coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
A while back I had the idea of making a big post here about all of the political forums. I was just going to find all the active ones, discuss their strengths/weaknesses, and note what topics they talk about and whether they bring any new information to the table. I quickly ran into one problem: there are thousands of active political forums across thousands of websites. Did you know, for instance, that the “DC Urban Moms” forum has a political section with 2,035,933 messages?
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Why not join a religious community? If what you want is high trust, you’re not going to find more trust than that.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
IMO the leading factor was an enhanced sphere of sympathy (among Whites) due to media trends: television, books, newspapers, music. Maybe this is begging the question, because why did this media begin to show sympathy stories for non-Whites? That I believe was caused by people with a certain philosophical bent who felt that it was their moral duty to increase sympathy for non-Whites, due to universalism or socialism or a belief that race does not affect personality.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
To add to this, the difference is especially clear in the Minecraft “engineering” community. Minecraft is an incredibly popular game and 32% of its playerbase is female. While there are many women who play the game for decorative and beautifying projects, and whose content online is extremely popular, almost none of the great discoveries/innovations done with the redstone game mechanics are the result of female players. These creations are complex and can just be seen as engineering, like figuring out how to make Minecraft within Minecraft or creating an orbital cannon.
The only possible reason we see such a disparity is that men are vastly more likely to be interested in engineering discovery/invention in its own right, and are solely willing to spend all the hundreds of hours doing it. This is a strong reason why you may not want to incentivize women into important creative roles in engineering or academia. Women perform as well as men in occupational settings by and large, but if they lack the weird drive to dump hundreds of self-motivated hours into invention, the result will be a net loss for society where we won’t ever know the inventions we’ve missed out on. Anyone whose career involves creativity and discovery and invention needs to spend many self-motivated hours enjoying the process.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
There’s a recent pilot study that incorporated some of Sarno’s ideas, but only n=11 for the intervention: https://journals.lww.com/painrpts/Fulltext/2021/09000/Psychophysiologic_symptom_relief_therapy_for.13.aspx
At 26 weeks, 63.6% of the PSRT arm reported being pain free (0/10 pain) compared with 25.0% and 16.7% in MBSR and usual care arms, respectively
Lead author is Professor at Harvard Medical School and an emergency medicine physician, so neither a crackpot nor someone biased toward psychogenic causation. Re: point 4: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23982421/
The combined MRI findings were not related to the degree of disability or the intensity of LBP. These degenerative MRI findings cannot explain variation in pre-treatment disability and pain in patients with chronic LBP accepted for disc prosthesis surgery.
I find this John Stossell 20-20 report interesting, especially at 9:40, where John discusses back pain with his brother Tom. Both John and Tom Stossell suffered back pain together. John was cured by Sarno, but his brother Tom (a scientist) refuses to even consider the notion. We should be more like John and not Tom in openness to heterodox treatment possibilities. Especially in cases where the institutional bias is strongly against non-physical treatment (less money to be made, back pain physicians out of work and embarrassed, lost respect of medical establishment).
Humans have a long history of non-physical pain etiology, like for instance those caused by hysteria and demons. Consider the Psalms: For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,” and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. In this verse, the physical pain caused by sin (which entails social stress, obligation, and personal failure) is ameliorated by voicing one’s faults and pursuing a stress reduction strategy in the form of religion.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Something interesting is that Sarno’s treatment is not merely “let out anger/stress”. It is specifically to delegitimize a “physical origin” of the pain, and to believe that the body is pretending to be in pain in order to prevent you from thinking about psychological/emotional concerns which are in turn solved chiefly by the emotion of anger. Some quotes from when I read his book years ago:
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“ In other words, I suggest to patients that when they find themselves being aware of the pain, they must consciously and forcefully shift their attention to something psychological, like something they are worried about, a chronic family or financial problem, a recurrent source of irritation, anything in the psychological realm, for that sends a message to the brain that they’re no longer deceived by the pain. When that message reaches the depths of the mind, the subconscious, the pain ceases.”
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“Another useful strategy sounds silly at first but has great merit. Patients are encouraged to talk to their brains. So many patients reported having done this on their own with good results that I now routinely suggest it, despite lingering feelings of foolishness. What one is doing is consciously taking charge instead of feeling the helpless, intimidated victim, which is so common in people with this syndrome. The person is asserting himself, telling the brain that he is not going to put up with this state of affairs—and it works. Patients report that they can actually abort an episode of pain by doing this. The woman whose case was described here did just that and experienced an immediate cessation of pain. It’s a very useful strategy”
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We must say to ourselves, “It’s all right to be the way we are: illogical, unconsciously enraged, like a child having a temper tantrum. That’s part of being human and it is universal.”
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I have enunciated three principles of treatment: repudiate the physical, acknowledge and accept the psychological.”
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I tell my patients that they must consciously think about repressed rage and the reasons for it whenever they are aware of the pain. This is in contradiction to what the brain is trying to do. This effort is a counterattack, an attempt to undo the brain’s strategy. It is essential to focus on unpleasant, threatening thoughts and feelings to deny the pain its purpose—to divert your attention from those feelings.
I’m interested in why it works. I think it has to be one or a combination of these: (1) the pain is due to a social stress which the human mind may instinctively process as physical, and assertive anger directed toward this pain fixes it because anger is a high status dominant emotion; (2) an ultra-negative association is being made involving the pain, making one’s mind flee from pain signaling, so perhaps the pain victim inadvertently reinforced pain sensitivity by associating it with the relief of some even more painful and intense stressor; (3) it is simply a matter of sensitizing the person to something other than their physical pain but which uses roughly the same pathway such as general life stressors.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
That’s pretty interesting. However, I don’t think it proves that fascism at one point was disproportionately Jewish, as a majority of the leading intellectuals and writers of fascism were not Jewish in Italy. Unless you mean, “Jews were more likely to be interested in the fascist movement”, but if the topic is “leading figures/influencers”, I don’t think that is evidenced. Fascism as a movement was, going by writers and major thought leaders, almost exclusively non-Jewish.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
What is the evidence that Jews were over-represented in the development of fascism?
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Is it the case that literary fiction is mostly pseudo-memoirs and filled with pity and sympathy stories? I checked once and this is what I found, but if someone familiar with the genre can inform me that would be cool. The issue could be that that we call this writing “literary”, when it’s really just emotional novels/novellas, ie what women have been consuming for one hundred years — gossip and wives’ tales that calls itself literature. Surely the weighty mark of “literature” has nothing to do with what the writer intends or what some capitalistic publishers desire, but how culture at large sees the work in the future.
I just… why would I ever want to consume the writing of someone who has merely been trained to write, who has spent their formative years regurgitating what their trait-conformist teachers have told them should be written, from textbook straight to to text? That’s incredibly boring and I will gain nothing. Imagine if Harper Lee and Hemingway grew up in suburbia and spent all their time gunning it at school to make it into the best graduate programs for writing. They would write nothing of value. Their writing comes from their experiences that began in formative years, their culture and inner culture. Graduate students in English are writing “literature” for reviewers and magazine writers who are also graduate students in English, none of which gunned it at developing a personality or any unique insight into living.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
What is the most gene determinant that evolutionary psychologists have went with human behavior?
When thinking about my dog and dogs before her, I’m just struck by how affixed their behaviors are by genes. Not just aggression and desire to socialize, but their needs for physical activity, the particular ways they like to exercise, what they like to do outside.
Then I think about myself. Could human genes be so determinant? Do humans have an essentially fixed type or category of activity that they must do to be happy, which is informed by their ancestral background? And I just wonder how specific these could be. Should farmer ancestors spend more time around dirt and animals? Do those who have musical genes need to be musical to be fully happy? Etc. How specific are these gene-determined affinities?
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
IMO female education gets more blame because, historically, women performed all child-raising activity in early years while also performing all homemaking activity. Men could pursue law, pursue a degree, pursue whatever and their only labor obligation toward their wife would be inseminating her. There is a reason for this delineation of labor. A pregnant woman should not be stressed (as happens in white collar professions), a child forms a bond with the mother in early years (we see this in apes), a child should be breastfed directly for a multitude of benefits, and women are better at handling multitasking. Failing to perform motherhood correctly, which should really be conceived as an art and not just a task, results in many extreme invisible costs like increased diabetes, autism, and BPD. There’s a tyranny of the visible here: calculating the cost of feminist-career practices is opaque (like calculating the cost of crime), but calculating the benefits is easy: one more worker drone. So for the sum total efficient good of society, it’s beneficial to not have women pursue intensive high-stress professional careers.
I would still press (as the far righter in question) that in a society where the rich are holding an immense amount of wealth, anything that reduces wage negotiation among the lower and middle class is net bad for median income. So NYC is replacing domestic nurses with foreign nurses to cut costs, while domestic nurses are striking for better conditions and wages. Hyper-inflated competition in an income unequal nation is surely a recipe for a terrible quality of life among median citizens. Instead of NYC hospitals taking a look at themselves (perhaps they need to make gov spending more efficient to pay nurses more; perhaps cut investor compensation at private hospitals), they will just reduce nurse QoL. Which reduces nurse-adjacent professional QoL: now anyone who had the ability to change position and become a nurse no longer sees that as an option, so they further have reduced wage negotiation.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
How else do you think the Lord’s Prayer can be translated in English?
Our Father, who art in Heaven
The original English has “which art”; this is an archaic 2nd person singular informal, I think. I think this can also be translated as simply “Father in Heaven”, “Father, the one in Heaven”, or “Father, You in Heaven”. I think “which/who art” is objectively bad, because it reads formal and alien to us, whereas prayer is decidedly non-formal. Prayer is intimate, as a child to a Father (that’s the first thing in the prayer!) so the language should be casual. Not so casual that it eschews the meaning. It’s important also, that we don’t privilege the brevity of the Prayer over the meaning. The prayer is already very short; you can add more words to clarify the meaning. English simply cannot, any way you slice it, convey the full meaning of the strange Greek constructions in the prayer. Attempting to do so is emphasizing brevity over the message, turning brevity into its own God, which is not justified.
I think I prefer something along the lines of: “Father to us, You in the Kingdom of Heaven”. “To us”, because because the beginning of the Greek emphasizes Father and then adds “of us”, but I think to us may be more meaningfully precise. Because importantly, the Father is not a Father in technicality (we state He is a Father) but in relation (He try is a Father to us in action/relation/will). So it is arguably more important to make clear the relation, which is “to us”. I will justify the inclusion of a new word shortly. “You in…” should be added because the following three lines are in — get this — Aorist 3rd person imperative passive.
Hallowed be thy Name
Immediately it gets confusing. This is an imperative, like “open the door”, but the Greek has a special 3rd person imperative used in cases where the requested party is not close. Imperatives are used in prayer. This a command, a request to God. It is not “allow your name to be hallowed”, or “your name is hallowed”; we as we pray are requesting that the name be made hallowed. Hallow is a verb here: Aorist Imperative Passive - 3rd Person Singular. Obviously we don’t jace this in English.
I will boldly say, that this should be “hallow thy name”. Yes, we are asking God to hallow His own name — we are asking in this sense for God to reveal how sacred His name is, to remind us; so sanctified and special is His name that only He can truly hallow it. This has Biblical basis: “I am who I am” and other passages in the OT where God effectively hallows His name for Man. Chryosotom and Augustine also interpret this as a request made to God.
I would say that, “make sacred your Name” is best if I were to grab a random person off the street and wanted them to pray only once.
Lastly, this is in an aorist tense which is kind of intentionally vague tense, but does indicate that the action has a definitive completion rather than is an ongoing action. The early Christian writers most commonly interpreted the request as being completed in prayer, not in the end times (eschatologically). For reasons I will justify later, I would say “make sacred your Name here” is probably best.
Thy Kingdom Come
Constructed the same as the above. “Have your Kingdom arrive” is good; “Have your Kingdom received” is okay. “Bring your Kingdom Here”. But note that Kingdom doesn’t refer to a bordered political state per se. It refers mostly to reign, to dominion. By specifying “Father in Heaven’s Kingdom”, above, we can now use another word for this line. Something like, “come with Kingly reign”. If you can find a way to make this palatable, it would be more like this than “thy kingdom come”.
thy will be done
Really I question whether “will”, which is hardly used in English in this sense, is best here. God’s wishes and desires are His will. Perhaps better is something like “enact your will”, or “do what you desire and will”. This last one is good.
on earth as it is in heaven
Interestingly, the early writers see this as modified all of the requests above. Eg, “hallow your name on earth, as it is in your heavenly kingdom”. Note that Earth is not globe. Earth is more like ground. There is ground, here, and Heaven, which is metaphorically conceived as a Sky Kingdom.
Give us this day our daily bread
Fine, except “daily bread” is more like “super-substantial”, it signifies a bread that nourishes spirit rather than body
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those…
Debts or sins is probably better. Perhaps, “just as we forgive those” is better.
Lead us not into temptation
Temptation should be “trial”, referring not just to temptations but the kind of trial Jesus went through.
“Deliver us from evil”
I would prefer “safekeep us from evil”.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
But this is incorrect. Without immigration, native wages and bargaining power would increase, meaning birth rates would increase. Without immigration, the government would need to incentivize births, or consider the real (feminism-related) issues. As is, immigration is the exact thing that the government is using to prevent any real discussion (let alone policy) on birth rates.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
GRT doesn’t claim that immigrants are at fault, though. GRT claims that domestic leadership is at fault. The leadership is at fault by (1) ignoring the realities of race and culture or the projected statistics on fertility rates, (2) beholden to an anti-white “conspiracy”, which (2a) is influenced by anti-white academics sometimes or (2b) is influenced by Jewish groups that benefit as they retain strong in-group biases while everyone else de-homogenizes.
One argument against (2b) in Europe is that the Muslim migrants generally do not like Israel and are already exerting influence to reduce their country’s alignment with Israel.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
No single item of fashion has a worse connotation. There are two ways you can salvage the outfit. If it’s straw or linen, you can get ripped, and wear a linen shirt with sleeves rolled up and some classic jeans. Odds are no one would recognize it as a fedora. Otherwise, the only way to salvage the outfit is to double down and ironymax. Don the overcoat, but have a pikachu shirt underneath. Wear crappy glasses, old Nike shoes, white socks up to your ankles, cargo shorts, maybe a tomigatchi hanging from your belt loop. Own the look and you can make it work.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
The only evidence we have so far is that the police investigated and released him. So the media’s reportage is premature (but, obviously, the norm for the past decade when an election approaches).
At the moment I’m more concerned about the mass assault on innocents in Chicago, for which we have video and eye witness accounts. This occurred in the same time period as the OP shooting story, but is given a decidedly non-racial angle in the news. But per one Chicago redditor:
I was caught in the midst of this. I'm visiting Chicago as I will be attending medical school here this year. A large group of people were collectively chanting "fuck you and your white woman" at my partner and I as we walked by millennium park. We were taunted and cornered on the L for no reason. I cried my eyes out. I was so excited about training here and serving this community, but now I'm so sad.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Purgatory is not endless fire that can be compared to this world, though; it’s a cleansing fire that “burns off” any horrible habits that have yet to be penance’d. While this is a punishment, it’s not maximal punishment like in Hell. A good example: once as a child while doing a sport I destroyed a nail on my hand, which was halfway off the finger. The pain was unbearable. I went to a doctor who promptly burned it off. The burning off of this wound was not worse than the original pain, neither was it worse than the relief of the solution. If you can understand how a painful procedure fixes a health problem, you can understand how a purgatory can fix a spiritual problem.
The problem with trying to riddle with God is that, by definition, He is greater than anything we can conceive. But riddling again also defeats the purpose of religion. We don’t abstain from walking on bridges because of the high-level problems involving Newtonian physics and the movements of atoms. You don’t flesh out the entirety of philosophy and theology before you assent to a religion, otherwise no one would ever be saved — you can’t read every book a theologian has written.
One the ways that theologians solved this trivial punishment is through a “Satan’s debt” atonement theory. Jesus tricks Satan into taking our place on the Cross; we “owed” Satan a debt due to our sins. Surely you can understand how someone like Jesus can trick Satan, and this requires no further explanation. Another theory is that the Father demands that bad actions are punished, but out of Love the Father allowed the Son to take our punishment, and so by witnessing this happen and witnessing the terrors of sin’s punishments we are saved. There are other atonement theories, and I’m sure you can find one that is persuasion to your own frame of mind. I would just allege that the crucifixion is not correct or incorrect based on an atonement theory; it is correct if it is believed in an emotional reality, because this is the way that it changes a person’s heart (the original Greek meaning of repentance btw).
God’s relation to Satan is, again, argued by theologians. What’s more important to understand is that (1) God, much like science, doesn’t care for you understanding every nuance of His ways, and neither could you understand every nuance in a lifetime; (2) God is beyond our comprehension, hence why the door to eternal life is accessed through faith and not the accumulation of human knowledge.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
If you could recommend one chapter of one translation of one classic (the Odyssey or any other) that conveys the spirit of the original text, what would you choose?
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Oh this is very cool. I’m confused why there’s not a massive server already running this? The demand would be nuts because 2b2t has a queue time of up to 10 hours. If it had no queue time would surely have a concurrent player base of 1000+ at times. This has a compound effect where the more concurrent players, the more popular it becomes, due to how content is proliferated on YouTube.
What I was considering, just as a fun daydream, is the implementation of good game mechanics to mitigate individual server load bearing. Special “rugged” terrain to deter building in the between zones of servers (super hot desert, super cold mountain, dangerous waters and so on); a “you’re feeling tired, stop and rest” feature while the game loads in the content for a new server, as a replacement to the normal hunger meter; an enormous spawn radius; a “main city” where things can’t be built and activities are limited.
I don’t know much about how MC servers work, but I also wonder if you can have players download on the client-side the blocks of the map within 4000 blocks from their location upon spawning, but only the blocks that the server reasonably predicts are unlikely to be modified/deleted (blocks under water, etc). You can have a player spend a minute downloading this information before each spawn; maybe this is 5min downloading the first time, but because little usually changes day by day it’s only 10 seconds next time. Wouldn’t this significantly cut down on server load because the server then only has to serve the newly modified/deleted blocks and can ignore everything they the player(s) is processing on his own computer?
I’m just really surprised we don’t already have some amazing 3000 concurrent Minecraft survival server.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
IMO this fundamentally misunderstands the nature of religion as practiced by real believers. It is not a gotcha logic game, but a spiritual drama that you understand emotionally. Sin demands extreme punishment, and Jesus willingly took our punishment out of an interested love in us individually. This frees us from the extreme punishment of our sins. This can be immediately grasped by everyone: something demanded a bad experience, a great individual out of love for us bore the bad experience to save us from it eternally. This induces feelings of guilt, love, wonder, and so forth.
Theology is just a way to flesh out this emotional dimension to satisfy our thoughts, but the theology is certainly not the point. Theology is the janitorial work to ensure that the point of the religion is clean from worries, hence why understanding theology is not necessary for salvation (withstanding a few simple paragraphs of assent in a creed). And so you have a concept like purgatory: if you die in faith, but never did penance for sins (usually easy stuff btw), there is a purifying punishment for these sins. This punishment is not greater than Jesus’ punishment, which is magnified for a number of reasons that would take a while to explain (his innocence, his being God, his emotional turmoil). Were the punishments equal, Jesus’ sacrifice would still be meaningful in that it grants Christians eternal life and access to God.
As for “why didn’t God kill Satan”, that’s like asking why we are not all already in Heaven. You can ask endless questions that have no quick answer whether you are a theist or an atheist, but theists can at least rest assured that the extra questions are irrelevant to one’s perfect happiness and destiny. I would mention that in the lore, Jesus descends into Hades and kills death itself, which is very cool and underrated.
As for “how could Jesus take our punishment”, this really isn’t problematic: because He was also God, or alternatively because our sins accrue a debt, but really, you just assent that He can to buy into the heart of the religion.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
How difficult would it be to distribute the regions of one large online Minecraft world across different servers, to allow for a player count in the 1000s? I watched some videos on the infamous 2b2t server, and am surprised no one has created a maximal case survival server.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
My point was that a commemorative partnership is a form of support. This is clearly evident in the maximal case: a commemorative partnership with the Russian army. The criticism would be, “how dare you commemorate an evil invasion force”, and no one would say “they are just trying to broaden their market” or “who cares?”. But I can flesh this out better. If Bud Light were to commemorate the relatively obscure Jared Taylor there would still be lots of condemnation, despite his obscurity. Even something just mildly bad, like commemorating a prominent flat earther, would get condemnation.
So the argument that it’s fine that Bud Light is commemorating a transgender is really an argument that transgenderism is acceptable and it’s fine that it’s promoted. As soon you start to see it as even slightly bad, then it becomes permissible if not obligatory to criticize a commemorative partnership
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
That’s fair to a degree, but do we even know if these societies selected for these traits? If you obtained resources by being a vicious war lord, or an excellent trader, or simply the child of a war lord, this does not indicate that you have more domesticated traits as usually conceived. While polygamy allows for certain men to have a lot of wives, this could bring about the opposite problem in that you might be picking the wrong men. A society in which only the rich and the warlords have the most children may not actually be what you want to create a safe, prosperous, civilized society. While you want some who are laser-focused on resource acquisition, and some who are focused on power, you want the majority to be a little bit more well-rounded snd peaceful.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
But surely the ancestors of Muhammad were not especially domesticated or obedient if they had bloody infighting in the century that followed Muhammad’s death. This is the problem of privileging a bloodline with polygamy versus a character trait (Christ-like).
This is largely the result of women, no?
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