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Sunday, December 11th, 2005
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4:41p - [LINK] What happens when it starts trending down?
"The Unreachable Singularity and the Innovation Transition" and "Innovation Transition, continued", ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) pompe considers the question of whether or not progress is inevitable.
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9:39p - [BRIEF NOTE] Chinook Jargon's accelerated rise and abbreviated fall
Chinook Jargon (Wikipedia, Language Hat), also known as Chinook Wawa, is a creole language that was once spoken throughout the Oregon Country, a region that once stretched uninterrupted from the northern frontier of Mexican California to the south of Russian America. Emerging from the contact of European traders and settlers and puissant indigenous cultures, Chinook Jargon flourished, becoming a language of wider communication throughout the region and even a first language. If only the Oregon Country hadn't been included in one or another overwhelmingly powerful and profusely immigrant-sending empire or transcontinental federation; if not, then Charles Lillard and Terry Glavin's very and characteristically readable A Voice Great Within Us would not have documented the retreat of Chinook Jargon as English advanced, but the stabilization of a thriving pidgin language spoken by a happily multiethnic and multiracial population.
current mood: for want of a nail (comment on this)
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10:10p - [BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Islam and Slavery
In comments, ajnovak brings up an interesting question. What impact did the Atlantic slave trade have upon African Muslims?
During the slave trade, the Portuguese in West Africa inevitably took slaves that were Muslim (although not all that many) in addition to the many Africans that were not. It was due to the slave trade that there are in Brazil communities of Muslims who have survived for hundreds of years, and it was these enslaved Muslims who led slave revolts against the Portuguese and Brazilians in the nineteenth century.
I have read nothing on it, but I wonder: how DID the Atlantic slave trade affect Islam and Muslims?
Responding, Peter notes that Islamic patterns of slavery, in North Africa and the Middle East, were quite different from those in the Western plantation economy. Leaving aside the origins of most slaves in the Islamic world in eastern Africa, following the 9th century CE Zanj revolt in what is now southern Iraq slavery in the Islamic world seems to have been focused somewhat less on large-scale economic projects and more on relatively prestigious household and bureaucratic positions.
As it is practiced, Islam is a religion that can lend its followers a decided amount of strength in contested with established authorities. Since the West African interior had been Islamized, at least in part, as early as the 9th century, it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to assume that many of the slaves taken from Africa would have been familiar with the Islamic model of slavery and--to put it very mildly--disappointed to find out about the nature of the Atlantic slave trade. Should anyone be surprised that, in Brazil, Islam inspired by many African slaves with at least a nodding acquaintance of Islam and Islamicate mores to revolt? No. We shouldn't be surprised that it survived, or that it inspired slave revolts even in the First Empire.
But what else did it do? I'm curious.
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10:39p - [LINK] "Asian, Western: Same, same?"
Over at the ever-interesting Asia Times, writer Tawada Yoko's "Asian, Western: Same, same?" considers whether or not such things as self-contained civilizations exist.
Traditional "Western" culture is often presented as a single line of development. That line, however, is a carefully cultivated fiction. For example, ancient Greek culture is viewed as being an important part of that cultural lineage, while the influence of Arab mathematics and natural sciences is excluded.
In Hamburg, however, I have not found any trace of ancient Greek culture. In contrast, in a temple in the Japanese city of Nara, at the end of the Silk Road, one can see an ornament of grapes that originated in Greece. This stone fruit still hasn't rotted, although it is more than 1,000 years old and was around for 1,000 years before that.
The cultures of this earth have always formed a network and not several parallel lines.
She's skeptical of the idea.
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10:42p - [QUIZ] What muppet am I?
Via Glennalicious.
( I wish I remembered this one. )
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10:44p - [LINK] This is so cool
You're Buffy fans, right?
current mood: fanboyish (2 comments |comment on this)
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11:00p - [SHWI] WI an earlier demographic transition in England?
As Jacques Vallin et Graziella Caselli's May 1999 comparative study "Quand l'Angleterre rattrapait la France" makes clear, England (and Wales) quickly came to exceed France in population by the first decade of the 20th century mainly because of a significantly greater excess of births over deaths. Although the French population was notoriously not fecund, England's 19th century population surge was unique, barely if at all matched by growth in parts of contemporary Germany and the Low Countries.
For whatever reason, despite being at the cutting edge of the Industrial Revolution, despite having arguably higher living standards and the
other prerequisites for a fall in births, England was late to the demographic transition. This lateness had fateful consequences. At the beginning of the 19th century, the England at the heart of the United Kingdom was less populous than any of the territorial monarchies of continental Europe. At the beginning of the 20th century, this England was not only as populous as its French rival, but it constituted the unquestioned anchor of the United Kingdom and also provided more than enough emigrants to settle its settlement colonies quite thoroughly.
Let's say that England enters the demographic transition earlier for whatever reason. Instead of growing by 360% as OTL, the English population instead gows by 250%, the same as contemporary Germany. Without considering migration, this gives us an English population circa 1901 just short of 23 million, almost 13 million short of its actual population of 32.5. What impact does an English population two-thirds the size of OTL have on the United Kingdom, the British Empire, and the wider world? We'll certainly have fewer English emigrants to the colonies. Quite possibly, if there's a conceivable role for more immigrants many (or most?) of the Irish and Scots who went overseas OTL might end up moving to the industrializing labour-hungry cities of England. This will have interesting ramifications on ethnic relations inside the British Isles, not to mention on the areas that received this immigrants OTL. This world's Canada will be less populous but will also have a significantly higher proportion of Francophones; this world's Australia might well have more and earlier Germans; this world's South Africa will be hard-pressed to control the Boer republics; this world's New Zealand might not exist at all.
Thoughts?
UPDATE (11:00 PM) : This is an expansion of a what-if posted earlier to SHWI.
current mood: uchronical (comment on this)
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11:32p - [BRIEF NOTE] Are men such gits?
A thesis for debate, from the Terminator 2 script, voiced by the character of Sarah Conner.
Fucking men... all you know how to do is thrust into the world with your... fucking ideas and your weapons. Did you know that every gun in the world is named after a man? Colt, Browning, Smith, Thompson, Kalashnikov... all men. Men built the hydrogen bomb, not women... men like you thought it up. You're so creative. You don't know what it's like to really create something... to create a life. To feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death... you fucking bastards.
Is Sarah Conner correct in her evaluation of the patriarchy? Or, is she overstating things just a little bit?
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