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The Baliocene Apocrypha

Because not all content deserves to be on a real blog.

POSTS FOLLOWING ACQUIRE DEMON-KNOWLEDGE ABOUT ME ARCHIVE

So if my historical sources are telling me the truth

and Im synthesizing the history properly

then, in fact, the entire edifice of Western civilization all the

cultural, social, and philosophical structures that define the world in
which we live today can be traced back to a stupid loophole in
Roman inheritance law.

NOTE: Everything here is taken either from Francis Fukuyamas

The Origins of Political Order or from a Livejournal post by the
Infamous Brad that I am currently unable to find. I get credit for
absolutely nothing, except noticing the connection between
Section II and Section III.

I.

What do I mean by the entire edifice of Western civilization?

Here, I mean the vague-but-enormous memeplex that can be

summed up in the word individualism. The thing where each
person is understood to be a social unit unto himself, with his own
destiny and with rights to his own person, capable of charting an
independent path through life. The thing where you pick your own
job and your own mate and your own friends and your own hobbies
and your own ideals. The thing where freedom is even a
meaningful concept because we conceive of humans as being
potentially free of each other.
Obviously, this whole individualism thing has both a lot of sources

and a lot of ramifications. But an absolutely central part of it,
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something without which it cannot survive or cohere, is economic

individualism: the idea that an individual person can own property in
his own right, with full and complete title to it, including the right to
alienate (sell) it as he pleases. Without that, well, people cant really
act as free individual agents unless theyre prepared to give up all
their resources, because all their resources are at least partly
controlled by someone else.

[Within any kind of historical economy, anyway. Lets leave

complicated ideas about the post-scarcity future for another
discussion.]

The main alternative to individualism is the tribe. Within a tribal

system, an individual basically isnt a meaningful social unit, he is a
component of his kinship group. The tribe owns all the property, and
you cant sell it off, because everyone in the tribe (including all those
yet to be born) have a claim on it. You have duties to the tribe, and
those duties define your life, even if maybe you personally would
rather do something else. You are bound to work, and marry, in a
way that advances the tribes interests. If you have wealth or power,
it is incumbent on you to use it in a way that advances the tribes
interests. You get the idea.

This tribe thing is the default social setup for humans. It dominated
most of the great premodern civilizations. In India, pretty much all of
society was built around kinship groups (jatis). In the Arab world,
tribal ties were always paramount so much so that basically every
successful Arab empire had to use slaves to run the government and
the military, just on the grounds that foreigners without families
wouldnt funnel all the empires resources to their tribes. The
situation in China was a little different, since the kinship groups got
kicked in the teeth early by Qin Shi Huangdis massive centralized
bureaucratic state, but they were always there and always fighting to
hang onto what power they could. Etc.

But not in Western Europe. Individualism took root in Western

Europe really early. You had contracts, and common law, and
alienable property, going back to at least the early Middle Ages.
Same goes for the primacy of the nuclear family over the extended
family, and cultural models of the non-family-defined free man. The
Enlightenment was building on a very firm foundation.
When people talk about the importance of the Hajnal line, this is the
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thing that theyre trying to get at. Follow

II.

Why Western Europe, and not anywhere else?

Because, right from its inception, the Roman Catholic Church and
only the Roman Catholic Church, not (for example) any of its Eastern
Orthodox counterparts engaged on a systematic campaign to
destroy the family.

I say that in in a funny way, but its true. There were a staggering
number of major rulings issued by the early Church that amounted to
kinship groups arent allowed to do the things that make them
function. Most famously, cousin marriage was banned, which meant
that it was extremely difficult for kinship groups to avoid diffusing into
each other and that they couldnt shore up the most important
alliances across generations with family ties. Less famous but also
very important was the banning of Levirate marriage (the marriage
of a widow to her husbands brother), which is a really useful
technology if you want to keep all your tribe members within the
tribe. The very fact that the Church pushed hard for the legitimacy of
female-owned property was a big part of this, since it meant that
kinship groups were risking losing some of their stuff whenever one
of their members got married. And all sorts of rules about priestly
behavior, including clerical celibacy, meant that priests couldnt
continue to serve as useful assets to their clans.

(Insofar as this stuff didnt come from the Church directly, it mostly
came from lawmaker monarchs like Charlemagne, whose agendas
tended to be intertwined with the Churchs agenda.)

OK. So, uh, why was the RCC such an implacable enemy of the
kinship-group system?

The short answer is because it was closely allied with the social
subclass of wealthy widows. Widows tended to give lots and lots of
money, and land, to the Church. This didnt work so well if a widows
stuff would all just get reappropriated by her husbands clan. So the
Church did everything it could to support a womans right to keep her
dead husbands property, and the women reciprocated by donating a
hefty proportion of that property.
The question remains, thoughwhy did this particular form of mutual

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back-scratching manifest only in Catholic territories? Why werent Follow

the Orthodox churches, or the various Hindu temples, doing exactly

the same thing?

III.

It turns out that upper-class Roman men liked younger women.

Much younger women. The average patrician wedding involved a
man in his late twenties or thirties, or even forties, and a girl in her
early teens.

(Brief explanation: as a rule, everywhere, aristocratic men get

married when their financial and political prospects have been firmly
established. Why would a brides family choose to roll the dice? In
Rome, for various reasons, this didnt happen until fairly late. But
Roman medicine was super shitty and nutrition was poor, so it was
generally desirable to marry the youngest possible woman for
fertility-maximizing reasons.)

This meant that, if an upper-class Roman wife managed to avoid

dying in childbirth, she was almost certain to outlive her husband by
quite a lot. Aristocratic Roman society was filled with youngish
widows. There was at least one in basically every patrician family.

The result: as civilizations go, Rome was slightly more concerned

than average about the plight of women whod lost their husbands.
Which is important, because traditional kinship-group-based
inheritance law is ridiculously terrible for widows. All the husbands
stuff gets reclaimed by the tribe, the widow is left dependent on the
mercy of a family that isnt even her family (as such things are
understood), and she is very likely to die or to be functionally
enslaved.

So the Romans came up with a kludge. Widows were, technically,

allowed to keep their husbands property in their own namebut
there were a ton of restrictions on what they could do with that
property. The idea was to keep the great estates intact until the
women in question either died conveniently or found a way to get
married again.

One of the very few things that propertied widows could do with their
money was donate it to temples. Unimpeachably respectable, right?
except that Rome was infested by this up-and-coming, wildly
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expansionist cult that was desperate for cash and upper-class Follow

recognition.

A whole bunch of the early Roman bishops got their churches off the
ground essentially by serving as money-laundering operations for
rich widows. The patrician women in question would donate vast
fortunes to the Christians, with the explicit understanding that they
would continue to control most of the money. Even so, the churches
were getting vastly more support from this system than they were
going to get anywhere else. And some of the widows in question
even came to decide that they were actually pious.

So the Church fathers arrived at the conclusion that wealthy widows

were their best friends. And the rest is, as they say, history.

#history #speculation

370 notes Jun 28th, 2017

MORE YOU MIGHT LIKE

brazenautomaton

mccreefucker

bumblesweet:
 Search balioc Follow

its really funny how like, pikachu has been the obvious
moneymaker for pokemon throughout its history, and theyve tried
to replicate this without success ever since. trying each gen to hit
on that perfect mascot formula
 Search balioc Follow

and finally after a series of unsuccessful and generally

unmemorable clumsy pikachu ripoffs, nintendo comes out with a
pokemon whose entire concept is boldfacedly, clumsy
pikachu ripoff
 Search balioc Follow

and everyone fucking loves it

brazenautomaton

because Mimikyu, by explicitly being a creature who wants to look

like Pikachu because it wants to be loved, is the only one that feels
sincere.

instead of projecting coolness and marketability, it projects

vulnerability and loneliness and I want to hug it.

balioc

This is what we call the Kylo Ren strategy.

Source: emperor-of-roses

88,174 notes
 Search
So the thing balioc
about
Jonathan Larsons work and this is most visible Follow
and central in tick, tickBOOM!, but also very important to Rent is
that it is 100% about the zeitgeist of the 90s.

Which means something more than a lot of people are dying of

AIDS.
Keep reading

#broadway #rent #tick tick boom #literary analysis

30 notes

balioc

balioc

So if my historical sources are telling me the truth

and Im synthesizing the history properly

then, in fact, the entire edifice of Western civilization all the

cultural, social, and philosophical structures that define the world in
which we live today can be traced back to a stupid loophole in
Roman inheritance law.

NOTE: Everything here is taken either from Francis Fukuyamas

The Origins of Political Order or from a Livejournal post by the
Infamous Brad that I am currently unable to find. I get credit for
absolutely nothing, except noticing the connection between
Section II and Section III.

Keep reading

balioc

ADDENDUM:

A number of people have been asking me a question that is, uh, very
on-point: if this widow-favoring dynamic originated in the days of the
Roman Empire when Christianity was still a nascent cult, how could it
characterize the Roman Catholic Church but not the Orthodox
Church, given that the schism happened so much later?

The answer, it turns out, is kind of boring and obvious rather than
wacky and fun. In fact the Rome-acquired widow-favoring thing
existed in both churches. The relevant difference was a large-scale
political one rather than a cultural or doctrinal one, arising in the
wake of Romes collapse. In the West, the Church was faced with a
wake of Romes collapse. In the West, the Church was faced with a

postapocalyptic
wasteland of isolated nobles and Germanic ravager
Search balioc Follow
tribes, it was the largest and most coherent social actor around, and
so it had a relatively easy time imposing its agenda. In the East, the
Church was faced with all the iron-fisted power of the Byzantine
empire, which responded to its attempts to depatrimonialize the
property regime with haha lol nope.

But the dynamic about which I was talking still seems to have been a
thing.

370 notes

When youre writing your posts about the anomie of modern

individualistic atomized existence, and talking about how we need to
find some more-communitarian more-interconnected more-tribal-
level mode of lifeplease remember what tribes are actually like.

Tribes are, basically, big families. You know how families work,
probably. You were probably raised in one.

And dont get me wrong there are many great things about
families. It is cool that, due to the power of collective identity,
resources can be distributed in a literally final-stage-communist
fashion with very little friction. It is cool that you can get to know
everyone super well, and keep an accurate map of all the
relationships. It is cool that people care about you, no fooling, they
really care about you, they are not going to drop you just because
youve become inconvenient or whatever.

Nonetheless. Somehow, Im betting that most of you fled from the

bosom of your families in order to go live out in the big cold atomized
impersonal individualistic world, and youre not exactly champing at
the bit to go back.

Because there are costs, and they are crushing. Families do not
understand, cannot understand, personal boundaries. The
counterbalance to your family will always care about you is your
family will feel free to use and remake every part of your existence.
Families are places where every point of incompatibility or tension
will be rubbed raw until it bleeds and festers, because people cant
just agree to leave each other alone. Families subordinate your
dreams to their own collective ambitions and values. Families run
Every. Single. Thing. through a system of manipulative personal
politics.
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Different people have different levels of tolerance for such things,
and so the individualism / tribalism tradeoff plays out differently in
every case. But if youre reading this, I am prepared to bet money

that you really really really benefit from the advantages of social
individualism, no matter how much loneliness and anomie you might
be feeling.

Squaring this circle is super hard. It is one of my major long-term

intellectual projects. Finding a system that combines people really
care about each other in a reliable fashion and resources get
shared in a non-stupid way with people will respect your individual
preferences/ambitions and people have the space not to impinge
upon each other intolerably iswell, it may be impossible, and if its
possible Im pretty sure no ones figured it out yet. But Im betting
that, at such time as we do figure it out, its not going to look anything
like segmentary communitarianism.

#cultural engineering #tribalism #individualism

362 notes

For that matter, Im generally in favor of giving your kids

Unnecessarily Flamboyant Names that can be condensed to Totally
Normal Nicknames if they really want because theyre lame or
something.

Like, yknow,

Polly > Polyhymnia

Al > Alaric

Luke > Lucifer

etc.

34 notes
So Im playing Persona 5. Like you do.
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Persona 5, being a Persona game, has a lot of dating-sim and life-
management-sim mixed in with its JRPG. And its just starting to hit
me how fundamentally weird it is to play at making life decisions in
the character of someone who has no personality.

Because thats what the Persona 5 protagonist is. Thats what

virtually every dating sim protagonist is, really. A man with no traits,
beyond a sort of general-purpose heroism*. A bland cypher who can
say or do anything in order to steer things in the particular direction
that the player prefers.

* although, yes, it is very much worth noting what traits are in fact
possessed by the bland heroic nullity this is probably an important
piece of cultural insight or something, in that it shines a light on
culture tropes so fundamental that they go unlabeled

Like

One of the major decisions, obviously, is which girl do you date?

And it feels super awkward, because its supposed to be about
forming a relationship, but theres no actual relationship to form,
because theres only one actual person involved. One of the two
love interests under serious consideration (for me) is an adorkable
hikokomori otaku girl with a lot of complicated social trauma, and
both my author-self and my thoughts-about-romance self are
screaming she needs to be with someone who shares her interests
and who wont feel crippled by her introversion! which is to say,
with a fairly distinctive kind of human being but the game provides
no way to be that, or even to be definitively not-that. The other one
is a serious brainy class-president Hermione Granger type, and it
turns out that she wants to become a cop, and Im wondering
whether this is ever really going to be a problem for my notionally-
chaotic-good has-Arsene-Lupin-as-his-spiritual-totem protagonist,
and then I realize that I dont know and I have no way to know.

You go through the game as a sort of walking, pretty-faced avatar of

the mouse cursor. Its theoretically a game about building
relationships, but you arent enough of a person to relate to anyone,
youre just making choices and grabbing at things that the unseen-
god Player finds interesting or desirable or fetish-fulfilling. The whole
thing is kind of surreal.

I dunno. I like Persona 5, very much, dont get me wrong. I like this
genre generally. I even understand the appeal of keeping your
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options as wide-open as possible, of (e.g.) having a blank-cypher
Follow

protagonist who can reasonably go out with any of the lovely tropey
girls youve laid out for him. But Im starting to wonder whether
theres a way to run things so that, as you make choices, you actually
define yourself you acquire traits that are visible in behavior, not

just in stats you close some doors as you open others you
become a person to whom the NPCs can react in a way that feels
real.

(At some point, I should probably talk about the interaction of this
stuff, narcissistic identity, gender, and the subject/object divide. The
dating-sim protagonist is pure subject, which is perhaps here better
rendered as pure Male Gaze, even given the fair number of games
in which he is in fact female. He is legible only through his actions
and achievements and acquisitions, not through anything tangible
and lasting about his self. He is, uh, all verb and no noun. Which
means, inter alia, that he has no identity at all. Which seems like it
might lead somewhere interesting.)

#video games #persona #rambly thoughts

35 notes

brazenautomaton

fatpinocchio

This is what eaten by culture war looks like.

Dont read the news. Especially dont read thinkpieces. Otherwise,

your availability heuristic will get messed up and youll think that the
culture war is actually important.

fatpinocchio

shlevy:

Care to expand?

Twitter, Tumblr, and the culture war industry in general represent a

loud minority. In my experience (and I went to a small liberal arts
college in CA), the regressive left isnt even that popular there, so I
expect that what we see is the result of the media seizing on unusual
incidents because thats what gets the clicks. In the broader world, it
seems to basically be a non-factor. Its more common to passively
Search
share posts withbalioc
a regressive-left message, but most of those people Follow
are still reasonably normally tolerant in real life. Consistent liberalism
is rare, but the norm of at-least-minimal liberalism through apathy still
looks very strong. Free speech issues arent on most peoples radar,
but theyd see punching Nazis as politically motivated hooliganism -
if it were ever relevant to them.
I think if someone wasnt directly subscribed to the culture war (or
following someone who really cares about it), theyd see very little of
it. Even if theyre interested in politics, the culture war may only rarely
come up. While the left gets a lot wrong, in practice, it looks more like
Senator So-And-So introduced the Safer Pencils for America Act
and some people support that and less like the kind of illiberal SJ
that Scott is concerned about. Republicans controlling everything
means less influence for Senator Safer Pencils, but it doesnt make a
significant difference for the antifa cluster, because they wouldnt
have been able to do much anyway.

Which is not to say that the culture war is completely irrelevant for
everyone. Maybe if you do IQ research at a university, youd like to
be able to talk about it without worrying that someone might come
down on you. If youre a conservative in a generally progressive
industry, youd like to speak your mind without being viewed as an
idiot. And in the regular political sphere, both sides keep finding new
ways to damage political liberalism. But as far as cultural liberalism is
concerned, it doesnt look like its going anywhere.

brazenautomaton

it must be nice to exist somewhere that is yet undevoured, so you

can pretend those who saw it happen are all just stupid and
contemptible

fatpinocchio

Considering the variance in places Ive existed that are all

undevoured, including what are supposed to be the main SJ
centers/battlegrounds (liberal arts college, tech company), Im
skeptical of the extent of the devouring. And I dont think that people
who think otherwise are stupid and contemptible. I have a great deal
of respect for Scott, whose post inspired my original comment. The
problem is that theres enough culture war content to surround
yourself with it, and then it seems like its everywhere, so its easy to
overestimate its importance.

This isnt the greatest analogy, but its kind of like alcohol. Not only
the addictive aspect, but also because if youre in a peer group
where heavy drinking is normal, it can seem like an inescapable part
of socialization and takes up some of your mindspace, but if you stop
of socialization and takes up some of your mindspace, but if you stop

engaging with itbalioc
Search and find different people, you see that you were part
of some weird group and that its actually not important.
Follow

brazenautomaton

Yeah, if alcohol explicitly colonized all of the places where you could
do the thing you wanted, and it was no longer possible to do the
thing you wanted to do that had nothing to do with alcohol, due to the
knowing, malicious, and deliberate actions of alcoholics; and
alcoholics were currently colonizing another related thing that you
wanted to do and making it their explicit mission to make it
impossible for you to engage with it without being showered in
alcohol and everyone was helping them and nobody was permitted
to notice it was happening and every time you point it out people call
you a hysterical liar who should be punished because you hate
alcohol-drinkers.

balioc

hyperbole (and bitterness) aside, this is actually a surprisingly on-

target analogy.

Because alcohol-centric socialization is in fact both

(a) really genuinely not universal, and

(b) nonetheless very very very widespread, especially in certain

particular sectors of the culturesphere, where its totally dominant.

[I was a member of my college sci-fi / gaming club. We didnt drink

much. Every so often someone from the college newspaper would
come by to do a patronizing human interest story on the weird nerds,
and an alarming amount of the time, these stories devolved into did
you know that there are people on campus who somehow magically
know how to socialize without getting totally hammered?!?]

There are in fact lots of places you can go that are totally alcohol-
free. There are lots more places you can go where people drink in a
very low-key way, such that youd barely notice. And if you land in
one of those places, the whole alcohol-centric thing can seem like a
weird quaint cultural vestige, something thats obviously not going to
impose itself on anyone whos not explicitly looking for it.

Except that not everyone is that lucky. If youre stuck in the wrong
town, or the wrong college, or the wrong line of work, or the wrong
subculture, it may be that alcohol is dominating every single social
center that you can see. It may be that your choice is between suck
it up and deal with the drunkards or leave behind everything and
it up and deal with the drunkards or leave behind everything and
everyone you know for the sake of this one preference.
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(or sometimes theres like one group of people around who arent
always getting shitfaced, like maybe its the campus Bible study
group or something, and you have absolutely nothing in common
with them apart from this one random thing about alcohol, but the

fact that every social gathering is full of plastered jackasses is

starting to really get to you, and you find yourself wondering whether
maybe it wouldnt be so bad to try letting Christ into your life)

Social justice is like that. Contra @brazenautomatons implications,

it hasnt eaten everything and its not going to. There are vast
sectors of the world of the country of the urban upscale crowd,
even that dont give any fucks about SJ, that arent even slightly
afraid of angry Twitter mobs, and that arent going to persecute you
for your unwokeness. And, to those who are sitting comfortably in
those places, the whole culture war can seem like a stupid internet
foofaraw to which the correct response is to Turn Off the Computer
and Get a Life.

But there are places where that is really really really not the case.
There are campuses, and industries, and social circles, where
everyone you know and everyone they know is living in perpetual
fear of having his life destroyed by an angry ideological mob. There
are hobbies and cultures, particularly online ones like fandoms, that
have been so completely destroyed by this shit that you literally
cannot find a (haha) safe instantiation of them anymore. If youre
embedded in one of those things, or if one of those things is very
important to you for its own sake, you are genuinely in a pretty bad
place.

For those who really cant help making everything about Whose Side
You Are On: no, this doesnt apply only to SJ. The conformity-
demanding ideological mobs of the right do exactly the same thing, in
the places where they have power. Probably thats caused a lot
more damage overall, although I confess that I care less, because
conformity-demanding right-wing ideology has never gotten any
traction at all in the cultural sectors where I dwell.
Source: fatpinocchio

161 notes

Wear clothes. Not too much. Mostly pants.

#shitpost #my sincerest apologies

#shitpost #my sincerest apologies
#i mean i don't know why i haven't seen this joke before #but i haven't
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#so here we are Follow

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Anonymous asked:

Why the demon theme? You don't seem especially

demonic in a conventional sense.

The demons hate the world. They claim that it is theirs by right of
creation, and that it was stolen from them, and that it is not as it
should have been that they were driven into the outer darkness,
and that their work was remade by those who could not understand
their vision. But they are known liars, so who can say what is true?
Regardless, reality in its current configuration offends them, for it
does not bear the marks of their art and it is beloved by their
despised enemies. They wish for it to be torn down and replaced with
something wholly different. For this reason they grant their power to
those who would change things utterly.

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