SolarCross wrote:Okay it may be that I am just a little dim but I can't quite connect up what you are saying with what I asked. Perhaps it is paradigm issue; you are trying to bang the square pegs of your concepts into the round holes in my mind.
Yes it is a debating tactic, and yes to does work, to refer to your initial question.
But my goal isn't necessarily to persuade anyone to my side in this particular case. It was, and usually is, to wipe away all the unverifiable opinion based experience arguments out of the way. Which, in this case, seems to have worked. After about half a page of throwing up the kind of arguments I'm attempting to stem, the user had to go back and restate something from the first page. Now, this got sidetracked by our own little chat, but the integrity of the initial argument was maintained without a lot of postmodernist claptrap.
That is the tactic I'm using because it is just as impossible to engage if we're sitting around like first year college students saying, "What is freedom?" Free from any context, or if we're like the more latter-day rightwing movement (or the Interwar European one) where it's a discussion of personal experience and our feelings about the experience.
In either case, even if one were here simply for boredom, there is nothing to speak about in this kind of framework. This would, essentially, just be a blog without responses and counter-responses were we to accept completely the postmodern framework.
We must have some kind of common ground on which to speak to each other. I think the whole notion of postmodernism is pretty silly (as is typical for a Marxist) but, if it helps:
PBS wrote:Postmodernism
A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.
Postmodernism is "post" because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody - a characterisitic of the so-called "modern" mind. The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philospher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism "cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself."
Oxymoron wrote:My question was on a practical and historical nature, as I was curious to learn from people who might have researched this topic.
I am just assuming that some natural selection was at work during the crossing over, but I wanted to see if there was actual planned breeding by the slave owners.
There isn't enough genetic variation within human beings in general for there to have been, "some natural selection...at work during the crossing over."
So far as I have ever seen, there was no attempt to make a planned breeding program. This, in part, probably stems from the conception that "African" was a category unto itself and you already had that in the population.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!