Comments on: Crunchiness redux

By: adam

adam — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 23:16:41 +0000

Louis,

I’m going to start calling that the “Fox News” defense: everyone is biased, so it’s not only pointless but downright underhanded to try to maintain objectivity.

Both you and Jim Blaut miss (or misrepresent) Diamond’s take on culture. It’s not irrelevant, but it is highly conditioned by environment. Diamond is interested in ultimate rather than proximate causes, and concludes that culture is more the latter than the former.

Did you even read the chapter on the Greenland Vikings? Diamond cites culture as one of the major factors in their failure.

Upon further reflection, you obviously did not read that chapter, because your comparison of white Montanans with the Blackfeet reads much like Diamond’s comparison of the Vikings with the Inuit. Except that Diamond actually makes a point.

By: Nabakov

Nabakov — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 07:10:22 +0000

“The only difference between me and a liberal or conservative book reviewer is that I am upfront about my politics.”

And of course the fact they actually read the books they’re reviewing.

By: Louis Proyect

Louis Proyect — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 13:42:49 +0000

To Phil Armstrong:

All book reviewers have politics, even when there is an extravant pretense that they do not. Just read any review of a left-of-center book in the NY Times Book Review for corroboration. The only difference between me and a liberal or conservative book reviewer is that I am upfront about my politics.

By: Phil Armstrong

Phil Armstrong — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 09:06:36 +0000

Louis @ 17: Why mention it at all if you’re just going to bash it based on someone else’s critique? It doesn’t add anything new to the discussion, and gives the distinct impression that you’ve decided that the newer book is bad before you’ve even read it. “This book is bad because the author has suspect politics, m’kay.” may convince those who share your politics, but it isn’t going to convince anyone else.

Skippy @ 18: It appears that the extraordinarily perspicacious moderator expunges the vowels from certain words. Something that I first saw done over at Making Light…

By: Barry Freed

Barry Freed — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 07:03:53 +0000

Regarding the original anecdote, that sounds like pretty typical blue-state behavior to me. I think they must still be using it to artificially sweeten their Kool-Aid too.

On eating insects, a friend of mine whose grandfather fought in the North Africa campaign in WWII once told me that he put her off chewing Dentyne gum as he noted that it tasted exactly like cockroaches, an unfortunate emergency ration he had to survive on for several months.

By: Skippy McGee

Skippy McGee — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 02:48:08 +0000

Mn, ths brd s gy. Flmng qr prtnts blwhrds I can’t believe you actually selectively censor lines of posts because they are too penetrating and too honest.

Louis, if you admire the native indian lifestyle, who not set a good example and live that way yourself? Or do you feel it is a moral imperative to remain here and instruct us in how superior it is to the Western world’s post-neolithic civilization?

Now we’ll see if the line above gets censored by the extraordinarily gy moderator.

By: Louis Proyect

Louis Proyect — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 21:00:39 +0000

To Phil Armstrong,

Sorry I don’t inspire confidence by not having read Diamond’s “Guns, Steel and Germs” before taking on “Collapse”. By the same token, I read Hardt and Negri’s “Empire” and decided that it was nothing but bullshit without having read any of their previous work. Life is too short to read the entire oeuvre of such frauds before making informed judgements.

By: pierre

pierre — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 19:24:23 +0000

Hmm, I thought it was

“the lifestyle of the undine savages”

undine, (nden´, un´den), in folklore, a female water sprite who could acquire a soul by marrying a human being.

Possibly a reference to Ariel in “The Tempest”? But it still doesn’t make sense to me either way.

Whoops, gotta go, my acorn bread is getting too close to the camp-fire. (Lotsa antioxidants, btw.)

By: abb1

abb1 — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 19:17:55 +0000

Of course. Thanks.

By: aretino

aretino — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 19:10:22 +0000

abb1:

Indian, for sure.

By: Phil Armstrong

Phil Armstrong — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 18:35:59 +0000

Louis: forgive me, but an article which starts with the admission that you haven’t actually read the author’s previous works but you’re going to criticise them anyway on the basis of secondary sources doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the quality of the rest of the article.

By: abb1

abb1 — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 17:12:42 +0000

Hey, I can’t decrypt a word in troll’s middle paragraph and it bothers me. In ‘ndn savages’ – what’s ‘ndn’ stand for? Help!

By: kgoesh

kgoesh — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 15:06:42 +0000

Louis – just my take, but I see Diamond as more of an apologist for the inevitable and less an oil puppet

By: ajay

ajay — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 10:02:35 +0000

No thread about eating rats can be complete without –
-[suspicious] What’s on the menu?
-Rat. Saute or fricassee. – Oh, the agony of choice. Saute involves…?
-Well, you take the freshly shaved rat, and you marinade it in a puddle for a while.
-Hmm, for how long?
-Until it’s drowned. Then you stretch it out under a hot light bulb, then you get within dashing distance of the latrine, and then you scoff it right down.
-So that’s sauteing, and fricasseeing?
-Exactly the same, just a slightly bigger rat.

(from Blackadder Goes Forth)

By: Skippy McGee

Skippy McGee — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 05:43:34 +0000

Louis Proyect, you used a socialist book to prop up some more socialist advocacy. Isn’t this exactly the kind of toxic self-referential gibberish that has defined Marxism for the past 100 years?

f y thnk s hghl f th lfstyl f ndn svgs, wh dn’t y st gd xmpl nd ld th w n dptng thr stn g pprch t lf?

I expect some odd sophistry about how you are needed here to educate the rest of us. Funny, that. Funny, indeed.