angry chimps 3 of 3

ANGRY CHIMPS 3

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note: I experimented with the denim jeans as a disposable razor sharpener minions have mentioned ( YouTube for a quick look ).  All along the jeans gave less of a quality sharpening than the glass sheet I used to use ( click here for product link ) but it was close enough, and free.  After three and a half months, I simply couldn't use it anymore, it was so dull.  That was three times a week, so expect 36 uses out of a disposable razor sharpened this way.  Not bad for a frugal method.
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another note: this is an excellent, and short, article on just the economic issue of oil production issues this country faces click here, bitches
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How can war reduce population?  In a tribal conflict, that seems easy enough.  Village A is running out of soil productivity and starts eyeballing Village B, with the same population.  If the villages are evenly distributed in genders and age groups, and intense regular warfare sees a 25% casualty rate ( the historical norm in tribal warfare ) with the males, in theory you could go a long time before you ran out of sperm donors ( and in fact, males are prized over females in births, so you start out numerically advantageous in this regard anyway ).  But that is not how it works-it is an exponential effect from casualties.  Each battlefield death weakens the defense of the group immediately.  And it isn’t rare to kill children and most ( usually not all ) females.  This allows an unimpeded attack which multiples the psychological impact.  You attack when safer, when you have the advantage.  The point of this whole exercise is to gain resources, not to die off in glory.  You kill kids and wives, and then retreat.  Your enemy is rightfully pissed and probably soon retaliates.  Where you are waiting for him in ambush ( historically, warring tribes maintain a no-man’s land between themselves-so the ambushers can ply their trade in a spot safe for their own population ).

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As long as you maintain the military advantage and continue harassment attacks, the enemy is very quickly decimated.  There is no rear from whence to send reserves.  If an attack happens monthly and “only” three people are killed, how long before a group of sixty to a hundred is wiped out?  Every warrior down increases the vulnerability of the survivors ( another reason women are targeted-and I hold no illusions that the better looking ones weren’t spared when possible, there always being an imbalance in the genders as stated above-was that they could, in a last ditch defense effort, take up arms.  Children were killed simply due to their uselessness.  But men, when deciding to attack, always played it safe when possible.  They only attacked when the odds were in their favor, to preclude injury.  Killing women in ambush lessened the future odds of the attackers being injured.  How hard would it be for a women to smear human waste on a small child’s bow and arrowhead?  They might die in the process but so would the male.  Cruelty to women was pragmatic in this regard ).

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Most likely, long before a critical casualty rate is reached, the besieged village evacuates.   Then the real fun begins.  Odds are they won’t flee into an uninhabited area.  They will be on the defensive, attacked wherever they went, far less able to secure food while that happened.  Wounds and hunger and reduced defenses quickly wipe out the group.  Thus does an area rid itself of half the population, through war ( all this explanation is needed to counter the argument stated by some that “the record shows population actually increases after a war”.  That is true, in modern warfare with less than a 25% casualty rate, and less genocidal inclinations from the attacker.  It also applies to a modern Oil Age society with surplus energy stockpiles ).  Now, lets cover the agricultural revolution and how tribes became empires and what differences that made.

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Here is a short lesson in allowing your dogma to partially blind you.  I discovered Libertarianism quickly after joining the military ( the book “The Market For Liberty”, most likely purchased through Loompanics-thank you, Mike, you beautiful bastard for thirty years of, indeed, the best books ever ) and while I’m past the point in believing it practical I still wholeheartedly subscribe to the utopian notion anyway ( well, more accurately, anarchy rather than Libertarianism as I say piss on ALL government, even limited ).  And so I was well inclined to believe the evil centralized government agriculture allowed were at the root of most problems.  Alas, that can’t really be the case, now can it?  If humans are just better armed, better communicating and better fed Angry Chimps, the Agricultural Revolution didn’t really change much of anything, fundamentally.  Fewer men fought.  And most likely there might be fewer casualties from resource depletion.  I’ll admit that is a bit hard to quantify, as tribal gatherers can’t defeat agricultural groups in attack ( once you get to the size of the Mongol Horde, you aren’t exactly a tribe anymore but rather a nomadic centralized state ).  Once farming takes hold on an area, until soil or water collapse, no other form of livelihood is allowed.  So you went from one form of resource depletion to another.  Do multigenerational tribes losing half their members regularly lose more or less than an agricultural empire lasting centuries before everyone dies?

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Anyway, a change in social organization was prompted by our old friend Evolution.  The behavior that won the war was adopted by all in self defense.  Aggressive expansion of ever bigger states, with ever growing population and ever increasing resource depletion is still no different than tribal survival or conflict, other than in scale and in fuel ( more vegetable matter and less meat ).  And of course in how the individual is treated.  Tribal life is far more equal, but of course every male must risk their life regularly.  This sounds cool and romantic to us now, and it might be preferable to being a serf, but none of us really know.  We are encased in luxury and can only dream or imagine or guess.  War hasn’t changed, nor groups behavior to one another.  Just social organization.  Which, and this is kind of the whole point to these articles, might need to be changed again.  Most survivalists tend to view future conflict from what they know, agricultural empire infrastructure.  They think only evil groups will attack them.  They think they can farm in peace with a strong military.  Well, spanky, you might just find yourself in a perpetual forth generational conflict with no stationary target, no civilized rules of war and no state to back you up.  Have fun!

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