Michael van der Riet: From my home office window I can see Northcliff, where Mzilikazi used to take pretenders to the throne to give them flying lessons. This followed the Mfecane/Difeqane when population pressure first occurred in Southern Africa as the southward-migrating Bantu people ran out of land. It’s my politically incorrect theory that the elimination by execution of the brightest and the best in a tribe led to selection for average or low IQ. This also happened a lot in European socialist...
McChuck: Strong men rule to this day. Gangs of their subordinates eventually conspire to kill and replace them. Blacks are notably violent and dumb, because Africans had little need to plan for the future. When it’s always summer, there is no need to plan for winter. When malaria killed hordes of people randomly, there was little incentive to develop the self control to ensure a future that you probably wouldn’t have.
Leon: I read somewhere that this ability to eliminate the overly aggressive was made easier with the adoption of missile weapons. You could kill at a distance and not have to chance a hand-to-hand encounter with a physically larger opponent.
Altitude Zero: One of the great mysteries of Caplan is how he can be so right on some issues, and so utterly wrong about others. For example, he’s dead right about the mass media, and yet he seems to believe that the mass media is anti-immigrant (!). He hates Communism, and understands the murder and havoc it wrought with it’s utter ignorance of the laws of economics, yet he’s a pacifist, because he believes that nations will not fight each other, for economic reasons (!!). You hardly...
Bob Sykes: This is the analogue to Turchin’s hypothesis that war civilized us. Specific to Wrangham’s theory, this doesn’t mean there are no hierarchies in foraging groups. There are a least three: the elder males, the elder women in parallel, and the warriors. Moreover, foraging societies are slave societies, and the warriors typically capture children and young women from other groups for slaves. The Plains Indians exemplify all of this. I think it is Charles Sykes (no relative) who...
Slovenian Guest: I liken mainstream media to a fun house mirror; both show you inverted reality. But it’s incredible the grip it has on people. I swear people are watching and believing their TVs, as if Moses himself is broadcasting from the mountain!
Pseudo-Chrysostom: To make a riff on the old Anonymous saying: none of us are as stupid as all of us. To estimate the effective decision making capability of a consensus-based decision making body, take the wisdom of its most foolish member, and divide it by the total number of members.
Pseudo-Chrysostom: History is full of patriarchal peoples because the matriarchal peoples all get defeated in wars with patriarchal peoples and get genocided as a result. Namefags in general, and namefag academics especially, always have to dance around the P word in the atlantic empire (amongst other things), and this neuters the clarity of their expression at best. (As for what it does at worst, well, see for yourself https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6Oy0uuTEiOY)
Jim: “Our ancestors” is doing a lot of work here. Secondly, how much of this historiography takes into account the antediluvian civilizations?
Jim: DEFCON 1 would, despite the Instagram Butt and dark eyes. It’s a shame about the eyes.
Michael van der Riet: Men get killed in battle. As Gavin says, this results in a shortage of men. Even today in some societies, loss of husband means end of game for the widow. She has no right of inheritance. If you read the Koran, Fourth Surah, men are enjoined to marry widows, especially of kin, to save them and their children from starvation. King David who reputedly had nine hundred wives or something was the husband of last resort. Those Israelites of old were a warlike bunch and men were getting...
Phileas Frogg: Kgaard, I haven’t read the book either, but after a moments consideration there’s a kind of logic to it. Very small hunter-gatherer tribes would need an incredible amount of trust and mate regulation to function. One guy going rogue and sleeping with four other men’s mates could destroy the entire group irreparably and doom everyone, necessitating monogamy as a norm. Meanwhile about 10,000 years ago we see the Agricultural Revolution with the rise of sedentary farming,...
Altitude Zero: As Kgaard points out, the term “Our Ancestors” is doing a lot of questionable heavy lifting here. ‘Our Ancestors” comprise a lot of different people doing a lot of different things over time.
Gavin Longmuir: Surely the drive for polygamy was the ratio of men to women? It is a fairly reasonable guess that — in the world of yesterday — there was a surplus of breeding-aged women. Men did the dangerous things like hunt large animals and defend the tribe from enemies, and many of them died in the process. Hence the surplus of women. Since children were (are?) critical for the survival of the tribe, they could not allow breeding-aged women to fail to produce. Hence polygamy. Note that...
Kgaard: That’s a pretty strong claim that humans were monogamous between 300,000 and 10,000 years ago. What happened 10,000 years ago that would have shifted things to polygynous again? It doesn’t make sense. But I will read his book. I mean we know that native Americans and Africans are/were polygynous until 200 years ago (or to this day).
Captain Duh: Its a cycle. Men give women power through monogamy, women abuse it, society falls, polygammy comes back and society is rebuilt, women complain and weak men bring in monogammy, women become whores and society falls again. Rinse repeat.
Slovenian Guest: Not just monogamous but in marriage-like arrangements; hence you could argue that marriage is just a legal recognition of natural order.
Brutus: This documentary shows how some polygynous practices have survived into modern times with China’s ethnic minorities. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1lbtuH7MuIY (Warning: it has some R-rated content and is not for children.)
DJF: “Proving it is nearly impossible.” Like election fraud.
Bob Sykes: Both NIL and the Portal provide openings for organized crime to influence the outcomes of college games. There is a lot of betting on point spreads, and point shaving is relatively easy and hard to detect. Proving it is nearly impossible. The 1978/79 Boston College MBB point shaving scandal is a case in point: https://www.playma.com/n ews/full-truth-about-bc- points-shaving-scandal-s till-unknown/
Isegoria, may you have a rational yet funny Christmas! ;-)
Thank you kindly, Borepatch. In fact, I’ll try to keep things rational yet funny into the New Year.
..and that’s why I come here often.
Happy coming New Year!
Happy New Year to you, too, Tatyana. (S Novim godom!)