but hopefully it will come in handy next time you encounter someone claiming that race isn’t real because of the genetic distances between Bushmen and Bantus or something like that.
Of course, I never really get tired of musing about early human migration paths (nor will I turn down a good map!)
Speaking of which, what’s up with haplogroup D and Central America? Or more specifically, its absence in Central America? Is there something specifically going on with the Aztec/Mayan/Olmec/Pueblo civilizations?
Let’s see now, links… I don’t know, but if you haven’t read Slate Star Codex‘s post yet on Cost Disease (really who am I kidding, of course you’ve read it,) you really need to go read it now.
And I will just say (though I will go into more depth on this later) that if anyone around these parts is still wondering why Trump won and why the alt-right, broadly defined, has been growing, Cost Disease is a big part of it. IMO.
Comment of the Week goes to alterorbisworld on What Ails Appalachia?:
A lot of your discussion reminds me of County Durham and Northumberland in the north-east of England, which is hardly surprising given the common borderer origin. The region used to be heavily industrialised and most of the small villages in County Durham were settled in a Klondyke or Yukon gold-rush style whenever coal was found, rather than having been there since Domesday. So like Appalachia, much of the industrial geography has become obsolete, stranding people in unproductive areas. Much of the same problems exist with obesity, drug-use &c. …
And those of you questioning the logic in “The Government is Us” like JKS:
…I was wracking my brain with how I was going to rail against that very quote from the article, and then I read your response. You nailed it. This whole, “if your for Trump then you probably have a great great grandparent who’s farm was burnt by the Union” nonsense is exactly why politics is so caustic these days. My grandfather likes a specific quote, the source eludes me, but it goes, “give a man a fish and he has food for a day, but teach him how to fish and he has food for a lifetime.” This gets at the heart of what most conservative people are saying. Not that the man in the quote should starve, but that just giving away food is not a long term benefit to anyone. …
Have a great week, everyone, and keep your toes warm!
Wow, is it Wednesday already? Time definitely flies when you’re busy.
In interesting news, Politico ran an article with a long (and somewhat misleading) section about Moldbug, and further alleging (based on unnamed “sources” who are probably GodfreyElfwick again*,) that Moldbug is in communication with the Trump Administration:
In one January 2008 post, titled “How I stopped believing in democracy,” he decries the “Georgetownist worldview” of elites like the late diplomat George Kennan. Moldbug’s writings, coming amid the failure of the U.S. state-building project in Iraq, are hard to parse clearly and are open to multiple interpretations, but the author seems aware that his views are provocative. “It’s been a while since I posted anything really controversial and offensive here,” he begins in a July 25, 2007, post explaining why he associates democracy with “war, tyranny, destruction and poverty.”
Moldbug, who does not do interviews and could not be reached for this story, has reportedly opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary, according to a source. Yarvin said he has never spoken with Bannon.
Vox does a much longer hit piece on Moldbug, just to make sure you understand that they really, truly don’t approve of him, then provides more detail on Moldbug’s denial:
The idea that I’m “communicating” with Steve Bannon through an “intermediary” is preposterous. I have never met Steve Bannon or communicated with him, directly or indirectly. You might as well accuse the Obama administration of being run by a schizophrenic homeless person in Dupont Circle, because he tapes his mimeographed screeds to light poles where Valerie Jarrett can read them.
*In all fairness, there was a comment over on Jim’s Blog to the effect that there is some orthosphere-aligned person in contact with the Trump administration, which may have set off a chain of speculation that ended with someone claiming they had totally legit sources saying Moldbug was in contact with Bannon.
In other news, Han et al have released Clustering of 770,000 genomes reveals post-colonial population structure of North America:
Here we identify very recent fine-scale population structure in North America from a network of over 500 million genetic (identity-by-descent, IBD) connections among 770,000 genotyped individuals of US origin. We detect densely connected clusters within the network and annotate these clusters using a database of over 20 million genealogical records. Recent population patterns captured by IBD clustering include immigrants such as Scandinavians and French Canadians; groups with continental admixture such as Puerto Ricans; settlers such as the Amish and Appalachians who experienced geographic or cultural isolation; and broad historical trends, including reduced north-south gene flow. Our results yield a detailed historical portrait of North America after European settlement and support substantial genetic heterogeneity in the United States beyond that uncovered by previous studies.
Wow! (I am tempted to add “just wow.”) They have created a couple of amazing maps:
Comment of the Week goes to Tim Smithers for his contributions on IQ in Are the Pygmies Retarded:
IQ generally measures the ability to learn, retain information, and make logical decisions and conclusions. It is not about mathematics nor reading, at least in modern testing (since about 1980).
Modern IQ tests typically do not have any math or even reading. Many have no verbiage at all, and there is no knowledge of math required in the least.
For example, a non-verbal, non-math IQ test may have a question that shows arrows pointing in different directions. The test taker must identify which direction would make the most sense for the next arrow to go.
I’m very sorry to disappoint, but I’ve done considerable research into IQ testing over the past decade. The tests have had cultural biases removed (including the assumption that one can read) in order to assess a persons ability to learn, to retain information, and to use common logic. …
You may, of course, RTWT there.
So, how’s it going out there?
(Who’s a good shark?)
I don’t really do domestic politics, but what do you guys think of Trump’s SCOTUS pick?
I’ve been working on some material about instincts and thought this was an interesting graph, relevant to my theory that pregnancy/childbirth have a physical (chemical/hormonal) effect on women, causing their mothering instincts to kick in (mothering isn’t nearly as useful before you have kids as after,) which in turn causes a change in attitudes toward abortion.
Obviously the graph proves little, because people who don’t approve of abortion are predisposed to have more children than people who do. What I really want is a time-based graph, measuring attitudes before and after pregnancy. But I’m having trouble finding that.
And here’s a graph of pension obligations. Pensions: they’ve got serious issues.
On to comments of the week. First I’m reposting Unknown128′s question because I can’t answer it, but maybe one of you folks can:
I wanted to ask what the German Nazis view on IQ and IQ testing was. From what I know they didnt realy percieve intelligence as a very valuable trait in the first place, prefering physical strenght, endurance and “nordic racial traits”. They bred warriors not thinkers. Also one does hear that they banned IQ testing or at least strongly disliked it.
Do you know anything specific?
This has been a relatively low comment week, but awards go to Leonard:
Antifa is American as apple pie. The use of violence to achieve political objectives is nothing new to communists, and America is a communist country. The original communist country. Don’t forget the civil war. Antifa is just updated antisla.
The reason why you’re seeing more antifa stuff now is that the communists have lost control of the Potemkin government. It’s not that they didn’t exist; it’s that rioting did not serve much political purpose. Pressuring Obama from the left was easy enough without violence. So using violence was fairly senseless.
and With the thoughts you’d be thinkin:
My understanding is Antifas evolved or are a subset of anarchist and socialist groups mainly focussed on combating fringe nationalist parties like the National Front (UK) or the Front National (FRA), whatever their equivalents were in other Western Europe countries etc, in the 70s-90s. Honestly they’re just black bloc dickheads who want to pretend they’re fighting Hitler.
The general dressing in black and breaking stuff style of leftwing activisim is known as black blocs. Basically just dress up in black cover your face and break things. I think it was popularised as a tactic originally against groups like the IMF and WTO, in the US at least it was probably due to “The battle for Seattle”, that was opposition to the WTO. You get routine riots and mischief by groups who perform the same behaviour for various left wing causes all around the world. I think Oakland has a lot of those guys behaving like dicks semi-consistently. …
That’s all for now. What are you thinking about?
So.
Antifas have been in the news a bit lately.
What is up with these people? Where did they come from?
While SJWs and progressives are well at home in academia, you don’t see a lot of explicit antifa support in the typical edition of Yale Magazine (though I am sure you can find it if you look hard enough.)
Honestly, I feel like we’re dealing with a completely alien, a-American ideology that has infected America, not through the universities, but some other mechanism.
Way back in the day, I read Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Satrapi (or one of her characters) claimed Bakunin was “the anarchist,” so naturally I read Bakunin, found him insightful, and attempted to find like-minded people online.
Unfortunately, the anarchist communities I found were infested with violent communists who seemed unclear on the principle of not coercing others, so I left. I was pretty busy those days so I didn’t give it too much thought; I figured perhaps weird ideologies just attracted a lot of crazy people.
I understand people who don’t like coercion or just don’t like other people telling them what to do. There are plenty of old-fashioned freedom-loving, libertarian-minded folks in my own family, after all.
This “anti-fascist” business, though, feels entirely alien. After all, how can you be “anti-fascist” in a country that has never had a significant fascist presence? You might as well call yourself anti-malaria.
Maybe there are organized fascist parties in Europe for anti-fascists to attack. I’m not European so I don’t really know, but I hear that dynamic is more of a thing over there. But over here, what boogeyman are they forced to invent to justify their existence? The Republicans?
No matter what your politics, you have to admit that’s some pretty bad linguistic creep.
Anyway, sorry this post is kind of late. Things have been really busy around here lately. (Whoops, looks like Thursday’s post went up before this one!)
On to the Comments of the Week:
Here’s BaruchK, disagreeing with me on “The Government is Us”: Brahmin Tic and the Civil War:
>which side you’re on probably has a lot to do with whether or not the government marched in and burned down your great-great-great-grandparents’ farm in 1864
I don’t think so.
Lower and middle class whites in various factory towns in the North and West are generally not huge fans of the government (especially since the government has decided to ethnically cleanse them from their neighborhoods via proxy racial warfare.)
It has more to do with whether you/your friends and loved ones are in a government-affiliated career field or community (the military and law enforcement are somewhat excluded, though the more intellectual parts of the military like the NSA lean left.)…
RTWT
and Chauncey Tinker, offering a positive perspective on Rumor, Outrage, and “Fake News”:
I think this is really a teething problem. The internet is still too new for systems to have evolved. Just a few years ago Wikipedia was really unreliable but it has improved a lot. A teenager managed to insert his name into several pages stating that he was a company executive although he wasn’t. Now its much harder to do this sort of thing.
Its easy to see the negative aspects and miss the positive ones as well. What has become increasingly obvious, thanks to alternative news sites and social media, is how much the current mainstream media that we have relied on for so long often in fact are misleading us by misrepresenting what is really going on. A good example of this was seen in coverage of the migrant crisis in Europe. The migrants were overwhelmingly fit young men, but the MSM chose to publish pictures of the few small children and women who were among them, giving a hugely distorted picture of what was really going on. The MSM’s “politically correct” agenda has been to a degree exposed and undermined by video evidence that circulates on youtube. …
A couple of my posts on related matters:
Here are a couple more quotes I saved over the weekend:
So guys, how’s it going? What are you thinking about?
Not counting a couple of guest posts, nor a few regularly scheduled posts that I haven’t written yet but will go up between the writing and the reading of this post, I believe I have just finished my 500th post!
(That means we are halfway to 1,000 posts!)
Since this blog would be a much duller place without my great readers and commentators, tell me about yourselves:
Where did you come from? (How did you find my blog?)
Which posts here do you like best? Like least?
What would you like to read more of?
Do you read any similar blogs (if so, which?)
Tell me something else about yourself!
In interesting links from around the web, we have:
The Oldest, most Complete Bible on Earth is in Ethiopia:
The world’s earliest known illustrated copy of the Gospels, the Garima Gospels, has been saved for centuries in a remote Ethiopian monastery.
Experts believe the Garima Gospels are also the earliest example of book binding still attached to the original pages.
Experts believe the Garima Gospels are also the earliest example of book binding still attached to the original pages. …
Legend says he copied the Gospels in just one day because God delayed the sun from setting so the monk could finish his work. The incredible relic has been kept ever since in the Garima Monastery, near Adwa, in northern Ethiopia at 7,000 feet.
Incidentally, Ethiopia also claims to have the Ark of the Covenant.
Mapping the Spread of Mounted Warfare, by Turchin et al.
Look at their map! Isn’t it great? Yes!
Does selection for short sleep duration explain human vulnerability to Alzheimer’s disease?
Compared with other primates, humans sleep less and have a much higher prevalence of Alzheimer ’s disease (AD) pathology. This article reviews evidence relevant to the hypothesis that natural selection for shorter sleep time in humans has compromised the efficacy of physiological mechanisms that protect against AD during sleep. In particular, the glymphatic system drains interstitial fluid from the brain, removing extra-cellular amyloid beta (eAβ) twice as fast during sleep. In addition, melatonin – a peptide hormone that increases markedly during sleep – is an effective antioxidant that inhibits the polymerization of soluble eAβ into insoluble amyloid fibrils that are associated with AD. Sleep deprivation increases plaque formation and AD, which itself disrupts sleep, potentially creating a positive feedback cycle. …
And A Meta-Analysis of the Self-Control-Deviance Link:
Results
A random effects mean correlation between self-control and deviance was Mr = 0.415 for cross-sectional studies and Mr = 0.345 for longitudinal ones; this effect did not significantly differ by study design. Studies with more male participants, studies based on older or US-based populations, and self-report studies found weaker effects.
Conclusions
Substantial empirical support was found for the main argument of self-control theory and on the transdisciplinary link between self-control and measures of crime and deviance. In contrast to Pratt and Cullen, but consistent with theory, the effect from cross-sectional versus longitudinal studies did not significantly differ. There was no evidence of publication bias.
On to Comments of the Week! (Gosh, this is hard, because you guys have left some excellent comments this week!)
August Hurtel in Democracy is America’s Religion:
But I also think it is a true observation. Democracy is damaging to Christianity. it does function like an idol.
I would have trouble with a response to ‘convert me’ too, though. Much of evangelism you see I think is caused by democracy and a sense of free resources. This idea that a sudden revival would be great- meanwhile, the average local church doesn’t have enough of an economy to handle it’s own children. Kids need to grow up and see a productive path forward, get married, and continue the church in time. Modern Christians don’t understand this, for some reason. Churches shut down due to lack of ability to think inter-generationally. Of course, this is a problem for much of secular America too. …
imnobody00 in the same thread:
Very close, but false. Democracy is not our religion. Our religion is the Enlightenment religion, which is a polytheistic religion.
The main god of this religion is the Self. The highest good is doing what the Self wants to do (instead of doing what God wants, what tradition states, what the community wants). The next god is Pleasure (derived from Self).
There are a row of second-tier gods: liberty, equality, relativism…
I also liked the other comments in this thread, but that’s enough quoting.
Over in Creationism, Evolutionism, and Categories, August Hurtel notes:
If we pay attention to the history of science, we would see that it includes a huge chunk of time wherein in Christians said ‘God did it’ and then they went about trying to figure out how God did it.
This really wasn’t much of an problem until the 1800s as the revolutions supplanted what was left of the nobility, and we became stuck with bureaucrats at the apex of our societies. Now, suddenly, what you believe or don’t believe is so ridiculously important. …
and Anon opines:
I think the “race is a social construct” people are 100% right, but for the wrong reasons. Unless you’re an essentialist (which is basically a type of creationism), categories do not exist in a mind-independent way. In other words, they are socially constructed. You may cleave at the joints, but you’re still cleaving. The issue isn’t social construction, it’s whether a the construct is arbitrary or based on reality.
You say the Answers in Genesis approach to species is unobjectionable. And it is. But this just highlights the socially constructed nature of the scheme. It’s easy to think of other approaches that yield different results and are also unobjectionable. A chihuahua and a great dane can’t breed (in vivo), but it’s not due to incompatible gametes..what do we do in that case? Depending on the situation, we may wish to group dogs and wolves together, or split each into their own group, or treat dog breeds separately. …
Holy [expletive,] my baby brother just joined the military. I don’t have any other details yet, but I wasn’t expecting this. I hope he does admirably and doesn’t get killed.
In blog news, I’ve added a section where I can list books/articles/documentaries etc the readers recommend. Note that I haven’t had a chance to read/watch them all myself.
In hilarious news that you probably already heard about, 4chan claims to have trolled the CIA:
In a story that is getting more surreal by the minute, a post on 4Chan now claims that the infamous “golden showers” scene in the unverified 35-page dossier, allegedly compiled by a British intelligence officer, was a hoax and fabricated by a member of the chatboard as “fanfiction”, then sent to Rick Wilson, who proceeded to send it to the CIA, which then put it in their official classified intelligence report on the election.
If true, this is not just amusing–and a show of how easily our “intelligence” agencies can be duped–it also shows the development of informal citizen-based organizations actually running [what is the correct word? disinformation campaigns?] against their own government’s organs.
Or, you know, some guy on 4 chan is lying.
Comments of the Week are going to BaruchK, who knows much more than I do about the rise of communism:
I don’t think so. Marxism took off towards the end of the Victorian era, when starvation, misery and unemployment were at historic lows.
Further, Marxism/socialism were not spontaneous phenomena. Rather, they were purposely developed, sponsored, propagated and lobbied for by small, elite groups, funded by the super-rich (Carnegie, JP Morgan, etc.) working over decades.
Sutton talks about how socialism allows the transformation of target societies into captive markets. Russia and China were not a threat to the Western elites as long as they were socialist. It also allows the one-way transformation of wealth into power. In the absence of socialism, wealth can come and go. Today’s industrial titan can have his wealth destroyed through crashes, innovation, etc. However, by using his wealth to coopt a government, he can create regulations which will stifle competitors (eg Sarbanes-Oxley,) have the government bail him out during crashes (recent examples abound,) ideally even create fiat currency (effectively sucking up wealth from the rest of the economy.)
Also:
The interesting thing about the USSR was its utter economic reliance on aid from the US and Europe throughout its entire existence. …
It is interesting to ponder why the USSR collapsed when it did. I suspect that it just got so sclerotic that it was not even able to manage its own assets and the resources it got from the West, both as payment for oil and as aid. By the end, nobody knew where anything was, how much of it there was, or how to get anything done. Terror was out, the population was no longer the fanatic communists or terrified peasants and workers of the earlier days, but rather demoralized petit-bourgeoisie (private cars and motorcycles, shitty as they were, had become attainable for normal people in the 60s, for instance.) The nervous system of the USSR, which had more or less worked for decades, had just broken down and no longer sent more or less accurate signals to and from its organs.
And With the Thoughts You’d be Thinkin’ for this communist tale (see sidebar for relevant links):
Here’s a fun(?) bit of history, the Soviet central planning in Central Asia didn’t just cause massive diversions of water to plant cotton causing the drying up of the Aral sea it caused the Uzbek communist party to have thousands of members and all but one of its members purged in the 1980s, Brezhnev’s son-in-law was also implicated. Basically the Uzbekistan communist party inflated its cotton production figures stealling billions (USDs) and was only caught by the use of spy satelites.
So what have you guys been up to this week?
I hear this clock tower is in Prague, one of the world’s most beautiful cities. I mean really, if you’ve ever wanted to live out your steampunk/gothic aesthetic in real life, Prague is the place for you.
I am tired so I am jut going to say that clocks are really pretty and I love escapements and then go back to work.
Comment of the Week goes to Erik Gertkvist for creative app ideas:
I am almost negatively impressed by the lack of imagination from those that try to help the Gypsies. Wouldn’t a text-to-(Roma) voice smartphone app be a temporary solution to analfabetism among Gypsies? Similar to offer some “dating outside your small group”-app as a way to stop inbreeding, “find a Gypsie-friendly doctor in your town”-app or teaching materials? Given the billions EU have assigned to help Gypses (that simply aren’t used) some app developers could deliver these support apps within a year.
Jefferson had an interesting post on the effects of density:
I’m a bit of a broken record on this, but there is a much cleaner explanation for density’s negative consequences. Density has two components, removal from natural feedback mechanisms, and social disruption (exceeding the Dunbar’s number, and the as yet unnamed version of this for acquaintances). Both of these components lead, inevitably to increased narcissism and increased status signaling (which have multplicative effects on each other). …
And heading back to an older post, Barry Jones has some interesting thoughts on atheism, homosexuality, and complexity:
I believe America is becoming way too polarized in its disagreements about everything under the sun, and Joseph Tainter correctly predicts the collapse of any society precisely because their solutions to immediate problems always increase the overall complexity of the society. For example, new laws allowing employees to sue to get their jobs back was an immediate good, but contributed to an already congested court system, motivating many judges to engage in more dismissal of cases than they used to. us Americans are brutally stupid in our penchant for thinking short-term solutions are the end-all, be-all of existence. …
So, what are you guys up to? Any requests for future posts? Any recommendations on the subject of pastoralism/pastoralits? Or the Cowboy/Sheep man conflict? (I’ve been trying to find sources on that and only turning up indirect references.)
Have a great week!
evolutionistx 