He then cites some discrepancies in the scales of published maps.
I don't know what any distances "really" are, but here are some calculations I made a while back on the width of the Wastelands:
RQ 2 book: 760 km.
Pavis/Big Rubble: 800 km.
Trollpak: 805 km.
RQ 3 Glorantha book: 756 km.
Geography of Glorantha from Wyrms Footnotes 11: 768 km.
Not too inconsistent, next to Paul's 2:1 ratio of highest to lowest, or the change in the scale in the Trollpak maps from 1 in: 10 miles (16 km.) in the first edition to 1 in: about 8 km. in the second edition.
I'll probably get a big "eat me" from Sandy for this one. That'll make up for my arguably sycophantic remark last month.
Nah. The God Learners were clearly scientists, of the sort that gives science a bad name. Scientists mostly don't believe in subjective world views, except to the extent that these are veils which get in the way of capital-T Truth. Since this isn't the cultural relativism daily (more like monthly :), I won't go any further into that morass.
The God Learners clearly believed that every culture had its paths of power, but that's very different, as different as nineteenth century unabashed imperialists, carving out spheres of influence so as to grab resources, are from the nineteenth century anthropologists whose work started us down the path toward cultural relativism.
And which of those sweeping generalizations is "a manifest untruth": that all cultures are equally viable, that they are equally worthy of respect, or that they make their people equally happy? Not that it matters--I don't know anyone except the straw men of Rush Limbaugh's imagination who believes any of them. The anthro professors I know, who would seem to fit the first bit of your category (proclaiming that each culture has a subjective world view), don't proclaim any of the sweeping generalizations you make.
The closest that you could accurately say is that a large portion of today's scholars see no objective basis for judging a culture. If we decide on any criterion (such as making people happy, GDP, number of nuclear weapons, or nightly broadcast of "The Simpsons"), we necessarily do so from within our own culture.
People who claim objective grounds for saying a culture is deficient usually have a religious axe to grind; you hardly ever hear scientists saying something like that, but you often hear, for example, missionaries. It'd be hard to be a missionary if you didn't believe that your target culture needed changing, wouldn't it? And it'd be terrible to believe, after having been a missionary, that there was no possible justification for having tried to undercut another person's worldview.
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