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Aaron Swallow

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Aaron Swallow is currently reading

La Réunion, a French Settlement in Texas

by William J. Hammond

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Aug 10, 2023 07:22PM

Aaron Swallow is currently reading

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

by Friedrich Engels

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Aaron Swallow said: " The Old World patriarchy was never about male sexual gratification or jealousy, it was just the most stable system that the Old World ended up with because sheep and goats can be raided, as well as just packed up and moved a few miles away from an ap The Old World patriarchy was never about male sexual gratification or jealousy, it was just the most stable system that the Old World ended up with because sheep and goats can be raided, as well as just packed up and moved a few miles away from an approaching peasant army that’s about to seize the means of production and redistribute it, because livestock walk with you, maize and potatoes can't, you don't bother increasing the meager yield from llama and alpaca once you have a super yield from maize and potatoes, and you can’t prove who anyone’s father was back then because no paternity tests, so the system just shorts out in the Old World with warlords setting up slave city states and empires because the stable political system is creating a system that sucks for 90% of people (serfs, peasants, slaves) to make it relatively worth it for violent men to go be convenient political pawns in the form of soldiers because otherwise their lives would suck, so the way you incentivize the political pawn soldiery is the possibility of getting rich instead of having a life that sucks and to do that you need to cut as many people out of owning property as possible, which ended up being all women, because women are not convenient political pawns as soldiers for the period because when warfare is down to muscle power, women are going to lose against males, that's not sexism, that's just the biological reality. Up to 90% or more of males were cut out of owning property in most of these systems, too, until about the 18th century.

If they didn’t do that then their neighbors were going to do it instead and that’s exactly what happened, the Old World Y chromosome bottleneck by 5000 BC shows that one man was passing on his genes for every 17 women, and the only detectable Y chromosome bottleneck in the Americas was in the Andes and even at that it was the least drastic of all the Neolithic genetic bottlenecks of the time, supporting the whole “livestock equals patriarchy because the human nature argument is massively in favor of communism without private property because livestock is mechanistic as such that it is docile and can be raided, dogs are nearly unique in domesticated animals in that they actually care who is in charge, sheep, goats, horses, cattle, camels, donkeys, pigs, they don’t care, nearly all humans are the same to them”.

*I suspect that the herds of sheep, goats, cattle and pigs eventually exhausted pasture land in the Old World, which caused a war in which nomads were exterminating adult males and taking the women and children as slaves; eventually this system ran out of pasture land and collapsed into something relatively more egalitarian in the form of the first city states in Sumer, Mesopotamia, the Nile, Yellow river civilizations.
I don't have any archaeological evidence for that, it just seems to be the most likely scenario, that the barley, rye and wheat strains in proto-agriculture were too low yielding to offer the political stability that livestock could at the time, so the path of least resistance was getting more pasture land.
Relative amounts of terraforming of the regions may have occurred in the form of livestock clearing land to make barley, rye and wheat strains more adaptable.

Livestock necessitates a patriarchy that polices women’s bodies because if you don’t police who women reproduce with, then the system of patriarchal inheritance is thrown into chaos and the private property interests that are all involved in making sure their male relatives know that they’re not going to be pauperized (institutionalized religion has entered the game) get pissed off because they don’t like chaos, and round and round this totally sick, evil system goes, and it got started with a grisly class war starting around 6,000 BC that resulted in a Y chromosome bottleneck.

You kind of had a patriarchy in the Americas, but not really.

You *really, really, really* had a patriarchy, though, in the super-Saharan Old World and quite a bit of one in sub-Saharan Africa, too, and the difference is livestock.

The Sahara and tsetse fly line stopped horses, mules and camels from spreading to *very much of sub-Saharan Africa, which were critical military technology, and also slowed down the spread of all the rest of those politically deterministic, critical sources of heme iron, protein, fats and craft supplies like skins, horn and fibers.

There were also drastically fewer natural fortresses and ports in sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. Trying to be the top dog in a place like tropical West Africa, without horses, camels, donkeys, mules, and so few places to dig in like the way you can in Italy, Greece, Iberia, Britain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, West Turkey, Japan, or Korea is going to be exponentially more difficult than in those listed places. The greatest genetic diversity in the world being in sub-Saharan Africa seems to support this theory. ...more "

Aug 10, 2023 03:33PM · see review

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― Katherine Applegate, The Alien

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