http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/dont-eat-fried-chicken/Content?oid=15873824 Comments On: Don't Eat Fried Chicken by Charles Mudede en-us Copyright 2013 The Stranger. All rights reserved. This RSS file is offered to individuals, The Stranger readers, and non-commercial organizations only. Any commercial websites wishing to use this RSS file, please contact The Stranger. webmaster@thestranger.com (The Stranger Webmaster) Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:01 -0700 Thu, 23 May 2013 09:30:00 -0700 Foundation http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss
1) Europeans are naturally superior (racist)
2) Europeans during the colonial era were morally worse than the people they conquered (maybe true in some cases, but there's plenty of non-Western empires that probably would've jumped at the chance to found overseas colonies if they had the technology to pull it off, so it's a fairly dubious, borderline-racist claim at the end of the day)
3) Europe and Asia were able to develop technologically due to the geography of those continents and the plants and animals they were able to domesticate that Africa and the Americas lacked, and so Europeans subjugated everyone else because they could (not racist, since it depends on the luck of having easy-to-domesticate horses instead of impossible-to-domesticate zebras). If you believe Jared Diamond says that might makes right, that's a very problematic argument that totally excuses colonialism, but he never says that. Other people just read it into the book.
Posted by redemma]]> Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:12:25 -0800 The Stranger
I'm in accordance with sgt_doom, in some strange way, and I believe that with Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond has been the captain of an 'intellectualist' pop-culture voyage to conveniently forget about the past and present violence of colonialism once and for all.

I haven't read the new book, nor will I (understanding all the while that this doesn't make me the most credible critic), but "What can we learn from traditional societies?" sounds a bit like "the conquistadores slaid them, the Dutch and English shackled and sold them, our large corporations have murdered and displaced them, and we the upper-middle class of Western society still have the nerve to romanticize their cute little primitive tricks."

Fuck you Jared Diamond, fuck you.
Posted by d.colonel.eyes]]> Wed, 06 Feb 2013 11:04:41 -0800 The Stranger Posted by Claypatch]]> Tue, 05 Feb 2013 23:43:10 -0800 The Stranger
I agree with you Charles, there seems to be more belly button gazing in Yesterday than expected. I have appreciated it because it forces a contemplation of values that are taken for granted in the hypercivilized modern age. Not all of us readers of The Stranger are bohemian hippies - or completely unengaged ragesters like Sgt. Doom - and a little splash of bracing scientific rationale to urge introspection of our values is welcome. But Yesterday is really just a half step up from being a really good self-help book, not the sweeping perspective on the world and how it came to be or what millions of years of evolutionary biology drives in us as individuals, a species, or a culture.

Posted by sniff]]> Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:30:24 -0800 The Stranger
Colonialism throughout Africa and parts of Asia?

Negative, people far more intelligent than I (Jane Jacobs and David Deutsch) have deftly destroyed Diamond's fundamental premise.

When, in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, America was slaughtering Filipinos in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it had nothing to do with Geobiology, or Biogeography or whatever the eff Diamond claims, it was empire and land and resource theft, pure and simple.

Resource theft, and the killing which accompanies it, is a complete trademark of such events: the untold killing and slaughter during the 1950s in South America (during Eisenhower, which laid the further groundwork), and especially during Reagan's administration in the 1980s, with American Special Ops doing untold damage to those societies and cultures there, all in the name of American-based multinational resource theft!

Your review of his recent book is completely on target, of course.

Where Diamond excels is writing those introductions for his buddies' hedge fund books, similar Wall Street fans and apologists.

Posted by sgt_doom]]> Thu, 31 Jan 2013 10:40:19 -0800 The Stranger