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oh my dear god, LOGIC FAIL.
May. 7th, 2009 09:09 pmWARNING: RANT AHEAD.
So I've been commenting on that Thirteenth Child review, because I am in a cluebat-wielding kind of mood this week. Or something. We've had a couple of derails already, as anyone could have predicted. What I didn't predict was the extent of the MASSIVE FUCKING LOGIC FAIL someone came in with just now.
Basically, as part of the spiraling alt!history discussion thread, we were talking about the putative existence of megafauna- basically, mammoths- in the North American continent. (Alt!history, okay, guys? Let's just call it alt!evolution/alt!climate for now and ignore the wobbly biological particulars. (Er. That sounds like it has a lot more innuendo than it does in my head, but I am tired and my vocabulary is beginning to fail me here.))
Someone said (what boils down to), "Why couldn't megafauna and NDNs exist at the same time?"
To which someone else responded:
To which I have to say: what the fucking fuck? I'm sorry, a nomadic hunter-gatherer society migrates over to a new land and hunts their fucking means of survival to extinction? Think again. SUBSISTENCE LIFESTYLE, PEOPLE. Subsistence: it means don't fucking take more than you can use. Have a little sense and do not project "civilized" European ideas of "more is better!" onto the people who never came from that background, who took the time and had the sense to learn to live off the land without destroying it. Also, look at your timeline again, please: passenger pigeon extinction? Post-European settlement. Buffalo? Post-European settlement. Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. I am not saying that Europeans were the only ones who fucked up the natural balance of this planet, but if you're looking to put the blame somewhere, don't put it on the people who fucking did it right.
So I've been commenting on that Thirteenth Child review, because I am in a cluebat-wielding kind of mood this week. Or something. We've had a couple of derails already, as anyone could have predicted. What I didn't predict was the extent of the MASSIVE FUCKING LOGIC FAIL someone came in with just now.
Basically, as part of the spiraling alt!history discussion thread, we were talking about the putative existence of megafauna- basically, mammoths- in the North American continent. (Alt!history, okay, guys? Let's just call it alt!evolution/alt!climate for now and ignore the wobbly biological particulars. (Er. That sounds like it has a lot more innuendo than it does in my head, but I am tired and my vocabulary is beginning to fail me here.))
Someone said (what boils down to), "Why couldn't megafauna and NDNs exist at the same time?"
To which someone else responded:
Given the following two things happening at roughly the same time:
A) A group of people migrating into a region that had not previously had human inhabitants.
B) Extinctions of a number of species of mostly large animals.
The OBVIOUS explanation based on most of human history is that A was an important factor in causing B. It may not always turn out to be the correct explanation but it had better be one of the explanations that is considered.
This isn't being insulting to the native peoples of the Americas, it's simply understanding that they ARE people.
To which I have to say: what the fucking fuck? I'm sorry, a nomadic hunter-gatherer society migrates over to a new land and hunts their fucking means of survival to extinction? Think again. SUBSISTENCE LIFESTYLE, PEOPLE. Subsistence: it means don't fucking take more than you can use. Have a little sense and do not project "civilized" European ideas of "more is better!" onto the people who never came from that background, who took the time and had the sense to learn to live off the land without destroying it. Also, look at your timeline again, please: passenger pigeon extinction? Post-European settlement. Buffalo? Post-European settlement. Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. I am not saying that Europeans were the only ones who fucked up the natural balance of this planet, but if you're looking to put the blame somewhere, don't put it on the people who fucking did it right.
