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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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I struggle to think of many other societies in which all three were simultaneously true.

Don' be so epoch-parochial!

E.g. during the Yamnaya expansions into Europe, rewards for ambition & competence were extremely high, price for failure was absolute and it was certainly possible to rise well above your station by conquering and putting to service enough peasants.

I haven't heard of those people before and looked them up, given that they existed around 3500 BC, what firm evidence is there that they lived the way you claim?

It's a niche subject, and I don't expect to be able to track down much on the topic itself. I did at least bother to ask GPT-4, but it had little to share on the matter.

I haven't heard of those people before and looked them up, given that they existed around 3500 BC, what firm evidence is there that they lived the way you claim?

The wikipedia article ?

This isn't any secret or obscure history, save maybe in India where the local idiots-in-charge like to pretend Brahmins and other higher castes aren't a small remnant of northern conquerors but were actually indigenous to the region. (The genetic data is always a good way of riling up Hindu nationalists on twitter)