prog | (no subject)

Today's featured Wikipedia article, on race is pretty interesting. It starts out with the (to me) surprising and somewhat suspect statement that many social scientists find the notion of race among humans as a pure and perhaps fundamentally flawed social construct, and then goes on to explain this point of view with great background and lucidity.

This is an example of me feeling richer after encountering an alternative to the conventional wisdom via Wikipedia; a counterexample would be the discussion page of the 9/11 article, which seems largely involved with a months-long (maybe years-long?) argument on whether or not it was a terrorist attack. (Buh?! Well, those against using the t-word argue that if Al Qaeda's principal motivation was not scaring people but the destruction of the WTC and Pentagon in order to remove their national utility, then it's more of a surprise military strike, with the thousands of innocent dead classifiable as wartime collateral damage. Buh?! Yeah, I know.)

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I thought Osama admitted surprise that the towers actually collapsed. And surely no one would think that one or two planes could take out the whole Pentagon.

And the "don't use that word" crowd would retort that, so long as their primary goal was directly hurting the USA's ability to trade, fight, and govern by attacking the buildings central to each of these activities, then the planes should be considered equivalent to an enemy nation's bombers or cruise missles. The enemy in this case simply found suicide missions to be an effective and efficient sneak-attack strategy, with the cost in lives not being a relevant factor to them at all. Hence, it wouldn't be terrorism, just an exceptionally unethical military strike.

And: Buh?! I'm not arguing for that side any further. :) I just find them equal-parts interesting and dumb.

Hmm, I'm actually sort of surprised you hadn't come across that view of race before. It seems very common in anthro classes and it's arguably present in many history ones as well.

And as for the "terrorism" discussion: wtf?

Alas, I took no classes, and the only classes I took where race (or, more specifically, the effcts of racial prejudice) showed up as a topic -- World History and U.S. Gov't -- didn't go down this social-science path.

Er, took no anthro classes.