aerobic respiration was a mistake, return to anaerobic respiration.
A lot of indigenous oral history covers a period like what was mentioned in the article. Many of them speak of a time when their societies were more violent, wasteful, and oppressive. Usually that period begins to change when a "messenger" appears who guides them. Not a whole lot of details about it because indigenous societies don't like sharing spiritual beliefs and oral history with outsiders.
Fucking read jason godesky’s 30 theses
Sure, why not.
I, like most Westerners, feel a very strong revulsion at the thought of pedophilia, for example. Yet, in the cultural context of the Etoro, the Marind-ani, and 10–20% of all Melanesian tribes [1], it is the only acceptable form of sex.
:ancap-good:
Lol I'm not trying to own you, I'm reacting to Godesky's blatant pedophile apologia. He dismisses the idea that fucking kids can be considered universally immoral on the basis that some cultures have different values, then proposes "diversity" as the only normative ethical value and then conveniently ignores the child molestation thing. The logical conclusion is that he doesn't think there's anything wrong with fucking kids as long as it doesn't impede this "diversity".
Hence the comparison to ancaps.
His point is that morality is relative, except for diversity, the logical conclusion of which is that libertarian behavior is fine. He doesn't say it outright, but he implies it in a "just asking questions" kind of way. Maybe he didn't even realize it, I dunno. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, but that right there's an issue with at least his anprim outlook.
I don't see the Marx connection. He used antisemitic language to make points but the points didn't lead to antisemitic concusions.
I don't really see how. Differences in sexual norms would just be another kind of diversity.
And I feel like it would have been good to make that argument if you do believe so after bringing it up.
He's basically making a consequentialist argument in favor of diversity rather than utility. Whatever increases diversity overall is good, and whatever reduces it overall is bad. So it makes sense for Western civilization to be a net negative. I can see how killing would generally reduce diversity, since when you're dead you can't really do anything, except maybe when it conflicts with cultural practices involving killing.
You'd have to make the case that that's also true of child molestation, but I don't see how that follows, and he doesn't make the case in this piece at least. And him personally thinking it's fine would be consistent with him using it as an example of moral relativity, and with his defense of preagricultural societies in general, plenty of whom didn't have a pedophilia taboo.
If he thinks there are any other moral goods, he doesn't state what he thinks they are and his points about morality being relative would undermine them (just like they undermine his claim that diversity is a good tbh).
Well, on the other hand trauma introduces all kinds of behaviors that nontrauamatized people generally don't do. Think of something like dissociative identity disorder: that could definitely qualify as diversity. The pscyhological experience of trauma is itself a diversity of experience. The condition of being traumatized is a kind of neurodiversity. And a wide range of differing sexual norms is definitely cultural diversity.
Killing's final, prevents the victim from ever doing anything again, but inflicting harm on someone else isn't necessarily.
It's really not a good framework for people who are anti-molesting children.
A range of possibilities entails differences. He doesn't argue for self-determination for its own sake or anything like that, just diversity. So, whether an individual has a say over it or not, a greater range of possibilities, in culture and psychology like in biology and ecology, would be good. All the things I mentioned would expand that range of possibilites, in ways that we would consider bad (because they obviously are) but in ways that would be good if the foundational good were diversity.
America limits diversity in the way it consumes and homogenizes everything it comes into contact with, but that's not necessarily true of abusive behavior.
The same principle would apply to different kinds of diseases, as long as they're not lethal or not very lethal (ignoring everything else he has to say about disease, which is complete fucking pseudoscience). Herpes is diversity. Chronic back pain is diversity. Mental illness is diversity (and this is one I know for sure a lot of anprims like to make, and one that really pisses me off personally, even if they insist that the conceptualization of mental illness as mental illness is incorrect).
Evolution, then, is simply a consequence of diversity. All organisms are subject to “dumb luck,” and untold heritages of the world were pre-emptively snuffed out by rocks falling at the most inopportune moments. Yet, the diversity of populations of organisms played with the probability of that dumb luck. Falling stones did not kill the swift and the slow in equal measure. Trees with flame-removedant seeds inherited the earth after enough forest fires had gone through. Evolution happens, as the inevitable consequence of a diverse world. As Dawkins abstracted it in The Selfish Gene, the diversity of possible chemical reactions meant that, eventually, a reaction would occur that reproduced itself. Such a reaction would have a higher probability of occuring again, as it was no longer relying on pure chance to do so. Anything that reproduces itself — even ideas — are subject to natural selection and evolution.
There's no self-determination in evolutionary contexts. Diversity is just a range of variation. Self-determination would only be relevant insofar as it produces diversity, which he describes as a blind behavior of the universe, not just choices made in human society.
If diversity required self-determination, there'd be no biodiversity. Plant species can't be diverse because they can't self-determine, etc.
Sure, more often than not, but not always. Choosing to conform to a norm would reduce diversity, choosing to maintain American society would reduce diversity, etc. Self-determination is secondary at best, so we end up having to justify things just on the basis of whether they increase or decrease diversity, not on the basis of whether they're compatible with self-determination.
And I mentioned why I think abuse, trauma, disease, and other awful shit meet the mark for diversity.
Mentally ill people definitely add diversity on the whole to society, in terms of contributions to different aspects of culture, in terms of introducing a greater range of behaviors than only mentally healthy people would, in terms of having a wider range of internal experiences than mentally healthy people - and that has nothing to do with self-determination. If anything, self-determination would get in the way of that diversity. And this all applies to trauma, specifically. It absolutely can be disabling, but I don't think disability necessarily reduces overall diversity. Almost always the opposite.
Lol I was just telling a friend about how cool and egalitarian humans were pre ag, whoops
Yeah it really is all over the place, with large varieties of social structures even in the same geographical areas at relatively the same time.
One neat thing I learned from tides of history is that while agriculture is generally associated in the Levant with sedentary life, the domestication of Maize was done by most likely non sedentary people over several thousand years criss crossing central America and northern South America.
Ultimately this seems to reinforce rather than undermine dialectical materialism. “Human nature” changes depending on circumstance. I’m reading “Kindred,” a book about neanderthals, as well as a book about Ötzi the Iceman, and it does really seem as though the primitive communist past was not quite the garden of eden we might imagine it to have been.
Ten or so years ago I visited Gobekli Tepe, one of the oldest manmade structures on Earth. It’s in a very hot and barren part of Turkey, near the Iraqi border. Yet the carvings you find there depict a world of abundance, as well as all kinds of animals which have been extinct in the region for thousands of years. The Kalahari, too, was probably very different one or two hundred thousand years ago.
Whatever makes people who we and our societies are is probably way more complex than climate change->primitive accumulation->capitalism.
Gobekli Tepe! I hope you raised a beer to those ancients while you were there.
There were like three people there: me, my driver, and a dude with a camel. I wanted to photograph the camel but the guy asked me for a few lira and cheap liberal me said no. I couldn’t get that close to the ruins. They were probably thirty or forty feet away. It was still cool though. Turkey has so much history, the ground is (literally) littered with potsherds.
