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    #51
    Originally posted by Duncan Gardner View Post
    No, I'd relocate the offenders to Rotherham. Double the average IQ in both places etc etc
    Triple in Rotherham's case.

    Comment


      #52
      I really don't, i'm not trying to be funny here but the Andamanese (and North Sentinelese in particular) have been known to be hostile to outsiders for at least a 1000 years. Even Marco Polo wrote about these guys.

      I guess their Scepticism on the outside world is down to their location. The island chain is strategically located between the Indian Subcontinent and the rest of South-East Asia so their encounters with outsiders were mainly Soldiers going to/ from War.

      TN Pandit, the Indian Anthropologist who has spent more time with these people than anyone else living describes them as peaceful and friendly people as long as you do not overstay your welcome.

      This is a good read.
      https://theamericanscholar.org/the-l.../#.W_6lxWj7Tid
      Interesting. I can't help but think that there must have been some event in the past that caused them to become overly distrustful to outsiders. I guess we'll never know.

      Can you get me the correct link? That one goes to an article about lack of toilet facilities in India.

      Comment


        #53
        Evariste Euler Gauss

        I think you are being completely unfair. I have quoted and responded to you every sentence.

        Yes there is. As an objective description of the level of complexity or advancement in development.
        Nah, it's subjective no matter what you or western culture define as 'Primitive' and 'advanced'. There are some who think devoting a majority of your time to developing ever more effective weapons of mass destruction and developing farming techniques that harm the environment is a good definition of a primitive race.

        Comment


          #54
          Originally posted by Gert from the Well View Post
          It could be argued that a 'primitive' hunter-gatherer society has many advantages over more 'advanced' agricultural ones. The anthropologist James C. Scott has argued that in many ways the adoption of agriculture may have been a regressive step. Hunter-gatherer societies have a number of advantages which are lost when humanity moves to the cultivation and domestication of plants and animals. They have a more varied diet, as opposed to the one or two food stuffs of agriculture, their life is less labour intensive, they are not tied to a single location and more importantly their societies are less hierarchical. With agriculture comes cities, debt and the creation of a non-productive class who benefit from the exploitation of the farming masses. This to me is one very good reason to ensure that there Sentinelese are not contaminated by modernity. The fact that they continue to survive or even prosper, may in a large part, be due to this self-enforced isolation from the rest of the world. I do not see how they will benefit from exposure to the stupidity of organised religion.

          Apologies for the manner that this written, but I've just started a MA in Philosophy so this style of writing is becoming second nature (at least I've not used footnotes!).

          You can read more of this in Scott's book Against the Grain which is not only a very good read but also shares a title with a great Bad Religion lp.
          I agree.

          Comment


            #55
            Originally posted by anton pulisov View Post

            Can you get me the correct link? That one goes to an article about lack of toilet facilities in India.
            Try this one.
            https://theamericanscholar.org/the-l.../#.W_-8z2j7Tic

            Most tribes would have been like this up to 150 years ago. A trick of the British to ingratiate themselves with these tribes would be to go in and kidnap a couple of memebers, treat them very well and then treat them very well and dazzle them with modern trinkets and shower them with presents.
            They would then return them to their homes to spread the word about what great folks those white dudes are. Next they would send in the missionaries with the white Jesus who would preach the gospel whilst looking over their shoulder to see what resources they had, Next would come the soldiers etc etc.....

            The Jawara tribe on Great Andaman were just as hostile until a few decades ago when they decided to join the modern world. They are now reduced to begging and being sideshows on the ever growing jungle safari business on that island where big busses trundle slowly through their heartland whilst they gesticulate to the delight of the camera clicking Europeans and East Asians.

            Interesting. I can't help but think that there must have been some event in the past that caused them to become overly distrustful to outsiders. I guess we'll never know.
            Probably a combination of events, each one further reinforcing their position that the outside world has little positive to offer.

            Comment


              #56
              I hope you realise, TG,that our differences are essentially only about the range of meanings of the word "primitive". You don't accept that it can have an objective meaning capable of use without value judgments. I maintain that it does have such a meaning, amongst others, meaning more or less "basic, relatively undeveloped". It strikes me as undeniable that illiterate hunter-gatherer societies living in small bands meet that definition, relative to agricultural societies, even more so relative to literate societies wtih urban life, and triply so relative to industrialised societies. Nothing I have said implies any opinion that development of technology and culture is necessarily a good thing, or implies any merit in the societies which have it. In many respects it obviously isn't a good thing, the most obvious being (a) the manifest ecological unsustainability of modern industrialised life (in terms of pollution and in terms of exhaustion of finite natural resources) and (b) the development of ever more dangerous and apocalyptic weapons such as nuclear, biological and chemical. The trade off inherent in the original agricultural revolution, between producing food which can support a much larger population, and forcing a worse quality of life on that population than their ancestors enjoyed as hunter-gatherers, is well known. Primitive lifestyles have, or had, some major virtues and advantages that we don't have. it doesn't mean they don't fit the definition of "primitive".

              Comment


                #57
                I fully understand your point as well as the metrics you and western society in general use to define what is primitive and what is considered developed.

                Some of the metrics you used in your earlier posts are what I challenge.
                The Easter Islanders were/are not considered primitive people but are probably some of the most stupid humans ever to walk the planet.

                Anyway, It's probably best we just agree to disagree on this matter

                Comment


                  #58
                  The fate that awaits the North Sentinelese.

                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdvlO6bPG60

                  Comment


                    #59
                    Originally posted by Gert from the Well View Post
                    It could be argued that a 'primitive' hunter-gatherer society has many advantages over more 'advanced' agricultural ones. The anthropologist James C. Scott has argued that in many ways the adoption of agriculture may have been a regressive step. Hunter-gatherer societies have a number of advantages which are lost when humanity moves to the cultivation and domestication of plants and animals. They have a more varied diet, as opposed to the one or two food stuffs of agriculture, their life is less labour intensive, they are not tied to a single location and more importantly their societies are less hierarchical. With agriculture comes cities, debt and the creation of a non-productive class who benefit from the exploitation of the farming masses. This to me is one very good reason to ensure that there Sentinelese are not contaminated by modernity. The fact that they continue to survive or even prosper, may in a large part, be due to this self-enforced isolation from the rest of the world. I do not see how they will benefit from exposure to the stupidity of organised religion.

                    Apologies for the manner that this written, but I've just started a MA in Philosophy so this style of writing is becoming second nature (at least I've not used footnotes!).

                    You can read more of this in Scott's book Against the Grain which is not only a very good read but also shares a title with a great Bad Religion lp.
                    I think it's possible to go a bit too far down this road. There's a reason that people switched from one to the other. Sure the early farmers shrank relative to the hunter gatherers, and were exposed to all sorts of illnesses due to living in close proximity to livestock. But there was massively more of them. But there's a reason why people made the switch. Being a hunter Gatherer is a really fucking grim existence, and you have to hunt and gather over a really large area in order to provide enough calories over the course of a year. It also makes it extremely difficult to have anything other than family sized groups.

                    All agriculture really is is collecting together those calories and having them in the one convenient place. Early farmers had a less varied diet sure but that's a) because they were farming things we'd barely recognize as food today, and b) people didn't know that a varied diet was important and were no longer eating anything they could find. I'm not sure what that has to do with the Sentinelese, but whatever happens the decision should be based on what they want, rather than something that looks a little like an introductory chapter to a book about the paleo diet.

                    Comment


                      #60
                      Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post
                      I think it's possible to go a bit too far down this road. There's a reason that people switched from one to the other. Sure the early farmers shrank relative to the hunter gatherers, and were exposed to all sorts of illnesses due to living in close proximity to livestock. But there was massively more of them. But there's a reason why people made the switch. Being a hunter Gatherer is a really fucking grim existence, and you have to hunt and gather over a really large area in order to provide enough calories over the course of a year. It also makes it extremely difficult to have anything other than family sized groups.

                      All agriculture really is is collecting together those calories and having them in the one convenient place. Early farmers had a less varied diet sure but that's a) because they were farming things we'd barely recognize as food today, and b) people didn't know that a varied diet was important and were no longer eating anything they could find. I'm not sure what that has to do with the Sentinelese, but whatever happens the decision should be based on what they want, rather than something that looks a little like an introductory chapter to a book about the paleo diet.
                      Ok, that's a fair point. But there were many parts of the world where (at the point of European contact) many tribes of hunter gatherers that lived in places that previously had large civilisations?

                      Comment


                        #61
                        well it depends on how far you are willing to stretch large. Also I don't know how many groups anywhere were only involved in Hunter Gathering. A lot of groups were involved in some sort of mixture. Agriculture developed independently in a lot of places. It literally requires no more than the insight "what if instead of walking three miles to find enough of plant X to eat, if I just planted a bunch of them beside each other?", or noticing that if you eat a bunch of stuff, and you're shitting in the same place, that plant grows there. The Key thing is what plants you have access to. The book Guns Germs and steel by Jared diamond goes into this a bit. The big reason that Agriculture took off to such a large degree in Eurasia is that by some freak accident of biology, about half the cereals we eat, and about half of the animals that can be domesticated were present in the fertile crescent, and the east west nature of the eurasia landmass means that if something grows in iraq, then it will probably grow in Ireland and Japan, and it can spread by walking.

                        Agriculture also arose in central and southern America, however you couldn't walk to the fertile Crescent so they were somewhat restricted in what they could grow. They only had access to a small number of crops that they could grow, and they had to make do with that. But there was a substantial agricultural civilization in the Amazon basin. There's widespread evidence of agriculture, indicating that there were an awful lot of people living there, but when Europeans arrived in the area, their diseases spread a lot faster than they did, so by the time they started going up the amazon, all the people were long dead, their wooden houses had rotted, and the rainforest had taken over their fields, so they were essentially forgotten, until people started wondering why they were digging up so much Pottery and asking why was the soil black in certain places.

                        You can walk to the fertile crescent from africa, it's really close, and the valley of the nile isn't massively different to central iraq, so you had large scale agriculture there for six or seven thousand years at least, but Africa runs North/South rather than east west, so while this means that Africa has enormous genetic diversity it's not great for the spread of grain, or other things. Africa also had almost no domesticable animals. You could put a harness on a zebra, and get it to pull a cart, but after a surprisingly short period of time, the Zebra is going to try and kill you. A lot of english colonials died learning this lesson.

                        Actually that book is very interesting. I don't know if it achieves what it is trying to ultimately achieve, but it starts from the insight that this guy is in the highlands of papua New Guinea looking at birds, and his native guide, who effectively grew up in the stone age, and lives the Stone age jungle hunter gatherer dream, is using his computer to Email researchers around the world to answer their questions. To him it's just another tool, and not a particularly difficult one to master, and tbh, that's all it is. Now that alone takes the first couple of hundred years of anthropology and sets it on fire, if it hadn't all been burned a while ago, but starting from the insight that all people are more or less exactly the same, how did things wind up the way they did, and it goes off on a jaunt through geography, climatology etc.

                        Comment


                          #62
                          I was not arguing against agriculture, I have yet to fully embrace anarcho-primitivism, but trying to make the point that the move to agriculture was not without significant drawbacks. Indeed there seems to have been many cases of people abandoning agriculture to return to a hunter-gatherer way of life, this being a result of disease, crop failure and maybe even revolt against the societal forms that came with agriculture. The tendency to view the Sentinelese as 'primitive' is the result of imposing a view that choosing a different model constitutes a wrong turn away from the single path to modernity, civilisation or whatever you want to call it. As TAB points out this path was not open to all, but based on the pure chance of where people lived. The example of the abundant resources of the Fertile Crescent (earworm for another Bad Religion song) and the civilisations that originated there has many similarities to the industrialisation of Britain being the result of a fortunate proximity of water and raw materials.

                          Comment


                            #63
                            That's interesting Berbaslug, I was of an opinion that a move to more intensive farming was a result of climate change in the fertile crescent which forced people to take a little more care in how they cultivated food and managed decreasing resources.

                            [quote]
                            But there was a substantial agricultural civilization in the Amazon basin. There's widespread evidence of agriculture, indicating that there were an awful lot of people living there, but when Europeans arrived in the area, their diseases spread a lot faster than they did, so by the time they started going up the amazon, all the people were long dead, their wooden houses had rotted, and the rainforest had taken over their fields, so they were essentially forgotten, until people started wondering why they were digging up so much Pottery and asking why was the soil black in certain places. [/quote}

                            I never knew that, you have sources of these pre-Columbian Amazonian civilisations?

                            but Africa runs North/South rather than east west, so while this means that Africa has enormous genetic diversity it's not great for the spread of grain, or other things.
                            Not sure about that, for a start North Africa in unrecognisable today to what is was at the (alleged) birth of modern agriculture 6000 years ago.
                            This is a good documentary of Sahara climate over milenia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIAkJg8knTI
                            Even after the receding of the lakes, the navigation of the Sahara with goods and ideas was relatively straighforward.

                            Africa also had almost no domesticable animals. You could put a harness on a zebra, and get it to pull a cart, but after a surprisingly short period of time, the Zebra is going to try and kill you. A lot of english colonials died learning this lesson.
                            That's funny, I can imagine the consternation of an Englishman being bitten by an angry Zebra.
                            I need to correct you, there are numerous domesticated animals in Africa. Some can be found here:
                            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...icated_animals

                            Gert
                            The example of the abundant resources of the Fertile Crescent (earworm for another Bad Religion song) and the civilisations that originated there has many similarities to the industrialisation of Britain being the result of a fortunate proximity of water and raw materials.
                            And it seems, the same impact on the climate.

                            Comment


                              #64
                              Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post
                              Being a hunter Gatherer is a really fucking grim existence

                              I guess it depends where and when. Can't say I'd fancy following herds of reindeer around the frozen wastelands of northern Europe but there are many examples of hunter gatherer lifestyles that sound more than appealing. I think it's also fair to say that ever since agriculture first created the surpluses which led to class societies, 95% of the human population for maybe 90% of human history would have gladly swapped their lot for that of the likes of the Andaman Islanders.


                              Looking at the time 150 years ago when the British 'discovered' them my own ancestors were mostly either fighting those Indians whose mutinous ways necessitated the establishment of a penal colony on the Islands on account of it being a better bet than starving to death back in Ireland; starving to death back in Ireland while dreaming of the move they'd shortly make to a Salford slum; hacking away at a coal face in a living embodiment of hell several hundred feet beneath Derbyshire. I reckon to a man they'd take their chances on "fucking grim." To a woman the choice would probably be even easier.

                              Comment


                                #65
                                On pre Colombian Black Soil in the Amazon Basin: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

                                Comment


                                  #66
                                  Originally posted by Tactical Genius View Post
                                  Really, according to the Thanksgiving plays, the Native Americans helped the Pilgrims when they struggled for food and they all lived happily ever after.
                                  This is a retcon partially invented by people in Massachussetts in, IIRC, the 19th century so they could say they invented Thanksgiving (and turn Plymouth into a tourist site). Virginia has a similar story of a intercultural feast a few years earlier, except those settlers were killed by locals a few years later.

                                  Relations between the locals and early English settlers were complicated and, of course, sometimes tragic, to say the least. But either way, nobody at the time of either event thought they were founding a holiday.

                                  In fact, feasts of Thanksgiving and harvest festivals have been celebrated by both European Christians and Native Americans long before they met on theses shores. But in those days, the one around the harvest took on special significance in Puritan communities because they had ditched Christmas and Easter as too “popish” and because fights broke out about weather or not Die Hard was a Christmas movie. (One of those is not true). Canada also has a Thanksgiving but it’s about six week’s earlier, which makes sense because the harvest is earlier in Canada.

                                  Ours was ensconced in the federal holiday calendar by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. In the 20th century, the stuff about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock was used, ironically I guess, to secularize the holiday a bit and give it some imagery - people wearing hats with buckles shooting turkeys with a blunderbuss. But that’s all nonsense that was tacked on later.

                                  So it’s appropriate to criticize the way Puritan-Native relations have been sanitized in the 20th and 21st centuries, but that’s mostly old news. There are a few school teachers and even school text books that suggest that the Indians moved west voluntarily - and that is infuriating - but no actual historians or anyone who reads history is misled by these legends. And, in any event, Thanksgiving doesn’t deserve to be tarnished by a connection to these attrocities because it really has nothing to do with that.

                                  Columbus Day is another matter...

                                  Comment


                                    #67
                                    Not sure about that, for a start North Africa in unrecognisable today to what is was at the (alleged) birth of modern agriculture 6000 years ago.
                                    This is a good documentary of Sahara climate over milenia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIAkJg8knTI
                                    Even after the receding of the lakes, the navigation of the Sahara with goods and ideas was relatively straighforward.


                                    No I should have made that a bit clearer. It's that generally speaking if you go 1000 miles east, or 1000 miles west, the climate is going to be basically the same, and the same things can be grown, and you can generally grow the same stuff as you move along the way. but if you go 1000 miles north or 1000 miles south and then everything is different, and this effect applies more the nearer to the equator you get. So agriculture came out of the fertile crescent and made a beeline for Egypt. But once there it went west along the mediterranean coast, rather than south. This is also largely true of south america as well BTW

                                    It's not that there weren't areas south of Egypt that were perfectly suited for agriculture, and it wasn't that the people were any different, and it's not that people couldn't travel. It's that as you went further south the climate kept changing as you got nearer the equator, and then started changing back again, and that makes it awkward for plants which essentially come from iraq and kind of do best in a similar climate. So it had to develop based on local plants, and animals had to gradually adapt to local conditions, and those are all barriers to the easy spread of agriculture. Looking at that list of animals that you put up, the only one that you can fully domesticate that was indigenous to Africa were bees. And we all know about Africanized Killer bees with their large size and their big stingers that frighten all those people on Fox news. It doesn't mean that it didn't develop over time, it's just that it wasn't quite the same.

                                    Comment


                                      #68
                                      Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                                      In fact, feasts of Thanksgiving and harvest festivals have been celebrated by both European Christians and Native Americans long before they met on theses shores. But in those days, the one around the harvest took on special significance in Puritan communities because they had ditched Christmas and Easter as too “popish” and because fights broke out about weather or not Die Hard was a Christmas movie.

                                      Suddenly the Second Amendment makes sense.

                                      Comment


                                        #69
                                        I remember maybe 35 years ago the first time I heard an atheist ex-Catholic say that the only time he would defend the Catholic Church was when it was slagged off by Protestants. I was a believer at the time so that didn't resonate so much with me then. But for me now, as I suspect for many atheists brought up in Catholicism, that is so true. And the word "popish" or "popery" is a particular trigger. Any time I hear that word used by Bible bashers my hackles rise. It's particularly obnoxious in conjunction with refusing to celebrate Christmas of course, the miserable Puritan bastards.

                                        Comment


                                          #70
                                          Originally posted by Evariste Euler Gauss View Post
                                          I remember maybe 35 years ago the first time I heard an atheist ex-Catholic say that the only time he would defend the Catholic Church was when it was slagged off by Protestants. I was a believer at the time so that didn't resonate so much with me then. But for me now, as I suspect for many atheists brought up in Catholicism, that is so true. And the word "popish" or "popery" is a particular trigger. Any time I hear that word used by Bible bashers my hackles rise. It's particularly obnoxious in conjunction with refusing to celebrate Christmas of course, the miserable Puritan bastards.
                                          how about potpourri?

                                          Comment


                                            #71
                                            Originally posted by Evariste Euler Gauss View Post
                                            I remember maybe 35 years ago the first time I heard an atheist ex-Catholic say that the only time he would defend the Catholic Church was when it was slagged off by Protestants. I was a believer at the time so that didn't resonate so much with me then. But for me now, as I suspect for many atheists brought up in Catholicism, that is so true. And the word "popish" or "popery" is a particular trigger. Any time I hear that word used by Bible bashers my hackles rise. It's particularly obnoxious in conjunction with refusing to celebrate Christmas of course, the miserable Puritan bastards.

                                            The Puritans' anti-Catholicism and its enduring influence on our culture is not widely known or understood, but their celebration of Thanksgiving in lieu of Christmas is a good example. I suppose we've collectively forgotten this part of our history because New England is now known for its preponderance of Irish- and Italian-American Catholics.

                                            In more recent history, anti-Catholicism was a more prominent part of right-wing evangelical culture until they decided to ally with right-wing Catholics on a few political issues, especially abortion and "school choice." But there are still a lot of backwards pseudo-Christians out there who genuinely think the anti-Christ is the pope, or will be the pope someday.

                                            I happen to believe that large, patriarchal, hierarchical organizations are about the worst way imaginable to do religion. But the puritans just wanted to replace one such system with another, so it wasn't an improvement.

                                            Comment


                                              #72
                                              Originally posted by Artificial Hipster View Post
                                              Looking at the time 150 years ago when the British 'discovered' them my own ancestors were mostly either fighting those Indians whose mutinous ways necessitated the establishment of a penal colony on the Islands on account of it being a better bet than starving to death back in Ireland; starving to death back in Ireland while dreaming of the move they'd shortly make to a Salford slum;
                                              Are you my cousin? I mean seriously. My father's Mother's uncles helped put the ire in empire after the indian mutiny with the Connaught Rangers, and I'm the first person in five generations not to divide my time between the west of Ireland and Manchester.

                                              The Thing about being a hunter Gatherer is that it's not all tropical island paradises. Mostly it's living in caves, or sleeping under trees. Generally being cold and wet, and usually not having enough to eat, and only knowing about 10 people. There's also a hell of a lot of walking. See they wouldn't be hunter gatherers in the indian ocean. They'd be hunter gatherers in the west of Ireland. Even if you were a pre famine cottier, with an acre of potatoes, the thing was that you only needed to do about 13 days of work a year to feed your substantial family, and keep a pig to pay your rent. The Issue that these people had wasn't that they were overworked. They were simply incredibly poor because they were massively underemployed. There's a huge amount of the time when farmers aren't doing anything. There were periods of time where northern european peasants essentially just hibernated for several months of the year.

                                              Comment


                                                #73
                                                Originally posted by Bizarre Löw Triangle View Post
                                                how about potpourri?
                                                It's a bit of a mixed bag, natch.

                                                Comment


                                                  #74
                                                  Originally posted by Evariste Euler Gauss View Post
                                                  I remember maybe 35 years ago the first time I heard an atheist ex-Catholic say that the only time he would defend the Catholic Church was when it was slagged off by Protestants. I was a believer at the time so that didn't resonate so much with me then. But for me now, as I suspect for many atheists brought up in Catholicism, that is so true. And the word i"popish" or "popery" is a particular trigger. Any time I hear that word used by Bible bashers my hackles rise. It's particularly obnoxious in conjunction with refusing to celebrate Christmas of course, the miserable Puritan bastards.
                                                  in fairness, "Popery," or "popish" aren't legitimate words of criticism. They're the language of 17th century sectarian bigotry, and the person using them is saying a lot when they use them. The Ex-catholic Atheist is merely responding to an expression of an ideology that doesn't care about the atheism distinction.

                                                  Comment


                                                    #75
                                                    Don't worry Gert. I'm from the legal profession and tend to write like it.

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