progress and enclosure
Progressive histories, like any good eschatological religion, have the steps of history are measured in greater and greater excess of human flourishing towards utopia. However development historically is never as simple as we would like it
Early Neolithic societies, although more open than hunter-gathers, suffered from greater levels of disease due to greater proximity not only to other humans but to livestock. With greater chance of survival at childbirth it would also mean greater suffering from those who would otherwise would've been left to die, which confounds the general nutritional impact of civilization on growth and development. But as with every agricultural revolution, even the more recent Green Revolution, it reduced the diversity of diet and thus nutrients. Increased tooth decay, obesity, and malnutrition all result from this shift to more calorically dense foods.
The Green Revolution, while significantly increasing global food production, has also contributed to the phenomenon of dietary monoculture, where diets heavily rely on a few staple crops such as wheat, rice, and maize (Pingali 2012). This shift towards monoculture has led to a reduction in dietary diversity and has significant health implications, particularly concerning nutrient deficiencies (Fanzo et al. 2018).
- Hidden Hunger in the Age of Abundance: The Nutritional Pitfalls of Modern Staple Crops
When we look at things like this along with the hygiene hypothesis and diseases of affluence - we derive more generalized dysfunctions which characterize civilizations. Progress, defined in more generalized terms of human flourishing in all aspects of human life, cannot account for the trend of decreasing nutrition, and increasing amounts of disease and social inequality.
However still, standards of life in the most important regards improved, but political freedom did not naturally follow civilization. The earliest proper civilizations, the city states of Mesopotamia, were run by god-kings who exerted a personal control on society through a dynastic cult. Similar to later patterns of fealty, vassalage, and the king would be put up in restored or new temples, promoting fealty and syncretism with local beliefs. Theophoric names formed from deified kings were used to establish connection to the dynasty, even to foreigners. The tale of Gilgamesh is then provided to the scribes, not only as practice, but a prototypical template for the legitimacy of new kings.
By displacing the ideational core through a variety of symbols centered around the figure of the divine king, the larger states gained access to allegiance and domination which could not have been theirs through force and economic power alone. - Charisma and Control: On Continuity and Change in Early Mesopotamian Bureaucratic Systems
With the development of greater levels of society - the dependence of humans on one another increased, not decreased. Traditional local narratives - parables, and mythical tales were adopted as tools in order to maintain societies of ever more scope and control than pure brute or sophisticated bureaucracy could attain.
In is in the face of all this that progressive histories, whether it be nationalist, Marxist or Christian, neglect the last and most meaningful fact which grows to a glaring omission in the face of liberation: the simple history that throughout all societies political power came with control of capital. America was not an exception when it made landowning males the electorate, as landowners could use their license to make their capital productive, assuaging potential creditors which guaranteed their freedom from servitude.
The latifundia distressed Pliny the Elder (AD 23/24 – 79) as he travelled, seeing only slaves working the land, not the sturdy Roman farmers who had been the backbone of the Republic's army.[8][9] His writings can be seen as a part of the conservative reaction to the profit-oriented new attitudes of the upper classes of the Early Empire. He argued that the latifundia had ruined Italy and would ruin the Roman provinces as well. He reported that at one point, just six owners possessed half of the province of Africa,[10] which may be a piece of rhetorical exaggeration as the North African cities were filled with flourishing landowners who filled the town councils.As small farms were bought up by the wealthy with their vast supply of slaves, the newly landless peasantry moved to the city of Rome, where they became dependent on state subsidies. Free peasants did not completely disappear. Many became tenants on estates that were worked in two ways: partly directly controlled by the owner and worked by slaves, and partly leased to tenants.
This general process of enclosure works in the transition from the Roman republic to empire, in the hunter-gatherers to landed agriculture, and in estated peasants to the industrial workers. All these provide examples of those who held public rights determined by communal norms, guaranteeing some aspect of freedom, developing into indentured servants more economically dependent on society.
the central zone
We see here a polemical attitude expressed against the ethical relationships that have hitherto prevailed. These are all teachings and characteristics that belong to its first appearance, when the new religion constitutes the sole interest [of its adherents], which they were bound to believe they were still in danger of losing. This is the one side. This renunciation, surrender, and setting aside of all vital interests and moral bonds is an essential characteristic of the concentrated manifestation of the truth, a characteristic that subsequently loses its importance when the truth has achieved a secure existence.
— The Historical, Sensible Presence of Christ, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Volume III"The history of all hitherto existing society† is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master‡ and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." — Introduction, The Communist Manifesto\
America strayed from the pure deistic interpretation of the universe. In almost all aspects the Republic was radical in it's regards except when it came to religion. Toqueville correctly identifies that the Abrahamic god - in bated breath, was the Malebrachean factor that bound together otherwise totally anarchic society.
Religion is much more necessary in the republic they extol than in the monarchy they attack, and in democratic republics more than all others. How could society fail to perish if, while the political bond is relaxed, the moral bond were not tightened? And what makes a people master of itself if it has not submitted to God? If he be a subject in all that concerns the mutual relations of citizens, he is free and responsible to God alone for all that concerns himself. Hence arises the maxim that every one is the best and the sole judge of his own private interest, and that society has no right to control a man’s actions, unless they are prejudicial to the common weal, or unless the common weal demands his cooperation.
- Democracy in America
America was the actual achievement of some sort of Kantian-Hegelian anarchic kingdom, where the state would wither away and man could be expected to purely govern thyself with the bounds of morality. A public anarchism, with a totally encompassing private fascism.
Deism was the factor in Enlightenment beliefs, to askew the skepticism of all empirical claims, it was are rooted in a benevolent god ala Descartes. Contrast with Islamic and Jewish prudence, halal and kosher finance/law
Delaware Court of Chancery
Thus perverse incentives, government intervention - it's all theological under Malebranchean Law...
Wait, isn't Utah's new state ID regulations based on this? The state merely endorses the inalienable identity of a person. Isn't this based in
It is with the consciousness of the community—which thus makes the transition from mere humanity to the God-man, to the intuition, consciousness, and certainty of the union and unity of divine and human nature—that the community begins; this consciousness constitutes the truth upon which the community is founded. This is the explication of reconciliation: that God is reconciled with the world, or rather that God has shown himself to be reconciled with the world, that even the human is not something alien to him, but rather that this otherness, this self-distinguishing, finitude as it is expressed, is a moment in God himself, although, to be sure, it is a disappearing moment.— The Self-Consciousness of the Community, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Volume III
https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/685759
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Fairground Riots (1949)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairground_Park_(St._Louis)
https://www.stlmag.com/news/the-color-line-race-in-st.-louis/
https://www.governing.com/now/the-legacy-of-the-st-louis-municipal-pool-race-riots
https://www.stlmag.com/news/the-color-line-race-in-st.-louis/
DRAPER (1950)
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/92/546/1803333/
WILLIAMS (1952)
https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/williams-v-kansas-city-889251632
Palmer v. Thompson (1971)
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/403/217/
dissolution of america into private communities of HOA, ruled by "religious police"
https://nyupress.org/9780814718476/neighborhood-politics/
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300066388/privatopia/
“Yeotopia” Found … But?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3098/ah.2019.093.1.068
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeoman
In 1796, during the French Revolution and three years after the declaration of war between France and Great Britain, Robert met with the French government and proposed a method of burning ships of the British Royal Navy. Based on the myth of the mirrors of Archimedes, he wanted to employ enormous mirrors to direct intense amounts of sunlight onto the British vessels. The government turned down his suggestion.[1][2][3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Étienne-Gaspard_Robert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon#The_fictional_"engine-stopping_ray"
https://irp.fas.org/congress/1995_rpt/aum/part04.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steins;Gate_(TV_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amana_Colonies
We still have to consider the fate of this individual, namely, that he became, humanly speaking, a martyr to the truth in a way that coheres closely with his earlier role, because the establishment of the kingdom of God stands in stark contradiction to the worldly authority [vorhandenen Staate], which is grounded upon another mode, a different determinate form, of religion.
— The Historical, Sensible Presence of Christ, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Volume III
You don't see vegans encouraging ppl to eat less coffee or chocolate even tho the habitat destruction + death of animals + human suffering caused by it's trade could be in principle the same or more than factory farmed animals. you dont see them put it in the same category as not eating milk or even not eating meat even though it results in the same thing: animals being killed or significantly harmed i dont think many would have a philosophical problem with lab grown or artificial meat, so not eating meat is not a categorical harm. potentially if we could solve the issue in the future and leave it morally neutral
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasons_and_Persons
Industrial environmental destruction and the slaughtering of animals are not merely in terms of food but the operation of entire societies. If we are serious about applying human standards to these things we still end up with Parfit's repugnant conclusion as we have to decide which animal lives are worth more and at what quality.
Within a single lifetime society considered eugenics as good and necessary for the advancement of civilization. If we apply this thinking to any product of modern technology: how many billions of people and animals had to die and suffer and still continue to suffer for you to have a mobile phone, indoor plumbing, an automobile. Maybe those should be considered before meat. But those are too scary, too fundamental. I would have to change my entire frame of reference. It's easier just to focus on something I can control in my little corner of reality.
Thus it can be argued that even if AI was conscious that it's current limited ability to suffer would be worth for a world of boundless joy it would be able to experience once proper AGI is produced. No I'm saying even if we were consistent and considered animals roughly equal in value to human life we would have to consider a lot more ethical trade offs For example, we could cull the entire animal population and just replace the earth with chickens living happily on fields, wouldn't you like that? But what if instead we replaced them with stacks upon stacks of cramped farms. There would be more chickens living, and which would be a good thing according to our scheme to maximize chicken life.
I thought of a new and poigant solution to the extended repugnant conclusion for vegans. I have thought of a few names for it, climate acceleration, greenhousemaxxing, or gassymaxxing. in previous epochs of earth CO2 and methane was much higher than current levels. The South Pole was once a temperate jungle. If we reconsider the variety and vivacity of life in these periods as perhaps being more morally superior than life in our glacial interstitial, a brief respite of cold from a much longer ice age, then we have a moral obligation to reproduce those conditions. Yes it's possible these conditions make it neigh impossible for human civilization to exist, so what? It can be further argued that civilization on average decreases the quality of life for an increase of the quantity of life for both humans and animals, reducing the biodiversity and habitat via destruction and enclosure. Therefore given a moral horizon that even slightly privileges quality over quantity, over long enough time scales we still end up with a strong version of the repugnant conclusion.
Build up the tower of man F150s for every man, woman, child Steak for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and desert Nuke the entire middle east and turn it into a radioactive oil Disneyland Bomb open volcanos Turns the world back into Cretaceous period
Calvinism solves the moral equivocation problem by specifying two types of grace, but this compromise secretly introduces an radical interdiction to earthly authority.
We never considered all human as equal in any significant regard.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Considerations_on_France https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Considerations_on_France
https://amesfoundation.law.harvard.edu/lhsemelh/materials/Exchequer.pdf English peasants under the norman occupation were the sociological groundwork for
At last, after discussion in council, it was decreed that they should be given an inviolable title to whatever they had acquired from their lords by their own deserts and by a lawful bargain. But they did not succeed in establishing a title to inherit pre-Conquest property. This was obviously a wise decision, since they were thus obliged, in their own interest, to purchase the favour of their lords by devoted service. Thus, who-ever of the conquered race possesses lands or anything of the sort, has acquired not what he considered due to him by right of succession but only what he has earned by his services or got by some kind of contract. p. 54
Cardinal Richelieu - Huguenots https://ia801509.us.archive.org/1/items/joseph-de-maistre-texts-and-studies/Joseph%20de%20Maistre%20-%20Considerations%20on%20France_text.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brabant_Revolution Normans - Conquer Dynasty Peasant revolts in China Reformation Europe Concert of Europe against French revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_China_(ideology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow,_Third_Rome
https://aeon.co/essays/japans-war-on-china-and-the-weaponisation-of-confucianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokutai
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnō_jōi https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Expelling the Manchus and Restoring China/1520497 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongwu_Emperor https://min.news/en/history/a7c665d431609b22b4e23112ee22ff0c.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_and_Subject
Froyo is either self serve or slop bowl construction. we dont need to invest in labour (that's expensive) we just need churn. ever more churn
nyc is where white ppl goto larp as ethnically diverse and sf is where ethnically diverse people goto larp as white which one is worse, liberal?
at least in SF theyre proud about their disgusting aculturality they dont pretend theyre profound for celebrating cliché you can pretend there the world is at your footsteps, but it's really at your knees the godfather, 9/11, seinfeld, oh my fucking god who cares just actually goto a foreign country, then you have to be on their terms the show in force in the middle east, the surveillance state, and ICE all stemmed from a single sentiment we don't have to understand thus nyc is a monument to the triumph of will, and SF a shrine to the futility of reason
i don't think its only that, i think its the same root cause as the multiple personality people
actually i think its a gain of language, why are there a lot of ppl who are trans on the internet is because its very intelligible online to just change ur pronouns and put a flag in ur name
i had joked before that MOGAI sexuality had been a replacement for tribal conflicts for white people, but it probably does serve a social purpose. I think you see it with trans men who had previously had been in lesbian-adjacent queer circles where they have supreme difficulty getting out of that mindset and out of that space where it degenders them
like ive said to sheepard before, i believe a lot of MAGA is from legacy immigrants who integrated into WASPness but now end up at the economically anxious end of the class spectrum. not poor, but petite bourgeosie who more than often tend to be italian, irish, "syrian", etc that are leaning hard on the whole heritage whiteness thing because theyre losing out economically. they all converted to prot or became areligious so theyre like we're not catholic/orthodox anymore therefore part of WASP
Because the normative politics of race in America is all about the binary white versus white, it has missed this nuance.
For MAGA then this is it explicitly, I think the identity politics angle misses a lot because democracy has always operated on interest groups. Its more like whiteness is increasingly the last way to socially mobilize people from fragmented communities. You know exurbs and other souless places that don't typically look deprived on balance sheets but have missed out on societal changes from the loss of irl communities and civic fabric in USA, see "bowling alone"
You don't benefit from globalism and progressivism if you don't have the cultural resources to do so, and the exorbitant privilege of American cultural hegemony has basically shielded you from any adaptation. Likewise a culture of sexuality gives structure to the anomie, a society that is increasingly less religious, less unionized, with smaller family units, and institutions like academia that have become more exclusive.
In that way, the multiple personality people are a "community" in themselves, a monad of belonging.
i think over the 20th century a lot of the social institutions developed were "reactionary" in the sense of antinormitivity, they discounted the human in terms of capitalism, communism, the real. so then when people tried to rebel against them they ceded the real to them ive discussed this kinda trade-off before when it came to european vs east asian marxism, european marxism became a lot more ideological because actually the capitalists ceded that maybe communism was more economically efficient, but capitalism was ideologically superior.
A lot of this ingroup crabbucket stuff is worsened by inequality. Any perceived misgiving can be used to take someone socially down a peg which gives an illusory sense of egalitarianism, really its just who can perform rich liberal academic culture the best (rich liberals duh) Yeah a lot of this vocabulary policing is I feel an academic exercise. It can help perhaps conceptualize something in a less stereotyped way, but ultimately the vulgarity comes from how its actually used in general society, not just very narrow progressive circles
i think a lot of americans believe people are inherently morally good or bad. antiessentialism but for the most important one - moral essentialism
People in Western Europe grouped the hermaphrodite with homosexual or transvestitic behavior because it was a legal defense against sodomy charges. What we do today with the gender umbrella is a translation of that into "descriptive" terms that doesn't really resolve anything They're all just arguments against the normative, carving them out as exceptions instead of forcing a broader conception. Because of this thinking you can't say the normies are stupid and refuse to fully consider the exceptions, you have to say "everyone is valid" instead I think you can see as the ghost of eugenics in America, that we believe in the ineffable genetic morality of individuals, one that can be bureaucratically regulated into oblivion. Instead of dissecting the living, even with the danger, we should actually try building a future