Call me suspicious but I suspect that now researchers have identified a percentage of the DNA or Europeans and Asians is from Neanderthal ancestors, the popular image of dark-skinned, inarticulate brutes of little brain will get an update with lighter skin and increased intelligence. Perhaps that's already happening in the comment thread attached to the story at Salon. Africans' DNA apparently doesn't contain the Neanderthal genes and, again, call me suspicious, I think that many people will "discover" that's some kind of disadvantage. Oh, and our African ancestors, apparently were mating outside of what used to be called our "direct lineage" as recently as a couple of decades ago. Only this will all probably undergo extensive revision in the next few years. If I could find the book where the discussion is, not long ago the most sciency and up-to-date experts were telling us why we had no Neaderthal ancestry at all. Which was science as surely as this story is now.
One really, really discouraging aspect of the comments is that people are blithely tossing around assertions about IQ, stupidly making assumptions about what various percentages of Neanderthal DNA in living people means for their intelligence. Any group of people who still believe in IQ, something so entirely debunked that it's at flat-earth levels of intellectual validity, should be regarded as anti-intellectual as most of the same people consider the vast majority of humanity, on the basis of their "low IQ".
Also from Salon, evidence of why the Occupy movement may have fizzled in many places, remaining so far as I can see in a few places where they actually decided to do something other than "occupy" public parks.
Jesse Myerson, in a bid to be declared the mostest leftist with the most, writes Why you’re wrong about communism: 7 huge misconceptions about it (and capitalism)
The mishmash of old line Stalinist and Maoist tripe, the brand peddled by those living under the horrible hardship of those non-Communist countries in the United States and Europe, goes so far as to excuse some of the greatest genocides of the 20th century. Genocides, such as the famine in the Ukraine, that are now known to have been engineered and those under Mao caused by his applying his favored "Marxist" ideological faith from the vantage point of not knowing a single thing about how to produce food.
I remember the day that I was sitting there reading about one of Stalins' mass murders and suddenly realizing that those people were as murdered as the piles of corpses in the photos taken in Nazi death camps. To pretend otherwise is as serious a crime against humanity as Holocaust denial. It was the moment that the wool was taken off my eyes and I realized how much of what the pseudo-left peddled was as big a lie as what the neo-Nazis sold. I would never again dishonor the victims by sorting them into categories of greater and lesser crimes against humanity.
Myerson is an attention seeking jerk who should be booted out of any real left, his fans too. He will produce nothing except damage to the left, he will never be anything but a club for the fascists to wield against us as the old communists were in the last century. None of them ever produced a single thing, they, like their sworn enemies, the anarchists, are a complete and utter waste of time for the left. They are not even genuinely leftist, being solely devoted to their ideologies which do not have the real needs of real poor people as their primary goal. If Myerson was big in the Occupy stunt, it's no wonder it failed. It was doomed to.
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