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Feb. 6th, 2007 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
urocyonHere's an unfortunately amusing Hillbilly Savants post by Eric Drummond Smith. "Unfortunately", since there's no shortage of similar irritants. :/ Good going responding to racist idiots, at any rate.
Apparently, Appalachia, Scotland, North England, and Northern Ireland gave nothing to modern culture beyond violence and superstition.
Yup. The original premise was fairly Eurocentric, so I can't really fault Smith for sticking with that approach, though it does introduce a further note of historical inaccuracy-by-omission.
Come to think of it, ISTR seeing something a couple of years back in Scientific American, depicting very much the same cultural group as demonstrating the lowest level of civic pride in the US. By his own standards, naturally--and it must be a bad thing, because he told us so. This was the same peculiar circular reasoning guy who also brought us such gems of statistical analysis as a totally objective natural beauty index, with scores calculated entirely using factors he found appealing. *sigh*
Apparently, Appalachia, Scotland, North England, and Northern Ireland gave nothing to modern culture beyond violence and superstition.
Yup. The original premise was fairly Eurocentric, so I can't really fault Smith for sticking with that approach, though it does introduce a further note of historical inaccuracy-by-omission.
Come to think of it, ISTR seeing something a couple of years back in Scientific American, depicting very much the same cultural group as demonstrating the lowest level of civic pride in the US. By his own standards, naturally--and it must be a bad thing, because he told us so. This was the same peculiar circular reasoning guy who also brought us such gems of statistical analysis as a totally objective natural beauty index, with scores calculated entirely using factors he found appealing. *sigh*