Young Master Smeet
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Where we were last time:Rosa accepts the dialecticI quoted:
Schopenhauer wrote:Dialectic, on the other hand, would treat of the intercourse between two rational beings who, because they are rational, ought to think in common, but who, as soon as they cease to agree like two clocks keeping exactly the same time, create a disputation, or intellectual contest. Regarded as purely rational beings, the individuals would, I say, necessarily be in agreement, and their variation springs from the difference essential to individuality; in other words, it is drawn from experience.To which Rosa said:
Lichtenstein wrote:I'm OK with the classical definition of 'dialectic' (connected with argument), although I prefer to avoid it since it creates confusion when I say such things; what I am not Ok with is the metaphysical version of the dialectic many of you seem to have accepted.Now, accepting the dialectical approach described by Schopenhauer means accepting that knowledge is contingent and emergent as part of an ongoing process, which is precisely what the "metaphysical" approach says in it's entirety. Rosa Lichtenstein may have spent 30 years of study on this, but I've spent five minutes in my coffee break this morning, and I get that. This post contains everything you need to know about dialectic. All else is detail.
Arrrrr!!
Quote:I think that's just playing with words, but I understand what you are saying. To draw an analogy, the difference between 'male' and 'female' is essentialist. What you are arguing here is that, while there are differences between different regional groups, those differences are not of fundamental importance.Yes. And no. What I am saying is that the packages that constitute different "regional groups" are not integral. Now, a ham sandwich must contain bread and ham to be a ham sandwich. But whether there is lettuce, the bread is brown or white, whether you use mayonaise or margerine or butter, or (indeed) the type of Ham involved is entirely incidental, it remains a ham sandwich. Just so the historical traits that mark apparent races. They are features that fit together more or less accidentally, with at most the glue of history putting them together.
Quote:I would add that tribal identification is a human impulse and any attempt to integrate different peoples together on a large scale can only be harmful and result in strife.Peasants were turned into Frenchmen, as the book put it, quite well.
Quote:That's just a reference to the scaleability of the methodology and doesn't refute the notion there are races (or meta-groupings) among human beings. The general point that comes out of the study is that tiny genetic differences are not a refutation of racial categorisation (a point you are now honest enough to acknowledge – good) and that regional and continental differences can be patterned into the genome.It's not about the scaleability of the method, but that increasing interbreeding between formerly distinct geographic areas can jigger it. A similar study, btw, can be done of radioactive isotopes found in bones of the dead: we can trace quite accurately where a human being grew up many thousands of years ago: that doesn't mean that we can categorise people according to radioactvie isotopes. The association is accidental, not essential.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/10/russell-brand-on-revolution
Quote:Total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political and economic system is what interests me, but that’s not on the ballot. Is utopian revolution possible? The freethinking social architect Buckminster Fuller said humanity now faces a choice: oblivion or utopia. We’re inertly ambling towards oblivion, is utopia really an option?…
Quote:Billy [Connolly] eyed us both, with kindly disapprobation. “I’d like to be a nuisance,” he said. “I want to be a troublemaker, there in the gallery in parliament shouting RUBBISH and PROVE IT.” Who am I to argue with The Great Trickster Connolly? I will never vote and I don’t think you should, either.While he did support 'Humanitarian intervention' in Iraq, he did later regret the decision when the reports of half a million dead started coming in. He struck me as a pretty humane writer.
This seems like a good start:http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/earth-carrying-capacity.htmbasically, every additional mouth to feed is a pair of hands to work: poverty exists because of property distribution and politics, not because of the absolute number of human beings, even if we try not to reach the potential carrying capacity of 40 billion. Indeed, there is a strong argument that you are being robbed. Where countries have low life expectancies, such as Gambia at around 40, you are being deprived of the useful work, knowledge and skills of those people who are dying young. Calls to cut the population are calls to make us all poorer.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24475342
Quote:Spencer Wells explained: "When you look at today's populations, what you are seeing is a hazy palimpsest of what actually went on to create present-day patterns."Dr Haak concurs: "None of the dynamic changes we observed could have been inferred from modern-day genetic data alone, highlighting the potential power of combining ancient DNA studies with archaeology to reconstruct human evolutionary history."So: 1) The genetic evidence alone isn't enough, we can only read it as part of a geographic/historic story in which we know otehr facts. 2) The Europeans only came up here 7,500 years ago. JBS Haldane measured the Darwin of humans to be about 70,000 years, so that's one tenth, which is almost an irrelevence in evolutionary terms.
Hrothgar wrote:This statement is incorrect. I have already explained why in this thread, but see also the below study as a referenced example.http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/8/68It's important to bear in mind that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is a general reference work rather than an authoritative text for any particular specialism.Erm,
Quote:Some have argued that the differences between continentally defined groups are relatively small and that it is difficult to distinguish groups without using large amounts of genetic data or specifically chosen markers. Our results show that continentally defined groups can be easily distinguished using only a small number of randomly selected SNPs. SNPs that are informative about ancestry are common and widely distributed throughout the genome and across SNP types. These findings illustrate the extent of genetic variation between continentally defined groups.That doesn't refute the Britannica article, unless you squint your eyes and tilt your head slightly to the left on second Tuesday of the Fourth month. No one disputes that contingent geographic/historic genetic differences exist, but the question is whether they are essential, never mind socially consequential. I also note from the article:
Quote:It could easily be extended to make predictions about smaller units of geography or individuals with a mixed background. This would require more extensive genotype data and well-characterized information about ancestral geographic origin from such individuals.That difficulty will increase as previously geographically distinct populations mix. That suggests to me that such differences are contingent.
Just to quote from Encyclopaedia Britannica:
Quote:Although most people continue to think of races as physically distinct populations, scientific advances in the 20th century demonstrated that human physical variations do not fit a “racial” model. Instead, human physical variations tend to overlap. There are no genes that can identify distinct groups that accord with the conventional race categories. In fact, DNA analyses have proved that all humans have much more in common, genetically, than they have differences. The genetic difference between any two humans is less than 1 percent. Moreover, geographically widely separated populations vary from one another in only about 6 to 8 percent of their genes. Because of the overlapping of traits that bear no relationship to one another (such as skin colour and hair texture) and the inability of scientists to cluster peoples into discrete racial packages, modern researchers have concluded that the concept of race has no biological validity.Oh what an evil man Ralph Miliband was:
Evil man wrote:This is in no way to suggest that electoral legitimation is all that a socialist party needs to seek or that a socialist party which means business can afford to rely on such legitimation alone. On the contrary, there is no question that an attempt at the radical transformation of the existing social order in socialist directions will require a lot more than this, within a complex and diffuse scenario that must include many different forms of action, pressure and struggle. But it also does need to include the attempt to achieve a measure of electoral legitimation at different levels and the achievement of a measure of representation in existing institutions. In the British context, as in the context of any other bourgeois democratic regime, this is an inescapable requirement for a socialist party, and needs to be treated as such, as a duty and as an opportunity, and not as a distracting and meaningless chore.In The British Road to Socialism, the Communist Party speaks of the creation by the labour movement, and as a result of a many sided struggle, of 'the conditions for the election of a Parliamentary majority and government pledged to a socialist programme';6 and it also suggests that 'when a socialist majority in Parliament is won it will need the support of the mass movement outside Parliament to uphold the decisions it has taken in Parliament. Conversely, the Parliamentary decisions will give legal endorsement to popular aims and popular struggles'.'It is very reasonable to argue that formulas such as these place too great an emphasis on the parliamentary and electoral aspects of a strategy of socialist advance; and also that they offer much too cramped a view of the meaning of socialist democracy. This is what the 'ultra-left' groupings have always claimed. But they have usually tended to spoil a reasonable case by arguing in terms which had little if any relevance to the real conditions at hand. They have rightly been concerned to warn against the dangers of 'parliamentary cretinism'. But they have themselves easily succombed to the temptations of anti-parliamentary cretinism and to the attractions of revolutionary phrase-mongering. There is no reason to think that this will change: it clearly answers the particular needs and wishes of a small and constantly changing but constant minority of militants on the British left.http://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5397/2296#.Uk2G3Fv1D6U
twc wrote:I read those sociologists as asserting that natural scientists lack scientific integrity. This is I believe, for the reasons I gave, a quite undeserved charge against scientists of conscious human fraud.But that's precisely what they aren't alleging. Just as with, say, Chomsky's propaganda model, it works best when you assume that the scientist in question is arguing in good faith, from genuinely (however mistakenly held) opinions. The point is that the funders back and promote science based on their interest, and a scientist whose methods and results please them will be rewarded, while those that don't will be cast into outer darkness. There are other methods/faults. Humans are political animals, and rivalries mean someone might attack a theory because they don't like who propounds it (or, conversely, support it because of the personal authority of the propounder). No one has the time to carefully sift all research, we have to take a small amount of 'faith' in the practitioners, sometimes (often) that is misplaced. Only after all that do we throw in conscious fraud as a real risk.
Erm, I linked to an article that demonstrated that Lbird's view was already incorporated into maintream academic discourse on the theory of science. I feel I have no need to: "confess that you’ve ignorantly sided with the terrified capitalist" ; "admit you’ve fallen hook, line and sinker for the belly-aching of a capitalist industry"; nor "propose, in this rapacious capitalist world, who has the integrity to diagnose the cause, and solve the problem". Indeed, that the apiarist industry is a party to a power struggle to defend itself was, kind of, part of the point.Now, TWC, will you:Admit that you started the Peloponnesian war.Apologise for the Bee Gees.Accept that only John Hurt can save the world, and cure all its ills?
https://theconversation.com/sometimes-science-cant-see-the-wood-for-the-bees-18532
Quote:Among those researching the field of science, technology and society, it is argued that scientific knowledge is never just about facts, but also about power. Facts are not simply discovered by science as absolute truths, but are instead constructed in social contexts that are riddled with power relations. As the old adage suggests, knowledge and power are always intertwined.What becomes a fact and what does not is a social and political issue that is concerned with what kind of knowledge – and importantly whose knowledge – acquires legitimacy and therefore authority.The full article is interesting on this question with regard to nicotinoid pesticides, the precautionary principle and bees.
