Re: race & anthro and history of both

Gerold Firl (geroldf@sdd.hp.com)
9 Dec 1996 21:17:58 GMT

In article <58flt9$6bh@panix2.panix.com>, erg@panix.com (Edward Green) writes:

|> I share your distaste for R-word idiocy, and just posted to this
|> effect, to which I have received no comment. I wonder if this is
|> because:
|>
|> (A) The sensible people are sick to the gills with hearing about it,
|>
|> (B) The unsensible people had no idea what I was saying, so didn't
|> even bother flaming me, or
|>
|> (C) My editor ate a word in the first line, so I looked like an
|> illiterate.
|>
|> Probably all of the above. I can understand "sick to the gills with
|> hearing about it"; the problem is, when all people capable of
|> greater subtlety of thought than a goldfish adopt this attitude the
|> flow of public debate is dominated by people who lack this
|> qualification.

(Note: the "r-word" is race)

There are some amusing/interesting aspects to the whole farce.

Consider the symmetry between the white supremacist and
afro-centrist: both seek to portray their pet group as the source of
all good, and the other as evil and/or degenerate. Native americans
have recently developed their own version of this little mania; see
vine deloria, _god is red_ or _red earth, white lies_ for some
howling examples.

Way off in another dimension entirely are the "progressives", who
try so hard to be progressive that they turn into the ultimate
ethnocentrists. They claim that race is a purely ideological/social
construct, with no biological basis, and thereby set man aside from
the rest of the animal kingdom, as if we were not subject to the
same laws of genetics and evolution as any other species.

|> It's as if the Institute of Physics had remained silent while public
|> debate considered *where* we were going to build the National
|> Perpetual Motion Machine, and when we were going to start. Silence
|> breeds idiocy.

Agreed.

On the other hand, we have been treated to a spectacle of sound and
fury, as numerous progressive crusaders have traded insults with bob
whitaker. I think I prefer silence. A person who signifies nothing
can at least preserve bandwidth.

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