#13 "but how you people can say that living like this is normal?"

Nobody is.

"or that parents have the right to keep their kids out of school isolated in middle ages conditions?"

Children have a RIGHT to 21st century technology? The Amish are a culture. There are amazon tribes in Brazil that want to live as hunter gatherers. Should the brazilian government round them all up?

"how do you justify that there are fellow citizens that in the name of religious freedom use corporal punishment"

Corporal punishment was the default method of child rearing for the last several millenia. If some europeans decided they didn't like it in the 60s, that doesn't mean everyone has to jump on board.

"and see incest as the most normal of things? "

No, that's bad, and nobody's defending it. (there may be cousin marriage, but that traditionally isn't incest)

"being politically correct has gone wau too far in the States IMHO."

You want to ban corporal punishment (spanking) and you accuse the US of PCism?

"if you live in a civilized society you must respect certain rules that don't come from a totalitarian state but from centuries of human evolution."

Like freedom and parental rights over their children? Wow. Non sequitur.

" religion is a personal thing and it should be respected but not to the point to keep kids out of school or permit those shenanigans."

The belief that religion is a "personal" thing only is a particular religious belief that no all religious people share. If you define their religion as personal only, it's no longer THEIR religion.

What a mess. From another article:

Now that he's had time to think -- and 10 hours in police detention gives you time for introspection -- Dan Moffat concedes things might have gone better if he'd cooperated.

When officers came to his door in Francisville Friday morning about 10 a.m. asking to speak to the owner of the property where he and three roommates were living, he said the guy wasn't home.

Even though he's been co-owner of the place since 2004.

And when they said they were going in anyway to investigate a complaint, he says he probably shouldn't have tossed the keys behind a gate where the cops had to fish them out.
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/inq-blinq/20009829.html

If you search google images for Manaus Landless Eviction

you get some additional viewpoints on the event, and other pictures as well.

Informative.

#3: "But a dozen riot police versus one woman holding an infant child? There's no way to justify what we're seeing in the moment that this photo was taken."

Police: Lady: get out. We told you to leave.

Lady: No

Police: Ok, we're going to march forward lockstep and if you value your dignity, you will get out of the way.

Lady: F you, pigs.

Police: march march...

Its very striking.

BUT: she was not caught by suprise. So she decided to stand them down.

I'm guessing she wanted to make a political point. So she puts herself and child at risk.

"The landless peasants tried in vain to resist the eviction with bows and arrows against police using tear gas and trained dogs. "

Ok, so they used violence against lawful authority. What do they expect? So the cops had tear gas, and used it to win a battle. Lopsided battles are oppressive now? I'm glad the Taliban was oppressed by the US.

In this context I find:

Spirit of the Rainforest: A Yanomamo Shaman's Story by Mark Andrew Ritchie

very interesting

Ritchie records the account of a shaman who *gasp, horrors* converts to Christianity and is VERY GRATEFUL to no longer go through life in a drug induced haze where the spirits tell him to slaughter the neighboring tribe for the last depradation in their ongoing feud. The shaman also is annoyed at the anthrpologists who want them to stay "pure" and don't want them to have western medicine.

It really should be read by anyone sure that all missionaries do is ruin functioning cultures.

"The word "primitive" means "at an early stage of development" but since their development is contemporary with own, there's no objective way to determine this. The assumption that aboriginal cultures are less developed or less advanced than our own simply because they're isolated from the so-called "developed" nations and they don't have what we call industry is incredibly ethnocentric. They also don't have toxic waste, and aren't poisoning their air and water. We do know their culture is different than ours, but whether or not ours is superior is an arbitrary value judgement with no objective measure."

Not really.

We know that, say, Germans didn't used to be able to travel 1000s of miles in a few hours, look up something someone wrote exactly as they wrote it 100 years ago, or smelt metal tools which last longer than stone tools, and can do more things.

distance, time, ability. All objective.

Now germans can do such things, and germans have built on what they learned to do themselves or copied others doing, and have done more things to shrink distance and extend time and increase abilities to accomplish tasks.

This group hasn't done the things other tribes learned to do. There may be all kinds of reasons for it, but it doesn't do any good to tell them they are as advanced when germans can clean a wound and prevent infection and perhaps they can't at all.

Wasn't it Joe Biden who said anyone who called his rifle "baby" needed to have his head examined?

But the army *told* him to do that!

A recent issue of Archeology magazine mentioned a conference of anthrpologists that dealt with some of Diamond's simplifications.

Here is an abstract

http://www.archaeology.org/0803/abstracts/insider.html

What I recall from the article is well summarized by responding to this summary from Wikipedia

"As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, he dismantles previous ethnocentric explanations for the collapses which he discusses, and focuses instead on ecological factors. He pays particular attention to the Norse settlements in Greenland, which vanished as the climate got colder, while the surrounding Inuit culture thrived."

Anthropologists respond that the Greenland settlements didn't "collapse" or "vanish", rather the people there willingly decided to up and leave and go home because they made choices to respond to climate change.

The "90%" testimony I've found claims that they are her words, but I'm not finding any side-by-side comparisons.

Is it really? 90% verbatim quotes? The web site didn't seem like that. Where can I see a side-by-side comparison.

36:

"foolhardy"

This place looks very much like Hopewell Village National Historic site in Pennsylvania, a late 18th century ironworks, fired by charcoal.

I think they wore boots, though maybe they wouldn't want to if it was 113 degrees.

Ironwork is hot work in any climate. I hope they are well compensated relative to their cost of living.