Try a slogan like “democracy is retarded” on the other hand and you’ll have butchered the holy cow of practically everyone.
Sure, but that’s because slogans aren’t about convincing people; they’re about signaling group affiliation. Wear a T-shirt with “democracy is retarded” on it and you’re effectively saying that you belong to a group that no one has ever heard of and is apparently openly opposed to one of the major shared tenets of practically every active political faction out there. Not a good way to win friends.
On the other hand, I’d be willing to bet that writing a series of blog posts, or even a book, on why democracy is retarded (ideally not in those words) wouldn’t paint you as anything more than, at worst, mildly crankish. Very little is actually unthinkable in the educated world—but if you’re going to voice opinions outside the Overton window you’d better voice them in terms of actual arguments. By definition, you can’t expect your audience to be familiar with the existing arguments for them.
Actually, wearing a t-shirt that says “Democracy is retarded” signals a double affiliation. One is opposition to democracy, and the other is willingness to gratuitously insult retarded people.
Maybe a triple affiliation, because it’s possible to put some content about what you don’t like about democracy in a short slogan, and you didn’t bother. From my point of view, you’ve just affiliated with boring trolls.
Very little is actually unthinkable in the educated world—but if you’re going to voice opinions outside the Overton window you’d better voice them in terms of actual arguments.
That depends on how far you are outside the Overton window, and also in what direction. On some particularly charged topics where the respectable opinion is remote from reality (or at the very least lacking firm justification and open to serious doubt), people are aware that there are plausible-sounding arguments against the respectable opinion, but believe that this is just seductive propaganda by crackpots or villains that has been decidedly debunked by the respectable authorities. (Even though that’s not the case, and the existing attempts at debunking are in fact severely flawed.) So even if you make a perfectly calm, logical, and scholarly argument against the respectable opinion, you’ll just trigger people’s alarms, without being able to make them listen.
Anecdotally, the recent essay advocating whipping (“In Defense of Flogging”) in place of jail sentences has been reprinted everywhere from the CBC to my local free paper.
“Very little is actually unthinkable in the educated world”
A great deal, however is unspeakable.
Masatoshi Nei and Naoko Takezaki measured the genetic distance between one human race and another, and between those races and apes, treating chimpanzees as if they were another human race: “The Root of the Phylogenetic Tree of Human Populations” They found that the distance between races was quite large, typically around half the human chimpanzee distance or so. They also found that some races had considerably less genetic distance between that race and the hypothetical common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees than other races.
Like Galieo, they were asked to repent and recant, and did so.
From 1996 to 2003 that opinion was officially unspeakable, and may well still be unspeakable. Although in 2003 there was a substantial expansion of what is speakable on race, Nei’s heresy does not appear to have been repeated.
So if the Medieval Catholic Church was explicitly theocratic, so is Harvard. Catholics are required to believe what the Church teaches, whatever that may be, and the Church is the final arbiter of what it teaches.
At the time that they published, it was permissible to believe that genetic differences between races were real and substantial, that races were diverse, but equal. The reaction to the proposition that some were more closely related to the common ancestor of man and ape was so hostile, that the existence of genetic differences between races was also prohibited. Rather suddenly official truth became that humans were diverse culturally but not genetically, that races were just labels for continent of origin, so that Persians are “Asians” and Chinese are also “Asians”, so Chinese are supposedly the same race as Persians, which doctrine was quite suddenly imposed not just in Academia, but on everyone in the English speaking world, and I expect most of the rest of the world also. The main finding of their paper abruptly became impermissible after it was published. So everyone is required to believe what Harvard teaches, whatever it may be, even though it changes from time to time. Because this paper pissed off our elite, Muslims in England are “Asians”, and the English have trouble figuring out what to call Chinese, since they are supposed to call them “Asians”also, but many Englishmen have trouble using a single word for two rather different categories. If only Nei had not attempted to estimate the distance between races and the hypothetical ancestor of man and ape, Britons would probably still be calling Muslims Muslims and Pakistanis Pakistanis.
This seems very confused. Here’s the paper you are referring to.
The study is trying to provide evidence for two different theories of the origin of H. sapiens: the out of Africa theory and the multiregional theory. If the out of Africa theory is true, you can expect to find more divergence between the sub-Saharan Africans and the rest of the human population because “the most divergent and first-established population is likely to stay in the place of origin and new populations would be formed when they move out of the original place. ” I don’t quite see any implication of racial inequality here, or anything to be upset about (although I can imagine some particularly juvenile racial taunts along the lines of your race is more closely related to the chimps than mine!?). Wikipedia also refers to these conclusions without hinting at any controversy attached to them:
“Nei and Roychoudhury then estimated that Europeans and Asians diverged about 55,000 years ago and these two populations diverged from Africans about 115,000 years ago.[15] This conclusion was supported by many later studies using larger numbers of genes and populations, and the estimates are still widely used. This study was a forerunner of the out of Africa theory of human origin by Allan Wilson.”
Also, what do Britons do when they need to refer to Pakistani Muslims? :)
Not only does the idea that different races would have different genetic distances from the common ancestor of apes not strike me as repugnant, it seems fairly obvious on examination. The further a population is from its ancestral environment (in terms of selection pressures of course, not geographically speaking,) the faster its genes are going to drift, so to the extent that not all environments that human populations developed in equally resemble that of our common ancestor, we should expect different genetic distances from that common ancestor.
But as for the magnitude of genetic difference between races, I can’t help but think “seriously half the human-chimpanzee difference?” That’s way more than I would have predicted.
Of course Persians and Pakistanis are Asians, since they live in Asia. The term ‘Asian’ appears to me to be a geographic term, not a racial one.
I can’t speak for the UK, but here in the English-speaking USA, we tend to think of Persians and Chinese as different races. (The various systems of classification differ on Pakistanis.)
You will often hear ‘Asian’ instead of ‘East Asian’ for the race that Chinese belong to. I would criticise this as a poor way to use the word. In any case, anybody who thinks that Persians and Chinese are the same race since both live in Asia is probably just being confused by this usage; nobody believes that in the English-speaking USA (neglecting people who only classify into their own group and everybody else and people who refuse to classify at all).
“Very little is actually unthinkable in the educated world”
That Marie Curie is famous for doing work that was completely routine when males did it demonstrates that women are incapable of doing science. If women could do science, you would have a more plausible poster girl than Marie Curie. If women could do science, no one would make a big fuss over very routine scientific accomplishments by women.
Marie Curie was the least important person on the three person team that discovered radium, yet no one remembers the other members of the team, nor does anyone remember the team that discovered radon, a similar but far more important discovery made at about the same time, far more important because that discovery revealed that radioactivity was a manifestation of one element decaying into another.
Marie Curie is remembered in the same way that two headed goats are remembered, that a woman doing even rather ordinary science is as extraordinary as a two headed goat.
Sure, but that’s because slogans aren’t about convincing people; they’re about signaling group affiliation. Wear a T-shirt with “democracy is retarded” on it and you’re effectively saying that you belong to a group that no one has ever heard of and is apparently openly opposed to one of the major shared tenets of practically every active political faction out there. Not a good way to win friends.
On the other hand, I’d be willing to bet that writing a series of blog posts, or even a book, on why democracy is retarded (ideally not in those words) wouldn’t paint you as anything more than, at worst, mildly crankish. Very little is actually unthinkable in the educated world—but if you’re going to voice opinions outside the Overton window you’d better voice them in terms of actual arguments. By definition, you can’t expect your audience to be familiar with the existing arguments for them.
Actually, wearing a t-shirt that says “Democracy is retarded” signals a double affiliation. One is opposition to democracy, and the other is willingness to gratuitously insult retarded people.
Maybe a triple affiliation, because it’s possible to put some content about what you don’t like about democracy in a short slogan, and you didn’t bother. From my point of view, you’ve just affiliated with boring trolls.
That depends on how far you are outside the Overton window, and also in what direction. On some particularly charged topics where the respectable opinion is remote from reality (or at the very least lacking firm justification and open to serious doubt), people are aware that there are plausible-sounding arguments against the respectable opinion, but believe that this is just seductive propaganda by crackpots or villains that has been decidedly debunked by the respectable authorities. (Even though that’s not the case, and the existing attempts at debunking are in fact severely flawed.) So even if you make a perfectly calm, logical, and scholarly argument against the respectable opinion, you’ll just trigger people’s alarms, without being able to make them listen.
Anecdotally, the recent essay advocating whipping (“In Defense of Flogging”) in place of jail sentences has been reprinted everywhere from the CBC to my local free paper.
Not seeing reprints of Nei’s paper “The Root of the Phylogenetic Tree of Human Populations”
It’s available freely online.
Overton window.
“Very little is actually unthinkable in the educated world”
Tell that to Andrew Bolt, a journalist currently being subjected to a show trial for heresy.
“Very little is actually unthinkable in the educated world”
A great deal, however is unspeakable.
Masatoshi Nei and Naoko Takezaki measured the genetic distance between one human race and another, and between those races and apes, treating chimpanzees as if they were another human race: “The Root of the Phylogenetic Tree of Human Populations” They found that the distance between races was quite large, typically around half the human chimpanzee distance or so. They also found that some races had considerably less genetic distance between that race and the hypothetical common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees than other races.
Like Galieo, they were asked to repent and recant, and did so.
From 1996 to 2003 that opinion was officially unspeakable, and may well still be unspeakable. Although in 2003 there was a substantial expansion of what is speakable on race, Nei’s heresy does not appear to have been repeated.
So if the Medieval Catholic Church was explicitly theocratic, so is Harvard. Catholics are required to believe what the Church teaches, whatever that may be, and the Church is the final arbiter of what it teaches.
At the time that they published, it was permissible to believe that genetic differences between races were real and substantial, that races were diverse, but equal. The reaction to the proposition that some were more closely related to the common ancestor of man and ape was so hostile, that the existence of genetic differences between races was also prohibited. Rather suddenly official truth became that humans were diverse culturally but not genetically, that races were just labels for continent of origin, so that Persians are “Asians” and Chinese are also “Asians”, so Chinese are supposedly the same race as Persians, which doctrine was quite suddenly imposed not just in Academia, but on everyone in the English speaking world, and I expect most of the rest of the world also. The main finding of their paper abruptly became impermissible after it was published. So everyone is required to believe what Harvard teaches, whatever it may be, even though it changes from time to time. Because this paper pissed off our elite, Muslims in England are “Asians”, and the English have trouble figuring out what to call Chinese, since they are supposed to call them “Asians”also, but many Englishmen have trouble using a single word for two rather different categories. If only Nei had not attempted to estimate the distance between races and the hypothetical ancestor of man and ape, Britons would probably still be calling Muslims Muslims and Pakistanis Pakistanis.
This seems very confused. Here’s the paper you are referring to.
The study is trying to provide evidence for two different theories of the origin of H. sapiens: the out of Africa theory and the multiregional theory. If the out of Africa theory is true, you can expect to find more divergence between the sub-Saharan Africans and the rest of the human population because “the most divergent and first-established population is likely to stay in the place of origin and new populations would be formed when they move out of the original place. ” I don’t quite see any implication of racial inequality here, or anything to be upset about (although I can imagine some particularly juvenile racial taunts along the lines of your race is more closely related to the chimps than mine!?). Wikipedia also refers to these conclusions without hinting at any controversy attached to them:
“Nei and Roychoudhury then estimated that Europeans and Asians diverged about 55,000 years ago and these two populations diverged from Africans about 115,000 years ago.[15] This conclusion was supported by many later studies using larger numbers of genes and populations, and the estimates are still widely used. This study was a forerunner of the out of Africa theory of human origin by Allan Wilson.”
Also, what do Britons do when they need to refer to Pakistani Muslims? :)
Do you have a link to the study?
Not only does the idea that different races would have different genetic distances from the common ancestor of apes not strike me as repugnant, it seems fairly obvious on examination. The further a population is from its ancestral environment (in terms of selection pressures of course, not geographically speaking,) the faster its genes are going to drift, so to the extent that not all environments that human populations developed in equally resemble that of our common ancestor, we should expect different genetic distances from that common ancestor.
But as for the magnitude of genetic difference between races, I can’t help but think “seriously half the human-chimpanzee difference?” That’s way more than I would have predicted.
Of course Persians and Pakistanis are Asians, since they live in Asia. The term ‘Asian’ appears to me to be a geographic term, not a racial one.
I can’t speak for the UK, but here in the English-speaking USA, we tend to think of Persians and Chinese as different races. (The various systems of classification differ on Pakistanis.)
You will often hear ‘Asian’ instead of ‘East Asian’ for the race that Chinese belong to. I would criticise this as a poor way to use the word. In any case, anybody who thinks that Persians and Chinese are the same race since both live in Asia is probably just being confused by this usage; nobody believes that in the English-speaking USA (neglecting people who only classify into their own group and everybody else and people who refuse to classify at all).
“Very little is actually unthinkable in the educated world”
That Marie Curie is famous for doing work that was completely routine when males did it demonstrates that women are incapable of doing science. If women could do science, you would have a more plausible poster girl than Marie Curie. If women could do science, no one would make a big fuss over very routine scientific accomplishments by women.
Marie Curie was the least important person on the three person team that discovered radium, yet no one remembers the other members of the team, nor does anyone remember the team that discovered radon, a similar but far more important discovery made at about the same time, far more important because that discovery revealed that radioactivity was a manifestation of one element decaying into another.
Marie Curie is remembered in the same way that two headed goats are remembered, that a woman doing even rather ordinary science is as extraordinary as a two headed goat.
You are James A. Donald and I claim my five pounds.