Simon Paynton

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.

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 lo…[Read more]

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.

@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 gro…[Read more]

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.:…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
if you would give the aspects of wokeness that you are supporting.

Just the general pro-human rights, pro-sexual freedom (except pedophiles), anti-racist, that’s it.

I think Republicans who are not being crooked snakes should have a respectable platform.  If they are being crooked snakes, they will have manufactured a platform…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Debunking the myth of truly egalitarian societies in human history.

We knew this already.  Present-day hunter-gatherers are not so egalitarian.  Except for the Batek of Malaysia, who are very egalitarian and do not have patriarchy, and the article does not contradict this.

demand-sharing, risk-pooling, s…

[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
And now the War on ‘Wokeness’ comes to the U.S. Mint……

I have to say, I think the designs that made it through look more inspiring than a pair of shackled wrists or Rosa Parks.  I think they’re more universal too.  But I deplore Trump’s fascist takeover.

I don’t agree with a War on Woke either.  I like wokeness. …[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
The sadistic rewards of cancel culture.

The Charlie Kirk purge: How 600 Americans were punished in a pro-Trump crackdown.

Now that the Right are cancelling the Left – are the woke still in love with cancel culture?

[Far-right nutter] Delay told Reuters that he believes in “accountability and consequences” and tha…

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Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
vitalism

I think it makes much more sense to say that life is matter that processes resources for its own benefit, than to say that life is that which contains a vital essence.

All living things have electrical and chemical energy coursing round their bodies.  When they die, this activity ceases.  Yet they are not b…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Life Is just Matter with Meaning.

This article is super-interesting.  Life is what happens when inert matter starts processing resources in order to promote its own survival.  That’s basically the starting axiom of my evolutionary ethics model.

They say the organism is processing information, which includes r…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
But yes, we made progress in the sense that we evolved to live in all of the Earth’s extremes.

Yes, and we’ve wrecked every single one.  We can’t compare one species with another to say one is better than the other.  Like you say, each is optimised for their environment.

We’ve made progress – but in what kinds of…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
But cooperative breeding, known as ‘alloparenting’, where individuals other than the biological mother help raise offspring did not start with them. Hominins before erectus already had extended childhoods, reduced canines, increased sociality, and group-based foraging, all of which support cooperative care. Homo ere…

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Apparently the first human species to make it out of Africa was Homo erectus, ~2 million years ago, and they were the first species to do cooperative breeding, meaning that a woman could have more than one child at once, because she got help in looking after them.  This meant that human children had longer in which to mature.

The human line must…[Read more]