Sunday School

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Jake:

The sad thing about those headlines is that they are both news and in a sense not news.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Simon:

That’s pretty much what woke people used to say. I don’t think we should cancel people, I think we should talk to them and debate them.

Talk and debate is good when it can actually change minds. With the Woke and MAGA crowds that need changing, I’m thinking they are too much in their own echo chambers to be reached.

Tucker Carlson’s half-assed “just asking questions” did nothing but give Nick Fuentes, Ian Carroll, and the satraps of Qatar a greater audience and intellectual caché.

And an assassin’s bullet did nothing but give Charlie Kirk martyr status as well as greater mindshare to Christian Nationalism as well as Candace Owens’ lunacy-of-the-moment and a Left-Wing death-worship cult

I now think my online handle was ill-chosen, it is more aspirational and self reflexive. I can make myself think and rethink, but damn few others.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

There would be little place for the very young, the very old, or the sick and infirm in a Hunter-Gatherer world.

That’s not true at all.  There’s plenty of evidence of prehistoric people caring for their sick and injured, and this evidence increases as we get nearer the present day.

E.g.: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/neanderthals-werent-the-strong-strapping-cavepeople-we-imagine

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

@jakelafort – I stay out of the “left”, I won’t sign my name to any ideology.  I find them totally nuts.  I saw that Instagram post, and they seem to have forgotten that slavery was invented in the Bronze Age.  I’ve had conversations with feminists who are completely ideology-bound until you shock them out of it.  The big problem is group-think and the puritan shame culture.  Nobody’s allowed to think straight or have any questions.  There’s no compassion whatsoever for opponents, who are seen as non-humans.  They’re just about as bad as MAGA people.

I’m just “progressive” I guess.  Centre-liberal.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

And an assassin’s bullet did nothing but give Charlie Kirk martyr status

It did, and any political violence is deplorable.  Even if he was aggressively anti-liberal, he had the right idea in debating people.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Simon:

That’s not true at all. There’s plenty of evidence of prehistoric people caring for their sick and injured, and this evidence increases as we get nearer the present day.

There’s no denying that primitive people certainly got injured often. I know this from a flintknapping class where we had to wear safety goggles, leather gloves, and long sleeves to avoid getting knicked and blinded by flying tiny chards of rock.

Primitive people certainly endured more food-bourne pathogens until they discovered that cooking took that sickness away.

But if too many members of a tribe got injured or sick at once, wouldn’t that mean less hunting and gathering and everyone would starve?

As I recall, Eskimos put their elderly on icebergs and set them adrift. And even post-Hunter-Gatherer Greeks and Romans left defective infants exposed in the wilderness.

There was care for the sick and injured among Hunter-Gatherers, but also limited knowledge of the nature of injury and disease, as well as a lot of culling of the human herd, as well as members of the herd never born.

The “Golden Age” is never as Utopian as it appears.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

But if too many members of a tribe got injured or sick at once, wouldn’t that mean less hunting and gathering and everyone would starve?

All the more reason to look after them and try and heal them.

I read of an instance where a hunter-gatherer tribe left behind an old lady who had dementia.  If people were/are being looked after, possibly it’s their family and friends who did/are doing it.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Simon:

All the more reason to look after them and try and heal them.

Come to think of it, you’re right here. I suppose that’s where the role of medicine man/shaman came from.

Still, the earliest known writing wasn’t around during hunter/gatherer times, so any medical wisdom they had would have spread by oral tradition, with the Telephone Game inaccuracies that brings. Even with perfect communication, accurate medical information was scarce and most medicine, East or West, was folk medicine from ancient times even into the early Twentieth Century, so hunter/gatherers obviously didn’t have it good on health and bedside manner.

I read of an instance where a hunter-gatherer tribe left behind an old lady who had dementia. If people were/are being looked after, possibly it’s their family and friends who did/are doing it.

True, and it happened often enough in many eras to suggest it was a norm.

Taken all together, it shows that hunter/gatherer societies had many other different priorities than equality and care for the weakest. As rotten as things can be today, it was always worse in times past.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Simon:

It did, and any political violence is deplorable. Even if he was aggressively anti-liberal, he had the right idea in debating people.

You are correct and I certainly wasn’t supporting that as an option. Just pointing out that all ways of dealing with opposing viewpoints have outcomes that are hard to pin down.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

As rotten as things can be today, it was always worse in times past.

You’re talking about life in the Garden of Eden.  I think it must have been both terrifying and beautiful.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Simon,

You’re talking about life in the Garden of Eden. I think it must have been both terrifying and beautiful.

I’m saying there was no Garden of Eden or “Golden Age” or “Noble Savagery”, whether terrifying, beautiful, or otherwise.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

I’m saying there was no Garden of Eden or “Golden Age” or “Noble Savagery”, whether terrifying, beautiful, or otherwise.

No power, no oppression, no money, no patriarchy?  Sounds great.  It’s true that people died very young though.

[jakelafortParticipant]

I just read the linked article and i confess utter ignorance of the Kabyle people and their struggle for self determination. I just wonder who the lefties will support.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-israel-of-north-africa-just-declared-independence-the-west-cant-ignore-it/

[StregaModerator]

@simon it’s not just people dying, like snuffing out a candle. It’s about leprosy, polio, and a million savage unrepairable wounds. It’s about the misery of pain, and the proximity to animal violence that pervaded in your ‘sounds great’ description.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Strega wrote:

it’s not just people dying, like snuffing out a candle. It’s about leprosy, polio, and a million savage unrepairable wounds. It’s about the misery of pain, and the proximity to animal violence that pervaded in your ‘sounds great’ description.

I take your point, that living conditions and the lack of advanced medicine would have made life brutal, dangerous and precarious.  Yet we could envy them some aspects as well.  There was very little violence.  They weren’t at each other’s throats.  What happened when they met up with other species of human?  Did they kill them and eat them?  Just the opposite, it sounds like they had a big party and “interbred” with their distant cousins.

Coupled with that, there was absolute freedom from other people, egalitarianism, and solidarity.  From that point of view, it was a Marxist utopia, that can only exist on that small scale.

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