هیچ تا بحال به این اندیشیده اید که تقسیمات سیاسی و نژادی و قومیتی کنونی چند سال قدمت دارند ؟ جهان در سد سال ، دویست سال ، پانسد سال و یا حتا هزار سال پیش چگونه بوده است ؟
تصویر جالب زیر، این تقسیم بندی را در زمانی بسیار دور تر از این زمان ها که بدان اشاره شد به ما نشان می دهد . نکته جالب توجه اینکه، حتا ده هزار سال پیش از میلاد مسیح نیز (دقت کنید؛ یعنی دقیقن سد و بیست سده ی پیش ) ، مکانی در جهان بوده است که ایران نامیده می شده است . به نقشه بار دیگر دقت نمایید ! در مکان خوزستان کنونی ، در حاشیه رود کارونِ همیشه جاری ، تمدنی بوده است که ایلام نامیده می شده است ، همان نامی که امروزه بر تارک یکی از محروم ترین استان های کشور عزیزمان نقش بسته است. آیا تا بحال به استان ایلام یا کشور ایران اینگونه نگریسته بودید؟ نامهایی با کُهنای سد و بیست سده !

تردید نکنید که این حقیقتی کوچک و داشته ی خرد و اندکی نیست وفتی که بدانیم حتا تا همین سد سال پیش، کشور هایی چون افغانستان ، ترکیه و پاکستان وجود نداشته اند و بعد ها تحت نظارت و نفوذ قدرتهای استعماری - و عمدتن بریتانیا ( در مورد عراق، ترکیه و افغانستان ) - تشکیل شده اند.
ای کاش قدر میهنی را که مفتخر به تعلق بدان و زیست در آنیم دانسته و برای بهتر شدن حال و روز آن ، تمام تلاش خود را بنماییم.
این تلاش الزامن اصلاح ساختار سیاسی ، اقتصادی یا مناسبات اجتماعی نیست ؛ چه ، آنها در توان فرد ها نیست مگر اینکه جمع باشند آنهم جمعی متشکل و سازمان یافته.
اما بسیار مشکلات، بلکه معضلات هستند که اصلاح آنها از من و شما نیز برمی آید. می دانم بسیار کسان خواهند گفت مشکلی که به دست من و شما حل شود اصلن مشکل نیست.
با این گفته سد در سد مخالفم . بگذارید سخن را با مثالهایی روشن تر نمایم : آیا تا به حال کسانی را ندیده اید که زباله و مواد بی استفاده ی خود را در خیابان رها کرده اند؟ آیا در ساحل دریا و یا کناره های رودخانه ها و دامنه ی کوه ها با انبوهی از زباله های بد بو مواجه نشده اید؟ آیا تا کنون در خیابان از اینکه فردی آب دهان یا بینی خود را در حضور شما بر زمین انداخته است منزجر نشده اید؟
آیا از دیدن شخصی که در حضور کسی برای او از الفاظ و تعارفات اغراق آمیز بهره می جوید اما به محض ترک مجلس ، وی را آماج تند ترین الفاظ رکیک و انتقاد قرار می دهد در شما حس تنفر ایجاد نگشته است؟ آیا از اینکه شخصی حجم عظیمی از آب را برای حرکت یک برگ خشک شده ی درخت از جلوی منزلش به 20 سانتی متر آن سوتر تلف کرده است عصبانی نشده اید؟ آیا ...
همانگونه که شاهدید رفتارهای غلط فرهنگی ما ایرانیان، بسیار بیشتر از آنی است که فکرش را بکنیم. آیا با وجود چنین رفتارهای غلطی و فرهنگ لبریز از ضعف و ناراستی، هنوز حق داریم خود را شایسته تعلق به سرزمینی بدانیم که قدمتی به کهنای تاریخ و حتا پیشا تاریخ دارد؟ سرزمینی که حتا از چم ِ( = معنا ) نامش «شرافت و نجابت» برداشت می شود. من که گمان نمی کنم ، مگر آنکه فکری به حال خود و فرهنگ نابسامان خود بنماییم!

پی نوشت- شما چطور؟ آیا شما نیز رفتارهای غلطی از خود و هم میهنان خود سراغ دارید که به همین راحتی بتوان آنها را به دور انداخت؟ به غنای این نوشتار خرد یاری رسانید.

]]> http://makgregory.wordpress.com/?p=67 Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:54:45 +0000 makgregory http://makgregory.wordpress.com/?p=67 En la última versión de Civilization, Beyond the Sword, sabeis que aleatoriamente ocurren sucesos en cada una de las civilizaciones que van quedando en el juego (en esta partida en concreto me he deshecho de dos), incluida la propia.

Desde bodas entre personas de civilizaciones y a menudo religiones diferentes, a hambruna de tal o cual ciudad, van dando un color muy diferente y vivaz a esta nueva versión del mítico juego.

Muchas son únicas, y la que os quiero presentar hoy, tiene origen español, por lo que me ha hecho especial ilusión (pese a ser antitaurino, y es que no son las corridas lo que nombran):

Cuando el suceso ocurre dentro de tus fronteras, el juego te ofrece varias opciones a elegir, cada una con sus propias consecuencias inmediatas sobre el tesoro, la fama de la ciudad, el ánimo de los habitantes, o la probabilidad de que gracias a tu decisión ocurra una cosa o la contraria. Y seguramente también con ocltas consecuencias sobre el patrón de país que evolucionará en el futuro lejano.

Yo elegí hacer fiesta nacional, con lo que la fama de Cartago sumó 300 puntos y el tesoro perdió 34, creo recordar.

I think the example we were using was the construction of ideas about Nation-States/Countries, Citizenship, and Democracy. Lots of people (and, clearly, most of our students) assume that the ideas we have about States and governance are continuous and even equivalent with those held by any group at any point of history. Simply put, national identity is taken as a "natural" idea. Which makes it hard for some people to discuss such issues in a historical perspective. This is one reason I enjoyed Appiah's "Golden Nugget" idea so much (not to mention that his talk was quite entertaining). It's a way to put the very notion of "Civilization" in perspective (without using an evolutionary model). Carl also provided me with references to Eugen Weber and to the Taviani Brothers' Padre Padrone. We could even use scene 3 of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (video). All of these things are, in my mind, landmines. Actually, "mind landmines" or, erm, "landminds." (Should I get a trademark?)

Of course, literature on nationalism (Benedict Anderson, Terence Ranger, Eric Hobsbawm, etc.) can also be used. Personally, I tend to like work on similar subjects by ethnographers like Regina Bendix and Kelly Askew.

Those "landminds" are only triggered when people start really looking into issues lying underneath society and politics. But when they explode, these landminds can be quite transformative. As per the deadly effects of the explosives from which they're inspired, these landminds destroy some apparently strong intellectual models.

So, although I see landmines as a major problem, I do see part of my work as "planting landminds."

Much less positive than the usual "planting the seeds of knowledge" metaphors, but also much more powerful.

Politics in India are caste-based. In other words, caste is the classification/unification that is politically the most significant. On the face of it, going by a plethora of hazy principles, it appears to be a bad practice. Not so, I believe, if we ponder a little on the obvious (and hence trivial) observation like this:

"India is a country of no majority, just infinite minorities. No caste has more than 20 percent of the population, and the ethnic/caste dynamic is increasingly transforming toward class/interest politics."
-- Teaching India

In a democracy, by definition, the common man gets to choose who rules the country. However, the common man has no motivation to make informed opinions on issues that do not concern his daily life. In a country like India, this means that the common man does not care about anything beyond his immediate security and wealth. It is a tempting blunder to add pleasure to be a concern, so we won't.

Thus democracy works in a manner that is not entirely obvious. Different sets of people choose their local leaders whose decisions they follow, these leaders have their own leaders and this hierarchy ends in political parties. In the electoral process the representatives of these parties contest against each other and those with larger support bases reach the parliament. Those among these representatives, who are elected by the rest, 'rule'; which means they get to chose which bureaucrats get to influence their decisions because, government is not a trivial thing that should be left to the common man ;)

In such a system caste forms the lowest level of selection, people choosing the local leaders. Since there are no majorities among the castes, there can be as little action directed at a section of the population as possible. Obviously, it is much safer than economic and religious based politics whose logical (and often inevitable) conclusion is in a Communist or Theocratic (either-way Totalitarian) regimes that exterminate all dissent.

So it is in our best interest to save the existing caste system. It stabilizes the system enough to make it look like a Juggernaut, slow to move but unstoppable.

Looking at it this way, it is not at all surprising that our textbooks demonize religion the most, and caste-system the second most. Over a period of time as people get conditioned against the caste based politics, owing to their contempt for religion-based politics, they will gradually move into the communist system of politics government which, our text book authors believe, is a good thing to happen! Once there, people don't have to bear the burden of the political process! The hazy principles that I mentioned at the beginning are nothing but this conditioning, not very unlike the religious conditioning that we hate. How we select one school of condition over some other, most probably, is the issue that determines everything.

Before some one jumps to any such conclusion, I have to clarify that I am not defending untouchability. What I am supporting here is the sustainance of diversity, not oppression.

need i say more?

History: The Roadmap to the Future--Africa.

History: The Roadmap to the Future--Europe

In our area countless posts like this still bound the land, forming sentinels of aging reminders of a time past when livestock grazed the land.  Now, sadly, the pastured herds are dwindling... the urbanites encroaching. I first used this photograph in a post about the laid stone walls in upstate New York and refocused on the image in April 2008 in Walking the fence line.

Yet, the weathered boundaries remain.

When I look at Dubya’s poll numbers staying absolutely dead-level week after week after week regardless of what he has fucked up this week, or how badly, I learn nothing new about George W. Bush. But A-B-Cs behind just about everything else I need to know about America stand painfully revealed. Those numbers confirm for me for the unmpteenth time that inside the mushy skulls of the 27%-ers there is nothing but a hatbox of junk machine parts, still twitching and clattering mindlessly along on corrupted software that was already obsolete before men walked on the Moon.

The 27%-ers are slugs madly fighting for the right to jump into the salt bucket and drag us all down with them, and any solution to the problems that vex us must begin with their grotesquely mutant versions of patriotism, economics, virtue and civilization being discredited, sequestered and driven into oblivion.

Our first, great, national problem is that our fellow citizens -- in their millions -- are damaged beyond repair.

And our second, great, national problem is that our media refuses to talk about it.

driftglass via Mike the Mad Biologist

Overview: "OPPRESSION IS WORSE THAN SLAUGHTER." (Qur'an.)
Oppression, apartheid and racism are not just cultural, they create biologically the very conditions they then exploit. Submission in people is not just cultural, it is also EPIGENETIC and hereditary. A symptom of this physiological condition is the irritation some minorities and leftists have towards Senator Obama. The Conventional Wisdom is that they are jealous, and afraid that an African-American president would deprive them of their main reason to ask for hand outs (i.e., whining that they are the obvious victims of racism).

Nietzsche believed there was something as slave morality, and that a lot of mentality had to do with physiology. We buttress this paradigm with recent science and illustrate it with the case at hand. Obama's history, up to the point he went to the US mainland, had little in common with that of the average American "black". His formation was instead that of a worldly Euro-American. The cultural difference between Obama and the rest of the "blacks", and the left, is so deep that it may be physiological. Obama, from his genesis, has the physiology of a master, whereas cultural African-Americans from their sad history, have the physiology corresponding to slave mentality. When Obama calls for change, he is ultimately calling for a PHYSIOLOGICAL change.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson himself, hinting to all this, put the debate in a physiological context of dramatic historical relevance.
***

NO REVERENCE FOR NUTS:
Jesse Jackson finds Barack Obama's manhood unbearable. In a call to custom, harking back to slavery in the USA, Mr. Jackson, one of the great historical figures of the Civil Rights Movement, suggested to do to Obama what the white masters used to do to uppity black slaves. Jackson confided his secret desire about Obama, in a whispery voice to a fellow guest on Fox News: "I wanna cut his nuts out". He accused his fellow Chicagoan of "talking down to black folks" by giving moral lectures to African-Americans. This was accompanied by an evocative pantomime, complete with sharp slicing gesture, and wind blown out of the stomach.

What is going on there? Mr. Jackson, a companion of Martin Luther King, was a trailblazer. He ran for the presidency twice, long ago, winning South Carolina. After listening to Bill Clinton belittling these achievements, the ease with which the previously unknown Obama is sweeping, tsunami like, towards the presidency, protected by the Secret Service for more than a year, as if he were already president, can only slightly exasperate Mr. Jackson. (In a sharp contrast, not only Mr. King was not protected, but he was threatened by law enforcement.)

Whining that one is oppressed, and begging has become an industry. Measures have been taken, in the USA and Europe, to put everybody back to work. But there is much more to it. Senator Obama wants not to be taken care of, but to take charge, to go from the mentality of a dependent to that of a master, to be the agent of change from SLAVE MENTALITY TO MASTER MENTALITY. Whereas Mr. Jackson, and most of the non violent Civil Rights Movement before him, plus much of the left, whine and resent, Senator Obama advises and commands. He has different hormones, and Jackson wants to cut them out. Let me explain.
***

THE MAJOR RELIGIONS AS SLAVE MORALITIES:
Nietzsche observed that there were essentially two types of moral systems:

1) The moral system of the slaves. Christianity, applied to the people, is the arch example of this "slave morality". Christianity asks to turn the other cheek, and love one's oppressor. Islam means "submission" outright, says everyone is a slave, and the Qur'an gaily gives plenty of orders to make it so. The slave morality is typically resentful and weak. "Good" is whatever pleases the masters, and whatever makes normal the subjugation one is submitted to. Strength of character, the little there is, is limited to "ressentiment" (Nietzsche's French). Sartre would later insist that "bad faith" allows to eschew one's responsibility as a free agent (a related complaint: if people are no willing to use their freedom, they are slaves).

2) The moral system of the masters is that "good" is whatever works to subjugate the masses. The masters are bold and strong. According to Nietzsche, the practice of the masters is to dominate people, themselves, and even the universe, by gaily accepting it for what it is (there is a relationship with the basic psychology of Islam, and, of course the Buddhist "eternal return of the same", symbolized by the wheel).

There is an obvious observation, that Nietzsche does not seem to have focused on. Slaves need masters. Any slave morality comes equipped with a master morality to administer it. So the same morality has two interfaces: one for the slaves, one for the masters. This Janus like characteristic is totally blatant in the case of Christianity. Christianity is not just a slave morality, it's also the morality imposed by the emperors of the later global Roman empire (Constantine, Constantius II, Theodosius, etc…) who were masters of such frantic dominance, that they destroyed civilization itself. Or tried to. (Nero with his lyre, and Caligula with his horse, were just children relative to them.)
***

HOW THE MAJOR RELIGIONS MASTERED THE SLAVES:
With Christianity, the master came first, and there was just one, the Roman emperor Constantine, who created God in his image. Emperor Constantine picked up the slave religion, Christianity, and he tweaked it to make his rule more personal, even more terrible (Uthman, creator of the Qur'an, followed a similar pattern, but was killed for it). That took Constantine more than a decade of inventive modifications. Although he viewed himself as the most important bishop, he converted to "Orthodox Catholicism" (his own invention) only on his death bed. Emperor Constantine was happy to use an army made of ferocious Pagans (Franks and adepts of Myrthra). Constantine and his successors knew not to fight wolves with Christian sheep (too Christian an empire, just as a too Buddhist an empire, being empires of slaves, could only be wiped out, and that is exactly what happened to Constantinople facing Turks and Franks and to the Tangut, facing Genghis Khan: totally wiped out).

Islam, a descendant of Judeo-Christianism born in the desert, is less of a slave religion than Christianity because it calls for killing "unbelievers" and strictly obeying one's superior. If one adds recommended behaviors in the Qur'an such as plundering and raping slave girls ASAP, it becomes clear it is more the bare bones metaphysics of a seventh century army rather than an entirely submissive message.

Historical evidence shows that Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism and Buddhism were relentlessly used to subjugate the masses in the service of powerful aristocracies that did not live at at all as they ordered their priests to preach. The most racist, the most incredible cruel, and also the oldest, and the most effective, by far, has been Hinduism, let it be said in passing. It maintained genetic separation for more than 3,500 years.

Constantine and his successors used Christianity to buttress for their degenerate fascism. They quickly made a bad situation worse, as they themselves became slaves to their own idiotic Christian ideology (so they destroyed intelligence and learning, the only way out of the mess). The Franks though, being less degenerate, less superstitious, and having a lot of taste for the highest values (like intelligence and learning) were able to refurbish Orthodox Catholicism from a mind seizure, into a tool.

The Romans had tried, but failed to conquer, Northern and Eastern Europe. The Franks did this, using Christianity as a Weapon of Mind Destruction. Priests  negotiated and threatened ahead of the Frankish armies. This undermined the resistance of the Pagan Germans, and eased the ferocious military assaults that followed. That type of conquest worked, and made Europe. It went beyond that Mediterranean Union that had long been the  Roman empire. The added sense  of spiritual purpose Judeo-Christianism, now fully tamed into a tool to tell the masses what was "good" and what was "evil" was crucial. The superstitious mess the all too religiously tolerant Romans had lived did not make for a unified sense of "good" and "evil" (the later Roman empire, having many major religions and deities, did not provide one "good" and one "evil", and the secular state was too weak, from the lack of education, to impose the sense of "good" and "evil" the law imposes; the imposition of imperial Christianity made the situation worse, because it fought knowledge and wisdom, and anything secular, as it organized its cherished Apocalypse).

The Carolingian mix of Christian mellifluous discourse to induce torpor, and relentless military terror to break everything in the way, was reproduced later during the European invasion of the world (and especially the Americas). A pope from the Middle Ages put out an order declaring that Africans could be enslaved (a Merovingian law of the seventh century had outlawed slavery in the Imperium Francorum, hence the necessity of the papal amendment).
***

HOW ENDOCRINOLOGY MAKES SUBMISSION HEREDITARY:
Nietzsche was insistent that a lot of human general philosophical, and mental posturing had to do with physiology. Well, we now can support Nietzschean guesses with a lot more science and history than he was aware of.

After the initial shock of combat, torture, terror and extermination, subjugated people often stay subjugated rather peacefully. In India, the monstrous racial divide imposed by Hinduism lasted nearly four thousand years, in no small part because the lower castes accepted it. Horrible torture and deaths were inflicted for the smallest transgressions of the racial caste order, most people, throughout history, would have died rather than accepting that. But the lower caste Indians learned to accept it, and to welcome it.

People reproduce from one generation to the next a subjugated mentality where the apex of manly resistance is resentment. Nietzsche heaped scorn on this.

But it's now easy to guess how the cultural patterns of subjugation can become so stable. It's not just a question of reading the wrong books. Culture induces physiology. CULTURE ENDURES AS PHYSIOLOGY. And it's hereditary. It's now known that a stressed out, or subjugated rat modifies its own genetic (to endure the subjugation better; this was discovered in 2008).

Subjugated animals are stressed. They have higher levels of many "stress" hormones, of a type so intolerable that they incite to frantic activity such as fleeing or to fighting. Generally they succeed in this, or get eaten. In any case, their problem is solved, and the stress hormones go away. But subjugated humans cannot do any of this. They cannot either fight or flee, because they are in chains (literal, or mental). Even the deliverance of becoming lunch is not an option. Instead, they have to sit, submit and seethe. And forever bathe in their stress hormones, something the last 400 millions years of evolution did not anticipate (it's so evolutionary unexpected that stress is one of the most important factor in heart attacks). So their health degenerate, except of course if they learn culturally to find the intolerable tolerable. And the way to do that is to modify one's EPIGENETIC, and that is probably what happens (just like for the rats, but way worse). Thus, what Nietzsche was whining about is a physiologically healthy reaction to a politically unacceptable situation. Under oppression, humans turn into lower species, literally. Nietzsche guessed this. In his strident attacks against German anti-Judaism, he pointed out that it's not the Jews who should be kicked out of Germany (as the anti-Semites had proposed to do), but the German anti-Semites themselves, because they were clearly the inferior race.

When Pavlov's dog expected a meal, acid appeared in his stomach. When a human expects sex or combat, the appropriate hormones go up, sometimes over very long periods (days). And it is also known that just as muscle grow when they are exercised, so does the activity of glands. Long term sexual abstinence leads to long term testosterone decrease for example. Just a (purely theoretical, and long in advance) anticipation of girlie action leads to an increase.

Hence an emasculated culture will lead to emasculated males, full of resentment, and systematic whining but without the tougher qualities of the true masters.  Rev. Jackson resentment for his leader's testosterone are somewhat justified. The testosterone (by mechanisms we do not understand yet) is related to brains being more assertive, more prone to risk taking, more masterful of the universe at large. And the relation goes both ways. Anticipating masterful action or competition, the testosterone prone brain favors the production of the hormone, so that its boldness will rise to the occasion. In some fishes, the master is a super male, with completely different epigenetics. If the super male dies, another male fish goes through the epigenetic transformation. In some species, if all males die, some females' epigenetics order the change into males... 

In other words, masters have the hormones to go with their masterful behavior, and when males are not around, they have to be created. Mr. Jackson is the big fish who could not transform himself in a super male. he, and a lot of the American left, could not find the discourse that could change the culture to the point the epigenetic itself would change.
***

AMERICAN SLAVE MENTALITY VERSUS OBAMA'S CULTURE: 
American "blacks" are descendants of slaves, often with an appreciable genetic contribution from white masters. American culture reacted to this troubling fact by calling "black" anybody with any perceivable or known African genetic contribution. Some American "blacks" have colored hair and colored eyes, and some are more white than many "whites". But never mind, "blackness" is the ultimate stain, don't get a touch of it, nothing can remove it.

This extremism of white American racism harks back to the Bible and the theory of the "elected People". In practice, in an important sense it means that white American racism was more racist than Nazism itself (Nazism recognized that race should be ignored if diluted enough, or if the individual and his family had proven superior enough). Crack Nazis prisoners in the USA were shocked by white American racism vis a vis their black GI guards. White American racism forced a total apartheid. A strong cultural apartheid was instituted.

The resulting black culture became a major world cultural contributor, superlative in music (jazz, rock) and pathos (blues). But one has to recognize that a lot of "black culture" has a lot to do with being a slave, and accepting one's condition. Indeed, one of the main anchors of black culture has been Christianity, the slave religion indoctrinated by the white masters, a great conqueror, with Islam, of the true African spirit. Good black Americans are expected to embrace their condition by being submissive, resentful, and care free like children. Hence Obama's reminder that "black folks" who chose to be parents have obligations.

Now who is Mr. Obama? Genetically speaking, he is exactly just as European as African. This does not make him so special, since some American "blacks" are mostly genetic Europeans. What makes Mr. Obama special is his cultural genesis. It's mostly worldly, Euro-American, and masterful.

Indeed: Obama's father was not a descendant of slaves, but of free Africans, first point. Second cultural point: genuine Africans do not live in awe of the Euro-American culture, they know the world is a bit more complicated than that. Third point: an African who travels to America will tower with contempt, as soon as he comes across American racism (not so much because racism is intrinsically "bad", but, because there is often very little to justify it, and because American racism tend, or tended to express itself in the grossest, most unjustifiable ways). Mr. Obama saw his father enough to get these points across. Then Mr. Obama grew up in Hawaii, well known to be by far the less racist state in the USA. In particular, it had no black ghetto (Mr. Obama's partly fictional memoirs feature some imaginary black characters. Eurasian would be more like it). Mr. Obama also grew up in Indonesia, where he could experience cultural shock, and that could only have made him stronger, like beaten up steel thrown in cold water. Mr. Obama was in great part educated by his white grand parents. Finally last but not least, he was educated forever in one the world's most elite private schools, Punahou. Punahou instills the morality of mastery, and many leaders have been formed there.
***

DID U.S. PLUTOCRACY CHANGE U.S. EPIGENETICS?
As the USA got into the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the protests of the US population were very far from shutting it down. Instead there was more than 80% approval for whatever the White House proposed to do. The population was eager to exhibit its submission to its masters in Washington. Part of the humiliation was to swallow cognitive garbage. US citizens submitted to an intense propaganda of lies and disinformation. It was not physiologically innocuous: as US citizens submitted to this mangling of their cognitive dignity, and capability, it is not excluded that they suppressed the entire part of their hormonal and epigenetic system in charge of cognition. So the incapacity to solve the problems of the USA may now be an epigenetic problem. There are plenty of indications of this. Very simple solutions to many problems have been found, and deployed, worldwide, but not in the USA. After all, it's the only nation to have stayed stuck in the Middle Ages with units of measurement, clearly a deep failure of character and/or intelligence. Barack Obama pointed to this recently by saying all Americans could say going abroad was "Merci beaucoup". He was immediately accused, once again to be an "elitist". Strange accusation in a country where the elite of the hyper rich is widely admired and allowed to buy elections.
***
***

Conclusion: POLITICAL SUBMISSION CAUSES GENETIC DEVOLUTION.
Many groups of people have been oppressed, and are oppressed. Women are a case in point. They obviously were more equal before the rise of agriculture and civilization (because their responsibilities were greater, to start with: most of the calories were brought by women). This is a grave situation. As the Qur'an puts it bluntly: "...And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out. Because indeed OPPRESSION IS WORSE THAN SLAUGHTER." (Sura 2:191 of "the Cow"). The Qur'an is right on that particular point. Oppression can be worse than slaughter, or murder, because it changes people into SUBHUMANS, just as the obverse condition of opportunity changes normal fishes into SUPERFISHES.

After Nazism rolled by, and crashed, and colonialism was inverted, racism became an unpopular concept. But that does not mean that it does not happen nevertheless. If the preceding is mostly true (and everything indicates it is), INFERIOR RACES EXIST, BUT THEY ARE CREATED BY OPPRESSION. Often the oppression has to do with human oppressors, but not always. People living in bad surroundings are also oppressed. This says that the problem of racism is not all in the mind, but also in the body, that the situation is worse than thought, and that to fix things up, it's not just a matter of chanting: "Give peace a chance", as one lays in a five star hotel bed (a sneak attack on John Lennon's naivety). 

People whose epigenetics is turned on so as to shut down a lot of what makes them human are made into practitioners of the baser instincts. It's bad in all sorts of ways: because it threatens civilization, and because there is a compulsion in humans to oppress further, or destroy who is perceived as inferior, it's an invitation to genocide.

This may help to explain why the Roman empire degenerated, and why plutocracies in general degenerate, maybe even why the USA has been degenerating. Plutocracy, the rule of the rich, submits the rest of the population, shutting down the full expression of their freedom, hence of their genes. The submitted become a genetically inferior race overnight. Extend this over the generations, and the problem is akin to creating a subspecies. During the European Middle Ages, the nobles and the commoners ("villains", namely "ugly" in modern French) looked racially different, just as in India the upper castes looked (and genetically are) different from the lower castes.

Masters and slaves tend to be comforted in their situations by the biology induced by their social conditions.

Master races are not a myth, but they were designed. Hence we can use the process the other way, not to turn some into inferior beings and oppress them further, but to turn more people into superior beings.

The more free and superior people there are, the more we will be able to confront the many riddles that baffle us, and seize the opportunities hidden therein. Whereas in the past civilization, especially in the desert, needed armies of slaves, to set up superior irrigation, now it needs armies of superior minds, to set up superior thinking.
***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
Tyranosopher.

P/S: The term "epigenetics" refers to all and any machinery changing gene expression in ways stable between cell divisions, and sometimes between generations. The original idea, due to Lamarck (circa 1800), was ridiculed, because it contradicted the theory of evolution long established by breeders of domesticated species. Epigenetics, as originally conceived, does not involve changes in the underlying DNA of the organism. The idea was that environmental factors can cause an organism's genes to behave (or "express themselves") differently, even though the genes themselves don't change. The epigenetic changes can be instantaneous (as in the fishes alluded to above). In a further twist, some now consider proven that direct DNA change can occur, by direct gene transfers between species (2008)).

The main theme above is that populations held in slavery may undergo epigenetic changes making them more accepting of submission. And that it is no coincidence that Obama does not behave that way.

Floods do not form mountains, but rather erode them away. Walter T. Brown, In the Beginning, 1986

All Biblical dates that I have seen for Noah's flood fall within a period of the earth's history known to historians the world over, as the "Bronze Age"

This is a period in our collective history in which we humans discovered and used the metals copper and tin to make Bronze. It started around 3500-3000 BCE in the Middle Eastern and African areas, and lasted until we learned how to make Iron (about 1200 BCE, probably in Africa) and thus entered the ‘Iron Age' This time span also happens to encompass the beginning of writing and keeping records...so we have written records of what was going on at these times; in other words this was ‘historical' time.

In those times the impetus for the development of the Bronze technology was war. Bronze was used in most weapons of the time, such as spear points, arrowheads, swords, axes, helmets, armor, and shields. Production of these items, in the quantities needed for the armies of the time, required much infrastructure and many people devoted to the making of them. This was not a fly-by-night operation

According to recorded history there were six well-established cultures or ‘civilizations' at the time of Noah's Flood. They were: Mesopotamia (Sumerian), Indus Valley, Egypt, the Minoan, the ‘Holy Land' area, and China.

Archaeological records such as ruins of cities, tools, pottery, skeletal remains, weapons, and other artifacts support the written records that survive. These records all show that humans and civilizations existed in almost all parts of the world at the time of the flood, and that there was a worldwide population of possibly 100 million people.

The civilizations of the time were using Bronze tools and had the potters wheel, looms to made textiles, had invented the plow and domesticated draft animals, they also traded with peoples hundreds of miles away.  In other words a cultural revolution was going on. Man was changing from herders and hunter-gatherers to settled agriculture and cities that could support the new technologies. An infrastructure was developing.  The written record and Archaeology support this view.

Records of the Sumerian/Mesopotamian civilization show a continuous ongoing culture from about 3350 BCE to a period well past the Noachian flood.  Mesopotamia had great prosperity and expansion during the flood period under Sargon the Great and his grandson Naram-Sin. The area was a thriving center of culture and advancing civilization. There is no evidence for a cataclysmic flood wiping out the entire culture and infrastructure.

Egyptian civilization is probably familiar to most of us. Egypt's dynastic history started with the uniting of Upper and Lower Egypt by King Menes, around 3100 BCE.  The Egyptian period known as the "Old Kingdom" lasted from 2800 to 2175 BCE.  During this time many of the pyramids were built.  There is no record, written or archaeological, for a monster flood destroying and completely interrupting this countries infrastructure or it's monuments such as the Sphinx, the Step Pyramid, or the Great Pyramids, which were built before ‘The Flood'

China has a reasonably accurate history starting around 3000 BCE. According to texts from a Chinese book called "Shu King" and verified by archaeological records, China was undergoing a prosperous period around 2400 to 2200 BCE during the early Yaou Dynasty.  They have no record of a cataclysmic flood interrupting their whole civilization and destroying the infrastructure of the country.

The Indus valley civilization has a well-known history dating back to perhaps 3100 BCE.  By 2500 BCE there were two major cities, Mohendaro (or Mohenjo-Daro) and Harrapa, which rivaled Egypt and Mesopotamia in population and technologies. This great Civilization also encompassed maybe 100 smaller cities, towns, and villages, and didn't fall until about 1500 BCE. They have no record of a worldwide civilization-destroying flood.

The Minoan civilization was probably as old as Egypt.  Based on the Island of Crete, this civilization grew quickly and was highly advanced by 2500 BCE.  By the middle of the second millennium it had an alphabet, used bronze tools, had pottery, textiles, advanced architecture, and had established cities around the Islands. It continued to grow and was a center for trade and culture until 1470 BCE when it was suddenly destroyed by the violent eruption of the Thera volcano. There has been no evidence unearthed from this civilization that shows a flood destroying their whole infrastructure, at any time in their existence.

We do not have any archaeological evidence from the Japanese culture, Native American culture, or the Black tribes of Africa that indicate a world wide flood at any time in their existence.

Think about this.  How could all these civilizations, tribes, and world-wide culture along with sooo many people suddenly disappear from the earth and then suddenly reappear all over the world and bring the same culture, arts, pottery design, architecture, writing, language, and artifacts that was unique to them and their part of the world.

The entire history of the world does not show...any...of the known civilizations to have a large gap in their chronology or technologies as a result of being destroyed by a worldwide flood.  It is not plausible that they were destroyed, and within a few short years, reappeared in their original numbers and with the same abilities and infrastructure. All the inventions and culture of the people of the time...would have had to be reinvented by new inhabitants...that did not happen.

It just didn't happen people.

For latest post go: Here

a. A cellular device the size of a refrigerator or

b. considering the Italian translation of "Venti," 20 cell phones and he apparently was speaking Itanglish.

A quick search in my trusty Google (its a website to type stuff into and it gives you more websites) tells me that my blog is the most popular site that contains the words "venti" and "cell phone." This can only mean one thing...

I'M FUCKING FAMOUS!

WHERE'S MY COKE AND FUCKING MONEY!?

The internet is fucking sweet.

So it's officially been a full Monday through Friday for this writing project bull shit and I have to tell ya, the writing part is pretty easy. The difficulty comes with deciding what to write, presumably because of the limited amount of time I have to think about it. But once it pops into my head (usually from something I read or something a friend said) it's pretty smooth yachting from there. Did you see the "I'm famous" upgrade I put into that sentence? So now that I've diagnosed the problem, I'm pretty sure a steady does of rambling will help cure it!

I'M SAVED!

This weekend is PACKED! Tonight I'm seeing WALL-E and Hell Boy 2, tomorrow I'm making my first trip to Atlantic City, followed by my friend Michelle's birthday and seeing her band Fortune and Spirits play at a bowling alley. Sunday will be the day in which the Long Island Hitmen go for an unprecedented 2 WINS IN A ROW followed by a wedding. I've been putting off what I have to say about American weddings until I went to the ones I had coming up, so next week be prepared for a BOMBASTIC ASSAULT OF HALF-THOUGHT-OUT OPINIONS!!! Along with how my weekend turned out.

Wish me luck at the tables. I only hope by the time I get home I'll still have enough money to buy the new Civilizations game for my 360 ::pushes glasses up off his nose::. Everyone have a momentous weekend!

Stay random,

tim!

Nicholas Kristof is saddened by “The Pain of the G-8’s Big Shrug” in the New York Times (09/07/08). He points out that genocide cannot be measured by adding the number of people killed, and just comparing that sum to other causes of death.

The hierarchy of values is the deepest problem in philosophy, and the most influential for future behavior. Morality, deep down, is the set of all behaviors that (are supposed to) work. Morality evolves. The Aztecs and a few thousands other anthropophagic cultures thought it was the apex of morality to eat other people. Closer to us, the Qur’an recommends to ingratiate oneself with God by killing unbelievers. This guideline explains why killing Israelis is often OK with Muslim opinion makers, and why the genocide in Darfur is of little import to them. Indeed, it is not so clear that the non Arab Muslims of Darfur are not really unbelievers. Although they claim to be Muslim, after all, they are fighting Arabs, and the Holly Qur’an was written in Arabic for some good reason, best known to God. The Qur’an never warns us enough against people who claim to believe in God, but are not really believers.

“Genocide” is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group (this is an abstract of the UN 1948 definition).

Thus the group destroyed in a genocide is selected according to criterions that are so superficial that the group is a priori innocent, per the very superficiality of these criterions, which are basically just pronounced enough to define the group. So it's truly mere existence that has become a crime.

Accepting genocide is accepting the ultimate nihilism, the making of entire human groups into a big fat zeroes, for no good reason whatsoever. Moreover, generally, the individuals in the group have not chosen to belong to it, they happen to belong to it. So the existence of individual choices is denied. The individuals massacred are typically totally innocent, and genocide claims that does no matter, either, they deserve death, and, or, torture. One just does not like their face, so let them die.

Hence accepting genocide is accepting that some people have the right to decide to exterminate people for completely superficial values, overriding all of basic positive human values and considerations. Since all the positive human values are overridden, by definition, we are left only with the values of the Dark Side. Cruelty, oppression, the will to exterminate, are made into the only divinities worth worshipping. (Not that these compulsions do not have an evolutionary justification: see the addendum; the point is that now we control evolution, lest we disappear.)

In other words, when big powers accept “genocide”, they recognize the right to the reign of the Dark Side. Roughly, they accept that the Devil makes an acceptable God, to be respected by being left alone. And maybe they admit that they are a bit afraid, so why should not other killers notice this, get together, and profit by setting up their own genocide, too?

Because genocide is always profitable: once people have been killed, their property, their land, can be stolen. This was the main practical reason why the Nazis killed the Jews. This is also why, after the Black Death (that killed about half of Europe), survivors were much richer, and the economy bounded up. As the killers pile up the riches ever higher, they always want more, and foster criminality as the ultimate career. To forget their own monstrosity, they inebriate themselves by valuing ever higher their evil values.

So genocide tends to grow. And it's a metastatic process. It cannot be stopped by flowers or lenifying discourses. The Dark Side lives by killing and terror. Nothing is stronger. Genocide knows goodness cannot stop it. Once goodness is dead, it's the end of its story. So, in the end, genocide ultimately has to be opposed by a more advanced civilization (being more advanced, its balance of good and bad, will be more tilted on the good side). Genocide can only be stopped by the same method that give it strength, namely raw violence. Thus, the earlier genocide is stopped, the cheaper, morally and in all other ways.
***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
http://patriceayme.com/
***

Technical addenda:
1) I suggested (June 30, 2008 ), that the present judicial set up of the UN (International Criminal Court and the International Court Of Justice) is insufficient, because it cannot suggest new laws. The UN needs advice from an Ultimate Crime Directorate, that would suggest various remedies and new international and global laws. That was the role of the Roman Senate relative to the assembly of the Roman People.

The UN has a general assembly (made of nations), but no equivalent of a senate (made of individuals). Indeed, although some cases of genocide are legally straightforward (Nazism, Khmers Rouges), others are not. For example, the case of Darfur is very complicated; similarly in Rwanda. In complicated cases, there have been legitimate grievances on both sides. To cut the vicious circle is, or was, not obvious. For example, the French military intervened unilaterally and massively in Rwanda ("Operation Turquoise"), and cut the circle of vice. Retribution was stopped, saving hundreds of thousands of lives, say some French leaders. That saved the lives of many Hutus (80% of the population) but of course the winners, a minority, accused France to have come to rescue the bad guys. Now French special forces have died in combat in Darfur, inside Sudan, and it would be better if the UN could determine once and for all what is precisely going on there, besides genocide. To determine causation in case of genocide should be a priority, and thus should be made independent of sanctions.

2) Genocide played a crucial role in human evolution. Literally dozens of species of various hominids were exterminated to make way for its majesty Homo Sapiens Sapiens. It is actually probable that genocide was such an advantage, and a necessity, that it was evolutionary selected as an inheritable sociobiological tendency. Indeed, the ultimate crime is not the extermination of other people, but the extermination of the environment. The later leads to the former, but not conversely (because, in the pre thermonuclear context, the killers survive). People hate in groups, because it helped the environment, and it was the only solution. But no more now.

In any case the probable sociobiological evolutionary selection of genocide makes it a formidable enemy, all too natural.

I don't know whether this is good or bad. But the Starbucks phenomenon hints at a critical issue facing countless developing communities (aka emerging markets) around the world: how to negotiate transnational and commercial development (which might bring much-needed basic services like water and electricity) with local culture (which binds people together).

Yesterday I was on a United Airlines flight, reading Paul Ricoeur's "History and Truth", which prompted thoughts about Starbucks:

We have the feeling that this single world civilization...exerts a sort of attrition or wearing away at the expense of the cultural resources which have made the great civilizations of the past. This threat is expressed, among other disturbing effects, by the spreading before our eyes of a mediocre civilization which is the absurd counterpart of elementary culture. Everywhere throughout the world, one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminum atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda...

And as I'm reading this, I ask for a cup of coffee and what do I get?

One could make an attempt to scream.

Caffeinated, back to Ricoeur:

In order to get on to the road toward modernization, is it necessary to jettison the old cultural past which has been the raison d'etre of a nation?...

It is a fact: every culture cannot sustain and absorb the shock of modern civilization.

Looping back to Starbucks' store closings, though, I'm a bit more optimistic. Sometimes modern civilization just cannot sustain and absorb the shock of local culture.

Hey, some people just DON'T want to unite with the same mass-produced cups of $5 coffee anywhere and everywhere. It's a start.

Perhaps, like many sensible citizens, you read Investor's Business Daily for its sturdy common sense in defending free markets and other rational arrangements. If so, you too may have been startled recently by an astonishing statement on that newspaper's front page. It was in a report on the intention of the world's second-largest brewer, Belgium's InBev, to buy control of the third-largest, Anheuser-Busch, for $46.3 billion. The story asserted: "The [alcoholic beverage] industry's continued growth, however slight, has been a surprise to those who figured that when the economy turned south, consumers would cut back on nonessential items like beer."

"Non wh at"? Do not try to peddle that proposition in the bleachers or at the beaches in July. It is closer to the truth to say: No beer, no civilization.

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. [...]

"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol."

BeerAdvocate.com had a nice piece on this topic a couple years ago, authored by Horst Dornbusch:

Once the Sumerians had learned to write about themselves and their beer-making, they became not only the world’s first documented people to have given up the hunting and gathering lifestyle of prehistoric man, they also became the world’s first documented brewers. We know from Sumerian records that, by the fourth millennium BC, this industrious society of scribes, farmers, and brewers used as much as half its annual grain harvest for beer.

Because we consider the dawn of Sumerian culture also the dawn of man's recorded history, there is sound reason to think that beer and human civilization began at roughly the same time...and humanity hasn’t stopped brewing since.

Crikey. Now i'm thirsty...