[davenotdead]

porn is the fast food of sexy.

and how many upscale-dining chefs eat fast food?

[pbradley]

"If only I could soothe my hunger by rubbing my belly."

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by notyourfiend

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6...ion-years.html


The seven stone, four-foot tall female roamed forests 4.4 million years ago – a million years before the previous oldest discovered fossil.
Her skeleton promises to fill in gaps about how we became human and evolved from apes. It has already reversed some common assumptions of evolution.

Rather than humans evolving from chimps, the new find provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved together from another common more ancient ancestor.

Each has evolved and changed separately along the way, it is believed.

Formally known as Ardipithecus ramidus — which means root of the ground ape — the find is detailed in 11 research papers published in the journal Science.

“This is not that common ancestor, but it’s the closest we have ever been able to come,” said Dr Tim White, an anthropologist and one of the researchers at the University of California.

The lines that evolved into modern humans and living apes probably shared an ancestor six million to seven million years ago, the research suggests.
Ardi has many traits that do not appear in modern-day African apes, leading to the conclusion that the apes evolved extensively since they shared that last common ancestor with humans.

A study of Ardi, under way since the first bones were discovered in 1994 in the Afar region of Ethiopia, indicates her species lived in the woodlands and could climb on all fours along tree branches.

But the development of arms and legs indicates she did not spend much time in the trees, the study claims.
Her pelvis suggests she walked upright and her teeth are closer to humans than primates. While she would have had a muzzle, it did not project out as much as modern apes.

Dr White described her as a “mosaic” that was neither human or chimpanzee.

“The only way we’re really going to know what this last common ancestor looked like is to go and find it,” he said. “Well, at 4.4 million years ago we found something pretty close to it.” Dr David Pilbeam, palaeoanthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, said: “This is one of the most important discoveries for the study of human evolution.

“It is relatively complete in that it preserves head, hands, feet, and some critical parts in between.”
Until the discovery of Ardi, the earliest well-known stage of human evolution was Australopithecus, the small-brained, fully bipedal “ape man” that lived between four million and one million years ago.

The most famous Australopithecus fossil is the 3.2-million-year-old “Lucy,” found in 1974 about 45 miles north of where Ardi would later be discovered.
Lucy was described as the “mother of man” and the missing link between humans and chimps. Before Ardi, she was thought to be the oldest fossil of a human ancestor that walked on two legs.

ahh.. Denknesh

 

, beautiful she is!


where was this fossil found outside of East Africa? Is it trying to discredit the idea that human life evolved and originated in Ethiopia and Kenya? That is bullshit if so.. its not just fossils in East Africa that suggest this, Ethiopia is home of the oldest continuously spoken language groups suggesting a proto-language to human speech originates there. Ethiopia is home to some of the oldest domesticated food crops and also the oldest domesticated animals. The combination of language and food production with human and pre-human fossils is strongly suggestive of Ethiopia being a craddle of civilization. the clincher, the DNA of mitochondrial Eve is East African (ie, we are ALL east african)

some humans may have evolved in Indus valley and Western Asia simultaneously but our DNA and archaeological evidence suggests that these like the Neandertal went extinct long ago, and so are not the true ancestors of Homosapiens.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by notyourfiend

oon the supply side, people living in third world conditions have been raped by capitalism. women are desperate to leave their situations and easily lured into being trafficked, families in dire poverty will sell daughters (because they can't support their children and they are worth less than men), poor men pimp out women to make enough money to live (after all, pimping is the only profession older than prostituion)

let me zoom in again":

Originally Posted by notyourfiend

oon the supply side, people living in third world conditions have been raped by capitalism

i like you, so i enjoy discussing shit with you, cuz that's the most fun thing to do among friends with coffee and cigarettes, so let me start here saying that to blame rape culture on capitalism is a case of historical myopia first and anthropocentrism second.

long before people were "rapedy by capitalism" they were raped by disease, famine, pestilence, volcanos, barbarians, beasts of prey, oceans and rivers and storms and falling rocks, and of course, neighbors and relatives.

selling and buying people is at least as old as the bronze age, which predates capitalism by some 3 or 4 milennia. now here is where people cry "blame the patriarchal sky gods for this shit", and i tend to agree, but the myth of the golden age of enlightened matriarchy remains a myth so far. we have no proof that people were "liberated" before the historical record. if anything, we ate our neanderthal "cousins".

then there is the danger of overstretching metaphors. as much as i love to use fuck metaphors for pretty much everything in life because they are essentially true, to equate rape with the ravages of nature (of which capitalism is a part, because culture is a part of nature) is a bit like saying "everything is everything". no i say, one can be life's fuckee and not turn into a fucker, and how that happens is a mystery to me, and i think that culture actually has a way to temper our natural beastliness rather than promote it-- some cultures temper it better than others of course, and american misogyny is no worse than say iranian misogyny.

the real "evil" lies not in culture but in our genome-- we are bred a vile, violent species which will take a lot of moral shortcuts to survive-- it's a fact of nature and evolution. call me hobbesian if you want but i do not subscribe to rousseau's delusional credo that we are all born good and society corrupts us. no-- we are all born mean greedy jealous little fuckers with strong hierarchical tendencies and a vast array of coping & survival mechanisms, and we've managed to build a nice-looking veneer for all that mess, which we call culture, and allows us not to murder each other at such a fast rate.

anyhuevos, if you doubt that female-ruled societies can be any less vicious than male-dominated capitalism, check out meerkat manor or read up on the latest bonobo research-- turns out the hippies of the ape family aren't so nice after all-- violence, mutilation, opression, etc. and don't get me started on matriarchal meerkats-- they are quite nasty.

and here's the kicker: non-capitalist dolphins rape too.

now don't get me wrong, i'm not saying "it's in our genes", i'm saying, let's give up on anthropological delusions and get to the meat of things-- we're nasty by nature.

Originally Posted by notyourfiend

...on the demand side, we are taught that we can and should be able to get what we want when we want it, including sexually. men want prostitutes/sex workers at a cheep price.

yeah, that's the last scene of "demonlover" right there.

[notyourfiend]

^ i have a lot to say in responce, however im rushing out to pick up a friend.

this is extremely abbreviated:

i never claimed that this shit only happens in day of global capitalism. once again, prostitution and pimping are the world's oldest professions. however, patriarchy and global capitalism facilitate the world wide phenomenon that we know today as human trafficking. trafficking is today's slavery. here is a lot of human evil but i really seriously do believe that trafficking goes beyond that. for example, in nigeria 1 in 4 people are somehow involved with the trade of trafficking - buying and selling people. i highly doubt that those numbers would be so high if it wasn't for extreme desperation.


you know what...i'm really not able to address everything that you wrote in this time frame. i keep getting text messages asking where i am. i'm just gonna get back to this tomm morning if that's alright with yah.

[notyourfiend]

to !@#$%!

combinded this w what i wrote yesterday:

we are using the term/metaphor (even though i would argue that it isn't even a metaphor) rape culture differently. i'm using it to denote a culture in which attitudes which promote rape/sexual violence are perpetuated/culturally acceptable. this mindset - the mindset that encourages men to get off when they want, especially in pornography and the like, the one in which people don't think of their sex workers as people w/o any regards to their background/experiences but as objects for their fetish - combined with global capitalism creates the climate for human trafficking.

i never advocated a matriarchy either. in fact, i believe that promoting one sex over the other falls into the traps in the oppressive gender binary which i would otherwise like the eradicate.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Nefeli

i was thinking that as a personal belief i m leaning towards what you say.
however, you say it yourself. "we managed to create culture".
us with the evil inside us and society/culture, who manages the evil, is again us. we created it, we felt the need to have it. we acknowledge evil. if we didnt, then evil would just exist. i dont mean that all our movites while creating culture were pure and nice, but there certaintly were motives to protect ourselves, our feelings etc.
im saying the obvious here, but its all us. there is constant fight between evil and good and which ever wins and makes us happy, depends on each one of us moral scale. since people are different (apart from the upbringing, and parents personalities and genes?, yes, its a mystery, how someone with evil in all those parametres, can be good, must be his/her nerves). we all carry inside us different numbers of sensitivity, empathy, what we think as right and wrong, sense of justice.

yes, you know, in the middle of writing what i wrote i caught my own contradiction, i.e., framing culture as a subset of human nature but also as outside of that human nature. but then as it was the interwebs and there was no real beer consumed i just posted it. whereas with real beer or coffee and cigarettes i would have corrected course.

anyway, there's a thing about culture and it's this-- that while it is a natural creation after all, it can be more easily modified than our genetic makeup. i do not believe in the tabula rasa, and old-school anthropologists are wrong, we cannot be programmed by culture to go against our nature, but i do believe that here we have the chance to modify the initial impulse, i.e., rather than, say, murder people outright, take a deep breath & draw violent comic books.

that is not to say of course that culture redeems us-- take the nazis, who were great art connoisseurs, and pillaged europe at the same time that they exterminated jews, gypsies, homosexuals, etc. at the physical end of every culture and civilization there are always weapons and yes, everything we are is in it.

i also did (on purpose) left out the part of us that we consider "good" (that definition changes also from culture to culture but that's another story). i did not mention them also because i think that's our nature as much as the nasty parts-- the instinct to care for others, to look beyond self-interest, to have empathy, etc.

both sides of the coin however i look at as survival mechanisms, not so much as morality. love, empathy, have to do with group cohesion and survival of the herd rather than the individual-- a product of natural selection just as violent impulses are. that doesn't make love, justice, empathy and generosity any less nice or beautiful or uplifting; i'm just saying, it's a part of the whole package, and more than that even-- we have these currents running through us some times in contradiction of each other.

but in any case-- i do have some hope in culture as a medium for us to choose, *to an extent only* how we modify what we are. however, i don't think we'll ever be these super-enlightened holy beings who do no harm.

of course, once we get to master genetic engineering, all bets are going to be off and i have no idea what we'll become.

[floatingslowly]

RAPED BY BARBARIANS - The Red Sonja Story

[Lurker]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i also did (on purpose) left out the part of us that we consider "good" (that definition changes also from culture to culture but that's another story). i did not mention them also because i think that's our nature as much as the nasty parts-- the instinct to care for others, to look beyond self-interest, to have empathy, etc.

both sides of the coin however i look at as survival mechanisms, not so much as morality. love, empathy, have to do with group cohesion and survival of the herd rather than the individual-- a product of natural selection just as violent impulses are. that doesn't make love, justice, empathy and generosity any less nice or beautiful or uplifting; i'm just saying, it's a part of the whole package, and more than that even-- we have these currents running through us some times in contradiction of each other.

Have you read Robert H. Frank's book 'Passions Within Reason'? He's an economist but brilliantly argues what you're saying here as well as other related things. It's brilliant book, I highly recommend it.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by notyourfiend

to !@#$%!

combinded this w what i wrote yesterday:

we are using the term/metaphor (even though i would argue that it isn't even a metaphor) rape culture differently. i'm using it to denote a culture in which attitudes which promote rape/sexual violence are perpetuated/culturally acceptable. this mindset - the mindset that encourages men to get off when they want, especially in pornography and the like, the one in which people don't think of their sex workers as people w/o any regards to their background/experiences but as objects for their fetish - combined with global capitalism creates the climate for human trafficking.

about the use of the term rape culture, i agree with the use of the term. it's a good one. there's definitely that-- saying "fuck you" is, actually, an innocent offshoot of american rape culture ("my dick is bigger than yours-- fuck you"--- see george carlin talking about religion for more).

about saying that capitalism rapes people, well, something is always raping us in one sense or another, so i guess, yah, but it overgeneralizes rape and it would allow us to say things like "europe was raped by the plague in the 14th century".

actually i think that capitalism created the climate where human trafficking can be a moral outrage-- we do value the individual after all more than, say, the romans did, and here we are saying "OMFG" rather than "i think i'm gonna go get me a slave in the market".

human trafficking is as old as moses. what's impressive is that it's nowadays ILLEGAL, rather than business as usual.

Originally Posted by notyourfiend

i never advocated a matriarchy either. in fact, i believe that promoting one sex over the other falls into the traps in the oppressive gender binary which i would otherwise like the eradicate.

oh no, i never meant to imply that you advocated matriarchy. it was a sort of preemptive answer, in the sense that if you look at it, men have been able to get off whenever they wanted to since we've had warfare-- raping and pillaging have always gone hand in hand with war. ghengis khan didn't need capitalism. but before the advent of war culture, some people have speculated, we had an enlightened matriarchy where everyone was nice and what not. i was just discounting that & saying i bet we've been violent and brutal (and nice and cuddly too) since we were lemurs.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Lurker

Have you read Robert H. Frank's book 'Passions Within Reason'? He's an economist but brilliantly argues what you're saying here as well as other related things. It's brilliant book, I highly recommend it.

thanks, i'll check it out

[notyourfiend]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i was just discounting that & saying i bet we've been violent and brutal since we were lemurs.

oh, i agree. and yes, human trafficking isn't new - it's existed for centuries during all economic climates. maybe i shouldn't have used the word raped in that context. what i was trying to say was that today's issues contribute to make trafficking a really horrific epidemic. patriarchy/racism/divides between the poor and the rich are in no way new, but globalization has added many complicated layers onto age old slavery.

about the illegality issue: the fact that prostitution remains illegal in most locations is often seen as one of the major contributors to sex trafficking. in all actuality, studies show that prostitutes are at the same risk of danger, even of being trafficking, regardless of the country's laws. for example, in amsterdam there are still a lot of underground prostitutes w/ pimps who charge less and will do things that legal prostitutes won't - such as fuck w/o a condom. that being said, it's still a necessity (in my opinion) that prostitution is legalized because it better allows prostitutes to go to officals/report those who are putting their lives in danger. since prostitution is illegal and first world countries tend to be incrediably xenophobic, those whom have been trafficked either wind up in prisons or being sent back to their homelands where they are shamed.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by notyourfiend

oh, i agree. and yes, human trafficking isn't new - it's existed for centuries during all economic climates. maybe i shouldn't have used the word raped in that context. what i was trying to say was that today's issues contribute to make trafficking a really horrific epidemic. patriarchy/racism/divides between the poor and the rich are in no way new, but globalization has added many complicated layers onto age old slavery.

about the illegality issue: the fact that prostitution remains illegal in most locations is often seen as one of the major contributors to sex trafficking. in all actuality, studies show that prostitutes are at the same risk of danger, even of being trafficking, regardless of the country's laws. for example, in amsterdam there are still a lot of underground prostitutes w/ pimps who charge less and will do things that legal prostitutes won't - such as fuck w/o a condom. that being said, it's still a necessity (in my opinion) that prostitution is legalized because it better allows prostitutes to go to officals/report those who are putting their lives in danger. since prostitution is illegal and first world countries tend to be incrediably xenophobic, those whom have been trafficked either wind up in prisons or being sent back to their homelands where they are shamed.

i love it when a good discussion helps me think.

so yeah, i'd say that global capitalism has created new markets for slavery and trafficking that didn't exist maybe 50 years ago, by connecting the powerful and the powerless in a scale not seen since tens of millions of slaves were shipped out of africa to the americas (not that slavery didn't exist there before-- of course it did-- and after). well, not in the same scale probably-- though i don't have figures.

but if we agree that human trafficking is not inherent to capitalism (not in its most vile forms anyway-- working at a pizzeria for minimum wage is bad but not as bad as being shipped in a container to work as a whore for the russian mob) -- sorry, i digressed-- if it's not inherent to capitalism, at least it is being facilitated by global trade networks-- well it always was facilitated by trade networks, or maybe it was often at the core of them, i.e. cause rather than consequence in cases like african slavery.

but anyway, while the subject gives me the fucking willies in a horrible way, i'm wondering if you could recommend a good primer to catch up on the subject of the current state of human trafficking--- since you'ver worked on it, any good pamphlets/publications/websites?

[notyourfiend]

im off to pay my landlord and then to dc, let's please continue with this convo up later tonight/tomm!

[notyourfiend]

ps - the american government's TIP (Trafficking in Persons) report is surprisingly a great place to start if you want to know what trafficking is/what the current state of it is world wide. it's funny how little the us government wants to do to combat the problem considering that they actually understand it relatively well...

http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2009/

[pbradley]

This thread is a rape culture to my sensibilities. I mostly blame !@#$%!.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by notyourfiend

im off to pay my landlord and then to dc, let's please continue with this convo up later tonight/tomm!

i'd like that, but it's friday night and generally i avoid the internets when getting shitfaced and getting laid long-form-style are in the works.

sunday there is a 30% hangover forecast so i could post post-breakfast depending on how lazy the day. but yeah.

and thanks for the links, will check out.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by pbradley

This thread is a rape culture to my sensibilities. I mostly blame !@#$%!.

you were asking for it

[Lurker]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

thanks, i'll check it out

Rereading your post I realise that you aren't saying exactly the same thing. He argues not that love, empathy etc help the whole group/social cohesion etc but rather actually help individuals. He also says that although these things have been evolved because they benefit the individual this doesn't mean that the individual is acting out self interest when being kind etc (that is similar to what you were saying).

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous

ahh.. Denknesh

 

, beautiful she is!


where was this fossil found outside of East Africa? Is it trying to discredit the idea that human life evolved and originated in Ethiopia and Kenya? That is bullshit if so.. its not just fossils in East Africa that suggest this, Ethiopia is home of the oldest continuously spoken language groups suggesting a proto-language to human speech originates there. Ethiopia is home to some of the oldest domesticated food crops and also the oldest domesticated animals. The combination of language and food production with human and pre-human fossils is strongly suggestive of Ethiopia being a craddle of civilization. the clincher, the DNA of mitochondrial Eve is East African (ie, we are ALL east african)

some humans may have evolved in Indus valley and Western Asia simultaneously but our DNA and archaeological evidence suggests that these like the Neandertal went extinct long ago, and so are not the true ancestors of Homosapiens.

maybe I should have read the article before I went on that Ethio-centric rant? The fossil was found in Afar depression, not far from where Dinknesh was found in 74, and it is only more evidence of an Ethiopian cradle of human evolution.

So now in Ethiopia you find the oldest proto-human as well as human fossils..

]"When the bones of two early humans were found in 1967 near Kibish, Ethiopia, they were thought to be 130,000 years old. A few years ago, researchers found 154,000- to 160,000-year-old human bones at Herto, Ethiopia. Now, a new study of the 1967 fossil site indicates the earliest known members of our species, Homo sapiens, roamed Africa about 195,000 years ago."