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Glorious Imperator
Blind Guardian
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I'm getting heavily into Mesopotamian history. I'm especially fascinated with the Neo-Assyrian Empire and their brutal war machine.
If anyone is planning on having children, bet all of your friends $500 that the child will have a birth defect. That way if the child is born with a defect you still get $500. It's really the only right thing to do.
Dak
mentat
Krigloch the Furious
Pants full of poo
damnromulans
Klingons do not faint
I'm walking 12 miles downtown tomorrow morning. Why not? It's not like I have anything else to do.
Saparmurat_Niyazov
Member
On the whole black thing: I think it's really weird that sub-Saharan Africans and aboriginal Papuans look pretty much the same but are not closely related.
Vimana
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Yeah, their environments had them evolve similar traits. I used to be super annoyed when people would mix up Chinese and Japanese people, but now I don't really care, I'd just rather people know that there are huge differences between people that otherwise would look/seem related. I'd also rather that schools would teach that racism is wrong by showing that the concept of race is just a social construct made for discrimination, rather than trying to validate every single "race" with their achievements to create the idea that everyone is equal. The reality is that some peoples accomplished more than others, but it had nothing to do with genetic makeup, it had more to do with their culture, their environment, and the size of their population. [/rant]
Dak
mentat
I would also like to point out that the term "accomplishments(accomplished)" is pretty subjective.
I did that my first day in Montreal. It's a good way to explore a new city.
Vimana
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Yeah, there's that too. The students are usually going to end up forming their own opinions of what "achievements" are better than others, and because they were never taught that it doesn't fucking matter, humans are humans, it unintentionally preserves racism in the subconscious. On the radio I've listened to advocates of teaching more about Africa in school to reduce racism, but that does nothing other than try to validate a certain people using the same standards used to invalidate them. It's best to just get rid of the standard altogether. That's the best bet America has for getting rid of racism.
The only reason I realized this was because my world history teacher in high school did. He criticized Guns Germs, and Steel on the basis that Jared Diamond tried to get rid of racist thought using loaded terms like "advanced," and "developed."
Saparmurat_Niyazov
Member
I actually enjoyed that book a great deal. But I see your point, he was pushing a very puritanical tolerance based agenda.
Vimana
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I never read the book, but I watched the documentary. He explained pretty well why the Europeans managed to conquer other places instead of the other way around. Another historian that also sheds a lot of light on this is Niall Ferguson. He showed how the Europeans were kind of lucky. If it weren't for the Ming dynasty, the Chinese probably would have started trading with the Americas long before the Europeans started seeking out trade routes. I'm not sure that Diamond pointed this out in his book, but it wasn't in what I saw of the documentary.
Guns, Germs, And Steel wasn't really pushing a PC agenda so much as debunking the myth that the cultural achievements of Europeans, which definitely seem superior to a lot of other cultures, are not valid evidence of a genetic superiority. It's a fairly convincing argument.
It was a good book, but I wish it had been about a hundred pages shorter.
It was a good book, but I wish it had been about a hundred pages shorter.
Blind Guardian
Member
It's easy to see how cultural 'accomplishments' (or the supposed lack thereof) have come about if you look at a culture's geographical proximity in relation to other cultures. Take the Romans and remove them from the Greeks and the Etruscans, put them in a vacuum, and they're no different from your average Papua New Guinean tribe. It's obviously all about exposure versus isolation.
