Category: Civilization, History, and Anthropology

  • Getting Un-Lost: It’s All of the Above: Genetic, Cultural, Institutional, Territorial

    [I] think I have lost a bunch of you. It seems we get truth. It seems we get the high trust society. It seems we get the western model of truth and trust produce economic velocity. It seems we get the reproductive division of perception and cognition. It seems we get that the anglo saxon and classical liberal model could not tolerate the enfranchisement of women and the loss of the church as a separate house of government. It seems we get the century of mysticism, pseudoscience and propaganda caused by the Jewish century – now at an end.

    But now that I venture into history in search of motivation to restore or sense of kin selection, it seems like everyone wants a single axis of causation: genetic, cultural, institutional, territorial. But it’s all of them. Not one.
  • Grid: Three Group Evolutionary Strategies

    Feminine: Aggressive Gossip: (jewish) Libertarian: Aggressive Trade (anglo neo-puritan) Masculine: Aggressive Violence (muslim)

    Russian = ++Gossip +Violence -Trade Chinese = +Gossip +Violence -Trade I suppose that we can graph all cultures on these three dimensions.
  • Grid: Three Group Evolutionary Strategies

    Feminine: Aggressive Gossip: (jewish) Libertarian: Aggressive Trade (anglo neo-puritan) Masculine: Aggressive Violence (muslim)

    Russian = ++Gossip +Violence -Trade Chinese = +Gossip +Violence -Trade I suppose that we can graph all cultures on these three dimensions.
  • The Steppe Manufactures Aggression?

    SO IS THIS RIGHT?

    • Africa generated variation because it is actually quite a hostile climate.
      the first waves out were not aggressive people.
    • Each new wave has been more aggressive than the last, and exterminated, raped, mated with, or ate the previous generation.
    • At some point the steppe and desert started breeding aggression because of herding.
    • The steppe took over from Africa as the primary means of evolving increased aggression.
    • This process has continued with the Indian civilization first to be exterminated, then the Iranian and byzantine. Then the many attacks on Europe. The conquest and conversion of Russia to an aggressive steppe culture.
    • Islam is an adaptation of religion for steppe and desert cultures.
    • Islam is the most aggressive religion-political system yet.
    • Only the Chinese are wiling to resist it.
    Is this right?
  • The Steppe Manufactures Aggression?

    SO IS THIS RIGHT?

    • Africa generated variation because it is actually quite a hostile climate.
      the first waves out were not aggressive people.
    • Each new wave has been more aggressive than the last, and exterminated, raped, mated with, or ate the previous generation.
    • At some point the steppe and desert started breeding aggression because of herding.
    • The steppe took over from Africa as the primary means of evolving increased aggression.
    • This process has continued with the Indian civilization first to be exterminated, then the Iranian and byzantine. Then the many attacks on Europe. The conquest and conversion of Russia to an aggressive steppe culture.
    • Islam is an adaptation of religion for steppe and desert cultures.
    • Islam is the most aggressive religion-political system yet.
    • Only the Chinese are wiling to resist it.
    Is this right?
  • Grid of Cultural Tactics

    1) TRUTH AND DECEIT,
    2) MASCULINE AND FEMININE,
    3) HOMOGENOUS AND HETEROGENEOUS.

    ———————TRUTH——————————
    MASCULINE————————-FEMININE
    —————————————————————-
    TEXAS………..GERMAN…………BRITISH 
    …………………..JAPAN…………….FRENCH
    ……………………………………………LATIN
    AMERICAN………………………….HINDU
    …………………..CHINA…………………………..
    ISLAM……….. RUSSIA……………JUDAISM
    —————————————————————
    ——————DECEPTION—————

    Note that the american/hindu line represents “idealism” more so than deception.
    Latins and french are pragmatic.  Anglos and Germans ‘truthful’.

    More later. Just capturing the idea while I’m thinking of it.

    Source: (3) Curt Doolittle

  • Grid of Cultural Tactics

    1) TRUTH AND DECEIT,
    2) MASCULINE AND FEMININE,
    3) HOMOGENOUS AND HETEROGENEOUS.

    ———————TRUTH——————————
    MASCULINE————————-FEMININE
    —————————————————————-
    TEXAS………..GERMAN…………BRITISH 
    …………………..JAPAN…………….FRENCH
    ……………………………………………LATIN
    AMERICAN………………………….HINDU
    …………………..CHINA…………………………..
    ISLAM……….. RUSSIA……………JUDAISM
    —————————————————————
    ——————DECEPTION—————

    Note that the american/hindu line represents “idealism” more so than deception.
    Latins and french are pragmatic.  Anglos and Germans ‘truthful’.

    More later. Just capturing the idea while I’m thinking of it.

    Source: (3) Curt Doolittle

  • Michael Philip on Malthus (Smart)

    I view Malthus as a tempered social revisionist who knocked down myths, thought in terms of social science mechanisms (he had both supply and demand and Keynesian macro in surprisingly sophisticated forms, not to mention an early form of Darwin’s theory of evolution), and was painfully aware of the importance of contingent human choices. He is one of the five most underrated, and also least understood, economists. To be sure, he favored small government and opposed the Poor Laws. But he was skeptical enough about the notion of a voluntary self-regulating order that I would not quite call him a classical liberal. I read his economics as starting with the Bible, and asking whether any mechanisms might bring us to a less tragic outcome than what is found in the Old Testament. He was never quite sure of the answer, and his mix of moralizing and skepticism later attracted Keynes.

  • Michael Philip on Malthus (Smart)

    I view Malthus as a tempered social revisionist who knocked down myths, thought in terms of social science mechanisms (he had both supply and demand and Keynesian macro in surprisingly sophisticated forms, not to mention an early form of Darwin’s theory of evolution), and was painfully aware of the importance of contingent human choices. He is one of the five most underrated, and also least understood, economists. To be sure, he favored small government and opposed the Poor Laws. But he was skeptical enough about the notion of a voluntary self-regulating order that I would not quite call him a classical liberal. I read his economics as starting with the Bible, and asking whether any mechanisms might bring us to a less tragic outcome than what is found in the Old Testament. He was never quite sure of the answer, and his mix of moralizing and skepticism later attracted Keynes.

  • Taleb is On Board with Tribalism

    Why GREECE, GREXIT, and “EUROPE” are an unnatural proto-Nazi “Aryan” construction — or why putting Teutons and Greeks together isn’t the smartest (and most stable) idea. Nor is it natural. The least *unnatural* union for Greece is some sort of *loose* Mediterranean League of City States (and another minor Balkan connection). But again, it would need to stay fuzzy –i.e., should you want to use history/culture, use them properly (“annales” style). + There are two natural cultural (eventually leading by mixing to ethnic) demarcations: butter vs olive oil (and eventually a third, the palm tree). The demarcation is robust: if people have the same food, they are the same (or eventually through mixing) become the same. Now if a nonblind but deaf Martian visited Turkey and Greece, he would think they are the same people (same with Lebanon and Western Syria). If words are different, body language in the Levant, Greece, Turkey and Southern Italy is similar. “Una faccia, una razza”. But a bureaucrat blinded by constructions would put the Greek in the same unit as the German, and bundle the Turk with the Huns in the Altai mountains near China. + But Mediterraneans are integrated as a socio-cultural unit. This is not just recent; the integration is 5000 years old in the East and 3000 in the West. The trend to “Europeanize” came with German scholarship which starting in 1820s (one Müller) tried to kill any Levantine/Babylonian connection to Greece, trying to give Germany some nobility in its historical roots, while French scholarship was until then considering Greece as deeply rooted in the Levant and Asia Minor, as a continuum from Babylon to the Phoenicians to classical Greece (mythology says that Europa herself was Phoenician). The rise of antisemitism played a part: the Teutonic cultural separation from the Levantine Canaanite race (the Jews and Phoenicians had near-identical language and ethnicity). + The Levant and what is now Greece spent at least 1000 years in the same political unit Rome-Byzantium and another few hunded in the Ottoman Empire; the Greeks and the Germans have now about 40 years together. + The nation-state started integrating the Mediterranean people. During the 19th Century only a few coastal cities such as Marseille and Toulon in Southern France spoke French, the rest spoke Provencal or Catalan. + The idea of a Mediterranean unit is not popular. Partly because it has been linked to Mussolini. + The Mycenians did not use a Semitic language (linear B). But the word Knossos (the capital) means “settlement” in Phoenician. + If a French person looks like a Mediterranean and speaks French, it is by colonization. The same applies to the “Aryanization” of Greece, to the “Turkification” of Asia Minor, and the “Arabization” of Syria or the “Aryanization” of India. Arian/Semitic/Hun is not a distinction beyond the language spoken.