my laptop died on the 5th. i resurrected it! but the push out of schedule has got me focusing on cleaning up my discography as a sole priority. i'm almost at the point where i've caught up to unfinished work that i always intended to complete. a few more days. when i get there, i will pause and spend possibly as much as a week cleaning up this page, as well as a few days dedicated to my proper web page.
i knew that if i started focusing on genealogical links then i'd lose focus. years ago, that meant falling into obsession. nowadays, considering that i have a stronger grasp of the genetics of the situation (we're all relatively closely related) and a better understanding of the social science of sexual promiscuity [some studies estimate that as much as a third of people are born into families that include males that are not aware they are not the biological father *and* women that are aware of this - this kind of "trickery" is a normal and natural aspect of human sexual behaviour that attempts to combine female intuitions about genetic superiority (dna daddy) and financial security (non-biological daddy, but in every functional sense actual daddy). while this recognition doesn't really have an effect on my underlying arguments regarding class, it does make the research meaningless. even if you get through the childish myths and legends of aristocratic control, there's no way to actually know who daddy ever actually was in any specific situation. in many cases, centuries-old gossip about the queen sneaking out late at night to meet her chosen genetic suitor has been preserved, and is probably true on a very real level. "he doesn't look much like his father" actually usually *does* have an obvious explanation!], it means losing interest. i wanted to ensure i was doing a certain amount of "formal reading" a day. i want to get back to it.
so, i'll be back!
....but it's quiet for a few more days on this front...
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/simpsons-co-creator-rescues-bears/19645/
some species of birds do this. we're not unique in it.
some people will counter that women were under strict control until relatively recently. well, i may question whether the examples provided are general or extreme cases. i may question how large a period that really applies to (does it apply to the "anarchy" of the early middle ages and periods before it?). but, excluding these academic questions, patriarchy is a system of control and comes out of reasons to control. that is, it gets the causality backwards - men exerted control over women's reproduction because it was the only way to ensure their dna would carry on, for the precise reason that women were constantly faced with this biological contradiction between ensuring that their own offspring had the best father and being coerced into this breeding system defined by land and wealth. women had to be forced into it to overpower their biological urges.
now, liberal-minded people of both sexes would, today, universally accept that treating women like child-bearing chattel vessels is morally wrong. there's no real debate there. but, how much of that follows from the social systems that have developed since the modification (i don't want to say collapse, because i reject that) of feudalism is a serious question. the old feudal logic no longer applies. yet, recognizing it's inherent injustice is not the same thing as understanding it or why it became a dominant system of controlled reproduction. as morally reprehensible as patriarchy is, it made sense relative to certain axioms - and as a reaction to natural, biological behaviour.
the flip side of this is that, throughout the history of patriarchy, we find examples of "enlightened land owners" that didn't really feel the need to enforce it. one could suggest it was only necessary to enforce it under the conditions that the male dna was coming from a less than ideal source. see, and now i'm starting to build a biological theory of patriarchy and class dominance, which was sort of what i was getting at in the first place, albeit very modified from my initial beginnings.
the point being that the argument isn't debunked by patriarchy. rather, it works as a mechanism to explain it along biological terms.
so, what i've shifted that aspect of the site to is away from mapping the lines out and towards examining their validity, even as i constructively build up these historical classes from their obscure roots in the collapse of roman control of northwestern europe.
marx & engels could not have fully understood the implications of modern evolutionary biology on their ideas. they're just too close together to each other. they were certainly aware of darwin's ideas, and engels particularly actually spent a lot of time with certain aspects of them, but they just hadn't developed enough at the time. while i may not agree with the social darwinists (a disagreement i share with scientific darwinists), the extreme political movements that followed social darwinism or their watered down equivalents in neo-liberalism, i have to at least give the right credit for actually adjusting to darwin. the left has not done that. well, kropotkin tried, but, he, too, was too close to the source. leftist theory has to be rewritten to take these ideas into account.
to carry on from my earlier point, the person closest to actually doing this (that i'm aware of) is actually that old liberal-in-a-hurry richard dawkins.
unfortunately, the left has tended to lean more towards freud than darwin. that's not going to get anybody closer to utopia, it's just going to trick workers into accepting conditions of dystopia.
this is what modern scientific socialism is actually about: