Posted on 12/07/2006 7:11:02 PM PST by paudio
Bingo.
I'm amazed Geico gets away with it. The ads are hilarious, btw.
no thanks.
Yep, that's the kind of non-response I expected.
Not many people are aware that for the first time in about 5000 years there are more people alive than there are dead.
Go, Mel, go.
thanks for the link
There are no Mayans. He is a 23-year-old Mexican opportunist. ;)
They probably haven't even seen it, just like the Jews who hadn't seen "The Passion of the Christ" but proclaimed it anti-semitic.
Unfortunately for them, being fawned over by that bunch clearly isn't high on his priority list.
It IS silly and stupid, too. That's why the Irish have so much violence between Catholics and Protestants. How utterly STUPID. We won't go into the Islamic stuff. That goes way back, too. Well, I don't feel guilty. I HAVE a life (smile). Mxxx
It IS silly and stupid, too. That's why the Irish have so much violence between Catholics and Protestants. How utterly STUPID. We won't go into the Islamic stuff. That goes way back, too. Well, I don't feel guilty. I HAVE a life (smile). Mxxx
I know Jared Diamond isn't the most popular author around here but I tend to read, think, then judge. He makes some very good points, but I'll warn you in advance that Diamond and Fagan are both "global warming" advocates:
Comments posted to http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/ecology/JaredDiamond2.htm on Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed:"
Although Mayan society had endured drought over its thousand year history, there is evidence that the most severe drought coincides with the collapse. Although Diamond acknowledges that such droughts occurred, he thinks that they were only critical insofar as they coincided with "too many people" in a confined space.
What is missing from Diamond's analysis, however, is the *cause* of drought. One would think that an environmentalist would want to address this question. To discover the answer, you have to turn elsewhere. In particular, the work of anthropologist Brian Fagan is most instructive. In a series of books on ancient societies, he focuses on the role of El Niño-Southern California (ENSO) events in their collapse.
In his latest, titled "The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization," Fagan points to the research done by climatologist David Hodell. By examining titanium traces in the waters off of Venezuela (a very precise way to measure droughts), Hodell concluded that a major ENSO event coincided with Mayan collapse. Archaeologist Dick Gill studied Swedish tree rings and came to similar conclusions.
Studying the evidence of Mayan ruins from this period, archaeologist Peter Harrison discovered evidence of cannibalism--a sure sign of a society driven to desperation. Another group of indigenous peoples, the Anasazi, whose social structures were similar to the Mayans, have also been connected to cannibalism. In their case, the findings have taken on a sensational aspect, especially when they are divorced from the climatological and economic circumstances that may explain them. In other words, cannibalism is not seen in the same terms as what happened to the Donner party, but rather as an expression of what Diamond termed "The Golden Age That Never Was."
The scholar most identified with this topic is Christy Turner II whose study "Man Corn" tries to explain Anasazi cannibalism as an early form of totalitarian control: [Poster’s Note: by the invading Toltecs from Mexico, it must be recalled, who are thought to have taken over the large ceremonial site at Chaco Canyon and who ruled the original inhabitants by terror.]
"Terrorizing, mutilating, and murdering might be evolutionarily useful behaviors when directed against unrelated competitors. And what better way to amplify opponents' fear than to reduce victims to the subhuman level of cooked meat, especially when they include infants and children from whom no power or prestige could be derived but whose consumption would surely further terrorize, demean, and insult their helpless parents or community? ... The benefits would be threefold: community control, control of reproductive behavior (that is, dominating access to women), and food. From the standpoint of sociobiology, then, cannibalism could well represent useful behavior done by well-adjusted, normal adults acting out their ultimate, evolutionarily channeled behavior. On the other hand, one can easily look upon violence and cannibalism as socially pathological."
Once again we find sociobiology trumping more useful forms of analysis based on objective economic factors. If you reduce humanity to being a "Third Chimpanzee" or "Naked Ape," naturally you will look for genetic dispositions to violence and subjugation instead of extreme distress brought on by climate or other socio-economic factors.
At least Diamond does not resort to such essentialist nonsense when trying to understand Anasazi collapse. Once again the main culprit is deforestation and unwise farming practices, but exacerbated by a drought that just seems to come and go with the seasons.
Once again you have to turn to Brian Fagan for a more satisfactory explanation of why such a devastating drought occurred. He states that the same ENSO events that struck the Yucatan peninsula also struck the American southwest. When crops failed and water disappeared, cannibalism did occur--although the exact extent is difficult to establish.
Many anthropologists and sociologists don't like Jared Diamond because of his ecological deterministic view.
Don't you have a dictionary?
The real question is: do you?
The Mayans were not a primitive civilization. In many respects their astronomy and mathematical calendrical skills surpassed those in Europe at the same time. They were amazing civil engineers. Take a walk through Tikal sometime.
If you want to talk about brutality you'd better think carefully on such things as the Roman Circus and persecution of Christians; the Spanish Inquisition; the ancient Greek and Carthaginian treatment of unwanted babies (and ours today!); the Viking Berserkers ... the list is very long and unbelievably brutal. Oh yes, the Conquistadores' slaughter of the Aztecs and near-total destruction of their culture and civilization. I think I might have preferred to have my heart quickly ripped out in a Mayan fertility rite than to be one of Napoleon's poor soldiers dying slowly of cold and starvation in the Russian winter.
These passions and frailties are neither Mayan nor European: they're human. Get a little perspective.
Click on my link in post #46 and then click on the link in post 34 on that thread.
I'm not absolutely sure what ecological determinism is. I generally don't like him because he tends to blame humans for all the world's ecological ills but doesn't bother to prove it. He's a raging liberal. But even liberals make valid points at times and I think the El Nino phenomenon accounts for enormous fluctuations in rainfall. The Nazca and Moche civilizations also fell because of El Nino-caused drought.
Mad Mel strikes again. What a loon...
"Gastronomic customs aside, something terrible happened to these people and cannibalism is only one tentative detail in something far more complex. While people rush off to rewrite cannibalism into the history of the Anasazi or Ancestral Pueblo, it is important to note that it is as of yet uncertain who were the victims and their attackers” (Burn).
Labeling all peoples from Mexico as practicing cannibalism is a huge leap IMO. I have absolutely no doubt it was practiced by the Toltecs and the Aztecs. But they came at a much later time than the Maya and had very little in common with them. My mind is open about the Maya but I haven't seen any real proof of non-ritualistic cannibalism except that mentioned in my previous post. It's pretty clear from very modern incidents that cannibalism is almost inevitable when people get hungry enough. Why should people struggling through a serious drought behave any differently than the Donner Party or the athletes in the Andes?
When my son was at ASU getting his PhD, he said ocassionally he bumped into Turner. I asked him a couple times to ask Turner this 'or that' question...I never heard a thing back, lol.
I don't like Jared Diamond's writing, albeit, I received and read his book "Collapse" as a present last Christmas. I liked his ideas about continental alignment and the possible consequences. His explanation of why the Africans never domesticated the Zebra was laughable...they were too mean, lol.
They are nasty critters but I think of the mahouts leading domesticated elephants around...I join you in lol!
Diamond mostly lost me with his knee-jerk statement that human overhunting in Australia and North America eliminated the megafauna. Maybe. But there are other (to me) more plausible explanations, like catastrophism-caused climate change that put an evolutionary premium on small body weight, speed, smarts and omniverousness.
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