Friday, August 10, 2012
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Fuck Robert Kagan And Would He Please Now Just Go Quietly Burn In Hell?
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10 comments:
What makes a great Olympian... http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/11/what-makes-a-great-olympian-sometimes-it-s-genetics.html
As I read another Big Yawn suggestion, I was thinking about this very point from one of the comment below as the author kept pointing out runners of "West African descent." So...WHERE ARE all the West African gold medalist sprinters?
"Here is the problem (one of them anyway) when talking about sports in terms of race: "...or nations with West African–descended athletes, like the United Sates, Jamaica, Grenada, and Trinidad and Tobago—have each turned out more elite sprinters than all of white Europe and Asia combined."
They have also turned out more elite sprinters than West Africa has. No sprinter from a West African nation has ever won an Olympic championship. The runners who dominate the sprints have, since 1964 (whites won the 100 meters in 1956, 1960 and in '72) come from the US and the Caribbean. Further, they've almost all come from English speaking countries. There have been vanishingly few elite sprinters from the African diaspora who come from former Spanish, French, Portuguese or Dutch colonies in the Americas. There is a mystery here, probably genetic, but it needs to explain why Trinidad produces elite sprinters while Nigeria doesn't.
WIth respect to East African runners, the dominant nation is indeed Kenya, but not all of it. Elite Kenyan runners tend to come from the same tribal groups, are born at altitude and like the best Ethiopian runners, come from the Rift Valley.
As is usually the case with these kind of articles, race becomes a generalized marker that masks all sorts of specific details that might actually tell us something. " -blueingreen66
Also:
"This is ridiculous and offensive. The author doesn't even know whether the sprinters he is referring to are of West African descent or not. They could be of Central African (40% of the slave trade) descent or Southeast African descent (about 2%). Even if they are of West African descent, that is like saying they are of Asian descent and including China, Japan, and Southeast Asia all in one. They could be of Senegambian, Biafaran, Benin, Guinean, or about 200 other types of ethnic descent that are not regionally proximate and are genetically distinct.
But most likely of all? They are descended from West Africa, Central Africa, and Europe all at once. Its not just the U.S. where DNA is all mixed up--it is everywhere.
Jamaicans have no more predisposition to be good sprinters than they have to be hard workers (the primary justification slave traders used for the slave trade--Africans are harder workers), and it insults the hard work that people like Bolt and Blake put in to be the best in the world to say that it is all in their DNA. It is true that their bodies may be suited to be efficient runners, but it doesn't mean that they don't work hard and it doesn't have anything to do with being from West Africa, or wherever the hell they are descended from." -jmhc
pasty jiggaboo sent me this nonsense this morning under the heading "genetic predisposition to violence" http://www.businessinsider.com/17-year-old-us-womens-boxing-gold-medalist-just-delivered-the-quote-of-the-olympics-2012-8
I rotflmbao'd him and responded that the hatchet-faced slav she whooped had the genetic predisposition to violence, but that sister-girl had a genetic predisposition to mastery in a very specific culture of competence. I further noted to his attention that broad spectrum black enrollment in cultures of competence (something that the greatest depression will render increasingly commonplace) amounts to his very worst nightmare.
I always repeat this but once in an interview Jet Li rejected the compliment people extend to him as being naturally "talented." He felt that is a disregard for the level of sacrifice, competitiveness and will power that it took to conjure up. Even with that came an equal level of both professional and emotional assistance from coach, family and friends, otherwise he would've been amongst the many others that had long since given up.
...BD went easy on you...we could have sent you this one (new release)...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlQBWdGjH4U
Shame..., BD must be dead below the waist to have missed what made this race so much fun to watch...,
Genetic tendency to kleptomania:-- Well, unlike Usain Bolt's winning relay, at least the officials did not have to stop the girls relay team from shoplifting the baton for a souvenir......
GCV nice point.
I feel the word "talented" often gets used in a patronizing way, as if we're all higher-ups discussing the behavior of a trained animal. (Saying this as a sometimes-industrial scientist who has felt the burn of the word "talent.")
Yeah I think there is some inherited ability in intellectual matters as well as in sports, but if you don't work the ass off it's not going to amount to much. I'm good at things I started trying to do persistently before I was 10-12 years old; I'm bad at everything else.
(Plus best-in-world is a very tricky measure. In sprinting, as it says in the article BD frottages so vigorously, because a few 1/100ths of a second is a clincher. That's not a lot faster. Even the "huge" gap of 9.7s vs 9.8s for the 100m is only 22.8 mph vs 22.6mph. Can that be significant in evolutionary terms? And the entire difference between say Jamaica and Germany is on that order.)
I'm just hoping that Ms Jeter doesn't have to cop to a Marion Jones-like secret.
best body in womens sports http://uglyblackjohn.blogspot.com/2012/07/move-over-serena.html accept no substitutes!
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