froasty

Let's say you're running a board game night each week over the summer in ten different cities and it's a standing rule that the group buys pizza.

If everyone has to anonymously chip in to pay for pizza, everyone will eventually chip in less--"Someone is going to pay for the pizza, but I shouldn't have to pay for more than my fair share! I already paid for a night's pizza this summer!" This is true for all board game nights in all cities.

HOWEVER, if you pay attention to who chips in for pizza and allow people to anonymously steal from attendees to board game night, regardless of whether they were a freeloader, that uniformity between board game nights stops.

In some cities, after several weeks everyone starts pitching in money for pizza. Why? Because the freeloaders want pizza, but don't want to have more money stolen from them than the cost of pizza that they ate. Pitching in removes people's justification for stealing from them and they still get pizza.

In other cities, counter-intuitively to certain demographics, when people can see who's paying for pizza and anonymously steal from attendees, certain people start stealing from the person who's habitually putting in more than their fair share. This cancels out the gain from people stealing from the freeloaders.

To account for the latter cities, the study authors posit that it's because the freeloaders are punishing the people that bought the pizza because they're the people most likely to have stolen back the cost of the pizza eaten.

The author of this article posits a different reason: in certain cities, they used to have a collection for pizza at board game night, but the delivery was slow and the good pizza rarely showed up before the night was over. And the host got to keep the leftovers. And board game night was always at Keynes's house, conveniently.

So in these cities, people still remember Keynes and punish anyone trying to restart Keynes's bullshit way of getting free pizza from them. Everyone who attended Keynes's board game night in the past feels it's better to just eat leftovers when they get home than to pay New Keynes to get pizza 10% of the time.

And, coincidentally, if there's ever another board game night at Keynes's, you eat everything you can get from him, because he's an asshole that buys Little Caesar's Hot-n-Ready's when he's paying alone, but guilts everyone else to pay-up next week when he orders a giant fuckin' pizza from the stoner hole in the wall that he gets to eat by himself because he won't stop whining about "B-B-but I bought the pizza last week!"

When any bar is set for what is considered "acceptable" inquiry in areas dedicated to research, we set boundaries that will inevitably be twisted to constrain research and free inquiry when reactionaries or revolutionaries are in power. They will use those boundaries as gameable dogma to expel and ostracize minorities. The reason academic freedom both exists and is largely value-agnostic is to preserve those norms and precedents should ideologues that aren't on your side assume power over you.

Sorry, I have no desire to hold your hand anymore as you struggle to produce a single coherent thought.

As you stated elsewhere, I'll be quite happy to debate with the "alt-right" and other adults. Sadly, that seems to exclude you, by definition. Keep your Orwellian licensing schemes on Ingsoc Island and leave the rest of us alone.

It is absolutely amazing how thick you are. Of course, mass radio and propaganda helped the Nazi state operate.

But they were only broadcasting on the radio after they had power in 1933. It only helped them amplify their hold after they already had total control of the government, in 1933.

But you know what actually helped the Nazi state form? Banning the NSDAP from 1923-1925. And in 1927, banning Hitler from public speaking. And in the period from 1925 to 1932, using armed fighting squads to try to de-platform him in bars precipitating the existence of the Sturmabteilung (SA). And yes, using radio as a political fulcrum to turn people away from opposition parties.

In 1933, Hitler walked the road paved for him by people like you. First as the farce of Weimar, then as the tragedy of National Socialism. Every action had a precendent. Every action justified first by a moral panic. Moral panic by people that can conceive of no reason not to use their over-weaning self-righteousness as a lever to tell other people what to do, without considering the long-term consequences of such actions, without context, without understanding, blindly obeying emotions generated by other people.

Because clearly, in retrospect, the Crusders' blind self-righteousness was morally wrong and led to horrors, the Inquisition's blind self-righteousness was morally wrong and led to horrors, the Commonwealth's blind self-righteousness was morally wrong and led to horrors, the Bolshevik's blind self-righteousness was morally wrong and led to horrors, the Nazi's blind self-righteousness was morally wrong and led to horrors, and countless other movements unnamed. But your sense of moral self-righteousness is morally right and justified and will lead only to utopia and the land of milk and honey.

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in 't!

This is definitely the case in my experience and reading of the situation.

Here's a quote from The Coming of the Third Reich by the premier historian of the period, Richard Evans:

"Communist rhetoric had become a good deal more violent since the inauguration of the ‘third period’ by the Comintern leadership in Moscow in 1928. From this point onwards, the party directed its venom principally against the Social Democrats. Every German government in its eyes was ‘fascist’; fascism was the political expression of capitalism; and the Social Democrats were ‘social fascists’ because they were the main supporters of capitalism, taking workers away from revolutionary commitment and reconciling them to Weimar’s ‘fascist’ political system. Anyone in the leadership who tried to question this line was dismissed from his party post. Anything that would help overthrow the ‘fascist’ state and its Social Democratic supporters was welcome."

Let's take a random quote from an article on Jordan Peterson that appeared yesterday. This is a man whose claim to fame is tselling young alienated ripe for alt-right recruitment men that, yes, liberal society has a place for you, but only if you clean your room and buy my books:

"Jordan Peterson's recent speaking engagement in Hamilton prompted Coun. Matthew Green's observation that Peterson is inflammatory and popular with the alt-right. And yet Peterson is frequently lauded as today's most important public intellectual. In fact, Peterson is less an intellectual than he is a gifted motivational speaker for racists and misogynists."

Jordan Peterson is de-radicalizing young men back towards an open and free society and is bringing back the cachet of public intellectuals (which is sad as Noam Chomsky is still alive). For some reason, the inquisitional progressives view this de-radicalization as a bad thing. It's absolutely bonkers.

And, of course, you resort to picking out Spotify as if in a vacuum. But it's not in a vacuum! Alex Jones was de-platformed on from a communication medium with 2 billion monthly users! A platform that, in 2013, 50% of Americans check every day, with 80% using it as their only social media presence! Facebook is literally the most public forum that has ever existed in the history of mankind! And this is just yet another miniature step--always justified--towards "preserving" democratic ideals by thoroughly undermining them through overreach.

And once again, you seem to quote from totems that you've never read and don't actually understand.

To wit, Karl Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies:

"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—

In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. "We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."

Clearly literacy, as well as history, eludes you. By March of 1933, the Nazis had risen to power. The Nazis did not weaponize radio and then rise to power. They rose to power and then took over radio.

And just how did they manage to dismantle the Weimar democracy and take over all forms of mass media so easily? Because for years prior, those in control of the German government had justified every violation of fundamental law, order, and governmental restraint in order to pinion the ability of political enemies to operate freely in the name of democracy and propriety. Yet, it turns out that, as your kind apparently never learns, power changes hands and the tables are turned against you. And yet now you have no tenable defense against being silenced--your opinions are the ones deemed too pernicious to allow to exist in a "free" society (as every society claims to be!). Your protestations are now "fake news" and, all-too-suddenly, you find yourself, your allies, and countless other innocents in a railway car to places like Kolyma or Auschwitz.

Amazing! Now the right to freedom of expression, as historically understood and instantiated by Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, is now considered a fundamentalist understanding of "free speech". And what exactly is Article 19?

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Clearly, the long, moral arc of the universe eludes you. Yes, those with power did everything within their power to repress and dispossess those utilizing nascent means of communication to spread free inquiry and discussion outside what "respectable" society desired.

The end result of that attempt at suppression and repression was the Thirty Years War, the Commonwealth of England, more than eight million dead in Europe, and a safeguard so enduring that within a generation of the aftermath, freedom of the press was established in the United Kingdom--as well as the dissemination of certain, how shall we say, liberal philosophies that led to the draconian view that freedom of speech is fundamental to an open society and must be purchased by eternal vigilance against those that would take it away. As previously noted: different times, different costumes.

Then it's clear that you're entirely ignorant of the history of radio in Germany, in particular its contribution to the rise of the Nazis.

Before 1933, German radio broadcasting was conducted by 10 regional broadcasting monopolies, each with a Weimar representative. Their radio had a distinctly anti-fascist and anti-Nazi slant up to the Nazi victory in 1933. If anything radio hindered the rise of Hitler.

https://www.princeton.edu/csdp/events/Petrova04042013/Petrov...

"The people have their own opinions! We must shut them up for the sake of democracy!" Next you'll tell me that fighting in the war room is prohibited.

Speaking of prohibition and the past, let's talk about the Index Librorum Prohibitorum and the Inquisition:

"[...] Subsequent pontiffs continued to exhort the episcopate and the whole body of the faithful to be on their guard against heretical writings, whether old or new; and one of the functions of the Inquisition when it was established was to exercise a rigid censorship over books put in circulation. The majority of the condemnations were at that time of a specially theological character. With the discovery of the art of printing, and the wide and cheap diffusion of all sorts of books which ensued, the need for new precautions against heresy and immorality in literature made itself felt, and more than one pope (Sixtus IV. in 1479 and Alexander VI. in 1501) gave special directions to the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, Trier and Magdeburg regarding the growing abuses of the printing press; in 1515 the Lateran council formulated the decree De Impressione Librorum, which required that no work should be printed without previous examination by the proper ecclesiastical authority, the penalty of unlicensed printing being excommunication of the culprit, and confiscation and destruction of the books. The council of Trent in its fourth session, 8th April 1546, forbade the sale or possession of any anonymous religious book which had not previously been seen and approved by the ordinary; in the same year the university of Louvain, at the command of Charles V., prepared an “Index” of pernicious and forbidden books, a second edition of which appeared in 1550."

It's almost as if the printing press had given anyone with paper access the sort of message amplification that John Wycliffe and Jan Hus could only dream of, and that Catholic society was being damaged by contextless applications of principles intended to protect it.

The parallels with certain other principles written for a time of longbows that have unintended consequences in an era of muskets should not be ignored.

It always astounds me that hysterical moralists today believe that they would be the ones resisting despots and authoritarian regimes, when it's clear that it was precisely those same hysterical moralists in different times wearing different costumes that would, on the drop of a dime, passionately support and install them for the sake of their own naïve sense of moral propriety.

I ruefully wait for the day that Comcast and the other big telecoms actually put fast lanes and walled gardens into place. On that day, when Randall Munroe and people like him complain about the death of net neutrality and the free exhange of information, I can relish in the silver lining of telling him and his ilk, that hey, freedom of expression doesn't apply to private pipes. Comcast doesn't have to listen or host your bullshit. They think you're an asshole and are just showing you the door.

This trend towards redefining freedom of expression to disinclude an audience is unfathomably Orwellian.

"No, no, we don't want to silence you; we just want to remove the hearing ability of everyone around you until you stop talking."

Instead of asking why these problems are endemic to every platform, people just say "let's try silver bullet #24 so that we can keep doing the same pernicious stuff with a veneer of progress" and now you have several more problems on top of the ones that already existed.

Are humans in large numbers capable of interfacing with individual human beings without engaging in pernicious behavior? The answer, as anyone online in the last twenty-five years is a resounding no. Are humans in large numbers capable of behaving immaculately when it comes to preserving their own or their customer's privacy? Once again the answer, as anyone online in the last twenty-five years (and several decades longer if you include proto-business networks) is a resounding no. If you add progressively more humans to anything, does the output improve? If the metric is human satisfaction, the answer is no. If the metric is the rate of return in a Ponzi scheme, then yes, okay, you've got me there. The cause of almost all problems is solutions.

As far as social media goes, it's literally designed to use people to promulgate human-motivated pseudo-information for as long as humanly possible. It's not for "socializing" or "meeting people" in the same way that TV shows and movies aren't there for entertainment. It's to sell the viewer's attention to people that have anything but their interest in mind. Moving to federated enclaves is just further deregulating an already throughly pernicious industry.

If your narrative can be derailed by pseudo-anonymous actors, you don't control the narrative.

The idea that I'm primarily disagreeing with is that Facebook, Twitter, et al. can be hegemonic in a user-populated space. I don't think they can. They can certainly exert large amounts of influence and constrain it, but it's not monolithic and they don't control it. Federation only makes that influence more invisible. It certainly doesn't remove it.

There's a pretty stark difference between organic internet communities as they were and what is emerging from federated platforms on an already connected planet.

I was on an emulation forum for several years in the early 2000s that had people from every walk of life, every stripe of politics, on essentially every continent of the planet, yet the number of regular users was still within Dunbar's number, for years. That's not going to happen nowadays. If you can reasonably attract ten users, you can and probably will attract several hundred, or more, in much smaller timelines.

This is borne out by looking at Mastodon instances right now--there are ~200 out of ~3000 that fall within reasonable estimates of Dunbar's number and there's no guarantee that any of them will be stable even in the short term. It's a Great Filter for comprehensible human communities.

Secondly, the notion that by federating or centralizing, you can avoid or generate discursal control is pretty unfounded. The 2016 US Presidential election and Brexit are more than enough evidence of that. People can and will use any capacity within their reach to influence discourse, regardless of who owns or doesn't own the infrastructure.

I'd argue that federating generally allows for more pernicious discursal control by monied and corporate interests, solely through the lack of singular points of control. If you can automate contact and distribution, which is already trivial, you can spread whatever you want as far as you please as much as you like, knowing that if 90% of administrators remove it, you still have 90% possible impressions and 10% of instances that haven't removed it. If the content is even remotely infectious, it'll immediately spread back to the 90% by the 10% of users, anyway. Chain-letters are great examples of this in action (and in their more modern forms "upvote this if," "retweet this if," and "like this if").

Yes, and nominally so did homeownership in suburbia vs rental in overcrowded cities. What it actually meant is that instead of being beholden to "The Man's" cultural standards, they were now beholden to the Homeowner's Association's. Instead of overt racism and segregation, they got redlining, blockbusting, and racial steering. Instead of razor thin walls leading to informal surveillance, they had to Keep Up with the Joneses.

Of course, the forces are now politically/socially based rather than fundamentally racially based, but the principle remains the same. It's another digital White Flight by any other name.^1

---

1 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419843/did-whites-flee-th...

Mastodon and other federated platforms are to social media what suburbia historically has been to cities.

People think it'll resolve or at least mitigate the issues of digital privacy, digital harassment, and digital overpopulation, but in reality will just create ever more wasteful and unaccountable digital sprawl while inevitably recreating the exact same problems (e.g. HOA discrimination, nosey neighbors, hiding all non-conforming traits lest your cohabitants judge you, etc).

Agreed. Just look at franchises that were around in the 1990s and compare them to their 2010s counterparts. Almost none of them look good in comparison to their antecedents.

Deus Ex -- You play as a cybernetic anti-terrorist operative in a prosaic and cynical vision of the future fueled entirely by the conspiracies of the mid-90s BBS scene. The world is complex, coherent, and fleshed out. You have the illusion that your choices matter.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution -- You play as a super bad-ass private security in a neo-Renaissance world populated fueled by the hyperbole surrounding transhumanism. The developers deliberately make it less complex compared to the original for the sake of streamlining, use banal pop culture for their "inspirations," and intentionally design the game so that player choices are irrelevant. [0] It can be boiled down to "We want to make a western Metal Gear Solid."

I'll just grab a quote from a random Fallout 3 retrospective here -- "[...] Fallout 1 and 2 were defined by complex storylines, detailed characters and far-reaching consequences to the player's actions. And that these elements are less prominent in FO3, while faster action and stunning visuals have been brought to the forefront." [1]

Or a Thief (2014) review: "The three major strengths of past Thief titles - wide open mission design, sound propagation and narrative - are this game’s biggest weaknesses. That is a fundamental problem it cannot hope to overcome." [3]

Video games "matured" in the sense that they became more like movies interspersed with interactive segments, but the notion that that made them more artistic is pretty unfounded.

---

[0] http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015489/Reimagining-a-Classic-T...

[1] https://www.rpgwatch.com/articles/fallout-3-retrospective-21...

[2] https://www.pcinvasion.com/thief-pc-review/

That's the crux of relying upon transgression for value--it ages rapidly and if it obtains mainstream success, dies on the spot. You can see it happen with authors, musicians, writers, essentially any creative output.

In terms of popular media, the early seasons of South Park and the Simpsons look absolutely saccharine compared to where culture's Overton Window is today. "Don't have a cow, man!" is positively benign.

I don't remember where I first heard it, but the best formulation that I've heard over the years is that the BSDs are for people that love Unix; Linux is for people that hate Windows.

I honestly think there's a latent explosion of interest waiting for the BSDs in the near future. The sprint to bring a "modern UX" to the Linux ecosystem in the last decade has made it extremely easy for newcomers to adopt, but has also made it pretty nigh impossible to figure out what's actually going on in the background if you weren't along for the transitional periods. Whereas with the BSDs, the immediate learning curve is much higher, but at the end of that curve, you have knowledge of a coherent system that obeys legible and documented rules and the feeling, if not the reality, that you, the user, are in control of your computer.

If you think that's prescient, take a look at the Privacy Protection Study Commission's Report to Congress twenty years before that in 1977:

https://www.epic.org/privacy/ppsc1977report/epilogue.pdf

https://www.epic.org/privacy/ppsc1977report/appendix5.pdf

Or Paul Baran's testimony to Congress in 1965:

"The initial questions are those of examining the proposed central file system, considering its weak spots, and creating a precise description of those safeguards required that are technologically and economically feasible. If the gap is too great, then clearly we should not build the system; But as a practical matter--we should realize that eventual development is almost inevitable. We would do well to concentrate on the more constructive and larger issue of how shall we control the development of the automation of all sensitive information files in order to [...] protect the rights of the individual and avoid a “1984” nation?

This may sound pessimistic, but if one can save money automating a data system it is only a matter of time until it happens. The only questions are: when and how? I would like to add the further distressing thought that we may already be well-along in the creation of the very system whose needs and dangers we are discussing today."

Okay, so there aren't primary sources. That's totally fine, though at this point, it's moot to speak about the relative ability for a traditional culture to cope with elevated mortality since we've moved into dealing with conjecture purely in slave economies created by conquerors and entirely subaltern peoples.

Just curious, earlier you stated that you spent "a lot of [your] mental life in the 17th century", where does that reach extend to? Is it just Portugal or is it specific to the Atlantic Slave Trade?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you're stating that there weren't primary sources directly involving the Angolans that you encountered? Just inference? Are there known records of their folkways concerning death?

Call me cynical, but any time a person near to power "commits suicide" or otherwise recuses themselves from the scene (present or historically), I generally take their volition in the matter with a very large grain of salt.

How were the Angolans coping? Did you encounter them in the archives?

1. Do you include adolscence within childhood? Because that might be where we're disagreeing. How would you define childhood?

2. I don't think a comparison between cultures where horse-riding is fundamental to one where it is primarily a leisure activity makes much sense when it comes to estimations of danger. Yes, hunts could result in injuries; I don't disagree there. However, if attrition was severe enough to impede the function of the martial culture, it wouldn't be actively propagated.

3. Yes, disfigurements and scarring would be common in the aftermath of epidemics, but in those situations, it's so common that to form cultural persecuting complexes around it is difficult to justify. Lepers, on the other hand...

4. That's really my entire point: the reason it's so hard for you to imagine is because, if you live in the United States, the entire existence of death has become divorced from culture and daily existence. It's an aberration and a taboo. In a culture where death during childhood is common, there are cultural forms that account for it. That doesn't mean that it is or isn't a loss, but that it accomodates and integrates that event within a broader chain of being. As far as judicial injunctions against infanticide go, early mortality is incidental to life, not fundamental. Actively destroying a potential person, particularly within a truly local culture, when it isn't already part of the folkways, is of course going to result in reprisal. However the very existence of cultures that practiced exposure shows that it isn't fundamental to the human condition to viscerally value the lives of infants unconditionally. As far as PTSD goes, it's largely about being unable to cope with a traumatic event. In a functional society, it seems unlikely to me that PTSD strictly as a pathology surrounding child loss would be a thing--and the sociology surrounding it as I've read it supports that assertion.

I really think our disagreement resides in our perceptions of how durable/fragile humans can be under duress. I think humans are especially resilient, particularly if given adequate cultural coping mechanisms within a culture.

I call shenanigans on all four points.

1. Delayed adulthood along with the carceral infantalization that accompanies it is purely a modern phenomenon.

2. Jousting was not nearly as common as popular culture presupposes. The notion that pitched battles, particularly ones that involved the nobility fighting personally and carelessly in melees, were encountered so frequently as to suffer from CTE goes against the historiography of the era.

3. Smallpox lasts about two weeks (if you live). Dysentery lasts about one week (if you live). Gangrenous limbs either kill you, come off, or recover. None of these cause persistent pain. If I get the flu every year, I'm going to have a worse time than these people, regardless of the existence of opiates.

4. Low infant mortality is also a purely modern phenomenon. It also ignores all known sociology on infant mortality. When infants and children die in highly mortal societies, their value is accordingly diminished. In many cultures where infant mortality is extremely high, they're not even considered fully human until around their first birthday.

Humans are amazingly resilient when it comes to persistent stress and develop culture-ways to cope.

This article is everything wrong with privileged moderns looking back on the past.

The world and the humans within it hasn't changed at all, barring costumes and jewelry.

The biggest fallacy in this article isn't that it's wrong per se; it's that the thesis distilled is "a member of the current intelligenstia criticizing the hoi polloi of the past" when the hoi polloi of their own current era are just as ignorant and the intelligentsia is just as fallible.

I really wanted to deconstruct the entire article, but I've spent way too much time on this as it is.

>Here's an early modern example, right when the world seemed to start to make sense. It might seem insane to us that George Spencer, a troublesome one-eye old servant in Connecticut, was tried and executed in 1642 for the crime of bestiality after a one-eyed pig was born in his village. It might also seem insane that both the pig and his own retracted confession were called as the two witnesses required to convict him. But by the standards of the community and the times, the only insane person was that godless trouble-making pig-fucker, George Spencer.

Let's look at some secondary sources regarding this case:

>"The early court records teem with incidents of irreligion, drunkenness, profanity, lechery, and worse. In one of the most extreme cases, George Spencer was charged at New Haven with 'prophane, atheistical carriage, in unfaithfulness and stubbornness to his master, a course of notorious lying, filthiness, scoffing at the ordinances, ways and people of God' culminating in his bestiality with a pig. An anxious committee of ministers asked him 'whether he did use to pray to God. He answered, he had not since he came to New England, which was between four or five years ago'. Spencer admitted that he had scoffed at the Lord's day, calling it Lady's day, but denied all the rest. However, he could not gainsay the record of his bad character, or the evidence of a monstrous piglet, to which he allegedly showed a telling paternal resemblance." 1

One can almost imagine the #LeafletStorm released in the days before his arrest:

"George Spencer Calls The Lord's Day The "Ladyes Day": Gets Schooled On Godliness"

"George Spencer: Genius, or dude who's gone too far this time?"

"George Spencer's Brand of 'Freethinking' Has a Long, Awful History"

"George Spencer Needs To See Some Of These Epic #IfTheLordWasALady Leaflets To See How Ridiculous His Remark Really Was"

And then you have this:

>"One of the magistrates reminded him of the scriptural text: "He thatt hideth his sin shall not prosper, but he that confesseth and forsaketh his sans shall > finde mercie." Spencer confessed, clearly misunderstanding the magistrate's use of the word "mercy." The judge was thinking of the next world, Spencer of this one. Before the trial, Spencer confessed the act eleven separate times and permitted a paper asking for mercy to be put up in church. At his trial, he refused to confess, apparently on the advice of a man who had told him that without it he could not be convicted. Faced with the many persons to whom he had confessed, he admitted that their testimony was true but denied having had intercourse with the sow. The court found him guilty because the "everlasting equity" of the Bible demanded the verdict." 2

So from these sources we can establish that:

1. The case of George Spencer is an outlier as considered by historians of the era.

2. George Spencer is essentially a neckbeard of the New Atheist type, circa 17th century America.

3. George Spencer admits that he is an irreligious, uncleanly man with a bad reputation, and that he admitted his guilt to these people, but that truly, he did not have sexual relations with that pig, even if the resemblance is uncanny.

4. The "proper" classes thought and had thought that he was clearly an ungodly person. Periodde. By troth, why are we even having this conversation? It's 1642 Anno Domini. #BurnAHeretic

5. His legal advisors insinuated that if he pled guilty, he could get a plea bargain.

6. Apparently, someone whom he trusted more advised him pre-trial that this was ill-advised--although whether it was "they're still going to hang thee if thou confess" or "the constable hath lyttle but shite in his hands without thine confession, brethren" remains ambiguous.

7. The court, having their orderly show-trial upset, says fuck it, claims that George Spencer is clearly guilty because of something he said in the past, and the pig is a self-evident witness, and why the fuck not? No one is going to defend this blaspheming piece of shit.

None of these strike me as particularly particular to an era. People have been crucifying others with the force of social pressure since recorded history began. The only difference is the scenery.

>We live in an enlightened era. Our mental toolboxes are full to bursting with evidence-based reasoning, with precedent, with doubt, and with logic. We hold many truths to be self evident. We stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants and we think this plain of shoulders is ground level.

Hint: Every class of intelligentsia throughout time thinks its own set of platitudes, dogmas, and evidence-derived conclusions are immaculate and inviolate. It's like a twisted form of Conway's Law 3 for ideology.

>Displays of magnificence were not only convenient, they were mandatory. Misers were spurned and mocked. Today we value a person by the money they have, but to the medieval mind, it was the money you spent and how you spent it that elevated your status. The Church glittered. Cathedrals were pieces of heaven brought to rest upon the earth. The nobles ate extraordinary dishes and wore imported silk, and the rising merchants strove to imitate them. The peasants might be annoyed by the idleness and corruption of the nobility, but few ever expressed wonder at the cost of their everyday behavior, only at cost wasted on pointless wars or lost causes. A crown of diamonds could silence any peasant in awe. To the First and Second Estates, earning money by labour or personal action was degrading; gifts were common and welcomed.

So let's break out two of the most egregious assumptions:

1. Conspicuous consumption is a medieval construct absent in the modern period.

2. All peasants are identical and identically stupid. They have no capacity for rational thought. If you put shiny in front of them, they will be entranced like Lennie Small.

The first is ludricrous, as the existence of the entire field of consumerism theory proves (an invention solely of the 20th century).

The second is equally as ludricrous and ironically, embraces mythological feudal castes as reality.

>Patrick says "the ruling class are living like Kardashians" and he's exactly right. The Kardashians seem to be reviled because they are talentless, unproductive, and ignorant - all flaws to a modern viewer, all virtues to a medieval one. We prize our working celebrities and revile our idle ones; if you want to think medieval, flip that idea on its head.

Uh, people revile people like the Kardashians? What? Their reality TV show has been running for more than ten years. Before that, it was Paris Hilton. Before that, it was Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. The great masses of people (you know, the generally termed talentless, unproductive, and ignorant) in all eras love vicariously revelling in decadence.

> Even today, people who meet a celebrity or a monarch express wonder at the oddest and most mundane details, as if some part of them had expected the object of such idolization to be more-than-mortal. Also, men and women were made of completely different substances. The idea of a law that applies equally or fairly to everyone was neither acceptable nor practical. Justice is a modern conceit. All relationships are horizontal and unsymmetrical.

I have but one retort to this: When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? 4

History is a long series of contentions, victories, and defeats by conflicting parties with their own self-evident and self-motivated truths--No people, no culture, no time is homogeneous, except to the extent that they are homogeneously heterogeneous.

My favorite counter-point to the implicit idea that people "in the past" were unthinking proto-humans unlike us is the entirely mundane ancient bathroom graffiti of Pompeii 5 that wouldn't be out of place in any public restroom anywhere.

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1 Cressy, David. Coming over: migration and communication between England and New England in the seventeenth century

2 Chapin, Bradley. Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606-1660. University of Georgia Press.

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_(priest)

5 http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%2...