Guillaume Blanc (Brown) and Romain Wacziarg (UCLA and NBER) "Change and Persistence in the Age of Modernization:
Saint-Germain-d’Anxure, 1730-1895∗"

Figure 4.1.1.1 – Fertility
Figure 4.2.1.1 – Mortality
Figure 5.1.0.1 – Literacy

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/1127999888359346177
https://archive.is/1EnZg
Short pre-modern lives weren't overwhelmingly about infant mortality:

From this weekend's excellent Deep Roots conference at @Brown_Economics, new evidence from a small French town, an ancestral home of coauthor Romain Wacziarg:
--
European Carpe Diem poems made a lot more sense when 20-year-olds were halfway done with life:
...
--
...
N.B. that's not a correction at all, it's telling the same story as the above figure:

Conditioned on surviving childhood, usually living to less than 50 years total in 1750s France and in medieval times.

T.S. Eliot

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Searching For Ithaca: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/searching-for-ithaca/
I have found in revisiting the work for the first time in probably five years that it is, like Laurus, a snapshot of a culture that was decidedly more in tune with the divine. It’s been amazing to read and hear about the daily involvement of the gods in the lives of humans. Whether accurate or not, it’s astonishing to hear men talk about bad luck as a consequence of irritating the gods, or as a recognition that some part of the man/god balance has been altered.

But this leads me to the sadder part of this experience: the fact that I want so badly to believe in the truths of Christianity, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Nor can I bring myself to believe (and I mean truly believe, at the level of the soul’s core) in the gods of Olympus, or in any other form of supernatural thought. The reason I can’t, despite years of effort and regular prayer and Mass attendance, is because I too am a prisoner of Enlightenment thought. I too am a modern, as much as I wish I could truly create a premodern sensibility. I wish I could believe that Adam and Eve existed, that Moses parted the sea, that Noah sailed an ark, that Jesus rode a donkey into town, that the skies darkened as his soul ascended, that the Lord will come again to judge the living and the dead.

...

The two guiding themes of The Odyssey are quo vadis (where are you going?) and amor fati (love/acceptance of fate). When I was still a college professor, I relentlessly drilled these themes into my students’ heads. Where are you going? What end are you aiming for? Accept the fate you are given and you will never be unsatisfied! Place yourself in harmony with events as they happen to you! Control what you can control and leave the rest to the divine! Good notions all, and I would give virtually anything to practice what I preach. I would give anything to be a Catholic who knew where he was going, who accepted God’s plans for him. It kills me that I cannot.

...

That question near the end of The Odyssey gets me every time: “And tell me this: I must be absolutely sure. This place I’ve reached, is it truly Ithaca?” I yearn for Ithaca; I yearn for home. I only wish I knew how to get there.

Searching Google books, I find that what the phrase originally meant in the 17th and 18th centuries was that "A loves B just as much as B loves A"; the amount of love is balanced, so there is no love lost. In other words, unrequited love was considered to be "lost". This could be used to say they both love each other equally, or they both hate each other equally. The idiom has now come to mean only the second possibility.

--

If two people love each other, then fall out (because of an argument or other reason), then there was love lost between them. But if two people don't care much for each other, then have a falling out, then there really was no love lost between them.

Interestingly, when it was originated in the 1500s, until about 1800, it could indicate either extreme love or extreme hate.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Olde English Version
No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;
if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe
is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as
well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine
owne were; any mans death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

MEDITATION XVII
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
John Donne

Lucretius's On the Nature of Things

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase found in the work of the Roman poet Juvenal from his Satires (Satire VI, lines 347–348). It is literally translated as "Who will guard the guards themselves?", though it is also known by variant translations.

The original context deals with the problem of ensuring marital fidelity, though it is now commonly used more generally to refer to the problem of controlling the actions of persons in positions of power, an issue discussed by Plato in the Republic. It is not clear whether the phrase was written by Juvenal, or whether the passage in which it appears was interpolated into his works.

...

This phrase is used generally to consider the embodiment of the philosophical question as to how power can be held to account. It is sometimes incorrectly attributed as a direct quotation from Plato's Republic in both popular media and academic contexts.[3] There is no exact parallel in the Republic, but it is used by modern authors to express Socrates' concerns about the guardians, _the solution to which is to properly train their souls_. Several 19th century examples of the association with Plato can be found, often dropping "ipsos".[4][5] John Stuart Mill quotes it thus in Considerations on Representative Government (1861), though without reference to Plato. Plato's Republic though was hardly ever referenced by classical Latin authors like Juvenal, and it has been noted that it simply disappeared from literary awareness for a thousand years except for traces in the writings of Cicero and St. Augustine.[6] In the Republic, a putatively perfect society is described by Socrates, the main character in this Socratic dialogue. Socrates proposed a guardian class to protect that society, and the custodes (watchmen) from the Satires are often interpreted as being parallel to the Platonic guardians (phylakes in Greek). Socrates' answer to the problem is, in essence, that _the guardians will be manipulated to guard themselves against themselves via a deception often called the "noble lie" in English_.[7] As Leonid Hurwicz pointed out in his 2007 lecture on accepting the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, one of Socrates' interlocutors in the Republic, Glaucon, even goes so far as to say "it would be absurd that a guardian should need a guard."[8] But Socrates returns to this point at 590d, where he says that _the best person "has a divine ruler within himself," and that "it is better for everyone to be ruled by divine reason, preferably within himself and his own, otherwise imposed from without."_[9]

http://latindiscussion.com/forum/latin/to-rule-mankind-and-make-the-world-obey.11016/
Let's see...Aeneid, Book VI, ll. 851-853:

tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem,
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.'

Which Dryden translated as:
To rule mankind, and make the world obey,
Disposing peace and war by thy own majestic way;
To tame the proud, the fetter'd slave to free:
These are imperial arts, and worthy thee."

If you wanted a literal translation,
"You, Roman, remember to rule people by command
(these were arts to you), and impose the custom to peace,
to spare the subjected and to vanquish the proud."

I don't want to derail your thread but pacique imponere morem -- "to impose the custom to peace"
Does it mean "be the toughest kid on the block," as in Pax Romana?

...

That 17th century one is a loose translation indeed. Myself I'd put it as

"Remember to rule over (all) the (world's) races by means of your sovereignty, oh Roman, (for indeed) you (alone) shall have the means (to do so), and to inculcate the habit of peace, and to have mercy on the enslaved and to destroy the arrogant."

http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/aeneid.6.vi.html
And thou, great hero, greatest of thy name,
Ordain'd in war to save the sinking state,
And, by delays, to put a stop to fate!
Let others better mold the running mass
Of metals, and inform the breathing brass,
And soften into flesh a marble face;
Plead better at the bar; describe the skies,
And when the stars descend, and when they rise.
But, Rome, 't is thine alone, with awful sway,
To rule mankind, and make the world obey,
Disposing peace and war by thy own majestic way;
To tame the proud, the fetter'd slave to free:
These are imperial arts, and worthy thee."

For most of its 100-year heyday, Greek tragedy's preference for the stylized, the abstract and the formal over anything we might think of as naturalistic was reflected both in the circumstances of its production (which, with elaborate masks and costumes and rigidly formalized music and dances, seems to have been a cross between Noh and grand opera) and in the dense, allusive, often hieratic formal language that the tragedians employed, one that fully exploited the considerable suppleness of ancient Greek. Needless to say, this language has posed problems for translators, who usually have to choose between conveying the literal meaning of the Greek -- crucial to understanding tragedy's intellectual and moral themes -- and its considerable poetic allure.

David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, the classicist translators who edited the University of Chicago Press series, which for the past two generations has been the standard American translation, generally opted for clarity of sense -- no doubt in reaction to the flowery, high (and highfalutin) diction that notoriously characterized earlier translations, none more so than the widely consulted Loeb Library translations. (''How camest thou to Earth's prophetic navel?'' the Loeb's Medea inquires of someone returning from Delphi.) The Chicago translations, with their crisp, straightforward and dignified English, manage on the whole to convey the meaning, if not always the varied styles, of the originals.

It is primarily in reaction to cautious translations like Chicago's that the University of Pennsylvania Press has begun its own ambitious new project: the reinterpretation of all the extant Greek drama -- both tragedy and comedy -- not by classics scholars but by contemporary poets, many of whom don't know any Greek at all and achieved their translations by consulting earlier English versions. According to the series' co-editor, David R. Slavitt, its aim is to freshen up the plays, providing the general public with translations that are ''performable, faithful to the texture . . . and the moment on stage, rather than the individual sequence of adjectives.'' Yet even if you accept these versions as interpretations rather than straight translations, as Slavitt invites us to do (ignoring the fact that the Penn versions are presented as ''translations'' that are ''loyal to the Greek originals'' and will become ''the standard for decades to come''), this new series is a disappointment thus far. Six of the projected 12 volumes are now available, and they are extremely uneven, providing neither the intellectual satisfactions of the original nor, it must be said, the compensatory pleasures of really distinguished English poetry. Indeed, the strained and unconvincing efforts at novelty that are this series' distinguishing characteristic suggest that the real goal here was, in the words of the press's director, Eric Halpern, ''to create a publishing event.''

"Croppies Lie Down" is a loyalist anti-rebel folksong dating from the 1798 rebellion in Ireland celebrating the defeat and suppression of the rebels. The author has been reported as George Watson-Taylor.[1]

This song illustrates the deep divisions which existed in Ireland at the time of the 1798 rebellion. Irish Catholics, and to a lesser extent Dissenters, were legally excluded from political and economic life. The United Kingdom was at war with revolutionary France at the time, and Irish republicans were encouraged by rumours that France would invade the island. The lyrics describe the rebels as treacherous cowards and those fighting them as brave defenders of the innocent. "Croppies" meant people with closely cropped hair, a fashion associated with the French revolutionaries, in contrast to the wigs favoured by the aristocracy. In George Borrow's 1862 travel book Wild Wales, the author comes upon an Anglo-Irish man singing the tune.

...

Oh, croppies ye'd better be quiet and still
Ye shan't have your liberty, do what ye will
As long as salt water is formed in the deep
A foot on the necks of the croppy we'll keep
And drink, as in bumpers past troubles we drown,
A health to the lads that made croppies lie down
Down, down, croppies lie down.

https://twitter.com/gcochran99/status/901517356266004480
Scotch, Irish, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, English. I can sing "croppies lie down" to myself.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/new-mexico/#comment-4390
Here’s a good old Anglo-Irish song:

...

Personally, I’m surprised that the Irish didn’t kill them all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_There_for_Honest_Poverty
"Is There for Honest Poverty", commonly known as "A Man's a Man for A' That", is a 1795[1] Scots song by Robert Burns, famous for its expression of egalitarian ideas of society, which may be seen as expressing the ideas of liberalism that arose in the 18th century.

https://www.scotsconnection.com/t-forathat.aspx

http://www.forathat.com/a-mans-a-man-for-a-that.html

- Huntington, 2004

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/889953571650891776

The views of the general public on issues of national identity differ significantly from those of many elites. The public, overall, is concerned with physical security but also with societal security, which involves the sustainability--within acceptable conditions for evolution--of existing patterns of language, culture, association, religion and national identity. For many elites, these concerns are secondary to participating in the global economy, supporting international trade and migration, strengthening international institutions, promoting American values abroad, and encouraging minority identities and cultures at home. The central distinction between the public and elites is not isolationism versus internationalism, but nationalism versus cosmopolitanism.

...

Estimated to number about 20 million in 2000, of whom 40 percent were American, this elite is expected to double in size by 2010. Comprising fewer than 4 percent of the American people, these transnationalists have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations. In the coming years, one corporation executive confidently predicted, "the only people who will care about national boundaries are politicians."

...

In August 1804, Walter Scott finished writing The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Therein, he
asked whether

"Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said:
'This is my own, my native Land?'
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned
As home his footsteps he hath turned, . . .
From wandering on a foreign strand?"

A contemporary answer to Scott's question is: Yes, the number of dead souls is small
but growing among America's business, professional, intellectual and academic elites.

Flyting is a ritual, poetic exchange of insults practised mainly between the 5th and 16th centuries. The root is the Old English word flītan meaning quarrel (from Old Norse word flyta meaning provocation). Examples of flyting are found throughout Norse, Celtic,[2] Anglo-Saxon and Medieval literature involving both historical and mythological figures. The exchanges would become extremely provocative, often involving accusations of cowardice or sexual perversion.

This poem contains the well-known quotation: "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'"

Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5040_(number)
Plato mentions in his Laws that 5040 is a convenient number to use for dividing many things (including both the citizens and the land of a state) into lesser parts. He remarks that this number can be divided by all the (natural) numbers from 1 to 12 with the single exception of 11 (however, it is not the smallest number to have this property; 2520 is). He rectifies this "defect" by suggesting that two families could be subtracted from the citizen body to produce the number 5038, which is divisible by 11. Plato also took notice of the fact that 5040 can be divided by 12 twice over. Indeed, Plato's repeated insistence on the use of 5040 for various state purposes is so evident that it is written, "Plato, writing under Pythagorean influences, seems really to have supposed that the well-being of the city depended almost as much on the number 5040 as on justice and moderation."[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_number
"Now for divine begettings there is a period comprehended by a perfect number, and for mortal by the first in which augmentations dominating and dominated when they have attained to three distances and four limits of the assimilating and the dissimilating, the waxing and the waning, render all things conversable and commensurable [546c] with one another, whereof a basal four-thirds wedded to the pempad yields two harmonies at the third augmentation, the one the product of equal factors taken one hundred times, the other of equal length one way but oblong,-one dimension of a hundred numbers determined by the rational diameters of the pempad lacking one in each case, or of the irrational lacking two; the other dimension of a hundred cubes of the triad. And this entire geometrical number is determinative of this thing, of better and inferior births."[3]

Shortly after Plato's time his meaning apparently did not cause puzzlement as Aristotle's casual remark attests.[6] Half a millennium later, however, it was an enigma for the Neoplatonists, who had a somewhat mystic penchant and wrote frequently about it, proposing geometrical and numerical interpretations. Next, for nearly a thousand years, Plato's texts disappeared and it is only in the Renaissance that the enigma briefly resurfaced. During the 19th century, when classical scholars restored original texts, the problem reappeared. Schleiermacher interrupted his edition of Plato for a decade while attempting to make sense of the paragraph. Victor Cousin inserted a note that it has to be skipped in his French translation of Plato's works. In the early 20th century, scholarly findings suggested a Babylonian origin for the topic.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoreanism
https://www.jstor.org/stable/638781

Socrates: Surely we agree nothing more virtuous than sacrificing each newborn infant while reciting the factors of 39,916,800?

Turgidas: Uh

different but interesting: https://aeon.co/essays/can-we-hope-to-understand-how-the-greeks-saw-their-world
Another explanation for the apparent oddness of Greek perception came from the eminent politician and Hellenist William Gladstone, who devoted a chapter of his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858) to ‘perceptions and use of colour’. He too noticed the vagueness of the green and blue designations in Homer, as well as the absence of words covering the centre of the ‘blue’ area. Where Gladstone differed was in taking as normative the Newtonian list of colours (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). He interpreted the Greeks’ supposed linguistic poverty as deriving from an imperfect discrimination of prismatic colours. The visual organ of the ancients was still in its infancy, hence their strong sensitivity to light rather than hue, and the related inability to clearly distinguish one hue from another. This argument fit well with the post-Darwinian climate of the late 19th century, and came to be widely believed. Indeed, it prompted Nietzsche’s own judgment, and led to a series of investigations that sought to prove that the Greek chromatic categories do not fit in with modern taxonomies.

Today, no one thinks that there has been a stage in the history of humanity when some colours were ‘not yet’ being perceived. But thanks to our modern ‘anthropological gaze’ it is accepted that every culture has its own way of naming and categorising colours. This is not due to varying anatomical structures of the human eye, but to the fact that different ocular areas are stimulated, which triggers different emotional responses, all according to different cultural contexts.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Outline of philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_philosophy
Figurative system of human knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figurative_system_of_human_knowledge

Branches of science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branches_of_science
Outline of mathematics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_mathematics
Outline of physics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_physics
Branches of physics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branches_of_physics
Outline of biology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_biology

- Table 1 is a good summary, but various interesting tidbits throughout
main points:
- latrones reminds me of bandit-states, Big Men in anthropology, and Rome's Indo-European past
- started having trouble recruiting soldiers, population less martial
- Church opposition to State violence, preferred to 'convert enemies by prayer'
- a Christian could use violence 'only to defend others and not for self-defense'
- Altar of Victory was more metaphorical than idolatrous, makes its removal even more egregious

http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/07/roman-state-and-genetic-pacification.html

should read:
Pax and the ‘Ara Pacis’: http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-studies/article/pax-and-the-ara-pacis1/1EE241F03F65C42B09AB578F83C7002C
PAX, PEACE AND THE NEW TESTAMENT: https://www.religiologiques.uqam.ca/no11/pax.PDF
BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE: http://sci-hub.tw/http://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/105/1/3/1442375/BANDITS-IN-THE-ROMAN-EMPIRE
Bandits in the Roman Empire: Myth and reality: https://historicalunderbelly.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/thoma-grunewald-bandits-in-the-roman-empire-myth-and-reality-2004.pdf

What Difference Did Christianity Make?: http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.jstor.org/stable/4435970
Author(s): Ramsay Mac Mullen

The extent of this impact I test in five areas. The first two have to do with domestic relations: sexual norms and slavery. The latter three have to do with matters in which public authorities were more involved: gladiatorial shows, judicial penalties, and corruption.

Clark/Frost Domestication: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/clarkfrost-domestication/
Thinking about the response of the pacified and submission Roman population to barbarian invaders immediately brings to mind the response of contemporary North Americans and Atlantic Europeans to barbarian invaders. It reads just the same: “welcome new neighbor!”

What about the Eastern empire? They kept the barbarians out for a few centuries longer in the European half, but accounts of the loss of the Asian provinces show the Clark/Frost pattern, a pacified submissive population hardly contesting the invasion of Islam (Jenkins 2008, 2010). The new neighbors simply walked in and took over. The downfall of the Western Roman empire reads much like the downfall of the Asian and North African parts of the empire. It is certainly no accident that the Asian provinces were the heartland of Christianity.

This all brings up an interesting question: what happened in East Asia over the same period? No one to my knowledge has traced parallels with the European and Roman experience in Japan or China. Is the different East Asian trajectory related to the East Asian reluctance to roll over, wag their tails, and welcome new barbarian neighbors?

gwern in da comments
“empires domesticate their people”
Greg said in our book something like “for the same reason that farmers castrate their bulls”

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began: —
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Having an accurate evaluation of a syndrome as a generally bad thing isn’t equivalent to attacking those with that syndrome. Being a leper is a bad thing, not just another wonderful flavor of humanity [insert hot tub joke] , but that doesn’t mean that we have to spend our spare time playing practical jokes on lepers, tempting though that is.. Leper hockey. We can cure leprosy, and we are right to do so. Preventing deafness through rubella vaccination was the right thing too – deafness sucks. And so on. As we get better at treating and preventing, humans are going to get more uniform – and that’s a good thing. Back to normalcy!

focus: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/02/22/neurodiversity/#comment-88691
interesting discussion of mutational load: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/02/22/neurodiversity/#comment-88793

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/blurry/
I was thinking again about the consequences of having more small-effect deleterious mutations than average. I don’t think that they would push hard in a particular direction in phenotype space – I don’t believe they would make you look weird, but by definition they would be bad for you, reduce fitness. I remembered a passage in a book by Steve Stirling, in which our heroine felt as if her brain ‘was moving like a mechanism of jewels and steel precisely formed.’ It strikes me that a person with an extra dollop of this kind of genetic load wouldn’t feel like that. And of course that heroine did have low genetic load, being the product of millennia of selective breeding, not to mention an extra boost from the Invisible Crown.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/blurry/#comment-12769
Well, what does the distribution of fitness burden by frequency look like for deleterious mutations of a given fitness penalty?
--
It’s proportional to the mutation rate for that class. There is reason to believe that there are more ways to moderately or slightly screw up a protein than to really ruin it, which indicates that mild mutations make up most load in protein-coding sequences. More of the genome is made up of conserved regulatory sequences, but mutations there probably have even milder effects, since few mutations in non-coding sequences cause a serious Mendelian disease.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/blurry/#comment-12803
I have wondered if there was some sort of evolutionary tradeoff between muscles and brains over the past hundred thousand years through dystrophin’s dual role. There is some evidence of recent positive selection among proteins that interact with dystrophin, such as DTNBP1 and DTNA.

Any novel environment where higher intelligence can accrue more caloric energy than brute strength alone (see: the invention of the bow) should relax the selection pressure for muscularity. The Neanderthals didn’t fare so well with the brute strength strategy.
--
Sure: that’s what you might call an inevitable tradeoff, a consequence of the laws of physics. Just as big guys need more food. But because of the way our biochemistry is wired, there can be tradeoffs that exist but are not inevitable consequences of the laws of physics – particularly likely when a gene has two fairly different functions, as they often do.

pronounced arrz long-uh, vite-uh brev-is

Vita brevis,
ars longa,
occasio praeceps,
experimentum periculosum,
iudicium difficile.

Life is short,
and art long,
opportunity fleeting,
experimentations perilous,
and judgment difficult.

https://archive.org/stream/libertyequality00stepgoog
http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/stephen-liberty-equality-fraternity-lf-ed

ὲδύ τι θαραλέαιξ
τὸν μακρὸν τείνειν βίον έλπίσι, φαγαɩ̑ξ
θνμὸν ὰλδαίνονσαν εύφροσύναιξ
φρίσσω δέ σε δερκομέγ’α
μνρίοιξ& μόθοιξ& διακναιόμενον.
Ζε͂να γὰρ ού& τρομέων
ένίδία γνώμη σέβει
θνατοὺξ ἄγαν, Προμηθεῠ
Prom. Vinct. 535–542

Sweet is the life that lengthens,
While joyous hope still strengthens,
And glad, bright thought sustain;
But shuddering I behold thee,
The sorrows that enfold thee
And all thine endless pain.
For Zeus thou has despised;
Thy fearless heart misprized
All that his vengeance can,
The wayward will obeying,
Excess of honour paying,
Prometheus, unto man.
Prometheus Bound (translated by G. M. Cookson)

Dedication

I. The Doctrine of Liberty in General

II. The Liberty of Thought and Discussion

III. The Distinction Between the Temporal and Spiritual Power

IV. The Doctrine of Liberty in Its Application to Morals

V. Equality

VI. Fraternity

The general result of all this is, that fraternity, mere love for the human race, is not fitted in itself to be a religion. That is to say, it is not fitted to take command of the human faculties, to give them their direction, and to assign to one faculty a rank in comparison with others which but for such interference it would not have.

I might have arrived at this result by a shorter road, for I might have pointed out that the most elementary notions of religion imply that no one human faculty or passion can ever in itself be a religion. It can but be one among many competitors. If human beings are left to themselves, their faculties, their wishes, and their passions will find a level of some sort or other. They will produce some common course of life and some social arrangement. Alter the relative strength of particular passions, and you will alter the social result, but religion means a great deal more than this. It means the establishment and general recognition of some theory about human life in general, about the relation of men to each other and to the world, by which their conduct may be determined. Every religion must contain an element of fact, real or supposed, as well as an element of feeling, and the element of fact is the one which in the long run will determine the nature and importance of the element of feeling. The following are specimens of religions, stated as generally as possible, but still with sufficient exactness to show my meaning.
I. The statements made in the Apostles' Creed are true. Believe them, and govern yourselves accordingly.
2. There is one God, and Mahomet is the prophet of God. Do as Mahomet tells you.
3. All existence is an evil, from which, if you knew your own mind, you would wish to be delivered. Such and such a course of life will deliver you most speedily from the misery of existence.
4. An infinitely powerful supreme God arranged all of you whom I address in castes, each with its own rule of life. You will be fearfully punished in all sorts of ways if you do not live according to your caste rules. Also all nature is full of invisible powers more or 1ess connected with natural objects, which must be worshipped and propitiated.

All these are religions in the proper sense of the word. Each of the four theories expressed in these few words is complete in itself. It states propositions which are either true or false, but which, if true, furnish a complete practical guide for life. No such statement of what Mr. Mill calls the ultimate sanction of the morals of utility is possible. You cannot get more than this out of it: "Love all mankind." "Influences are at work which at some remote time will make men love each other." These are respectively a piece pf advice and a prophecy, but they are not religions. If a man does not take the advice or believe in the prophecy, they pass by him idly. They have no power at all in invitos, and the great mass of men have always been inviti, or at the very least indifferent, with respect to all religions whatever. In order to make such maxims as these into religions, they must be coupled with some statement of fact about mankind and human life, which those who accept them as religions must be prepared to affirm to be true.

What statement of the sort is it possible to make? "The human race is an enormous agglomeration of bubbles which are continually bursting and ceasing to be. No one made it or knows anything worth knowlhg about it. Love it dearly, oh ye bubbles." This is a sort of religion, no doubt, but it seems to me a very silly one. "Eat and drink, for to-morrow ye die;" "Be not righteous overmuch, why shouldest thou destroy thyself?"

Huc vina et unguenta et nimiurn brevis
Flores amoenos ferre jube rosae,
Dum res et aetas et Sororum
Fila trium patiuntur atra.
...
Omnes eodem cogimur.

These are also religions, and, if true, they are, I think, infinitely more rational than the bubble theory.

...

As a matter of historical fact, no really considerable body of men either is, ever has been, or ever has professed to be Christian in the sense of taking the philanthropic passages of the four Gospels as the sole, exclusive, and complete guide of their lives. If they did, they would in sober earnest turn the world upside down. They would be a set of passionate Communists, breaking down every approved maxim of conduct and every human institution. In one word, if Christianity really is what much of the language which we often hear used implies, it is false and mischievous. Nothing can be more monstrous than a sweeping condemnation of mankind for not conforming their conduct to an ideal which they do not really acknowledge. When, for instance, we are told that it is dreadful to think that a nation pretending to believe the Sermon on the Mount should employ so many millions sterling per annum on military expenditure, the answer is that no sane nation ever did or ever will pretend to believe the Sermon on the Mount in any sense which is inconsistent with the maintenance to the very utmost by force of arms of the national independence, honour, and interest. If the Sermon on the Mount really means to forbid this, it ought to be disregarded.

VII. Conclusion

Note on Utilitarianism

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/947867371225665537
https://archive.is/WN38J
"Some people profess that the Sermon on the Mount is the only part of Christianity which they can accept. It is to me the hardest part to accept."

—James Fitzjames Stephen

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/914358533948428288
https://archive.is/qUh78
This distinguished philosopher was one day passing along a narrow footpath which formerly winded through a boggy piece of ground at the back of Edinburgh Castle, when he had the misfortune to tumble in, and stick fast in the mud. Observing a woman approaching, he civilly requested her to lend him a helping hand out of his disagreeable situation; but she, casting one hurried glance at his abbreviated figure, passed on, without regarding his request. He then shouted lustily after her; and she was at last prevailed upon by his cries to approach. “Are na ye Hume the Deist?” inquired she, in a tone which implied that an answer in the affirmative would decide her against lending him her assistance. “Well, well,” said Mr Hume, “no matter: you know, good woman, Christian charity commands you to do good, even to your enemies.” “Christian charity here, Christian charity there,” replied the woman, “I’ll do naething for ye till ye tum a Christian yoursell: ye maun first repeat baith the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, or faith I’ll let ye groffle there as I faund ye.” The sceptic was actually obliged to accede to the woman’s terms, ere she would give him her help. He himself used to tell the story with great relish.

https://twitter.com/avermeule/status/917105006205177856
https://archive.is/I4SAT
A counterfactual world in which Mill is taught only as a foil for J.F. Stephen, Hart as a foil for Devlin, and Kelsen as a foil for Schmitt.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/26/how-ae-housman-invented-englishness
fucking lol:
https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/877543510941028352
https://archive.is/uWhkb

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/07/no-slouch/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruin
The Ruin is an elegy in Old English, written by an unknown author probably in the 8th or 9th century, and published in the 10th century in the Exeter Book, a large collection of poems and riddles.[1] The poem evokes the former glory of a ruined city by juxtaposing the grand, lively past state with the decaying present.

https://coursewikis.fas.harvard.edu/aiu18/images/The_ruin.pdf

Splendid this rampart is, though fate destroyed it,
The city buildings fell apart, the works
Of giants crumble. Tumbled are the towers,
Ruined the roofs, and broken the barred gate,
Frost in the plaster, all the ceilings gape,
Tom and collapsed and eaten up by age.
And grit holds in its grip, the hard embrace
Of earth, the dead departed master-builders,
Until a hundred generations now
Of people have passed by. Often this wall
Stained red and grey with lichen has stood by
Surviving storms while kingdoms rose and fell.
And now the high curved wall itself has fallen.

...

The heart inspired, incited to swift action.
Resolute masons, skilled in rounded building
Wondrously linked the framework with iron bonds.
The public halls were bright, with lofty gables,
Bath-houses many; great the cheerful noise,
And many mead-halls filled with human pleasures.
Till mighty fate brought change upon it all.
Slaughter was widespread, pestilence was rife,
And death took all those valiant men away.
The martial halls became deserted places,
The city crumbled, its repairers fell,
Its armies to the earth. And so these halls
Are empty, and this red curved roof now sheds
Its tiles, decay has brought it to the ground,
Smashed it to piles of rubble, where long since
A host of heroes, glorious, gold-adorned,
Gleaming in splendour, proud and Hushed with wine,
Shone in their armour, gazed on gems and treasure,
On silver, riches, wealth and jewellery,
On this bright city with its wide domains.
Stone buildings stood, and the hot stream cast forth
Wide sprays of water, which a wall enclosed
ln its bright compass, where convenient
Stood hot baths ready for them at the centre.
Hot streams poured forth over the clear grey stone,
To the round pool and down into the baths.

http://biblehub.com/nasb/ecclesiastes/1.htm
9 That which has been is that which will be,
And that which has been done is that which will be done.
So there is nothing new under the sun.

Burning the Cosmic Commons: Evolutionary Strategies for Interstellar Colonization: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/filluniv.pdf