Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Reelya on July 20, 2020, 02:15:40 pm

Tribal government only arose after agriculture.

I'm guessing there's a very particular definition behind that cursive

Yes, because pre-agricultural societies everywhere, and they do exist, don't have anything that we could call a government. We call both hunter-gatherers and agricultural communities "tribes" in common parlance, throwing all "primitive" peoples into one pot and then we just assume we know the traits that apply. For example you assume that a "tribe" has a chief, a shaman, heir to the chiefdom, that kind of thing. But hunter-gatherer tribes don't have any of these things. Emphasizing the word government was because that's where you get those things, not from the general concept that the word "tribe" is used to cover.

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bloop_bleep is correct that for 95% of human history there was no hierarchy or government, because that predates the development of agriculture.

How would anyone even know to make this conclusion?

Quite basically, since we can observe remaining hunter-gatherer societies and they all have strong commonalities. When all your possessions are what you carry around with you, power structures don't make any sense. There's nothing to control, no way to really control people. If someone is an asshole or tries to "take power" then if you're only carrying what you own you just split off and wander somewhere else.

Tribal government only arose after agriculture.

bloop_bleep is correct that for 95% of human history there was no hierarchy or government, because that predates the development of agriculture.

But as soon as intensive farming comes into the mix things change completely. So the argument that "tribes" were still hierarchical is wrong because that fundamentally misunderstands where the schism is here. The Zulu or Hawaiian tribal structures for example were heavily based on agriculture, these were not the hunter-gatherer tribes that we're talking about by any means.

I did really want to like Merchant and ended up trying a few times (and deleting it each time), but in the end it felt like too much work for too little gain.

The sweet spot in that game is really the opening few hours and it goes downhill after that.

It's worth noting that in Jewish cosmology, stars /were/ angels. Lucifer referred to Venus, yes, but was actually also Satan.

Actually, that etmology literally only dates from the King James edition of the bible, in English. So as far as the name goes it's a pretty recent addition. Like a lot of things believed by Christians that has very little association with the actual bible.

Re: gardening tips: I don't think I'd heard of ergot fungus before, interesting. No idea if it grows in my climate but it might bear looking into.   
I feel like you're really oversimplifying the other option there, though...   

Ergot hallucinations have actually given us a fair chunk of history and folklore:

https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1037.htm

In 1976 Linnda Caporael offered the first evidence that the Salem witch trials followed an outbreak of rye ergot. Ergot is a fungus blight that forms hallucinogenic drugs in bread. Its victims can appear bewitched when they're actually stoned.

Ergot thrives in a cold winter followed by a wet spring. The victims of ergot might suffer paranoia and hallucinations, twitches and spasms, cardiovascular trouble, and stillborn children. Ergot also seriously weakens the immune system.

Now Mary Matossian tells a story about rye ergot that reaches far beyond Salem. She studies seven centuries of demographics, weather, literature, and crop records from Europe and America.

Down through history, Matossian argues, drops in population have followed diets heavy in rye bread and weather that favors ergot. During the huge depopulation in the early years of the Black Death, right after 1347, conditions were ideal for ergot.
...
Then, in the 1500s and 1600s, the symptoms of ergot were blamed on witches -- all over Europe, and finally in Massachusetts. Witch hunts hardly occurred where people didn't eat rye.

It's kind of sad to say that what was going on the 14th century kind of resembles 2020. You had a mass plague spreading, conspiracy theories about it, you also had the ridiculous cures and religious stuff too.

I'm not well-versed enough in US law to say whether they're doing it fully legally, found a legal loophole, or they just don't care (and most news sources can't seem to decide on this either yet), but I simply see this as fairly just and effective means of countering anonymous instigators within a crowd that's essentially helping them escape justice (i.e. doing the exact same thing they accuse police of doing).

It really is absolutely ridiculous to say that because some citizen broke the law, then the police are justified to also break the law to stop them. That logic just doesn't work.

Right now you have people in basically a military role randomly kidnapping people off the streets, illegally interrogating them without any due process, then dumping them again when they can't get anything on them, and it's easy to see from the accounts that they're either destroying records related to this, suppressing the information, or just not keeping any records about what's going on. So right now in the USA you have illegal detainment going on, but they're also keeping it out of the records, so they're testing the waters with random abductions without record keeping. If they get away with this, they'll go further in the future, that's how it works.
 
That's a very dangerous game to play. It's the type of things fascistic latin American governments routinely do, and the type of thing that easily leads to abuses. Like, if they accidentally kill one of these people they can and probably would just dump their body in a dumpster somewhere and agree to never mention it again.

Oh right, but this is justified I guess because sometimes protestors hide their identities, wear masks etc, so it's ok to be kidnapped by commandoes with balaclavas on in unmarked vehicles. Because, fundamentally ... that's the same thing the protestors are doing right? Sorry but that logic doesn't work.

I'm watching through the episodes of the Extra History series on Youtube, highly recommend it.

I got up to the episodes about Japan's warring states era, the Sengoku Jidai, and came across a common thing that comes up in these things, which really doesn't make any sense. One of the Oda clan generals, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, started as a peasant, then became a servant of the Oda clan, starting as a sandal bearer for Oda Nobunaga, quickly becoming promoted, eventually becoming one of the top generals of the era.

Now, the thing is, even some fairly serious discussions of his rise seem to overly focus on the sandal-bearer point, for example Extra History here says "he must have been really good at carrying shoes" to get promoted, and in this example and others, depict him as some goofy guy who's really good at shoe-carrying therefore somehow just lucked into becoming a general. This is plainly silly. Say someone started as a burger-flipper but worked their way up to be Vice President of McDonalds, if you said "wow, you must be really good at flipping burgers to have made it this far" that would be insulting and ridiculous.

The deeper point here is a common misconception: people don't understand how promotions work. We have this working conceptual model that do good at current job = promotion, so when we see someone like Toyotomi Hideyoshi rising from sandal bearer to general, we somehow assume that his ability to arrange shoes was at all relevant to the process. In fact, someone who's the perfect sandal bearer would probably have been low on mental ability but very committed to their role, and would never be promoted. Oda Nobunaga had close contact with all his servants and probably pointed to Toyotomi Hideyoshi and said "this guy: why are we wasting him as a sandal bearer, he's clearly better than that", regardless of how good he was at the current job, which wasn't even relevant.