that's an incoherent take. The natural laws of animal instinct are inherently deterministic and oppressive. Fight or flight. The strongest survive. Concepts like fairness, magnaminity, and restraint in the interest of justice are unknown. There's no international agreement among cats to refrain from eating endangered bird species, for instance. (The fact that human laws against killing endangered species have often been disregarded does not override the fact that the ordinances have also had some partial success- or the fact that no animal species other than humans is even capable of formulating a concept as subtle as preserving natural diversity at the expense of immediate gratification.)
To the extent that human laws reify oppression or lead to oppression, it's because some of them are formulated and/or selectively enforced for the purpose of the oppression of the weak by the strong, to prevent the threat of competition, for territory or survival, and/or to maximize the advantage of a few at the expense of the rest, in a zero-sum game. That's as "natural" as it gets. A squandering of the unique capacity of reflective human awareness to do any better, but there isn't anything per se "unnatural" about it.
"The societies that have rules that don't oppress are not following human rules."
Got any specific real-world examples to reference? Your statement is so vague that I can't even tell whether you're referring to human societies or nonhuman societies.
I'm sufficiently familiar with Huron-Iroquois territorial conflicts, the pre-contact history of intertribal rivalries of the Plains tribes of North America, the rise and fall of the Mayan Empire that occurred centuries before European contact ("Chiapas" is a region in Mexico; the indigenous people who live there have historically been Mayan subgroups) and the 20th century militarist regime of Imperial Japan (a hereditary monarchy!), to know that you're a romantic fantasizer.
But I'm curious as to where you got such fatuous ideas. Got any scholarly reference support for them?
"You should use their name, actually, instead of acting like a French fur trapper with no respect ( typical Judeo-Christians) ."
You're in no position to patronize me with linguistic nit-picks, given your reliance on unsupported arguments and cloud-castle narratives. I don't dictate the way that foreign language speakers refer to my ethnic group in their language.
I don't label the religions of others with stereotypical smears and sweeping generalizations that select the same few data points and factoids to twist logic in order to libel the totality of their religious traditions as the worst plague to ever befall humankind, either. Atheist regimes that propounded utopian egalitarianism held sway over the nation of France at the cusp of the 18th-19th century, and regimes that relied on more worked-out ideological blueprints managed to gain power and govern more than a billion people for much of the 20th century. The results of those experiments were not pretty.
I'd advise proponents of repeating the atheist utopian experiment- or of establishing some Rousseauean-animist alternative, of the sort you seem to enjoy fantasizing about- to attempt their next beta test at a much less ambitious scale. A social consensus consisting of a population of 30,000, say- approximately the estimated size of the Huron Confederation at the time of first European contact. https://historykeen.com/huron-tribe/
That seems to me to be a more doable project than table-pounding about the eradication of "the Abrahamic religions", as if success at that project was the top priority to returning a planet of 8 billion people to a Golden Age of Natural Grace, Egalitarian Justice, and Plenty.
The chart above (which likely requires some magnification in order to be legible) provides metrics for the 100 largest death tolls in human history that resulted from commands and policies decreed by human leaders. The chart is taken from The Great Big Book Of Horrible Things, published in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Big_Book_of_Horrible_Things
How are you managing to obtain such detailed knowledge of features of the culture of Cahokia, to assert so confidently that Cahokia lacked either police or courts? The only available evidence is archaeological- and is is so often the case, it's rudimentary. Cultural ecology researchers can only offer some general guesses about the factors that led to the eventual decline of Cahokia in the 13th and 14th century. (again; pre-European contact.)
"I'm a professor of History. I've got a shit load of evidence. You still haven't given me a single example of a Judeo-Babylonian law structure in even one society that doesn't oppress. Why don't you try that, and then I'll supply more examples and evidence. Oh, because you can't find a single example of laws and courts not being used primarily to oppress..."
"Professor of History"? You don't even sound like an amateur historian to me. You sound like a quack. You're capable of packing so much clueless, axe-grinding, Bad Interpretation into one paragraph that I have to confine myself to selecting a few of your sillier errors.
Are you actually implying that modern jurisprudence- especially that found in the modern societies of the West- hasn't substantially changed in any form since Talmudic "Judeo-Babylonian law structure" developed 1000 years ago?
"Lawsuits to settle allegations of misconduct by more than 7,600 officers from around the country have amounted to more than $3.2 billion over the past decade, reports the Washington Post. The alleged misconduct led to nearly 40,000 payouts to resolve lawsuits and claims of wrongdoing at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments between 2010 and 2020. More than 1,200 officers in the departments surveyed had been the subject of at least five payments; more than 200 had 10 or more..." https://thecrimereport.org/2022/03/09/police-misconduct-cost-taxpayers-over-3-2-billion-in-settlements/
Did the "Judeo-Babylonian" courts of the Halachic era make that sort of allowance for effective redress of grievances by inhabitants of their society who brought suits claiming law enforcement misconduct by the government institutions? I don't pretend to be an expert on the theory and practice of Talmudic jurisprudence in the Middle Easte in the 6th-11th centuries. That game appears to be more like one of your your specialties. But if you know something that I don't, have at it.
"you can't find a single example of laws and courts not being used primarily to oppress."
I just posted an example above, complete with a reference link. Using a keyword search, it took about ten seconds to find.
I don't understand what you are talking about. First you said that rules and laws exist solely for the oppression of lower castes and then you said only nature makes the rules. So you think nature makes oppressive rules? There are rules for reaching consensus. As far as I know they are human rules. They are not oppressive unless you are one of those people that likes to take up all the space.
YOU were talking about the difference between human law and natural law. I never said a word about it before you brought it up. I was talking about who makes the laws for people and how it could be different if it were not the elite making those laws.
Rules and laws made by the oppressors are made to control those they oppress. If rules and laws were made by the people, things might be different.
that's an incoherent take. The natural laws of animal instinct are inherently deterministic and oppressive. Fight or flight. The strongest survive. Concepts like fairness, magnaminity, and restraint in the interest of justice are unknown. There's no international agreement among cats to refrain from eating endangered bird species, for instance. (The fact that human laws against killing endangered species have often been disregarded does not override the fact that the ordinances have also had some partial success- or the fact that no animal species other than humans is even capable of formulating a concept as subtle as preserving natural diversity at the expense of immediate gratification.)
To the extent that human laws reify oppression or lead to oppression, it's because some of them are formulated and/or selectively enforced for the purpose of the oppression of the weak by the strong, to prevent the threat of competition, for territory or survival, and/or to maximize the advantage of a few at the expense of the rest, in a zero-sum game. That's as "natural" as it gets. A squandering of the unique capacity of reflective human awareness to do any better, but there isn't anything per se "unnatural" about it.
Well said DC Reade!
"The societies that have rules that don't oppress are not following human rules."
Got any specific real-world examples to reference? Your statement is so vague that I can't even tell whether you're referring to human societies or nonhuman societies.
I'm sufficiently familiar with Huron-Iroquois territorial conflicts, the pre-contact history of intertribal rivalries of the Plains tribes of North America, the rise and fall of the Mayan Empire that occurred centuries before European contact ("Chiapas" is a region in Mexico; the indigenous people who live there have historically been Mayan subgroups) and the 20th century militarist regime of Imperial Japan (a hereditary monarchy!), to know that you're a romantic fantasizer.
But I'm curious as to where you got such fatuous ideas. Got any scholarly reference support for them?
"You should use their name, actually, instead of acting like a French fur trapper with no respect ( typical Judeo-Christians) ."
You're in no position to patronize me with linguistic nit-picks, given your reliance on unsupported arguments and cloud-castle narratives. I don't dictate the way that foreign language speakers refer to my ethnic group in their language.
I don't label the religions of others with stereotypical smears and sweeping generalizations that select the same few data points and factoids to twist logic in order to libel the totality of their religious traditions as the worst plague to ever befall humankind, either. Atheist regimes that propounded utopian egalitarianism held sway over the nation of France at the cusp of the 18th-19th century, and regimes that relied on more worked-out ideological blueprints managed to gain power and govern more than a billion people for much of the 20th century. The results of those experiments were not pretty.
I'd advise proponents of repeating the atheist utopian experiment- or of establishing some Rousseauean-animist alternative, of the sort you seem to enjoy fantasizing about- to attempt their next beta test at a much less ambitious scale. A social consensus consisting of a population of 30,000, say- approximately the estimated size of the Huron Confederation at the time of first European contact. https://historykeen.com/huron-tribe/
That seems to me to be a more doable project than table-pounding about the eradication of "the Abrahamic religions", as if success at that project was the top priority to returning a planet of 8 billion people to a Golden Age of Natural Grace, Egalitarian Justice, and Plenty.
No. You really are appallingly ignorant of world history.
https://www.scifacts.net/human/genghis-khan-death-toll/
https://www.scifacts.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/06atrocities_timeline-popup-768x1012.jpg
The chart above (which likely requires some magnification in order to be legible) provides metrics for the 100 largest death tolls in human history that resulted from commands and policies decreed by human leaders. The chart is taken from The Great Big Book Of Horrible Things, published in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Big_Book_of_Horrible_Things
How are you managing to obtain such detailed knowledge of features of the culture of Cahokia, to assert so confidently that Cahokia lacked either police or courts? The only available evidence is archaeological- and is is so often the case, it's rudimentary. Cultural ecology researchers can only offer some general guesses about the factors that led to the eventual decline of Cahokia in the 13th and 14th century. (again; pre-European contact.)
"I'm a professor of History. I've got a shit load of evidence. You still haven't given me a single example of a Judeo-Babylonian law structure in even one society that doesn't oppress. Why don't you try that, and then I'll supply more examples and evidence. Oh, because you can't find a single example of laws and courts not being used primarily to oppress..."
"Professor of History"? You don't even sound like an amateur historian to me. You sound like a quack. You're capable of packing so much clueless, axe-grinding, Bad Interpretation into one paragraph that I have to confine myself to selecting a few of your sillier errors.
Are you actually implying that modern jurisprudence- especially that found in the modern societies of the West- hasn't substantially changed in any form since Talmudic "Judeo-Babylonian law structure" developed 1000 years ago?
"Lawsuits to settle allegations of misconduct by more than 7,600 officers from around the country have amounted to more than $3.2 billion over the past decade, reports the Washington Post. The alleged misconduct led to nearly 40,000 payouts to resolve lawsuits and claims of wrongdoing at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments between 2010 and 2020. More than 1,200 officers in the departments surveyed had been the subject of at least five payments; more than 200 had 10 or more..." https://thecrimereport.org/2022/03/09/police-misconduct-cost-taxpayers-over-3-2-billion-in-settlements/
Did the "Judeo-Babylonian" courts of the Halachic era make that sort of allowance for effective redress of grievances by inhabitants of their society who brought suits claiming law enforcement misconduct by the government institutions? I don't pretend to be an expert on the theory and practice of Talmudic jurisprudence in the Middle Easte in the 6th-11th centuries. That game appears to be more like one of your your specialties. But if you know something that I don't, have at it.
"you can't find a single example of laws and courts not being used primarily to oppress."
I just posted an example above, complete with a reference link. Using a keyword search, it took about ten seconds to find.
I don't understand what you are talking about. First you said that rules and laws exist solely for the oppression of lower castes and then you said only nature makes the rules. So you think nature makes oppressive rules? There are rules for reaching consensus. As far as I know they are human rules. They are not oppressive unless you are one of those people that likes to take up all the space.
YOU were talking about the difference between human law and natural law. I never said a word about it before you brought it up. I was talking about who makes the laws for people and how it could be different if it were not the elite making those laws.