Friday, October 22, 2010

Pitfalling My Way Through Un-PC Ravine...

I tried to add/reply to  my own post ('China Holds Mortgage -' down a ways), but that didn't work, and it went here as a post, so I might as well just leave it.

I don't really want to be a bigot, but these questions and feelings just occur.  As Sr Aloysius cried, 'I doubt! I DOUBT!!'  Woe is we.

'...and, yes, I know that there are many races / subracial types, in the morphological / physical / genetic sense...'  Unlike current Tea Party Repub Senate candidate Sharron 'BS & Backtracking' Angle, who's presently trying to spin her way out of challenging the propriety of a Hispanic interest group in her audience, because a lot of them looked Asian to her.  We are so schizoid, so multifariously whack on the subject of RACE.  How can we make any progress when the word itself, and all that pertains to it, is so individually understood (in the sense of being pertinently different in concept to how the same is understood by others, especially if those others aren't just tunnel-visioned 'truthiness' raging bigots)?  It doesn't help for airy idealists to try to wish it away, or for one bunch of scientist to say that DNA scientists prove it's an illusion while others (calling Prof. Gates and his TV show -among others!) use DNA markers to 'prove' you're this or that much of some 'race' because you had ancestors who sometime clustered and bred on one of three continents... Even though all those continents have always, in human history and prehistory, have each had folk of the full span of human coloration and morphology...Which is one way we mean 'race', while (especially outside the present English-speaking world), the word has like been used to mean 'ethnicity as national/tribal affiliation and culture'.  We all just don't know what we really mean by 'race'.

I wonder if this is true:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_aboriginals
'Reports from American envoys and others suggest that Taiwanese aboriginals under Qing rule were treated extremely harshly. Presbyterian missionary George Leslie Mackay in From far Formosa (1896) reported that "if a savage is killed inland, the heart is eaten, flesh taken off in strips, and bones boiled to a jelly and preserved as a specific for malarial fever" (Mackay 1896:276). American consul James W. Davidson described in The Island of Formosa (1903) how the Han Chinese in Taiwan ate and traded in their aboriginal victims' flesh (Davidson 1903:255), a practice also mentioned by Owen Rutter in Through Formosa (1923), whose account bears some similarities to Davidson's (Rutter 1923:224–225). Sangren, in History and Magical Power in a Chinese Community (1987) mentions Davidson's account, adding that elderly Ta-ch'i informants had corroborated his claims (Sangren 1987:223).'
Soooooooooooooo un-PC of me (and the above 'Yellow Peril' era quotes may be abominable false witness for political agendae) but it does seem that what (used to?) be called 'the Mongoloid Race' has tended to slip a little more easily into exigent or inimical cannibalism than the other so-called 'races'.  If this is so, I wonder if it might be because 'race scientists' have said the characteristic 'Mongoloid' morphology originated as adjustments to arctic conditions:  Which until recent times = a long season of STARVATION.  (We know that the tall, pale, hairy, beaky-nosed 'Euroids' of Scandinavia and Russia went Androphagi in the same circumstances) This might well also relate to the comparative lack of food taboos had by Mongoloid people, particularly the frequent cultural readiness to eat dogs, cats, and primates, which other races tend to think of as 'family member' species.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Too Many Obits: Gallery 2010 as All Souls Approaches


Started this blog attentive of obituary salutes and trying to stay away from whining and snarling and politics~ have failed bigtime at both... But here's a link to a picture gallery of some famous deceased in this year so far.  A few perhaps would have been 'better to have had millstones attached to their necks and been drowned in the depths of the sea' than to have caused the harm they did, but most of them, ahhhhh... You were a part of our lives; a good and willing exchange of life and energy.  Your ghosts, and so very many other friendly phantoms, ever welcome in the spacious tabernacles of our tattered hearts:  Take another piece of our hearts with you to those everlasting green pastures of blissful peace!!!
http://www.aolnews.com/entertainment/article/barbara-billingsley-beaver-cleavers-tv-mom-dies/19677013