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Oh, my, I have new readers. Hello and welcome. It's not always heavy-duty essay-ranting around here, but frankly, I do that quite a lot. So long as we're all clear that this journal really is a natural habitat for teal deer and if I say "cut for length" I really mean it, everything should be fine.
Also, sometimes - like now - I post before I take my ADHD medication and things get a bit random. (And I leave substantive posts, like my next incident of yelling at people about Important Stuff, to after I take my medication.)
Anyway. It's Monday. Certain People do that thing where they post an invitation for people to say something they've achieved lately, which is cool. However, even though I think it's awesome for people to post that kind of thing in multiple places, that's not what I'm doing here. (Although, for the record: My recent achievements include writing a couple of good posts and successfully playing E flat major on the guitar, which, you understand, is quite an awkward fingering.)
But there are new people here as well as some old favourites, and I am mean mean mean and well aware that people are totally capable of complimenting others but often have trouble acknowledging their own awesomeness, so let's do this one:
Comment here to tell me three things you like about yourself. Feel free to do this to your own friends as well.Current Mood: brain ferrets! Current Music: early morning birdsong. and crows. they don't sing. they ghrark. Current Location: my BED
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So, about three years ago I promised someone - I now forget who - that I would share this when it was finished. I ended up not doing so, because I didn't get around to finding somewhere to put it online as a PDF, and I didn't want to try and fix up the formatting (with all the footnotes included, especially since endnotes make me cry in my special angry place) and it was all just too hard and then I got hit by a car a month after I handed this in.
Well, now I have proper webspace.
Here's the thing: I keep thinking to mention this, and then changing my mind, and now realising there's no reason not to.
In 2006, I wrote an essay about Star Trek. Specifically about Star Trek and history - the way history shaped Star Trek, and vice versa. The essay has major flaws - I didn't address the subject of women in Star Trek pretty much at all, and the writing is not my best, and it's several years old so I'm several years better at history now.
But people might be interested. So, on condition that people keep those caveats in mind: Series on the Edge of Forever: The Future History of Star Trek. PDF. Includes bibliography.Current Mood:  nervous
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So, one of the things that keeps being brought up in the discussion around Racefail09, Racefail the Thirteenth Child II is this:
The justification given for the deletion of the entire native populations of the Americas is this: in order for magic megafauna to survive, the natives need not to have moved in, because, it is claimed, "archaeology" says that the megafauna were rendered extinct by the hunting of humans.
As I quoted in my last post on this topic:
The extinction of megafauna around the world was probably due to environmental and ecological factors. It was almost completed by the end of the last ice age. It is believed that megafauna initially came into existence in response to glacial conditions and became extinct with the onset of warmer climates.
In temperate Eurasia and North America, megafauna extinction concluded simultaneously with the replacement of the vast periglacial tundra by an immense area of forest. Glacial species, such as mammoths and woolly rhinocerous, were replaced by animals better adapted to forests, such as elk, deer and pigs. Reindeers (caribou) retreated north, while horses moved south to the central Asian steppe. This all happened about 10 000 years ago, despite the fact that humans colonised North America less than 15 000 years ago and non-tropical Eurasia nearly 1 million years ago. Source: The Australian Museum, factsheet on megafauna extinction.
This, then, is the actual current mainstream view. Now, orthodoxy is not automatically accuracy, but where the bulk of research is in agreement, a radically opposed view must bring the weight of evidence to bear in its favour.
The book that keeps getting cited on this is 1491, by Charles C. Mann. Allegedly a really convincing source; certainly, as it's the one that they all bring up, I'm going to treat it as a sufficient source for this argument, as far as pointing out why this is wrong goes.
First of all: Yes, it's a book. A published one. That doesn't mean it's right, doesn't mean it's not in fact purest excrement. David Irving writes books. Keith Windschuttle writes books. Not-even-slightly coincidentally, they're both racist revisionists.
One paragraph summary of Mann:
Setting aside Mann's political aim - which is, as I understand it, more about better land management than about writing the native populations out of existence, so don't judge him by the people who cite him - we have, as the central relevant claim, the idea that the various native American populations were vast and numerous before 1492 and European invasion. His contention is that up to 95% of the population were wiped out by European diseases, factional warfare, and overexploitation of available resources; the wild lands into which the colonists moved were much wilder than they had been.
Right.
1) There were tens of millions of native folk, but they all died around the 16th century of European plagues.
This argument? It is not clever.
a) If this were the case, the oral histories of the relevant peoples, which are not extinct and which record other instances of plague, would include it.
b) If diseases like smallpox (the one specifically cited) had ravaged the populace previously, subsequent generations, being descended from the survivors, would have an inherited resistance to it - they would not have been as susceptible to it the way they were when smallpox was being used as a biological weapon a few generations later.
c) Smallpox would have been extant on the continent. Diseases don't disappear. Even smallpox, the only disease now nominally eradicated by humanity, occasionally recurs in isolated areas, but it's not endemic, so it's kept in check. Without serious and advanced vaccination-based medical intervention, these diseases persist. Consider that, despite modern medical technology and the widespread availability of preventive vaccines, a landmass as isolated as Australia still only recently eradicated endemic measles. It wasn't. Nor were other European diseases.
d) Plagues just don't hit that hard. Consider that worse diseases than smallpox have not had anywhere near that kind of kill rate. The Black Death killed between 30 and 60 percent of the population of Europe - which, at the time, was living in conditions pretty much perfectly designed to maximise its impact. The 1918 flu pandemic didn't get anywhere near those kinds of kill rates. Nor did the plague of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Zaire Ebola Virus, pretty much the deadliest disease in existence, doesn't get that high.
If your argument requires something to be deadlier than Ebola Zaire, you damn well better have some evidence. There is none - not historical, not epidemiological, nothing.
2) Those millions of native folk cultivated the land and modified the environment for their own benefit.
Okay. Assume they did. Why does this mean they exterminate useful animals? Remember, we are talking about the extinction of the megafauna - dragging in wider considerations of prehistoric living in the Americas is purest derailment.
:crickets:
The animals humans exterminate when we modify the environment to our own benefit are predators. Wolves, lions, tigers - they kill livestock and they kill people. The actual evidence is that native populations of the Americas hunted and ate large meaty beasts. This means that they have an active disincentive not to hunt them to extinction. The actual evidence is that they killed them if and when they wanted to - buffalo jumps aren't exactly the least wasteful way to bring down your dinner - but, as the actual evidence shows, this didn't cause buffalo extinction. Millions of buffalo were still wandering around North America after millennia of human habitation.
Please stop bringing Charles C. Mann into this.Current Mood: tired Current Music: Tongan Choir - 'Otua Mafimafi
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Hmm, I really need to take my second dose of ADHD meds...
Meanwhile: Song rec! What About Us, John Barrowman. I like the song, and it totally needs to be vidded, preferably for Kamen Rider Kabuto no really, but I also like the clip it has, because:
a) John Barrowman is pretty
b) The standard couple imagery is... really quite amazing, for a music video. It has two couples, split-screened as they go through an identical Troubled Relationship storyline. One of the couples is a white man and a brown-skinned woman who's not being all submissive or treated as a sex object even slightly. The other couple is two men. In a music video! Music videos are the great bastion of heteronormative iconography and misogyny and racism and homophobia... except John Barrowman makes the world a better place.
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So, today I:
- Discovered that I do not, in fact, have A Certain Medical Condition, the treatment of which required procedures sufficiently triggering to me that the first two times I did it I fainted and the third time I only didn't faint because I spent half an hour lying down and being kept talking by Vel'ithya. I don't have to do that any more so I WIN.
- Made several new icons for Dreamwidth. I have a seed account! I can always have many icons! I want many icons. There is this one, which is for my brain ferrets and also for when I want to throw a distraction, and also the following two, which may or may not have something to do with having spent some time in the last couple of days talking to people I thought were being very stupid:
 
IT TOTALLY SAYS PEA
Okay, I'm clearly, like, twelve, max, and I'll probably decide that's Really Not Me and either never use it or actually delete it, but still.
- Did I mention I don't have to do the Triggering Action of Doom any more? Seriously, so much win.
- Watched two peacocks having an argument. It goes like this:
*honk* warrrholololll!
*honk*!
eeeya*HONK*
*honk* warrrrhololololollll
Repeat variations while they glare at each other.
Meanwhile, there is clearly drama in the World of Peafowl at uni - the two brown peahens who were totally lesbians together appear to have broken up. One of them is now hanging out with the white peahen, and being all snuggly with her, while the other brown peahen is wandering around with a peatoddler.
So, either the peamama shagged one of the peacocks (but WHICH ONE? There are now two young peacocks, and the old one is nowhere to be seen!) and the other pealesbian ditched her faithless ass and shacked up with the white peahen, or the pealesbian ditched peamama for the white peahen (who was previously single) and peamama found solace in the arms wings of one of the peacocks.
Who she has subsequently ditched, given she doesn't let either of the peadicks (they're both jerks, honestly) come near her or the peatoddler. (She let me get closer to her baby than she lets either of the males get.)
Both the current pealesbians appear to be keeping their distance from peamama. So I think there's clearly dykudrama happening.
... I like watching the peafowl, okay?
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