Indeed.
Having read that, I can now (retrospectively) pretty accurately describe my abandonment of Christianity, in so many words, as “the realization that I was worshipping Moloch and not Elua.”
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This is largely beside the topic – maybe I should start a thread things you don’t get – but I really don’t understand the whole agriculture was a mistake idea. So, most agriculturists have to spend all their time laboring, in conditions that leave them unhealthy and prone to disease, to secure food that’s still terribly inconstant. Whereas apparently the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is healthier, with both plentiful food and leisure. It just lost out because it doesn’t allow high population densities.
But then people with all that spare time and resources presumably didn’t refrain from breeding, so what kept population densities lower? The linked Diamond article offers at least one answer: that any babies had within four years of each other would have to be abandoned. I get that infanticide is also common in agricultural societies for a long time. But isn’t it weird to describe this as a time period of great human prosperity and add in, purely incidentally, that the reason everything was awesome is that most babies were killed?
I mean, I know I have thoroughly modern prejudices on the subject. But if you told me I had to work hard all my life, and in exchange more of my family’s children could not die, I’m not sure it would seem like such a horrible trade?
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A few paragraphs before infanticide in the Diamond article, there’s this:
Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts – with consequent drains on their health.
Infanticide wouldn’t explain fewer pregnancies, or less drain on a mother’s health from pregnancy. And, presumably such a society wouldn’t have a taboo against birth control; such methods would be less effective than the ones we have today, but I imagine they’d have abortifacients and contraceptives, as well as a basic understanding of “pulling out” if not a comprehension of the rhythm method.
Again, none of that would be as effective as what we have today, with a better understanding of how fertility works, but there must still have been some ability to do family planning beyond infanticide, even in ancient hunter-gatherer cultures.
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I mean, ok, I focused solely on the infanticide bit because that itself makes for a really awful utopia. But even if you accept that really clever use of birth control took much of its place, still, I’d expect that having a healthy population with such plentiful resources would mean population density should keep rising over the centuries unless other things limited it. What were those limitations, and how much do they factor into how great things really were?
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That’s a good question. It would also seem like wealthier people in more developed nations, better able to provide for children, likely to have better health care and live longer and therefore have more children, would do so. But we see the opposite currently. The wealthiest, most developed populations have the lowest childbirth rates, in some cases they are below replenishment rates. That’s not limited to any specific culture or region either.
Nor does it seem to be limited to humans. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-new-old-age/201906/what-opossums-can-teach-us-about-why-we-age is a case where opossums on an island, with fewer natural predators and longer lifespans, have notably smaller litters later in life.
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I used to take valsartan and I remember getting the recall notices. I also remember how understated they were. Then I switched to losartan and then more recall notices. Good to see the FDA is such an ineffective shit show. This article was interesting but really pissed me off.
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That sucks. I really hope you don’t suffer due to this.
I bet the biggest problem is the outsourcing of generic drugs to countries like China and Indian, where the factories are even less vigorously overseen than in Europe and the US. But unfortunately the FDA is hampered by law and is often toothless. Sometimes I think it’s only purpose is to make people think drugs are safe, rather than really making them safe, especially since user fees were implemented, where manufacturers pay a (million dollar?) fee for each submission. The fees make the FDA beholden to companies rather than the public (and squeeze out smaller competitors).
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Thanks. I’m already predisposed to certain kinds of cancer so the last thing I need is something else further boosting the odds for me.
It just shows that if nothing else, self regulation doesn’t work.
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Agreed.
I’m on a candasartan generic myself. So far no recalls, but they probably just haven’t checked yet.
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doubtless, one has heard some of this before. But not all of it.
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Gatherer-hunter societies tend to delay weaning, which reduces fertility. Farming societies tend to hasten weaning. I’m not sure why.
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More hands to work on the farm, would be my guess. Farming is labor intensive, meaning if you have a family farm, you need people to help out.
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also, from the new republic. Not as long, but as long as we’re here.
Here, a generation after Boeing’s initial lurch into financialization, was the entirely predictable outcome of the byzantine process by which investment capital becomes completely abstracted from basic protocols of production and oversight: a flight-correction system that was essentially jerry-built to crash a plane.
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Damn…
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While I haven’t read the article (yet) here are things about CTCA, I know…
- They will bring in every specialist they can. Make sure your insurance company approves all of them.
- If you are deemed terminal, they will try to transfer care back to your primary doctor so your death won’t be on their books.
- They will string along hope when they are trying to recruit you, but if your insurance is crap and/or your prognosis is bleak…Buh Bye.
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In Darkly , Leila Taylor offers a racially-minded revision of the Gothic canon, from Walpole to the present, with a particular focus on its American incarnations.
Who is Walpole? Wouldn’t it make more sense to begin with Wulfila, the Ring of Pietroasa, the Passion of St. Saba, Auxentius, the Skeireins, the Fragmenta Bononiensia, and so on?
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I assume he means this guy, who I’d never heard of either…
Looks like you can read some of his stuff here:
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