[lit-ideas] Re: Ah, philosophy


Not quite sure your point.  That we're no better than anybody else?  That does 
comport with reality.  Like now with the GS stuff.  When the SU fell apart we 
(the Chicago School, Milton Friedman, etc.) quite literally went in there and 
helped the oligarchs help themselves to the mineral and other riches through 
cowboy capitalism (Naomi Klein), until Putin came along and set up some speed 
bumps.  Now our oligarchs, mostly in the form of GS, are using gangster casino 
capitalism on the U.S.  I read the article in Rolling Stone last night, and it 
turns out we are all native peoples, indeed we are.  Grab what you can for 
yourself and devil take the hindmost, even to where you bankrupt the entire 
country, as long as you have your yacht.  I'm curious what Noam Chomsky would 
say about this.  What's to say, right?  Corruption on such a grand scale it 
almost lies outside of reality, the battle of the gods in which the overtaxed 
peasants are but
 collateral damage.  I can't even imagine how this is going to shake out.
 
Andy


--- On Thu, 7/23/09, Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Ah, philosophy
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thursday, July 23, 2009, 5:15 PM


>>They also seem to have been quite human in their personal lives


People still in Rousseau fantasyland might want to look at Steven Pinker's _The 
Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature_ [Viking Penguin 2002]. There's 
an interesting chart accompanying the text on pp. 56-57.  Drawn from the work 
of anthropologist Lawrence Keeley, it looks at "percentage of male deaths 
caused by warfare" in hunter-gatherer versus Western liberal democracies.

Top of the slaughter list are the noble Jivaro, with a kill ratio of almost 60 
percent. The author writes, "The nearly invisible bar at the bottom [of the 
chart] represents the United States and Europe in the twentieth century and 
includes statistics from two world wars."

"Moreover ... native peoples are dead serious when they carry out warfare, Many 
of them make weapons as damaging as their technology permits, exterminate their 
enemies when they can get away with it, and enhance the experience by torturing 
captives, cutting off trophies, and feasting on enemy flesh."
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