[lbo-talk] Blowing Up an Assumption

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Jun 9 16:55:53 PDT 2005



>[lbo-talk] Re: Blowing Up an Assumption
>Michael Pugliese michael.098762001 at gmail.com
>Thu Jun 9 14:40:08 PDT 2005
<snip>
>>On 6/9/05, Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
>>The origins of modern Iraq were similarly arbitrary -- Iraq was
>>made of three vilayets (administrative districts) of the Ottoman
>>Empire -- Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra -- that British imperialists
>>carved out for as a mandate for the British Empire:
>
>So, Iraq should split into three states? Why that is the "divide and
>conquer" plan of Leslie Gelb! http://slate.msn.com/id/2099574/


>[lbo-talk] Re: Blowing Up an Assumption
>Michael Pugliese michael.098762001 at gmail.com
>Thu Jun 9 15:51:09 PDT 2005
<snip>
>On 6/9/05, Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > shouldn't it be up to the Iraqis whether or not the country is split?
>
>You know I thought of typing that. But, isn't that obvious?

Why did you ask a question to which an answer was obvious?

Beyond particular examples discussed in the thread, in principle, origins don't have much to say about the present or the future in the affairs of human beings. The clitoris isn't an adaptation, but women enjoy having and using it anyway. "[D]escribing female orgasm as a nonadaptation simply amounts to making a claim about how it came to be present, historically, in the human population. _Nothing at all_ is implied by that fact, as I argued before. The trait can still be seen as extremely important culturally, or not. _Its historical genesis does not dictate our cultural attitudes toward female orgasm_" (Elizabeth A. Lloyd, "All About Eve: Bias in Evolutionary Explanations of Women's Sexuality," Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Workshop in History and Philosophy of Biology, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, <http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000853/00/chapter_2.pdf>, March 23-24 2001). The same goes for other historical constructs, such as nations and states. That's what freedom is all about.


>[lbo-talk] Re: Blowing Up an Assumption
>uvj at vsnl.com uvj at vsnl.com
>Thu Jun 9 15:52:19 PDT 2005
<snip>
>Jim Devine wrote:
>>shouldn't it be up to the Iraqis whether or not the country is split?
<snip>
>We could apply the same logic to Tibet and Xinjiang.

Why not? -- Yoshie

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