I have roused the furious slap-fighting anger of the HBD crowd, that’s for sure. They have now come up with a priceless
argument to refute everything I’ve said, and are accusing me of being a creationist.
This image is priceless. Yes, @pzmyers, by definition, is a creationist. Why does PZ hate Darwin so?
This must be a doozy of a refutation, encapsulated in a single image. And here it is.
The Cultural Marxist War against Darwinism
Creationists: evolution is a social construct, not biologically real.
Liberal Creationists: race is a social construct, not biologically real.
Charles Darwin: I’m not a creationist: I’ll use the word ‘race’ in title of my Origin of Species
You might have seen an earlier version of this argument in the comments here, but that was before they ran out and got the juicy quote from Charles Darwin.
I confess, the first thing that had me confoozled was that term “Cultural Marxist”. I had to scurry over to Wikipedia to look it up, I’m embarrassed to say. Here’s the definition:
Cultural Marxism refers to a school or offshoot of Marxism that conceives of culture as central to the legitimation of oppression, in addition to the economic factors that Karl Marx emphasized. An outgrowth of Western Marxism (especially from Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School) and finding popularity in the 1960s as cultural studies, cultural Marxism argues that what appear as traditional cultural phenomena intrinsic to Western society, for instance the drive for individual acquisition associated with capitalism, nationalism, the nuclear family, gender roles, race and other forms of cultural identity; are historically recent developments that help to justify and maintain hierarchy. Cultural Marxists use Marxist methods (historical research, the identification of economic interest, the study of the mutually conditioning relations between parts of a social order) to try to understand the complexity of power in contemporary society and to make it possible to criticise what, cultural Marxists propose, appears natural but is in fact ideological.
Oh. Hey. I am sympatico with most of that (I’d disagree with the arrow of causality implied in that phrase “to justify and maintain hierarchy”, but this is just a synopsis so maybe the reality is more sophisticated than that). I guess I am a Cultural Marxist then, in the sense that I oppose the appropriation and distortion of natural processes to justify ideological ends.
You learn something every day.
Of course, I don’t think my critics use the term in that rational sense. They are using it as a conservative insult.
In current political rhetoric, the term has come into use by some social conservatives, such as historian William S. Lind, who associate it with a set of principles that they claim are in simple contradiction with traditional values of Western society and the Christian religion. In this usage, political correctness and multiculturalism, which are identified with cultural Marxism, are argued to have their true origin in a Marxian movement to undermine or abnegate such traditional values.
I have to go along with that, too: fuck Western tradition and religion.
And then, conveniently, the racist wackos have lately been sending me a link to their favorite definitions. Here’s one from a site called Destroy Cultural Marxism.
Cultural Marxism: An offshoot of Marxism that gave birth to political correctness, multiculturalism and “anti-racism.” Unlike traditional Marxism that focuses on economics, Cultural Marxism focuses on culture and maintains that all human behavior is a result of culture (not heredity / race) and thus malleable. Cultural Marxists deny that biological reality of race and argue that race is a “social construct”. Nonetheless, Cultural Marxists support the race-based identity politics of non-whites. Cultural Marxists typically support race-based affirmative action, the proposition state (as opposed to a nation rooted in common ancestry), elevating non-Western religions above Western religions, speech codes and censorship, multiculturalism, diversity training, anti-Western education curricula, maladaptive sexual norms and anti-male feminism, the dispossession of white people, and mass Third World immigration into Western countries. Cultural Marxists have promoted idea that white people, instead of birthing white babies, should interracially marry or adopt non-white children. Samuel P. Huntington maintained that Cultural Marxism is an anti-white ideology.
Now that’s more like it. That’s the attitude I get from these loons: that I’m a race traitor because I recognize the humanity of people who are not white, and think our society perpetuates racist myths that require active opposition. It’s also a load of nonsense. I don’t tell white people that they should marry black people, or any other color-matching bullshit: I think people should be free to marry whoever they love.
That site also has some other charming definitions that I never wanted to know, but are very revealing.
Concepts to oppose Cultural Marxism:
Genophilia: The love of one’s own race. A natural instinct that Cultural Marxists want to deny (at least for whites).
Identitarian Religion: An older form of religion that stresses ancestral obligations. Adamantly opposed by Christian Cultural Marxists (at least for whites). Throughout nearly all human history, identitarian religion (aka, ethno-religion), has been the norm.
Leukophobia: The irrational fear of whites organizing racially.
Nation: The very word ‘nation’ (from Latin ‘nasci’) implies link by blood. The traditional (non-Marxist) understanding of nation implies racial homogeneity. (Until very recently Europe has always been racially homogenous and USA, in 1960 census, was 90% white.)
It’s true. I don’t love my own race. I love people, though, and I don’t see any reason to exclude the majority of humanity from my circle of friends simply because of their ancestry, nor do I think it’s a good thing to start slicing up countries into tinier fragments of pure ethnicities, bolstered by a racist religion. And what are these people going to do in a few decades, when the USA is less than 50% white? Leave and go back to their racial homeland? Which is where?
As for their bogus syllogism that tries to equate denying that something is biologically real with being a creationist, some things aren’t biologically real — there are no fairies, unicorns, or winged monkeys. Stating that they don’t exist does not make one a creationist. There are differences between individuals that are genetic, and therefore the distribution of individuals carrying them fall into clades, but that does not imply that all of humanity cleaves naturally into a small number of discrete groups. That is a recipe for hate, as well as being biologically invalid. Which, I guess, makes the Human Biodiversity phonies all a bunch of creationists, by their own reasoning.
Also, bad news: Darwin was a racist. He carried a great many of the prejudices of a typical Victorian gentleman, and they come through in his writings; but at least they were softened by his humanism, and he aspired to be more egalitarian. But you don’t get to call St. Chuck your perfect ideal. He was flawed. And the theory does not rely on the perfection of one of its discoverers.
Holly Dunsworth also has a relevant quote from Darwin’s The Descent of Man.
Man has been studied more carefully than any other organic being, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classified as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawford), or as sixty-three, according to Burke.
I’ll add to that this quote:
Although the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet if their whole structure be taken into consideration they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points. Many of these are of so unimportant or of so singular a nature, that it is extremely improbable that they should have been independently acquired by aboriginally distinct species or races. The same remark holds good with equal or greater force with respect to the numerous points of mental similarity between the most distinct races of man. The American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans are as different from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Fuegians on board the “Beagle,” with the many little traits of character, shewing how similar their minds were to ours; and so it was with a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate.
Darwin isn’t your friend, HBD racists, and even if he were, it would be an element of his character to deplore, not reason to accept race hatred as a necessary component of evolutionary thought.
HBD and evo-psych: cage match, or match made in hell?
Either way I’m sure they’d have a lot of drivel to spout at one another. Preferably waaaay out of earshot of everybody else, who would get on much better without ’em (pace the inconspicuous minority of people who may actually be doing some real science in evo-psych; there must hopefully be some out there somewhere).
… oops, that seems a bit OT, sorry. The commonality I had in mind is that devotees of both rely on using sciency-sounding bluster and bullshit to prop up prejudices.
The anti-scientific folk just really cannot seem to wrap their heads around the fact that we don’t worship Darwin. They apparently simply do not get a non-authoritarian worldview. Hence the constant harping on what Darwin said, or didn’t say, or exactly what words he used to say it.
‘Cause y’see, if they can show just one tiny crack in the holy writ, the entire edifice comes tumbling down. It’s what folks around here like to call weapons-grade projection.
“Race-traitor” is about the finest compliment a conservative flathead shitheel could ever offer me. I hope there’s video to document the moment, especially my peals of merry laughter!
Another funny thing is, they’re likely to be offended by catcalls of “Nazi” or “Klansman” in public – when isolated from the rest of the pack of cards they’re nothing but – rather than anything else. Because they really understand they ARE shits.
Lemme guess.. “maladaptive sexual norms” means homosexuality, right?
Also, why the hell should non-western non-christians care about the traditional values of western christianism?
(And no, gender roles and nuclear family sure as hell ain’t intrinsic or limited to “western culture”. Unluckily)
I’m really glad for these articles exposing the horrifying rot beneath the sciencey facade these stains have erected. I mean, I didn’t object to the idea some human populations might have different rates of occurrence of different characteristics that might even translate into different aptitudes – that thing about Ashkenazim being selected for intelligence based on historical circumstance possibly even appealed to me because it would give anti-semites hives. BUT THEN I found out that was based on the work of one group of dudes being financed by an avowed racist, and I saw how even that seemingly benign idea was in fact an unholy mess.
Hell, the weird self-appellation has creepy implications. When ecologists talk about biodiversity, it’s usually in the context of trying to preserve populations of organisms that are at risk of extinction. There are several billion of us. You don’t think that’s enough genetic diversity in itself? What’s the agenda, and why are overt white supremacists quick to embrace your findings? Ya better think about it baybay.
I just hope these people don’t hate Cultural Marxism quite as much as Anders Behring Breivik does.
[trigger warning for mass murder, violence against children]
The term “Cultural Marxism” as per the gumby-quoted definition entered the public discourse in a big way after it was used in Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto that he posted to the internets just before he went to shoot up a bunch of kids in Norway. Er, he was agin’it and he thought those of the people he killed who were white deserved to be shot because they were cultural Marxists. I was unaware that a non-idiotic definition existed.
If someone seriously uses the Gumby definition of Cultural Marxism, this is a pretty serious red flag that they are racists of the most vicious and violent kind, who think that shooting kids because they might in the future sell out the nation’s lilly-white daughters to the muslim hordes is pretty A-OK. That’s about the only thing the term is useful for.
In the actual text of Origin, Darwin also talked about ‘races’ of cabbage. Somehow I don’t think he was using the term ‘race’ the way the racists do… not that they would actually check or anything.
Although, I do suspect that some of those cabbage races probably underperform on IQ tests.
Ugh. Have they actually READ Darwin? (Okay, we all know the answer to that…).
The “races” in the title of The Origin are varieties within ANY species. The “favoured races” are just “variations within species with traits that succeed better under selection”, not “whities”.
“Race” has had a great many meanings throughout history and in different parts of the world. The oldest use, and the one Darwin was using in the title, is “a line of descent”.
From the OED, definition 1: . A group of people, animals, or plants, connected by common descent or origin.In its widest sense the term includes all descendants from an original stock, but may also be limited to a single line of descent or to the group as it exists at a particular period.
Here is the etymology from the OED:
“Etymology: < Middle French, French race group of people connected by common descent (c1480 as rasse), offspring, descendants (1496), subdivision of a species represented by a certain number of individuals with hereditary characteristics (c1500), time span of a generation (1552), origin, extraction (1558), set or class of people sharing the same profession or the same character (1564), group of animals born to the same mother (1611), subdivision of mankind which is distinguished from others by the relative frequency of certain hereditary traits (1684) < Italian razza kind, species (a1388; earlier as masculine noun razzo (c1300 in sense ‘descent, lineage’, with reference to a horse)), group of individuals of an animal or vegetable species which are differentiated from another group of the same species by one or more characteristics which are constant and hereditary (a1446), offspring, descendants (15th cent.), further etymology uncertain and disputed. Compare Old Occitan rassa gang (late 12th cent.; Occitan raça), plot, conspiracy (13th cent.). Compare also Catalan raça (c1400), Spanish raza (1438), Portuguese raça (1473).
Various explanations of the origin of Italian razza have been suggested. Two of the most popular of these suggest a Latin origin: one theory suggests a derivation < classical Latin ratiō ratio n., while the other sees the word as being shortened < classical Latin generātiō generation n. An alternative explanation (and one supported by modern dictionaries of Italian: see e.g. M. Cortelazzo and P. Zolli Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana at razza) derives the Italian word < Old French haraz haras n. For a full discussion and summary of these and various other competing theories see Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch at ratiō."
Here is a pertinent line of dialogue from Warren Beatty’s movie “Bulworth” (which deserves to be much better known than it is:
“I think everybody should keep fucking everybody else until we’re all the same color.”
I love the scare-quotes around anti-racism, I really do.
And, frankly, political correctness, multiculturalism, anti-racism? With the fine company this offshoot of Marxism keeps, I feel that we should be very good friends indeed.
Cultural Marxist? Don’t they know the term anthropologist?
“Although, I do suspect that some of those cabbage races probably underperform on IQ tests.”
Compared to whom? Not the HBD nuts, I’m sure.
These guys using the term human biodiversity is strange. After all they believe in a handful of races that are supposed to remain “pure,” with as little interaction with each other as possible. That doesn’t seem like it would lead to diversity, but rather to a handful of monocultures.
Leukophobia:
I am very disappointed that this doesn’t mean fear of white blood cells.
@13: Won’t work. You’ll still get random distribution of the skin tone genes so some people will be lighter, others darker. Might be able to get to where the only thing that indicates is your melanoma risk, if you’re really lucky.
It has me wondering if they’re oblivious about the health problems of purebred pets. There’s a reason we have terms like “mongrel vitality.”
The thing I love about white-supremacist movements is that one look at their membership is sufficient to discredit the very notion of white supremacy.
@dianne #19
Goldarnit, I thought people were scientifically minded here… What is being proposed is an experiment! Of you go boys and girls start at it, *then* measure the average skin tones of your offspring!
Actually, as a systematist I wonder why you write (not for the first time if I remember correctly) that humans fall into clades. As far as I understand the word, that is precisely what we don’t, because talking of clades (AKA monophyletic groups) only makes sense once interbreeding between them has pretty much stopped. Human populations have so much gene flow between them that there is no phylogenetic structure but rather a network-structure, and thus the word clade applies as much as the word “purple” applies to length descriptions.
Another way of putting it is that the claim of humans falling into distinct clades is a much stronger one even than the claim that there are objectively definable races. If it were true, we could speak of several human species.
@dx: My parents and grandparents already did that experiment. Results were mixed.
Well, Marx did tend to smear teleology all over everything. But yeah, if you remove the teleology from “cultural Marxism” you basically get…paying attention to how culture affects people. But it must be teh ebilz, because Marxism!
That’s as true for the HBD racists quoted above as for the creationists on the other side!
Not how it works. Unlike what Darwin (at least originally) thought, heredity is digital, not analog. Remember your Mendel, and then google for “black-and-white twins”.
Or look at really well-mixed places like the Cape Verde islands. There you can for example find people with very dark skin and curly hair that is light blond.
They are meant to imply that being against racism is being racist against Whites.
1) I agree. 2) …under some species concepts but not others, as usual.
Thread won.
Re: Clades.
I would suggest that the problem with thinking of human populations as ‘clade-like’ is that our best evidence points towards there *usually* if not always having been substantive gene-flow between any population one might choose to identify and the surrounding populations, and hence for there never having been human populations that were clade-like for any reasonable length of time.
It would of course be *imaginable* for there to have been clade-like populations of humans, but even if there had been, the question of how different those populations would be (or would have been) would still be a separate empirical issue (two populations that were isolated, but both reasonably large, would not necessarily diverge much over relatively short time scales…). But again, since on my reading of the literature all our best evidence points towards nearly ubiquitous gene-flow and away from isolated populations, the point is moot.
Robin Andreasen has argued that there once were human populations that formed clades, but that with the growth of travel, the clade-like nature of populations has collapsed. I think historically she is wrong to think that travel was so rare until recently, and again, I think our best evidence points towards even quasi-isolation having been the less frequent rather than more frequent state for most human populations. But her position does point towards a question — how much gene flow is necessary to undermine the ‘clade-like’ nature of populations more generally? It is I suppose possible that on some markedly weak interpretations, there might once have been short-lived clade-like populations of humans, but that seems to be abusing the term… And in any event, it wouldn’t get you the ‘races’ that the HBD folks want!
IIRC, in Ursula LeGuin’s “The Lathe of Heaven,” race problems were “solved” by turning everyone gray. (And that was the only one of the story’s “solutions” that wasn’t worse than the original problem.)
And to the white supremacist crowd, you start being “against Whites” the second you start objecting to the notion that they should become the progenitors of a tiny aristocracy of inbred “pure” self-proclaimed übermensch entitled to hoard all the available resources and power and convert these into castles, servants and harems.
…I don’t know how long you’ve been waiting for that setup, but that was PERFECT.
“Hello HBD. This is the operator. You have a collect call from “Basic Familiarity with History”. Will you accept the charges? Hello? HELLO?
Hmm, sorry, Basic Familiarity with History, they say they’ve never heard of you.”
Oh, communist:
this is why I love you and miss your blog!
Should we try one more time to actually get together in person?
It’s my nym, without extended honorific, at the google thingy, remember? We really should make it work. I need more smart, anti-racist snark in my life.
“are historically recent developments that help to justify and maintain hierarchy.”
Someone is introducing a red herring here, though I don’t know if it is the “Cultural Marxists” or their detractors. Substitute “historically recent developments” with “age-old pathologies” and you still have the same point that cultural norms need to be evaluated with regard to whether they are actually methods of maintaining privilege, and therefore have no place in a free and fair society.
But this phrase functions as a bait and switch where you planned to argue for changing a cultural norm on the basis that it is contrary to human rights, and instead get into a pointless p$$$ing match over whether it is recent or “traditional”.
Regarding “mixed” results: I am white, my wife is Asian, and I live in Vancouver, quite literally the “city of mixed marriages.” I see so many racial variations illustrating the Bell Curve, it’s a fascinating proof of Mendel’s observations. A couple of days ago, downtown, I saw a young man with *completely* Caucasian features and *totally* Asian skin colouring. Cool. And two days later, only a block away, I saw a 10-year old boy with dead-white pale, pasty skin, and fully Asian facial features.
I have pointed this out to my son, and also explained to him that by virtue of “hybrid vigour”, he has partial immunities to both smallpox (my side) and malaria (wife’s side).
Yes, it doesn’t matter how many times we humans fuck across racial lines, there will always be a huge variation of skin colour/facial features. And unfortunately, a bunch of people who think those variations really mean something.
I posted this comment before about some modern definitions of population, race, subspecies, and species. They are from Futuyma’s book, Evolution 3rd Edition (http://sites.sinauer.com/evolution3e/glossary.html), which is used at the university level.
Population A group of conspecific organisms that occupy a more or less well defined geographic region and exhibit reproductive continuity from generation to generation; ecological and reproductive interactions are more frequent among these individuals than with members of other populations of the same species.
Race A poorly defined term for a set of populations occupying a particular region that differ in one or more characteristics from populations elsewhere; equivalent to subspecies. In some writings, a distinctive phenotype, whether or not allopatric from others.
Subspecies A named geographic race; a set of populations of a species that share one or more distinctive features and occupy a different geographic area from other subspecies.
Species In the sense of biological species, the members of a group of populations that interbreed or potentially interbreed with one another under natural conditions; a complex concept (see Chapter 17). Also, a fundamental taxonomic category to which individual specimens are assigned, which often but not always corresponds to the biological species. See also biological species, phylogenetic species concept.
The one thing that I would like to point out, and is captured a bit in the definitions, it that there is no completely objective criteria within and amongst the definitions because it is all on a continuum as you move from a population to a species (and beyond).
David Marjanović@26
Skin color is an example of polygenic inheritance and is not an example of Mendelian inherited trait.
sez ray ingles@9:
More: In the Origin, Darwin never referred to races of humans.
You seem to be making a sarcastic comment on certain persons’ ignorance and/or poor grasp of logic. Would you like to intensify the level of snark?
They are claiming this applies to the U.S.? With a straight face?
And… damn. My reply to ray ingles was supposed to have a pseudo-HTML “<Clippy>” tag.
Anri@3
I would also add that anytime someone invokes Darwinism there is a good chance that they don’t understand evolution. Evolutionary theory did not end with Darwin and anytime someone says Darwinism or Darwinian Evolution it makes my head want to pop, because Darwin is only a part of modern evolutionary theory.
Each of the genes is, separately, inherited according to Mendel’s laws. I made no claims to the contrary.
Sometimes. And sometimes not. There is absolutely no doubt that all living human beings belong to one species.
A nation has been famously defined as a group of people united by a common delusion about its ancestry and a common hatred of its neighbours.
David Marjanović@42
It is true AFAIK that the genes are inherited according to Mendel’s laws of segregation and independent assortment, but they are not inherited according to Mendel’s law of dominance.
Nick Gotts@43
I completely agree. I think you are inferring things in my comment @36 that just are not there.
Also if you look at the link I gave @36 here is the definition of a clade
And like Alex SL@23, I am not sure why PZ would use that word to describe groups of humans.
No, I’m not. I’m obliged to conclude that you don’t understand what you’re writing.
But this doesn’t support your point*. In a contributing alleles model, offspring of heterozygotes will still exhibit segregation–they won’t all have the same phenotype, but will have phenotypes that are multinomially distributed (approaching a normal distribution when allelic contributions are approximately equal). This should apply across a population, varying only in skewness when allele frequencies are unequal (linky)**.
*And ignores the fact that Mendel’s law of dominance is far from universally applicable.
**Assuming HW equilibrium no variance arising from environment, linkage equilibrium, and that all phenotypic variance is additive genetic variance.
Nick Gotts@36
And what do you think I don’t understand?
Antiochus Epiphanes@49
My original point (@37) was that skin color does not follow Mendelian genetics and is an example of a polygenic inheritance, which is exactly what your link is describing.
Well, since we’re all quite ready to point out that Darwin was not the be-all and end-all of evolution, may I also point out that Mendel wasn’t the ultimate in genetics, either.
“….in 1960 census, was 90% white.”
Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but in 1960, the classification “white” included Hispanics and Asians; I remember my mother self identifying as white on my birth certificate around that general time frame because it was the only box she could check. She’s brown as a chestnut.
We’ve never been as homogenous as these douchebags would have liked us to have been.
PZ Myers@52
I agree. Mendelian genetics is just a good place to start, because of it’s simplicity, before you get into the non-Mendelian genetics (ie. the rest of genetics).
Why do you say that Darwin was racist? From what I’ve seen his works specifically refuted racist myths at the time and he seemed to support racial equality. Even of the ‘savage’ native americans, he believed that all man came from savage origins, which is the opposite of the popular view of the time period (which is that they were naturally that way).
Is there a particular reason why you say Darwin was racist?
Darwin didn’t get everything right of course, still to this day it is pretty damn impressive how way ahead of his time he was, and how well common descent and natural selection have stood the test of time. He was also way ahead of his time in his attitudes toward race including his adamant opposition to slavery. Of course if you compare his attitudes with modern ones (outside conservative and tea party types) of course he comes out looking quite bad, but we should judge people by the zeitgeist of their times, not modern times.
Whose to say that in future times we’re all going to look to future historians like wachadoodles and barbarians for doing nothing and not giving a fuck about climate change as well as numerous other related environmental disasters such as human created mass extinctions, and perhaps for thinking that money and “free markets” are the best ways to distribute wealth, that is if future people survive to tell the tale.
If this is “cultural marxism,” count me in since I agree with much of what was said.
I once had an argument with a guy that claimed that blondes were the master race because blonde womens’ armpit hair is softer and because all the blonde people, including Jesus, came from Atlantis (which was apparently somewhere near Britain).
Gee, the Redhead begs to differ…..
So…”cultural Marxism” is right-wing dogwhistle code for “being a decent human being”, basically?
Understood. Sign me up for a big frosty mug, then.
Antiochus Epiphanes@49 (and David Marjanović@42)
Your right. I was conflating codominance and polygenic inheritance in regards to skin color. I take back my comments @45 and 51.
ummm, because the blonde gene is recessive? yeah, that makes blondes a little more rare, but is rarity, the definition of Masterdom? If so, Redhair (ginger?) seems even rarer, so they must definitely be THE master race.
And with such fiery tempers, reflected by hair color. Kneel before the redheads.
You don’t really need to call them “HBD racists”, that’s kind of like saying “red pill misogynists”, or more poignantly, “KKK racists”. It’s a tad redundant.
Quite agree with most of what has been said about that human biodiversity site’s lack of knowledge of
biology, cultural marxism, multiculturalismreality in general, but I noticed something that’s a pet peeve of mine:This has never been true. Ever. From British Sailors of Colour in the 1800s
http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/65828070288/1800s-week-flidgetjerome-submitted-to
To Ira Alridge, Victorian actor.
http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/59324381697/1800s-week-portraits-of-ira-frederick-alridge
To John Blanke, court musician of Henry VII and Henry VIII
http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/52069684636/unknown-artist-westminster-tournament-roll
To sir Morien of Arthurian legends
http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/55426449653/sir-morien-black-knight-of-the-round-table-the
And that’s just recent stuff in England, since that’s what I had links for at the ready. There’s evidence for people of colour in England far earlier, including as Roman soldiers at or before Hadiran’s Wall (hilariously, the Vindolanda letters that tell us the most about them contain an awful lot of requests for warmer socks). I could go on about my own home country, Denmark, or any other part of Europe.
In other words: it’s probably never been the case that Europe was all-white, nor that it was segregated from the rest of the world. The silk road was in use before it became the silk road, meaning that individuals and objects travelled from Asia to Europe and Africa, the Roman Empire, Macedonian Empire, Mongol Empire and the Islamic nations that encompassed Al-Andalus (More or less Spain and Portugal) all encompassed both parts of Europe as well as areas outside of Europe. Contrary to popular belief, people didn’t leave where they’d lived for a long time just because an empire fell.
The whole idea falls apart from pretty much any perspective, but the historigraphic one pretty much shows that their basic premise of contemporary multi-culturalism corrupting ancient separate non-overlapping pure races is based on something that never really was the case.
PS: Since I linked so much to it, I am not affiliated with MedievalPoC. It’s a very good blog about history and the misconceptions a lot of people have about medieval Europe and history in general, though. ^_^
Hm, nothing about the main plot then? That cultural marxism is just a sinister tactic meant to destroy society , so it can more easily be put under the jack-boot heel of communism? That was the storyline i usually heard pre Breivik from the far right/libertarians.
@61 twas brillig (stevem)
Yeah, well… it’s been conclusively proven* that gingers don’t have souls, so…
*In a study by one E. Cartman in 2005
from @63, who objected to this myth:
This triggered memory of my own distorted sense of “racially homogenous” (hopefully, to be disabused of it) that of all the peoples of the world, the most racially homogenous was Japan. All small, short, straight black hair, slanty eye lids, lactose intolerance, yada, yada, yada. The only variations among them was dental; buck teeth being the most significant. It was so obvious to me, how homogeneous they are, when I visited Japan and towered over them, in my 6ft tall, lumpy body. I know, I know, it’s just my poor senses that made it difficult for me to distinguish each Japanese person from another person of the same heritage… that’s why I’m writing this here, to purge my bigotry and racial stereotyping, etc. etc. Really, I’m not just trolling to say insulting things under cover, I know it is stupid to characterize Japanese this way, I’m trying to purge it from myself, honest. Writing is one way to purge those thoughts that float around in one’s brain. Going now…
Anyone denying that race is a social construct should take a brief look at the history of groups that have come to be considered “white” over the last few centuries. I wonder how many of these racists are of Irish or Italian descent, and if they knew how much luck they’d have trying to join the equivalent white supremacist groups a hundred years ago or two.
Antiochus Epiphanes@49 (and David Marjanović@42)
I remembered last night that skin color is a combination of incomplete dominance and polygenic. So I take back the take back of my comments @45 and 51. (Arrrgh, the brain farts were bad with this one yesterday)
parasiteboy: no biggie.
No; under most species concepts, clades can lie within species, and usually they can even overlap species.
Clade = monophylum
An ancestor and all its descendants.
One word: Ainu.
The Japanese language hints at two sources, one from the west, one from the south.
twas brillig #66
My first experience in Japan was more like,
“How the fuck can you say that these people all look alike??!?”
Even if everything these misogynistic fascists were true, which it can’t be unless science completely redefines species, the history of racism has brought to society the most malevolent horrors in history.
The scary thing about the HBD guys is that they currently hold a lot of sway over parts of the DSM. Like, seriously, one of the members of the Human Biodiversity Institute was appointed to lead their committee on sexual paraphilias. And of course he got his own homophobic, sexist, and transphobic pet theories in. :(
Sarah Noble:
Shit. That is scary.
Argh.
#67, Tom Foss:
Even my pure white Scandinavian ancestors faced early discrimination: they were slow, stupid, emotionless, passive, and suitable only for oxlike mindless labor. Send ’em off to someplace cold — that’s what they’re used to, right? — and have them farm places the temperate white people were too smart to settle for. And my father’s side were all miserly Scots and flight drunken Irish, and we all know how subhuman they are.
Fortunately, we’ve got black people and Mexicans to look down upon, so it got better for my ethnic groups. And some of my relatives, on both sides of the family, we’re appalling racists.