This is... so bad. Like if The Onion wrote an article mocking liberal anthropology they could scarcely do better than this guy. But who needs satire when we got Wade Davis?

Wade defines 9/11 as "the biggest story of culture [anthros] or the country would ever encounter" & says anthros alone could answer the question "why do they hate us". Bro. The levels of erasure it takes to say this. @KimTallBear uses the phrase "American Dreaming".
Ah yes, and of course "the West" has "technology" while everyone else has "culture". Endless.
He argues Carleton Coon's racist science was respected at the time of his retirement. No mention of the protracted disputes over his work. No mention of Montague Cobb or Sherry Washburn of course. More erasures.
He says genome science shows that "race is a fiction". It's true that groups we call races are not genetically distinct categories. But racism and its effects are still real. & I'd be hard pressed to find a field where race science is more alive & well than genomics.
The theory of social change is.. something else. Wade argues anthropology was the root of social justice movements, as if there were not BIPOC & others resisting colonial social orders at every moment.
Just last night I re-read Frederick Douglass's 1854 repudiation of Sam Morton and co. Written 4 years before Boas was born. It articulates much anti-racist thinking about human variation decades before anthros would. As did Rudolph Virchow's work, Boas's mentor.
This is not to say that Boas was not an important (if problematic) counterpoint to voices like Ales Hrdlicka on the biology of racial difference in humans. But Boas's ideas have a history. More erasures.
"Anthropology matters because it allows us to look beneath the surface of things." Who is the "us" here that was unaware of how colonial social orders operate?
"Anthropology is the antidote to nativism, the enemy of hate, a vaccine of understanding, tolerance and compassion" - revisionist history that sees anthropology as history's antidote to colonialism and not its agent.
In 1969, Vine Deloria Jr. said "The fundamental thesis of the anthropologist is that ppl are objects for observation, people are then considered objects for experimentation, for manipulation, & for eventual extinction." This is the colonial history of the field we must face.
Wade writes that anthropology "inoculat[es] the world from the likes of the Proud Boys and Donald Trump". Y'all. If "but Trump" were an entire field 😂
I won't even touch the last paragraph. It is vile.
Y'all. The task, as it has long been, is to resist and re-story Wade's and so many others' brand of anthropological dreaming that reinscribes the same diseases of colonialism for which it claims to be cure. An honest account of history is fundamental to that project.

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Tomorrow, January 6th, MAGA chuds, Proud Boys, and white supremacists are planned to descend on Washington D.C. to contest the election. Among them will be NSC-131, a New England based neo-Nazi organization. Let's welcome them by saying hi to one of their members, Eddie Stuart!


Edward Stuart, from Chester, New Hampshire, has been a member of Nationalist Social Club (NSC) since the very beginning and is a staple participant in their actions. He is known in NSC chats as "Carl Jung" and is well connected in the New England Nazi scene.
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NSC-131 is a neo-Nazi group that was started in Massachusetts in early 2020 by Chris Hood. You can learn more about NSC and it's members in these threads:


Eddie describes his ideology as "Esoteric Hitlerism" which is an occult form of Nazism that literally worships Adolf Hitler as a god, or, specifically, as an incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu. Here is Ed holding the RigVeda with some of his occult Nazi pals. Interesting Ed!
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Much of this ideological insight was gained from Eddie's Twitter, where he originally used his "Carl Jung" persona and reposts explicit neo-fascist content and racist memes. In one edited picture, Eddie can be seen at an NSC event in late June 2020 holding a Nazi Sonnenrad flag
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I've seen many news articles cite that "the UK variant could be the dominant strain by March". This is emphasized by @CDCDirector.

While this will likely to be the case, this should not be an automatic cause for concern. Cases could still remain contained.

Here's how: 🧵

One of @CDCgov's own models has tracked the true decline in cases quite accurately thus far.

Their projection shows that the B.1.1.7 variant will become the dominant variant in March. But interestingly... there's no fourth wave. Cases simply level out:

https://t.co/tDce0MwO61


Just because a variant becomes the dominant strain does not automatically mean we will see a repeat of Fall 2020.

Let's look at UK and South Africa, where cases have been falling for the past month, in unison with the US (albeit with tougher restrictions):


Furthermore, the claim that the "variant is doubling every 10 days" is false. It's the *proportion of the variant* that is doubling every 10 days.

If overall prevalence drops during the studied time period, the true doubling time of the variant is actually much longer 10 days.

Simple example:

Day 0: 10 variant / 100 cases -> 10% variant
Day 10: 15 variant / 75 cases -> 20% variant
Day 20: 20 variant / 50 cases -> 40% variant

1) Proportion of variant doubles every 10 days
2) Doubling time of variant is actually 20 days
3) Total cases still drop by 50%

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I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.