Not unlike Kripkenstein. — Banno

I disagree that Kripke does violence to Witt. I don't see why you would say that.

It's all going to hell, man. Beans are spilling all over the place!

During the Permian extinction there was so much crap in the atmosphere that the partial pressure of O2 went from 35% all the way down to 12%. It's 21% now, and that's what we need to survive. If the PO2 went down to 12% again, most living things on land and in the oceans would die.

A mass extinction is like this: imagine a car that goes through a lot of hardship, but keeps running. Finally a point is reached where a critical component of the engine falters and the whole engine stops. During a mass extinction, there's a fundamental breakdown in the mechanics of the biosphere. This has happened several times. There's one mass extinction where they're still not sure how life survived at all.

The palace economies in Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Levant were waning in the late Bronze Age, being replaced by primitive market economies led by private merchants or officials who owned private businesses on the side.[citation needed] The last holdout and epitome of the palace system was Mycenaean Greece which was completely destroyed during the Bronze Age collapse and the following Greek Dark Ages. — wikipedia

If you really want to read about any of this, anything by Moses Finley is good stuff.

Can you actually make that argument rather than asking us to assume it? — unenlightened

In the Bronze Age, the most important commodity, food, was not private property. Land wasn't. People worked in the fields and brought their produce into the temple to be divided by the priests. It's called a temple economy. There was no free market. How patriarchal were they? We can only speculate. In the opening scene of the epic of Gilgamesh, the people of Ur are praying to the Sun god to help them because Gilgamesh, their king, is making all the men work hard, and he's having sex with all the women. The Sun god hands the problem off to a female divinity, the fertility goddess. She makes a man out of clay and sets him roam like a wildman. In due course, the wildman is tamed by the temple prostitute. This wildman eventually becomes the best friend and homosexual lover of Gilgamesh.

So we have a bisexual king, the one who initiates wildmen into a civilized state is a prostitute. One of the most important deities is female. In real life, the leader of the temple, where the food is divided up, is the King's daughter. I'm not suggesting that women had equal rights in this society. I doubt anybody had any rights per se. But this is not patriarchy as we know it.

The conditions you describe for the genesis of patriarchy, where private ownership drives men to know who their offspring are, didn't exist until the Iron Age. Our knowledge of the Iron Age is not foggy. We know it pretty well, and though a case could be made for what you described, if would be fairly flimsy.

All we know is that as the dust cleared from the Bronze Age collapse, patriarchy had become normal. From early accounts, we know this was a very dangerous world to live in. No one travelled around. You just stayed close to your clan.

So maybe ownership played a part. Maybe patriarchy became the dominant cultural scheme for other reasons. I'm speculating just as you are.

@Tobias
I have a hypothesis for you. Patriarchy offered a survival advantage to societies by providing strong family units. In societies where neoliberalism became rooted, priorities shifted from the well-being of families (which was important after the depression and WW2) to the welfare of financial institutions. This created a sense of vulnerability in the labor pool. At the time, fighting the power of unions was seen as paramount to economic stability. But years later, large holes began to appear in the social safety net for some, particularly Americans.

Now look at JD Vance, the vice-president of the US. His outlook was shaped by his childhood experiences with the disintegration of the family unit. His mother was a drug addict. He was raised by his grandmother. He places a lot of importance on the welfare of children. He might fit into a larger conservative framework that probably is a little retrogressive.

Though we may be facing challenges in the domain of the male persona, blaming the political shift on this psychological issue would be to fail to see the tangible problems causing stress. What nobody outside the US seems to want to digest is that immigration control and tariffs are potentially beneficial to American labor. There's a real problem that this administration has done more to fix than generations of left-center politicians. In other words, I'm pushing for looking at the real problems on the table.

Patriarchy is one of a number of social schemes. The British Celtic and Navajo schemes are examples of alternatives. Suppose patriarchy won out by a kind of natural selection? It offered some advantage? If that's true, and we're now transitioning to some other scheme, we might want to think about what we're losing when patriarchy declines. Perhaps it's not a matter of egos, or ownership. Maybe it was about strong family units that gave some kind of robustness to society. The Iron Age was a hard time to be alive, so maybe that selected for patriarchy.

If that's true, then it may be that moralizing about it is irrelevant. If we escaped patriarchy, it's because conditions allowed creativity that didn't exist for our forebears.

I don't know what you don't know. If I have said something you disagree with, based on the article you linked, then perhaps you can clarify, taking account of that DNA evidence that I think supports and justifies my position. — unenlightened

The Celts were as civilized as anybody else in the Roman world. Virgil was Celt.

I don't know. In Bronze Age societies, the high priestess was usually the king's daughter. The temple would house women who had sex for a living. The character who transforms the wildman Enkidu into a civilized person is a temple prostitute.

I think the patriarchy being talked about in this thread is more Iron Age. A whole other civilized world existed before the Greco-Roman world we know so much about. I wouldn't jump from hunter-gatherers to the Iron Age, in other words.

Apparently the British Celts didn't have male dominated societies.. How would you account for cultures like their's?

Pretty much. — Banno

Couldn't I know that P without ever communicating about it to anyone?

Present a true sentence? Do you mean make an assertion?

Territorial expansion is something very close to heart for him indeed. — ssu

Sure. Who wouldn't want a massive ice sheet?

Are you trying to say there is no such thing as knowing that?

And anyway, the idea that more territory gives you more prosperity is basically an outdated idea... — ssu

I'm guessing someone told him Greenland and Canada will be prime real estate when climate change starts getting more severe. It's a little early to worry about that though.

What one diagnosis would that be? — javra

I'm not sure why you're asking me that?

I associate dark femininity more with Lady MacBeth - relentless manipulation of MacBeth & challenging his manhood, unbridled ambition, and complete lack of morality. — BitconnectCarlos

She's a good one, yea.

What do you here have in mind? — javra

Just trying to give one diagnosis to a bunch of people who have different ailments?

And all this to me gets exceedingly complex when philosophically enquired into. — javra

That may be because of inappropriate generalization. Diagnosis is difficult in the case of one person. Diagnosing our society would take a vantage point around fifty years in the future. Diagnosing our culture isn't possible. It's just a living thing, doing its thing.

I think @AmadeusD is right though. In a sense, there is no feminine spectrum of power from light to dark. There are veins of our heritage where femininity in general shows up as bad: frail, muddle-headed, prone to irrationality and hysterics. In order for women to step out of the shadows, they had to be careful to avoid seeming powerful, because they would come across as bitchy. The ideal is innocent Snow White. Her powerful Step-Mother is evil.

Where is the OP finding this positive adult femininity? Where in our heritage is that supposed to be coming from?

Yes, i agree with that. There's a clear area on the spectrum of 'masculine' behaviour which is pernicious and destructive. Equally with feminine behaviour (again, acknowledging that the important difference is that the in former case, people tend to die - hte latter, they kill themselves (this is a bit of jest)). — AmadeusD

I think dark femininity is more like the witches in Macbeth, allied with nature, fucking people up.

Would you say there are light and dark versions of masculinity? For instance, Superman is clearly light. He's all good. He's all about truth and justice. And then there's a darker, morally ambiguous guy. I gang member, for instance. I would say the type of masculinity that's appearing out of the US government right now is the darker kind.

Are Americans here truly OK with this? — ssu

Is your main concern that countries should respect one another's sovereignty?

If you need folk to genuflect, then I do agree that the US was a great civilisation. — Banno

Really? I'm surprised you would say that. It did have some cool things in it.

Indeed, famously Australian, but Arnott's were purchased by the US corporate Campbell's Soup in 1997. There followed an explosion of varieties in the crass US tradition, including of all things a cheese variety for the Indonesian market.

Divided loyalties. — Banno

Oh, I see. In honor of Campbell's soup and Andy Warhol, you should take one of the Tim Tam packages, frame it, and put it on the wall. The art isn't the package, it's in the experience of staring at it in a frame. Just take note of what goes through your soul as you're staring at it. See how great America is?

:grin: I wish you well though. Tim Tams aren't American, so you can buy them guilt free.

Sorry, you didn't read my post so I'm not going to read yours. :cool:

If I were you I would limit purchases from the US due to carbon emissions involved in shipping.

Imagine that you first found out that foreigners hate Australia when you were about 12. Since then that's always been in the wings as you encounter non-Australians. For the most part they hate you.

They moan and moan year after year about how ugly you are, how everything Australia does is fucked up, how the world would be MUCH better off without you, on and on and on, endlessly.

Then one day Australia feels like it's time to bounce off the global stage. Some native isolationism starts kicking. Now what do you hear?

They're moaning because Australia used to be reliable. They used to be sane. They used to save hundreds of millions of lives on the regular. They used to be there to defend us. And now they're GONE! Do you think you might be a little bemused? Anyway, the US never had any responsibilities.

The present US administration has shown that it cannot be trusted. — Banno

Kind of in the same way China can't be trusted. I was talking to a Kenyan about the weird things China does. They come in claiming they're going to employ Kenyans, they do photo ops, put up billboards with rainbows on them, and then the Chinese use Kenyan prisoners as slave labor.

Would the US do this? :chin:

abdicated it's responsibilities — Banno

responsibilities? :chin:

It's not that complicated. Don't accept intolerance.

just think, like T Clark, that there are worse things than allowing speech that may hurt feelings. — ChatteringMonkey

And you feel the same way about racist speech?

The point is that it is an argument to not have restrictions on free speech, because it can and will be used by those in power to consolidate their power. — ChatteringMonkey

So Jamal is suppressing misogynistic speech to consolidate his power?

Bit of a non sequitur. The fact that it can be applied to anything doesn't make it any less true. — ChatteringMonkey

But what is the point of saying it? "I'm not disagreeing with the people in power, I'm just saying they have all the power"

I don’t know what that means. — T Clark

It means that if we want an environment without racial, religious, or sexual intolerance, we have to be somewhat intolerant of it.

Every tyranny there has ever been has used this exact same argument. — T Clark

tyranny of tolerance

:up:

but I also respect how European countries have handled such noxious speech. — J

But antisemitic hate speech is illegal in Germany, right?

But what about when some of you justify the nuclear attack on Japan? Would I be ok with just ignoring it too?

A 'double standard' for free speech, huh. — javi2541997

I guess we could talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki elsewhere if you want. Talking about the morality of events in war isn't the same thing as outright bigotry.

But what if someone produced an antisemitic rant? Would you be ok with just ignoring it?