Updates from razib RSS
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razib, murtad fitri
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razib, murtad fitri
the GSS has a variable, “SPKMSLM”:
Now consider a Muslim clergyman who preaches hatred of the United States. If such a person wanted to make a speech in your community preaching hatred of the United States, should he be allowed to speak, or not?
obviously it is legal to preach; but how many people say it should be allowed? men more than women, whites more than blacks, smart more than dumb, educated more than uneducated, irreligious more than religious, liberal more than conservative. graphical form below.
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razib, murtad fitri
Cartoon controversy returns to campus:
“As an institution purportedly committed to making our campus an educational environment where all students feel equally comfortable, we feel that by hosting Kurt Westergaard Yale is undermining its commitment to creating a nurturing learning environment by failing to recognize the religious and racial sensitivity of the issue,” the group said. “Certainly, it would be unlikely for a white supremacist or a holocaust denier to be a distinguished guest speaker at Yale; hosting individuals who propagate hate is not only a disservice to the minorities that hate is directed towards but to the campus community as a whole.”
1) if concerns of sensitivity resulted in this event not occurring that would be way worse for the image of islam on the yale campus (it isn’t as if feminism has become awesomely popular in the past generation in the wake of the perception that the campus left has stifled dissent from feminist orthodoxies). this is probably why the MSA is being low-key.
2) i can see where muslims come from i guess in analogizing the cartoons to holocaust denial or white supremacy. but for those who think islam is a made up religion, or those who think religions are made up in general, this is only an issue about the emotional hurt to muslims (or religious people in general who see in aspects of islam expressions of the sacred). holocaust denial and white supremacy are about hurt to people emotionally, but the incineration of 6 million jews and several decades of institutionalized white supremacy mean that these charges have more concrete heft to them (a white supremacist was invited to michigan state by YAF a few years ago, but student protests led to a cancellation of the event i think).
3) i have to admit, the whole fight speech with more speech blah blah gets a bit old. life and time and space is finite, so obviously you prune who you give time & space to based on interest or relevance.
4) more muslim human beings died as a direct consequence of the disturbances in the wake of the danish cartoons than non-muslim human beings.
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razib, murtad fitri
Attitudes of Republicans & Conservatives by demographic to evolution
Conservative elites are conflicted on evolution, liberals are not
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razib, murtad fitri
Can a Mixed Race Contestant Become a Chinese Idol?:
But there is one thing that distinguishes this 20-year-old from her peers, something that has made her the unwitting focus of an intense public debate about what exactly it means to be Chinese: the color of her skin. Born to a Chinese mother and an African-American father whom she has never met, the theater student rocketed into the public consciousness last month when she took part in an American Idol-esque TV show, “Go! Oriental Angel.”
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These kinds of posts on the most popular chat rooms have attracted thousands of comments. A few have been supportive of Lou, but the rest range from expressions of fear and ignorance to outright racism. One of the most popular posts about Lou Jing on the KDS Life forum asks in mock-seriousness: “Is it possible that she is Obama’s daughter?” Another poster said: “I can’t believe she’s so shameless that she would go on TV.” Most of the critics are agreed on one point – that this black woman cannot be regarded as a “real” Chinese. -
razib, murtad fitri
No remorse from terrorist, court told:
A Toronto man who admitted yesterday he was a member of a terrorist group that planned attacks in Canada was caught on police wiretaps saying he hated non-Muslims.
Ali Mohamed Dirie, a Canadian born in Somalia, called white people the “No. 1 filthiest people on the face of the planet. They don’t have Islam. They’re the most filthiest people.”
He added that, “In Islam there is no racism, we only hate kufar [non-Muslims].”
dude should go live in saudi arabia and see how teh awesome they treat somalis (since being fellow sunni muslims they won’t be racist against him).
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razib, murtad fitri
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razib, murtad fitri
more craziness from the 10/40 window, In northern India, village elders order ‘honor killings’:
In late July, three months after Maun married Banwal, he was lynched by residents of her village. They hacked at his body with scythes and farm tools until he moved no more.
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razib, murtad fitri
i had a weird thought about the putative slacker/dumb/deadbeat terrorists (allegedly) cropping up. i think that for a variety of reasons dumb rabble might aspire toward violent political action to a far greater extent than someone finishing their phd in materials science, but it is the latter who are more likely to be able to execute. IOW, i think the expected value of destruction wrought is going to be higher for the very small number of very smart terrorists than the small, but larger, number of dumb terrorists. IOW
(terrorism | dumb) > (terrorism | smart)
(destruction | dumb) < (destruction | smart)
(terrorism | dumb) X (destruction | dumb) < (terrorism | smart) X (destruction | smart) -
razib, murtad fitri
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razib, murtad fitri
uh, From Smiling Coffee Vendor to Terror Suspect, the most bizarre part:
In April 2008, according to bankruptcy records, he began using a Discover card. May 2008: a Shell card. June 2008: five new credit cards. July 2008: three more, including ones from Sony and Radio Shack. August 2008: two more.
He would later report that his monthly expenses were $1,108, including $450 in rent and $390 for food. His stated income was only $800.
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In March, Mr. Zazi filed for bankruptcy. He said on the application that he was unmarried and listed $51,000 in debts.he flat-out lied about the marriage part (wife & two kids in pakistan). but $51,000 in debt is A LOT to incur for a guy who works a lot and doesn’t live with his family.
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razib, murtad fitri
just an fyi, i did a bloggingheads with john hawks on fossils & evolution. since several readers have emailed me that they appreciated finding my scienceblog via talk islam, i’m pretty sure a subset of readers might be interested….
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razib, murtad fitri
the pew religious landscape has a variety of data on american denominations and traditions. i decided to check two variables and how they relate to each other:
1) those who say that “religion is very important to their lives”
and
2) those who avow that “their religions is the one true faith which leads to eternal life”how does #2 relate to #1? i did a loess fit. two conclusions:
1) low religious intensity of a group strongly predicts lack of agreement with #2. that is, the less religious you are the more likely you are to think other religious can lead to eternal life.
2) but, very religious sects may agree with #2 more, they exhibit a much wider range of attitudes. part of this is that these groups where 90% of people say religion is very important have constricted the range so that they’re all basically the same.
in my limited selection of sects only two groups appreciably deviated from the trend line away from the extreme of those who are in super-religious sects: muslims & disciplies of christ. muslims are more exclusive than their religiosity would predict, while disciplines of christ are less.
see the chart here.
Update: OK, i realized i should just log transform both cuz the Y axis is also compressed. look here.
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razib, murtad fitri
U.S. Charges Afghan – Born Man With Bombing Plot:
A Colorado airport shuttle bus driver was charged under federal anti-terrorism laws with plotting to set off explosives in the United States and accused of acquiring the same bomb-making chemicals used in the 2005 London transit attacks.
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razib, murtad fitri
there is a new groundbreaking paper on indian genetics out, and i have a very long post on it. fwiw, i don’t really believe that the high between-population differences in india are due to small founding populations which expanded.
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razib, murtad fitri
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razib, murtad fitri
No consensus on who was behind Sept 11: global poll (from 2008):
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razib, murtad fitri
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razib, murtad fitri
ok, “feel good” story, Girl’s Refusal to Be Child Bride Inspires Nation – Even President of India Wanted to Meet Rekha Kalindi.
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razib, murtad fitri
over at scienceblogs i received this comment from “mohammed Y”. i didn’t see a point in responding to it, so i just left it, but it might be useful here:
From a scientific point of view, I really wouldnt give a weight for a 3% increased risk out of such a massively complex study because it might be due ANYTHING. Besides, this recessive gene effect could be a double edged blade in a sense that families with pure lineage and good atributes will also have this multipler effect and continue nourishing. One other point, I think we cannot really claim that we really understand how natural selection and genetic evolution evolve.. this field is really full of surprises because it is evolution, which mean it keeps evolving.. even with all this advancement and information explosion.. I think our evolution mechanism will always find ways to “evolve” more robustly and correct itself overtime. the fact that we dont know them yet does not mean they are not there.
my response:
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razib, murtad fitri
readers who want a deeper, and less typo-written explanation, Inbreeding & the downfall of the Spanish Hapsburgs .
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razib, murtad fitri
i read about how middle eastern dress for women has gotten way more “conservative” in the past generation. so what’s up with queen rania and asma assad? do they get crap for the way they dress, or does their class status give them immunity to any social pressure? i just thought of it cuz of this image of queen rania with michelle obama, she’s got her skirt above her knees (not that i’m complaining). if you looked at rania’s images in particular she basically looks like penelope cruz’s better looking sister (and dresses like it too).
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razib, murtad fitri
follow-up to the comment below about the magnitude of the difference between parent-child & sibling mating vs. first cousin mating, assuming that there isn’t a systematic culture of inbreeding:
* parents & children share 50% of their distinctive genes in common (let’s that just genes).
* first cousins share 12.5% of their distinctive genes (this number goes up with intergenerational inbreeding).
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razib, murtad fitri
since we’re talking about incest, Mackenzie Phillips had sex with her dad.
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razib, murtad fitri
Taliban targets descendants of Alexander the Great. story about the cultural threat which the kafir kalash of chitral face. the genetics don’t support a relationship to the peoples of southeastern europe; the kalash look like a “genetic isolate.” because they’re isolated and backward non-muslims, pagans basically, they haven’t intermarried with outsides in a long time. because of their backwardness they’ve had a high enough birthrate to compensate for the conversions to islam which have occurred on a regular basis. the only reason these pagans exist is because they were on the british side of the durand line; affinal peoples in ‘kafiristan’ were forcibly converted to islam ~1900. when i first read about the kafir kalash as a kid i suspected that they’d be gone by the end of my lifetime, and it looks like this generation is going to be when the bell tools. at least we’ll have color photographs and films.
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razib, murtad fitri
jay-z seems to have larded the new single ‘run this town’ with references to the five percenters, a post-muslim group.
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razib, murtad fitri
indonesia is becoming less muslim (marginally). see here and here. also looks like significant numbers of people were “protestant” because of suharto era hostility toward irreligion (legacy of the anti-communist era). unlike many nations indonesia seems to have reliable statistics because of the nationalist ideology which encourages affiliation to one of the recognized religions.
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razib, murtad fitri
reality check:
now that “animists” are tapped out christians and muslims are at parity and fertility does matter more (note that animists all turned christian in the past two generation in the aggregate). christians should blame mission schools which resulted in higher indices of human development among yoruba and igbo vis-a-vis hausa and fulani.
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razib, murtad fitri
Young Muslims use punk to loosen their religion:
But just because they aren’t practicing Islam in the traditional way doesn’t mean they don’t still consider themselves religious Muslims.
“It’s infinitely more pious to be true to your heart, because that’s where religion really lives,” said Kamel, who grew up in the Chicago area, raised by a Muslim father and Catholic mother.
punk muslims seem a bit self-indulgent. but i guess the youth are always such….
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razib, murtad fitri
some info unsealed in the rifqa bary case. reminds me of:
Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it.” (Matthew 10:34-39 NASB)
this can be generalized to conversion to other religions from that of parents almost universally, not just christianity.
