Roman Britain in Black and White
the-tls.co.uk
the-tls.co.uk
Taleb blasts the nature and tone of the argument, concluding "scholarship is dead in the UK,"(https://medium.com/incerto/something-is-broken-in-the-uk-int...) but the irony is that if it's ending, it's ending in part because of behavior such as his.
I actually agree in general with his perspective on the cartoon, but found his behavior unacceptable. The other side of the argument isn't unreasonable, even if you conclude it's maybe not the best side of the argument.
In some ways it doesn't matter, but I'm getting tired of the right setting up this dynamic where they engage in ad hominem bullshit, and then act offended when other side responds. I say this as someone who often identifies with the right--it's alienating and pushes reasonable people away. Rather than apologizing about not being respectful of Professor Beard, he becomes defensive and somehow tries to rationalize it.
Next time Taleb, could you please just take the high road in your behavior? Even if the other side is totally full of shit, and acting inappropriately, you'll look better and everyone will win by being the better one. I even agree with you and you've turned me off of your own damn arguments.
Jeez.
its not different than the way the left attacks people as: racist, homophobe, mysangist, uneducated, hillbilly, etc.
the last one i find quite interesting, a party that is supposed to stand against stereotypes, labeling, and skin color references uses hillbilly / red neck a lot.
I do agree it is not a real rebuttal if the other side has a point unrelated to their bigotry.
If someone actually is racist. Not if someone is merely disagreeing with SJWs.
It should not be something we make a knee-jerk reaction on. Real racism should be opposed and we should find a way to persuade people that playing the delicate snowflake victim card is also not appropriate.
As ever, calling people names just gets you universally thought of as an idiot.
So don't do it.
2) Anything bigoted is unacceptable.
3) Anything I find unacceptable should be beaten down with ad hominim attacks instead of properly heard out and debated.
Got it.
How can you square this logically?
Taleb's persona, however, does not lend itself well to open debate over such issues, as he champions himself as being a lone iconoclast against the "IYIs". All we can do is enjoy the show, I guess.
Agreed -- it's a bullshit attempt to re-write history.
> why, in the current day, history needs to be rewritten to be completely fictitious.
For example complaining the recent Dunkirk film has mostly white men in it... when that was true of the historical event it depicts.
But I did want to point out that a lot of The Black Swan - was about berating "other economists and their flawed theories". I feel he tries a lot to make it clear that he isn't an economist...
But I haven't read enough books on economics to know if this is what all economists like doing to each other.
PS: I really enjoyed that book and tried to absorb many lessons from it, but I gotta say "pop-risk" is a funny nickname for it.
– Sub-Saharan Celts http://i.imgur.com/WSHbj36.png
– A Sub-Saharan English Nobleman, 1215AD http://i.imgur.com/Y5WFtXO.png
– A Sub-Saharan blacksmith, Iron Age Britain http://i.imgur.com/XptrQDP.png
– A North-African Norman priest http://i.imgur.com/5JHBzMN.png
The criticized video was supposed to be "An exploration of life in Roman Britain shown through the eyes of a typical family." http://i.imgur.com/tg25juJ.jpg
Consider that priests of the Lemba tribe carry the Y-chromosome Cohen gene.
http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/lemba-tribe-in-so...
This whole story is just right wingers picking the wrong example out of ignorance and then stubbornly using mob tactics to compensate. They can't have a meaningful discussion about the show because they are too narrowminded to understand why the example they picked was the wrong example for the point they were originally trying to make.
Had the arguments about skin colour in that BBC show not been based on the roman soldier example (which happens to be a very weak example, due to the roman empire being so famous for putting soldiers into places so very far from their origin), Mary Beard, being an expert in roman history, would not even have weighed in.
The guy is the editor for a literal conspiracy theory website that condones the idea that Sandy Hook was staged by the US government. And long list of even more ridiculous and appalling things.
They make their money selling pseudoscientific "wellness" products of the kind that Gwyneth Paltrow sells on Goop.
The main star of Infowars recently admitted it was just an act of entertainment because if he didn't a divorce court would have ruled him a danger to his children based on things he says and does.
Back to the matter at hand, he's literally proposing a conspiracy theory, based on an educational cartoon, for children, about the Roman empire. Just let that soak in.
The BBC are, in this theory, intentionally promoting "mass uncontrolled immigration" to children via animations about the Roman empire. Step 2 ???. Step 3. White Genocide.
It's an embarrassment to us all as a species that this passes for political discussion today.
(Taleb is the arrogant loud-mouth[1] who made his money in the financial markets, Alex Jones is similar in aspect but made his money by building an audience of right-wing conspiracy theorists and then selling them herbal supplements.)
[1] Not an insult. I suspect he’d embrace this description whole-heartedly.
Unfortunately twitter doesn't seem to be presenting the thread of Mike's replies any more, which seems like a failing of the platform.
Al Binnie-Lubbock @alastairis · Jul 26 Replying to @MikeStuchbery_ and @PrisonPlanet I enjoyed this thread apart from the ableism in the first tweet. Not cool.
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Mike Stuchbery Mike Stuchbery @MikeStuchbery_ · Jul 26 I apologize unreservedly. I will do better.
My guess is that as the thread became popular and more people replied to parts of it, twitter favours presenting more of the recent replies and the original thread becomes harder to see.
I'm not sure conspiracy is the right term, but it does seem like political propaganda from BBC, don't you think? How else would you explain the unrealistically "diverse" representations of history (the Roman period being just one of them as you can see in that other post)?
The falling back on 'I got more citations than you, so ner' isn’t exactly a good look either.
Btw Taleb was a huge fan of Beard. Until a few days ago that is.
In what way am I 'pulling the gender card' exactly?
"I think Prof Taleb did get annoyed when I said that I had read his ‘pop risk’ book, not the others. But I was actually trying to make clear that I had some knowledge of his work, though not a lot."
Geneticists disagree.
If people want to get anything productive at all out of these constant Twitter flareups they need to allow for de-escalation.
Most academics who also write popular works aren't prickly about describing their popular works as such; I don't think Hawking would get upset at someone describing A Brief History of Time as pop cosmology.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/dna-roma...
As it says, it's mostly people talking past each other.
Taleb is unnecessarily un-collegial though.
Dr. Taleb and others show a massive ignorance of how the studies of history, archaeology, and biology work when they assert that we can just "look in the genes" for an unambiguous record of every damn person who has ever set foot on the British Isles. But a misguided desire to hold history to the same evidentiary standards as, say, physics or mathematics - including by physicists and mathematicians - is nothing new.
What's more worrisome is the determination of some to willfully ignore historical evidence that might challenge their worldview.
Look around the Internet - there is a new revisionist history of the Western world that is being pushed, one that holds a shared "white" or "European" identity as paramount. These are the people who came after Dr. Beard as they come after anyone who challenges their views.
These people are undoubtedly far less numerous than they appear; they use bots and multiple accounts to make themselves appear more legitimate. This itself is dangerous, as it may cause bystanders to view these people as more mainstream than they truly are (and it's no secret that people ascribe more credulity to an idea when it seems widely accepted).
This is not going to get better as neural networks improve at writing tweets that sound human.
Furthermore, a study is probably incorrect if it can't withstand sanity checking from simple population models based on data we do have from the time (e.g. Roman garrison sizes).
> Look around the Internet - there is a new revisionist history of the Western world that is being pushed..
The revisionism is actually that Roman Britain was ethnically diverse. To paraphrase the source of this controversy, Paul Joseph Watson: If Roman Britain was diverse then modern day Japan is ethnically diverse.
The "we are all immigrants" narrative is pushed to justify mass immigration and open borders. This might make academics like Beard feel cosmopolitan and P.C. views might draw the attention of the Guardian and boost her book sales, but tens of millions of people are suffering from the consequences of these policies and feel alienated by an elite that they feel is working against their will and best interests.
> These people are undoubtedly far less numerous than they appear; they use bots
Paul Joseph Watson has over 1m subscribers on YouTube and his videos have hundreds of thousands of views. This places his daily circulation higher than most newspapers. While only a small percentage of those people may agree with his views enough to push them online, that is still a lot of people.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading "Skin in the Game" and wonder whether this story will become another anecdote of Taleb's "Intellectual Yet Idiot" social class.
Modern day Japan, btw. is ethnically "Japanese". Which is to say the entire country are migrants from various parts of the Asian mainland over the last 4000 or so years, again, obvious when you know what to look for. (And don't mention Korea...)
Concern over the problems of the modern era, overpopulation and refugees, are real, valid and deserve respect. But they don't need to be mixed up with the convenient stupidities of racism.
I don't understand the argument this is making. Could you clarify?
OP is making a joke -- if you want to call Romain Britain ethnically diverse, you might as well call Japan ethnically diverse. The term becomes meaningless.
You probably mean racially diverse -- most Roman soldiers / administrators were ethnically Roman, regardless of race.
> then what happened to the diversity?
Cities have historically been population sinks, not able to replenish themselves without constant population flows from the countryside. If there were non-white people in the cities it might not have left much trace in the population's genes.
This is indeed the case, and the nativists v. cosmopolitans culture war is raging throughout the West. It's one of the reasons behind Brexit, for example.
I don't think it's either new or revisionist -- the vast majority of European have been white, going back millenia.
And very many Europeans, particularly educated ones, have considered themselves as European, both in geographical terms, and in civilisational terms -- e.g. they thought of them selves as Romans, or as part of Christendom, or as part of the West.
> it isn't really up for debate whether there were Roman soldiers and civilians in Britain who came from the far reaches of the Empire and beyond. Yes, including from Africa.
Indeed so.
> Whether we would have looked at these people and said they were "black" is, as Dr. Beard explains, pretty unanswerable
In terms of what they looked like, most Romans were of Mediterranean appearance.
This is all silly any how.
where are the genes ?
etc. etc.
(In other words: it’s a legitimate question, but the way Taleb is using it as some kind of gotcha! query suggests that he isn’t really asking it in good faith.)
Or, more generously (as to Taleb’s character) that the implicit premise (if there were ethnic diversity, we would have robust genetic evidence) justifying his argument is itself not based on a well-informed understanding of the context.
[1] See The Ethics of Disagreement in https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fa...
How would a Norman gene be different from a French or Norse one?