My inner Neo-Zealanders' fallacies
Funny…
I just woke up. I was having a funny and surprisingly not-abnormal dream. You know, the few occasions where I remember my dreams, I practically always find a really impossible situation going on. Not this time, and that was the first thing that struck my mind.
The dream was staged on a very nice bar, something not very different from the bar on the park by DebConf (in fact, with nice, Spanish-evening-esque light conditions). I was having there some beers with Andrew (NZ), Penny (NZ), Steve (UK), Damog (MX). We were just ordering a nice round of beers; I paid for mine with the €0.50 coin I found yesterday in my kitchen (hey, that’s cheap beer! ;-) ). And the conversation was, in fact, quite logical and interesting.
We were comparing the worldviews with which children across our cultures are educated at school. Andrew was sharing how children in New Zealand were taught about the human migrations that led to the population distribution until the 1500s, when Europeans started changing the face of the Earth. Most of the argument was the same one we all know — Early humans leave Africa, their traits specialized for the different weathers, what is widely regarded as the three main racial branches (European white, African black, Eastern yellow - My inner Neo Zealander does not care too much about political correctness, it seems), with Amerindian brown and South-seas black branching off at some point in the process. So far, so good… Debatable but good.
Andrew and Penny continued explaining that the apparent reason, according to New Zealander anthropologists, why the indigenous population in America accepted the culture imposed after the European conquests in the XVI-XVII (contrary to the almost complete annihilation of the Pacific/Indic ocean native cultures) centuries is because the group that crossed Bering ≈50,000BC, and some later groups with whom they inter-mixed came from a semi-developed proto-Christian society, so the new ideas were closer to their own beliefs. Damog, Steve and me gust nodded with interest.
Less than 30 minutes later, awake and after my morning coffee, I’ll have to ask you: WTF‽ A proto-Christian society… ≈48,000 years before Christian era? No, no way your argument holds any water!
(on a side note: At least I know that if at some point I develop a multiple personalities disorder, and they are allowed in the same room at once, I will have a good time debating with myself about interesting topics)
Comments
if at some point?
dear crazy wolf, that point arrived some years ago… but the world loves you anyway!