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Baker "Ellison said Sam had once claimed that “he would be happy to flip a coin, if it came up tails and the world was destroyed—as long as, if it came up heads, the world would be, like, more than twice as good.”

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Wolf: How depressing that such smart guy could not even hint at what regional policy could look like. [This is not snark.]

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Zoomer: Yes, the trick is to keep the outgroup as far down the Great Chain of Being as possible. :)

Key word "realizing."

Perhaps naively, but I still believe that most of our problems are mistaken models of the world (a large part of which would be fixed by internalizing Econ 101) rather than evil utility functions.

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Patriarchy follows the plow? That doesn't fit with all those patriarchal societies that existed before the plow was invented and that persist today without the plow. Rice cultures that rely on flooding to suppress weeds are just as patriarchal as wheat based societies that rely on the plow. The natives of the Pacific Northwest were extremely patriarchal, but they weren't agricultural.

The feminist explanation I heard back in the 1970s was simply "androgens". Men are bigger and can get a lot stronger than women. When push comes to shove, they can shove harder.

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author

More like “superpatriarchy follows the plow and the chariot”, I think

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That sounds more like it.

The PNW tribes were pretty solidly patriarchal. I'm not sure if they "modernized" it, but the AMNH in NYC used to have a small shed for recalcitrant teenage girls. They were also an aristocratic society with solid privileges and well enforced IP rights. A friend of ours was a descendant of King Joseph's summer wife. (She was never referred to as a queen or any other title which is kind of telling.)

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