“While acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged,” wrote Jared M. Diamond in an essay in The New Yorker last April.It's hard to believe that Diamond would just make this stuff up, although one wonders how the New Yorker's famous fact-checking department would be able to verify Diamond's information.
Now two of the subjects of that essay are acknowledging their own vengeful feelings. This week a lawyer filed a $10-million defamation claim in a New York court on behalf of two Papua New Guinea men whom Mr. Diamond described as active participants in clan warfare during the 1990s.
Mr. Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of the best-selling Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W.W. Norton, 1997), and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, 2004), based the essay almost entirely on accounts given to him by Hup Daniel Wemp, an oil-field technician who served as Mr. Diamond’s driver during a 2001-2 visit to New Guinea. (The full text of the essay is open only to New Yorker subscribers, but a long summary is available here.
Mr. Wemp is now one of the lawsuit’s two plaintiffs; the other is Henep Isum Mandingo, a man who, according to Mr. Diamond’s article, was attacked and paralyzed on orders from Mr. Wemp.
For nearly a year, Mr. Diamond’s article has been scrutinized by Rhonda Roland Shearer, director of the Art Science Research Laboratory, a multifaceted New York organization with a sideline in media criticism. Ms. Shearer, a sculptor and writer, is the widow of Stephen Jay Gould, who preceded Mr. Diamond as a widely esteemed public interpreter of science.
[Adventures in Reaction]
Monday, April 27, 2009
New Guineans, aided by Stephen Jay Gould's widow, sue Jared Diamond
Due to many distractions over the past few days, I don't have much to write about, so for today I'll leave you with this, which is not from The Onion: Jared Diamond sued by subjects of his article:
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That's what you get when you rely on anecdotes for your tales, instead of more verifiable information. I heard a lot of crazy shit too, but some people still just won't believe me. Good thing the statute of limitations is up for me.
ReplyDeleteI speak from direct experience. People have cell phones or they can get to a phone.
ReplyDeleteI speak to Daniel Wemp frequently by phone (as my phone bills testify).
It is notable that since Wemp discovered that he was featured in The New Yorker as a murderer and had a few questions for Diamond about that (including why he was never told he was going to be in a magazine and why the facts were jumbled), Diamond has refused to call Daniel despite being given the number.
If anyone is interested in details they can read our initial article.
http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/latest-journalism-news-updates-149.php
I read Diamond's garbage from the public library and thought he was full of crap, as well as being an anti-white leftist.
ReplyDeleteReally, the only solution to this injustice is to fly Mr. Wemp and Mr. Mandingo and their families here and give them green cards, government jobs and subsidized housing. Once resettled in the U.S. the plaintiffs can properly pursue their case against Diamond and the New Yorker with help from state-appointed attorneys.
ReplyDeleteIt seems Diamond was also wrong about Greenland, just as he was about Easter Island.
ReplyDeleteHeh,
ReplyDeleteI can't figure out if that entry a couple up is for real or not.
But then, I guess that someone who can't figure out how to properly insert a URL is in the same league as Steven Jay Gould.
Some Stinky Journalism Latest Updates.
Ethics in journalism is some sort of new concept for the left!
Sorry for not adding the tags. I assure you it has nothing to do with my politics. But just for your information, I am neither left or right. Both sides have big problems and advantages and disadvantages. I stay out of politics --I don't even vote--as a method to stay to facts and not personalize. I fundamentally don't like polarization and feel the requirement of "loyalty" to one party or view an enemy of truth.
ReplyDeleteCampaign reform is a good example--neither party wants to do it! No, politics, I leave for other souls.
Thanks again for fixing the link to our report.
I think I'm going to cancel my trip to find out about the sensational drama in Nigeria that is always alluded to in their famous emails. If I reported it and they came back and said I lied, I feel very confident that their story of our encounter would be far better, fantastical, and yet, believable.
ReplyDeleteYou know, have the Samoans ever thought about reparations for the reputation their women suffered because Margaret Mead believed and reported their stories? They were just having fun with her and telling her what she wanted to hear, how on earth were they to know they would become known as the biggest sluts in the world. Perhaps a price tag can be put on their pain and suffering.
The idea that the Norse in Greenland wouldn't eat fish is just gormless - they ate fish everywhere else they went. Shetland, Orkney, Ireland.......
ReplyDeleteWhat about Isum and the others who never spoke to Diamond but are accused of heinous crimes? Mead's tales of sexually active girls is simply not a fair comparison. Nor is the fake emails scams fair with their fake sad tales...In the case of the emails, these people ar trying to make a buck by tricking people out of potentially big buck.
ReplyDeleteWemp was a working stiff trying to do his job (driving Diamond),then Diamond, without permission, uses his name and others names for booking $25,000 lectures.
What possible benefit was ever in this for Daniel Wemp. He was only driving Mr. Daisy (Diamond) around?
But hey if its okay to call innocent people criminals (and then blame them for it) then what else can I say to you, Mr. Anonymous. But why don't you say all this stuff using your real name?
widely esteemed public interpreter of science. Although I had problems with Stephan Jay Gould and disagreed with his interpretations on some issues, there is no bigger fraud in the public interpretation of science prospering today than Jared Diamond, an advertisement for himself and [I always suspected] somewhat of a fabricator and sleight-of-hand artist.
ReplyDeleteThe New Yorker often prints pretentious rubbish as fact. I called them on it and a guy named Hendrick Hertzberg responded in the usual sanctimonious condescending manner affected by TNY writers. I was right, but this concocter stubbornly insisted that his "interpretation" had passed muster with the so-called "fact-checkers" who themselves were die-hard lefties, as a short-lived subsequent dialogue online with HH revealed.
Hertzberg still thinks Jimmy Carter was a great POTUS, to give you an idea of the quality of his analysis.
"Although I had problems with Stephan Jay Gould and disagreed with his interpretations on some issues, there is no bigger fraud in the public interpretation of science prospering today than Jared Diamond"
ReplyDeleteYou sure about that?
Jared Diamond told a plausible enough sounding story about how Europeans ruled the world without genetic advantages. Sort of an impressive achievement (the story, not the world ruling) to take on the challenge of explaining what he did. Basically, the best case that can be made from the evidence for the doctrine of zero group differences (by way of offering an alternative explanation for the most obvious case against ZGD).
He basically admits that the whole endeavor is tongue in cheek in the preface when he acknowledges the certainty of different environments selecting for different mental traits. He hides the implications of this admission by claiming that he thinks the environment that people in PNG put more emphasis on cogitative skill than any other. Once you acknowledge the differences in selective pressures of different peoples (as Diamond does) you've given up the whole game. At that point you have to look at other areas for evidence of the outcomes of selection. We all know what every single data point indicates and it isn't for the cognitive superiority of PNG tribesmen.
Gould was far, far worse. I'll leave it to Paul Krugman to deliver the take down here:
"I am not sure how well this is known. I have tried, in preparation for this talk, to read some evolutionary economics, and was particularly curious about what biologists people reference. What I encountered were quite a few references to Stephen Jay Gould, hardly any to other evolutionary theorists. Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved [sic] by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there."So Gould failed to understand the basics of the field he popularized and then slandered everyone who deviates from political correctness as a horrible horrible person.
Diamond is a sly liar / storyteller out for personal gain.
Gould was a fully accredited member of the inquisition.
-Steve Johnson
One more take down of Gould:
ReplyDelete"If you've read anything Stephen J. Gould has ever said about evolutionary biology, I have some bad news for you. In the field of evolutionary biology at large, Gould's reputation is mud. Not because he was wrong. Many honest scientists have made honest mistakes. What Gould did was much worse, involving deliberate misrepresentation of science."
The whole article is an interesting read:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/beware-of-gould.html
-Steve Johnson
If, even in principle, he can be sued then what about the way the New Yorker, & everybody else, published stories about massacres in Kosovo which turned out to be complete fabrications? In the Milosevic "trial" it was proven again & again that such stories were lies & the US government claim that the Serbs had killed 500,000 Albanian men *well over 100%O has been reduced to about 2,000 deaths of all nationalities overwhelmingly by KLA & NATO bombers.
ReplyDeleteSince this war resulted in 350,000 being ethnicly cleaned & many thousands murdered by the KLA, after they had been signed up as NATO police, the option of 350,000 people suing the New Yorker & also the rest of the media & government for genuine physical damage must be a real one.
NATO's police cut up hundreds, probably 1,300 Serbs while they were still alive & sold the body parts to our hospitals. Possibly Jared could put forward as a defence, that he hadn't accused the New Guinea headhunters of anything as bad as his own government does.