A new shirt, Vaccines Cause Adults. I think that’s pretty funny. Since I don’t have that sort of human, it wasn’t my idea. Obviously, Photo 51 t-shirts are still on the DNAGeeks website.
Patrick Wyman does not recommend The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. The killer observation for me is that whenever Patrick knew a lot about the topic the author was kind of wrong or off. This is an incredibly important sign for me. If you don’t have this still, you probably need to get to a point where you know enough about a topic. Just pick one, any topic. Additionally, he observes that 40% of the book deals with 20th and 21st century history. That’s also a big no-no for me. Contemporary history is well covered in our society. We have a presentism bias.
On the other hand, I would recommend Empires of the Silk Road. Christopher I. Beckwith is kind of cranky, but he’s learned and interesting.
Valerie Hansen’s The Silk Road: A New History is one I’d also recommend. It’s more focused on archaeology and the earlier period before 1000 AD. Hansen also lacks the long narrative ambition of Beckwith’s treatment, but if you want to know how Sogdian merchants rolled during the Tang dynasty, this is for you.
Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road is also a good book, though its focus is rather narrow.
Lee Jussim asked on Twitter what counts as “white” today since so much social justice discourse (SJD) revolves around the concept. My response is basically “white” is what is necessary for you to win an argument (though another element now is that if you are Muslim you are not white, no matter how white you look, just like if you have a Spanish surname, you are not white either somehow). Here is how it works:
Italians are white: the ancient Romans were white people who oppressed and executed a marginalized person of color, a brown Palestinian named Jesus.
Italians are not white: Until after World War II Italians were actually not viewed as white, and had to “become white” (or, they had to become people who think they are white). They were even lynched!
The takeaway is that sophism is a feature, not a bug. That’s why I’m so good at faking this discourse.
Fire & Blood launch at Lowe’s theatre! Join John Hodgman and GRRM as they discuss Fire & Blood. Don’t miss the only appearance and book signing event for Fire & Blood. https://t.co/wAUsYk4aRw
— George RR Martin (@GRRMspeaking) September 29, 2018
He’s trolling us.
Global alliances and wheels within wheels. Talking about the concern that American Leftists have about Hindu nationalism. Though they seem sanguine about Islamism.
John Horgan interviews Bob Trivers in Jamaica. As usual with Trivers, it’s crazy. Though if you read his autobiography, Wild Life, there’s a lot that’s similar.
Of all Trivers’ books though, I would really recommend Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers. There’s a lot of science and biography in that work. Anecdotes about W. D. Hamilton in particular I enjoyed.
Variation in actual relationship as a consequence of Mendelian sampling and linkage.
What’s China’s new luxury status symbol? A curvy butt. Had a conversation with a friend who is a businessman in China. His female employees have butt-workout apps.
Margins – Save, annotate and share your papers with anyone.
An Empirical Demonstration of Unsupervised Machine Learning in Species Delimitation. The title is kind of weird. STRUCTURE? Also, I don’t really believe in automatic species delimitation. But it’s an effort.
Common genetic variants contribute to risk of rare severe neurodevelopmental disorders.
Reproductive Longevity Predicts Mutation Rates in Primates.
Stronger and higher proportion of beneficial amino acid changing mutations in humans compared to mice and flies. I think I’ll blog this.
Reihan Salam has a new book out, Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders. The title is a bit overwrought, but Reihan is not. Obviously we share a lot in terms of our backgrounds and our opinions. And on questions regarding assimilation we’ve been on the same page for a long time.
The Blank Slateism of the Right. This is really about the Anglo-Right. American conservatives who come out of the liberal tradition are big fans of John Locke. That should tell you all that you need to know.
Robert Plomin’s Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are is coming out soon. To be honest it looks like an updated version of Judith Rich Harris’ The Nurture Assumption.
Greg Cochran wrote up a review in Quillette with the expected title, Forget Nature Versus Nurture. Nature Has Won. Nathan Comfort in Nature wrote Genetic determinism rides again.
Stuart Ritchie was not happy with Comfort’s review:
Another disgracefully smear-filled–not to mention factually sloppy–review of a genetics book from Nathaniel Comfort. Why do Nature keep asking this guy to write for them? https://t.co/QwNjk9U1st
— Stuart Ritchie (@StuartJRitchie) September 25, 2018
The review is as bad as you’d think. He doesn’t seem to know the science, but that’s a feature, not a bug, for the sort of review he’s going to give. It’s useful for me because I can note who retweets and “likes” the review, as these are people who I will ignore on all things genetics indefinitely.
A bigger question that I asked a few liberal academic friends: with all the concern over eugenics where’s the widespread objection among the usual hand wringers about noninvasive prenatal testing and widespread abortion of fetuses that test positive for Down Syndrome? In the Nordic countries nearly 100% of fetuses which test positive are aborted. In France about 75%. In the United states 70%.
My personal suspicion is that academics are much more concerned about future and vague eugenical specters. Not those activities done freely and through the proactive choice of people of their own class and likely liberal politics. Burn a few Robert Plomin’s at the stake, but make sure you don’t jeopardize your colleagues’ dreams of having a “healthy” baby.
Overlooked factors in the analysis of parole decisions. Basically it looks like the old result that judges are harsher before lunch is an artifact of who is seen before lunch (prisoners without attorneys tended to be seen before lunch).
Unless I have looked at the original study, I’m starting to just shy away from retelling results published through peer review. Studies really need to have sample sizes in the title. Small sample sizes are OK in some contexts, but so often they are used to get away with stuff.
I for one am looking forward to several hundred pages of Targaryen lore (although I thought it was hilarious that when Elio and Linda asked for Targaryen stuff for the World of Ice and Fire book, he gave them the equivalent of 800-900 pages of the stuff).
A lot of East Asian women have flat, tucked under butts – it’s due to the angles of the spine and pelvis. Strengthening glutes can help and has other benefits. If people don’t exercise their butts enough, the muscles on the lower outer parts of the buttocks can atrophy with age, which very adversely affects people’s ability to walk strongly with their feet close together. I see a lot of elderly people who walk with splayed legs and rock side to side when they walk; it’s really common here – that’s because they have lost those muscles, and once atrophied they can’t get them back.
So, more power to the butt workout apps, that’s the way to do it.
That splayed leg rocking walking motion is one of two things that are noticeably very prevalent in elderly women here, along with really bad scoliosis – some of them end up bent over double, it’s so bad (no prizes for guessing what that is due to).
http://www.fao.org/state-of-food-security-nutrition/en/
Hunger is on the rise
Weren’t northern Italians always considered white?
Finished “the captured economy” by brink Lindsey. A very important book! Ended up skimming “the diversity delusion” as it had a lot of info I’d already been made aware of through Twitter. A good review, though, if you’ve never heard that stuff.
Weren’t northern Italians always considered white?
you’re the white southerner, so an expert on racism, you tell us 😉
though to be sure the gov. always thought italians were white. they allowed to be naturalized
Last year, after my oldest took her first college exam (either ACT/SAT), the big discussion among her white friends afterwards is that they didn’t know how to answer the race/ethnicity question. They had never heard of the term “Caucasian.” At least one of them checked Hispanic, but I think they mostly chose to skip the question, which is pretty white, right?
Anyway, I thought of Razib, ’cause I know he thinks “Caucasian” is a stupid category.
I had a hard time with Empires of the Silk Road. The editorializing at the end was difficult to stomach. But I learned a lot.
The “who is considered white” thing becomes very interesting when applied to North American Jews (Jewish discussion boards get the question on a fairly regular basis). The answer to the question serves as a decently reliable ideological litmus test.
What about the Spanish & Portuguese in the colonial era? Did, they refer to themselves as white? Did, early racial theorists in the 1700s group all Europeans together as ‘white’ (or whatever term they used). That’s a question to ask.
Italy has always been at the epicenter of what it means to be European (‘white’) in terms of culture. It has always been very European or ‘white.’
The (western) Roman empire was really the beginning of a unified European cultural sphere and it was centered in Rome. The (western) Church was centered in Rome & was a core feature of Europe from 300-1800. If, you look at European history, places in Italy usually played a big role. Renaissance, classical music, etc.
This goes to show, European=/=northern European. What, it meant to be a westerner wasn’t originally defined by physical appearance. But, now a lot of European history has been racialized. To some people western culture=super uber whiteness & racism. It’s why, some idiots call ancient Greek philosophers “old dead white men” when being ‘white’ meant nothing to them………. (continued)
………. (continued)
Here’s an example of changing the definition of race in history to fit a narrative…..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples
Antiquity section.
“when it came to expansion in other parts of the world, namely Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, then totally new cultural dynamics had entered into the equation, so to speak, and one sees here of what was to take the Americas, South East Asia”
“But because already existent populations within other parts of Europe at the time of classical antiquity had more in common culturally speaking with the Greco-Roman world, the intricacies involved in expansion across the European frontier were not so contentious relative to indigenous issues”
one good reason to support Communism
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/world/asia/china-maoists-xi-protests.html
Italians were lynched because they were Catholics. The KKK was anti-Catholic in addition to being racist.
“Reproductive Longevity Predicts Mutation Rates in Primates.” This is a really cool paper. It is short, easy to understand (comparatively) and worth the read.
the ancient Romans were white people who oppressed and executed a marginalized person of color, a brown Palestinian named Jesus.
What are you, some sort an anti-Semite?
The KKK was anti-Catholic in addition to being racist.
Nothing new. Just carrying out the fine tradition of the Protestants in the Catholic colony of Maryland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Revolution_(Maryland)#1689_Protestant_Revolution_in_Province_of_Maryland
A crazy piece on what it’s like to be Ughyr in China:
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2018/10/01/an-internment-camp-for-10-million-uyghurs
And another crazy video about the Chinese health care system: https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000005336868/capitalism-china-health-care-system.html
They’ve reduced the number of people in absolute poverty but it’s now one of the most unequal societies
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-23/china-s-racing-to-the-top-in-income-inequality
My personal suspicion is that academics are much more concerned about future and vague eugenical specters.
They’re concerned that a revival of eugenic thinking will cause the Nazis to pop up out of the ground and reopen the death camps. Because eugenics is what caused the Nazis. Seriously! I can’t count the number of times it’s happened that I would be talking about some topic even just tangentially related to eugenics, and someone would ominously intone something along the lines of “they thought like that in Germany back in the 30’s, and we all know where that led…“
Holy moly a link to the Chief Hennessy assassination. Well played Rajib. I like to think I still know some things you don’t but I see now that’s an illusion.
Mr. Khan,
In your tweet, you asked about the Saudis disbursing money in DC. This is a most interesting question, to which you’ll never receive an accurate or satisfactory answer.
Of course, all major countries lobby the USG, but the mechanics of that lobbying are different from country to country. For example, Chinese lobbying is often effected through the US Chamber of Commerce-types. The American corporate lobby (including the agri-business sector) is heavily invested in the US-China relationship and advocates on behalf of that relationship even without much prompting from the PRC.
Saudis don’t have this kind of “organic” support in the US. To the extent they have business relationships, these are most salient in petroleum and defense. But these are heavily politicized and are subject to considerable scrutiny, especially today. So the Saudis invest greatly in personal relationships* among hyper elites and the “deep state.” You can see this in a snap shot when you go to a Saudi party in Great Falls, VA minutes away from Langley and see the who’s who of the deep state in cozy company of the Saudi notables.
*These personal relationships also factor in substantially in Saudi domestic power plays in ways more grassroots, cultural (e.g. France and UK), institutional, or govt-to-govt foreign lobbying does not.
Russians, by the way, despite a long experience in running front groups during the Cold War, are rather uncouth and awkward at influence-peddling in the U.S. The Israelis are, of course, without peer in this game, but they have tremendous advantages that other countries have in that their co-ethnics are elites in almost every walk of life in the U.S.