Another post from a Savage Minds contributor, Tak, on a “different blog”:http://www.froginawell.net/japan/?p=106, talking about the Diamond controversy. Other Savage Minds types have denounced Diamond as “no nothing anti-racist” and “quasi-racist” (they seem to be overlapping categories); Tak says that he’s just plain racist. The basis for this accusation? First: Diamond says “in an article”:http://www.kimsoft.com/2004/japanese_roots.htm that the Japanese are the most distinctive major country in terms of their culture and environment. But Japanese imperialists too say that the Japanese are distinctive in terms of their culture and environment. In Tak’s own words, “Stop right there, mister, because to those who know Japan’s modern history, he has just reproduced the rhetoric of Japanese imperialism!” In addition, there are “frightening parallels” between Diamond’s belief that physical environment is an important causal variable, and the work of a racist Japanese author, who, according to “some Japanese critics” believed that environmental factors were responsible for Japanese racial superiority. _Quod erat demonstrandum_. Or something. Second, Diamond “perpetuates racism by associating a group of people with specific traits,” (i.e. cultivating rice!) and holds to the bizarre thesis that “rice cultivation gives a military advantage over hunter & gatherer people.”

This is beyond sloppy. You don’t fling around accusations of racism in public forums without serious evidence. Tak doesn’t have serious evidence, or, as far as I can see, any evidence whatsoever. Instead he has a selection of egregious misreadings and slurs-by-association (you can judge for yourself whether Tak’s piece is a fair summation of Diamond’s article; the latter is a short, easy read). I simply don’t understand what is going on here with Tak and with the other Savage Minds who have contributed to this debate. It’s fine and good to challenge Diamond’s evidence and arguments with other evidence and counter arguments. That’s what academic debate should be about. It’s also fine to challenge particular styles of thinking if they’re unable to come to grips with certain kinds of phenomena. But if you want to claim that certain kinds of reasoning are inherently racist and repugnant to right thinking people, which is what seems to be going on here, you had better have strong evidence to back up your accusations. So far, all I’ve seen a lot of vaguely worded innuendo. There’s some underlying deformation of thinking here, and I’m not sure what’s driving it.

Update: Kerim at Savage Minds offers a “possible explanation”:http://savageminds.org/2005/07/26/guns-germs-and-steel-links/.

bq. If we anthropologists seem a little to ready to throw around the term “racist” it is not because we are “jealous” of other disciplines … it is because we are all too aware of our own history as a discipline. Anthropologists were the foot-soldiers of colonialism, promoting theories of racial superiority to justify colonial expansion. As a result, we are sensitive to the ways in which specific interests can be served in the name of “objective” science.

This seems to me to be at least part of the story – anthropology’s complex historical relationship with imperialism is indeed one of the mainsprings of the discipline’s identity. But while it helps explain, it doesn’t _give license_ to Ozma and Tak to fling about poorly sourced accusations of racism like confetti (Diamond very clearly is not promoting any sort of theory of racial superiority, or anything like it).

Update 2: See this “post”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=68 by Tim Burke, which does a nice – and careful – job of criticizing Diamond.

Yahoo! responds to Google Video with The Yammys aka the Yahoo! Video Search Awards launched yesterday. Get those creative juices flowing in the following categories: Road Trips, Office Humor, Bloopers, Pets and Misc (so just about anything else). It’s a nice publicity idea to get some attention for their video search service. That is, assuming you – or anyone you know who likes to send around links:) – get a kick out of watching a dog on a skateboard. [thanks]

The Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton has launched a new initiative to make available audio and video recordings of academic lectures and events. For now, the University Channel is focusing on public and international affairs, because, as the site claims, “this is an area which lends itself most naturally to a many-sided discussion”. Perhaps the idea is to have people link to the material on the site and then host discussions on their own blogs or classrooms as I do not see a place for the suggested “many-sided discussion” on the UC site itself. The scope of materials that will be included seems quite broad judging from what is already available (IT, religion, politics, etc.).

It is certainly nice to have one central repository of such materials. If the project succeeds in getting lots of places on board and hosting material from all over then it has the potential to be a great service. In fact, the collaborators it already has lined up are already a good sign of its potential. (Then again, some people have suggested [see first comment] that “text is the only useful information on the Internet”.;)

Under John Howard, who built on precedents established by the preceding Labor government, Australia has adopted some of the harshest anti-refugee policies in the developed world, centred on the policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers (including children) without trial in camps located either in remote areas or (under deals driven with dependent client states) outsourced to Pacific Islands. This policy was popular to begin with – it won Howard the 2001 election – but as the panic of 2001 has subsided and the evils of the policy have emerged, public opinion has shifted against it, and the worst aspects of the policy have now been abandoned.

The release of the remaining children being held in detention brings an end to the worst single part of this sad and shameful chapter in our history. At the same time, the oppressive use of Temporary Protection Visas has been rejected by the Federal Court. I hope the government will not appeal against this decision, and that we can put the whole sorry episode behind us, and start the search for a more rational and humane solution to the problem of responding to asylum seekers.

Flickr’s photos tell me that it’s cold and sunny in “Canberra”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/1arc/28680138/. I knew that already. The Lobby Bar is closing in “Cork”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/docaoimh/28704801/, which comes as a shock. (It’s a great venue.) And the Saguaros are flowering in “Tucson”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/notna/28514213/. That means it’s really hot in Arizona right now — “dangerously hot”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4723233.stm, in fact — just as I’m about to return there. One advantage of desert life, though, is that it’s possible to live in a more-or-less solar powered house. Even though the materials needed to build a house like this aren’t really that expensive anymore, few are built because housing construction is a lot like film-making. The difficulty of bringing together so many specialized contractors for what’s essentially a small-scale, often one-off project means that a lot of energy goes in to ensuring that all the bits hook up together in a reliable, predictable manner. The paradoxical result is that a lot of fluid network activity amongst creative individuals produces a tendency to conservatism and a bias against innovation in the actual outputs. Reconfiguring some bit of the house (the cooling system, say) means that a bunch of other people back along the supply chain have to adjust their standard practices, and they don’t want to. Symmetrically, prospective buyers may be nervous about the resale prospects of such a house in a market where the demand for innovation is strictly limited. So in much the same way that most films are boring and cookie-cutter, so are most houses, despite the fluidity and high potential for creativity inherent to the enterprise. Nicole Biggart “makes this argument”:http://ciee.ucop.edu/docs/market_struc.pdf for commercial buildings, and large parts of the housing market seem similar.

There is still a fair amount of innovation. It’s just difficult to get it incorporated into standard plans for homes. Tucson has “many examples”:http://www.solarinstitute.org/innovative_home_tour/index.html of solar-powered or otherwise energy efficient homes, including one of the few “zero-energy homes”:http://www.toolbase.org/tertiaryT.asp?TrackID=&DocumentID=3688&CategoryID=69 in the country. The ZEH is _net_ zero energy, of course: it’s designed to produce what it needs via solar panels, and its overall energy consumption is very low. An “ordinary” solar home is not a ZEH, but if its built right it’s very cheap to run. If things go according to plan, I’ll be living in one come November.