More random links

[annwfyn]

Here is another link from Jared Diamond, to follow up the last one that Susan and Andrew debunked so thoroughly. This one is one race and the biology of it, and I quite like it.

This is an interesting piece about how a number of media outlets determinedly set about blaming fictional Islamic terrorists for the Norwegian attacks, building up a fake threat based on nothing, until they discovered it was, actually, a home grown nutjob. At which point, as a note, a lot of newspapers stopped talking 'terror attack' and started talking 'murder'. Because crazy Christians aren't terrorists. They are just murderers.

Here is Russell Brand (yes, him!) writing about Amy Winehouse and I think it's the best article on the subject I've read so far.

And finally, in more cheerful news, Go see a lot of lovely pictures of people getting married in New York after the state finally legalized gay marriage. I actually got a bit misty eyed at this. I think it's the elderly people getting married after 50+ years together which got me. It's disturbingly heart warming stuff.

Comments

[wyldcard.livejournal.com]

Yeah, love the Russell Brand piece. Makes me reassess him.

[pmp.livejournal.com]

There's an ongoing arguement on a forum I frequent over whether or not the bastard's religion was his motivation, they're calling for all religion to be banned and thrown away as clearly religion is the only reason people ever commit mass murder.

Rather than say, the age old motivations such as money, power or plain old craziness.

[ulaidhan.livejournal.com]

Diamond's doing better in that one... but he still garbles things quite a bit. Including his own supposed logic.

For example, near the beginning he explicitly cites +anthropologists+ (not biologists or geneticists) as support for a rejection of a genetic classification of race - and does so separately to a wonderfully vague reference to "many anthropologists" regarding race as no longer useful as an analytical tool.

As was the case in the previous article, he seems to be blundering his way through a multi-disciplinary field, grabbing onto anything that lets him argue against a straw man of "conventional wisdom", without regard to the context of what he quotes or the overall coherence of his point.

Even the simple point that he explicitly explains that sexual selection characteristics that vary in close correlation to geographic location constitute differentiating subspecies ("racial") characteristics in warblers seems to have been forgotten by the end - when he's arguing that geographically-varying sexual selection characteristics in humans should +not+ be seen as methods of differentiating between human variants.

The fundamental discovery that sparked off the article seems to have been that contemporary anthropologists are not committed to the description of 'racial' characteristics, but are instead much more likely to focus on smaller categories (such as ethnies, which is where my own academic work most overlapped with anthropology). But he's tried to seize upon that rejection of super-categories (without grasping some of the reasons why) to simultaneously both dimly recognise and try to reject the notion that humans are social creatures basing their interactions upon perceptions.

The bollocks quotient in the article is lower, but Diamond is still half-grasping some fairly old and rather basic concepts and trying to attack an unreal foe with what he's built out of them. The basic point seems to be "because I believe that judging people on a superficial basis is bad, here's an article to tell you not to do it".