Simon Mathews

@regthefronkeyfarmer Oh well, now I’m de-modded maybe @unseen will talk to me again 😜

Enco, there was one day when the boys decided to drive into town (there are no actual roads to the marae, you just drive over scrubby sandy bumps till you get to a road) to get Fish & Chips and sliced white bread. The fish was covered in thick batter so I opened one up and ate the white meat inside the batter case. One of the boys eyes lit up, he…[Read more]

Strega wrote:
@regthefronkeyfarmer Apparently I’m no longer a moderator (!) so you’re on your own if anything gets rowdy

Bring it on if you have a god on your side!! 🙂

Seriously Strega, that is not good enough. You will always be more that a participant to us all !!! I am making protest signs. We need more god mods!!

@strega – that’s a fantastic story.  The thing about pre-industrial people is their strong community ethos.  It shows how good it is for us.

Enco: the buzz is now snoring.

@regthefronkeyfarmer Apparently I’m no longer a moderator (!) so you’re on your own if anything gets rowdy 🤣

Thanks, Reg!!

Reg, one of these days that’ll be a reality 🙂

Strega, I will meet up with you in a hour or two…..

Enco, Jake…. I’ve spent thirty minutes deciding how to choose a small window into profundity. I’ve landed on a Māori experience.

Each tribe has its own “marae” which is their sacred community building where they attain a sense of ‘belonging’. It is prohibited for non-tribe members.  I was adopted as sister, and embraced into the shared flow of…[Read more]

Have a great week!

@Enco the tribes I lived with were NZ Māori, Fijian Pacific Islanders and a little with the Aborigines in Australia. Not part of any group or organisation – I went by myself, and bearing in mind the potential risks, I probably ought to be dead several times over, by now.

Stories about all of them, that changed my perceptions of almost…[Read more]

Y’all know that SCOTUS just defanged the Voting Rights Act, right? So incumbent legislators are already celebrating by ramping up gerrymandering.

Short:

@Enco

”We Homo Sapiens just surround our wars with ideology and religion” is quite a profound statement.

This fits in with the behaviours of some of the far flung tribal groups I’ve lived with. For them, religion is a comfort, not a cause. They still have aggression, but the dividers between ‘them’ and ‘us’ are more commonly tribal root orientat…[Read more]

According to my studies, one of the big differences between chimps (and the other great apes) and humans, is that we are “domesticated” (compared with them, our society is not structured around male-male dominance relations).  That means that we are able to cooperate and share.  Chimps can’t share, and therefore there’s no point cooperating.

We t…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Why humans are not clever chimps. (interesting site)

Theophilus Painter was not a very rigorous thinker, he kept making mistakes, of assuming things when he didn’t know, sometimes rooted in racial bias it is probably true.

New data from the National Institutes of Health show the human genome varies from the chimp…

[Read more]