*Guns, Germs, and Steel* (Two)
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Predicting 2030
 August 25 2023
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    ‘The five major human groups . . . ’ – here is Jared Diamond struggling to not say ‘race’ or something similar.

     

    Just three pages later, it’s ‘anatomically defined human groups.’ Same struggle.

     

    Then it’s ‘ . . . distinct people tend to have distinct languages.’

     

    This is exactly the orthodoxy that David Reich is admitting in *The Most Interesting Paragraph of 2023*.

     

    This orthodoxy is everywhere once you know what you’re looking for. The definitions of ‘ethnicity’ are an example.

     

    Here’s one entirely at random:

     

    ‘the quality or fact of belonging to a population group or subgroup made up of people who share a common cultural background or descent.’

    Gee, I wonder what ‘ common descent’ is?

     

     

    All This is a form of the ‘straw man fallacy,’ readers. It goes like this:

     

    you can find ‘scientific racist’ researchers lumping humans into just three categories; but you won’t find left-wingers noting the sub-categories of these.

     

    And with just three categories, the argument for ‘race’ is just dumb.*

     

    But if you allow ‘mini-races’ – like ‘anatomically defined human groups’ and ‘population groups’ and ‘common descent’ – it all just stops being scary.

     

    People discussing history, people discussing susceptibility to disease, people with a need to discuss ‘anatomical definition’ – all these folks play the game of decrying ‘race’ but indirectly admitting ‘mini-races.’

     

    *And this is where the straw man is hiding. The ‘scientific racists’ really claim that there are more than three races/sub-races. But you can make yourself look clever by demolishing the argument-that-no-one-is-really-making that there are only three races.

     

    political theory political history trans gender postmodernism lysenkoism
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