Aris Katsaris, you’re the one accusing the field of physical anthropology
No, I don’t remember accusing that field of anything. Since your comment begins with a blatant falsehood, I will not bother reading the rest of it. Downvoting it unread, and classifying you as a troll.
No, I don’t remember accusing that field of anything.
You seem to have forgotten how this conversation got started. Someone said “Race is a cultural convention.” You argued that this claim, although common in physical anthropology (you cited George W. Gill’s view to support this assertion), is false. I suggested a more charitable, steel-mannish reading of the “Race is a cultural convention.” thesis, and asked you what your own reading of this common multiculturalist thesis is. You responded “Given how I might have said/believed something similar myself just a couple years back, I think I know what is meant.”, and then proceeded to unpack your own earlier views. We’re still trying to do that unpacking, and unless you’ve silently changed your mind about the structure of this discussion, you’re still trying to give an exposition of what the anthropology textbooks in question, and most other people who support this view, have in mind.
My suggestion is that you have yet to give an interpretation of “Race is a cultural convention.”, and of the general anti-racial-categorizations thesis, that would plausibly have been held by academics, since the denial of more than one racial trait statistically clustering together, and the denial of non-continuous human variation, both reflect truly fundamental misunderstandings of human phenotypic and geographical variation. At the very least, a great deal of textual evidence would be needed to justify attributing such a strong, absurd thesis to so many anti-racialist people. Now: Where, precisely, do you disagree with my representation of this discussion? And where, precisely, do you disagree with my specific counter-arguments?
Since your comment begins with a blatant falsehood, I will not bother reading the rest of it. Downvoting it unread, and classifying you as a troll.
It’s understandable that you’re angry; dissonance (both internal and social) inevitably makes us angry. Intellectual virtue isn’t about being stoically immune to such responses from our very primate brain; it’s about how you handle them when they arise, how you minimize the damage. Just a word to the wise.
No, I don’t remember accusing that field of anything. Since your comment begins with a blatant falsehood, I will not bother reading the rest of it. Downvoting it unread, and classifying you as a troll.
You seem to have forgotten how this conversation got started. Someone said “Race is a cultural convention.” You argued that this claim, although common in physical anthropology (you cited George W. Gill’s view to support this assertion), is false. I suggested a more charitable, steel-mannish reading of the “Race is a cultural convention.” thesis, and asked you what your own reading of this common multiculturalist thesis is. You responded “Given how I might have said/believed something similar myself just a couple years back, I think I know what is meant.”, and then proceeded to unpack your own earlier views. We’re still trying to do that unpacking, and unless you’ve silently changed your mind about the structure of this discussion, you’re still trying to give an exposition of what the anthropology textbooks in question, and most other people who support this view, have in mind.
My suggestion is that you have yet to give an interpretation of “Race is a cultural convention.”, and of the general anti-racial-categorizations thesis, that would plausibly have been held by academics, since the denial of more than one racial trait statistically clustering together, and the denial of non-continuous human variation, both reflect truly fundamental misunderstandings of human phenotypic and geographical variation. At the very least, a great deal of textual evidence would be needed to justify attributing such a strong, absurd thesis to so many anti-racialist people. Now: Where, precisely, do you disagree with my representation of this discussion? And where, precisely, do you disagree with my specific counter-arguments?
If by ‘troll’ you mean ‘someone acting in bad faith,’ might I suggest that your human psychological model is a bit implausible? (Or, possibly, you have become too personally invested and are not applying your own model carefully. I couldn’t say.) A corollary of Hanlon’s Razor: ‘Never attribute to trolling that which is adequately explained by good-faith misunderstanding or disagreement.’
It’s understandable that you’re angry; dissonance (both internal and social) inevitably makes us angry. Intellectual virtue isn’t about being stoically immune to such responses from our very primate brain; it’s about how you handle them when they arise, how you minimize the damage. Just a word to the wise.