Re: Why Python When There Is Perl?

On 4/2/24 02:50, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Tue, 26 Mar 2024 15:25:07 -0500, Physfitfreak wrote:
 

On 3/25/2024 10:56 PM, rbowman wrote:
>

Agriculture was the downfall of the human race.

>
It led to the concept of ownership. Farmers fought pastoral nomads for
thousands of years because farmers claimed they "owned" the land with
grass on it, and nomads didn't understand that logic one bit, and had to
feed their livestock with the grass on that land.
>
Farmers (i.e. settlers) won.

 Jacob Bronowski, in “The Ascent Of Man”:
      Genghiz Khan was a nomad and the inventor of a powerful war
     machine. And that conjunction says something important about the
     origins of war in human history. Of course, it’s tempting to close
     one’s eyes to history, and instead to speculate about the roots of
     war in some possible “animal instinct”, as if, like the tiger, we
     still had to kill to live, or, like the robin red-breast, to
     defend a nesting territory. But war--organized war--is not a human
     instinct. It is a highly-planned and cooperative form of theft.
     And that form of theft began ten thousand years ago, when the
     harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus, and the nomads rode out
     of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not
     provide.
 Very, very early TV documentary (1971) on the history of science. You
might consider it low-tech nowadays, but I found him an absolutely
riveting presenter. Holocaust survivor,
mathematician/philosopher/polymath, on first-name terms with many of
those who worked on the Manhattan Project ... he died not long after
completing the series.

That's indeed a nice observation he made with what he had at his disposal. But I wished he had access to the best sources, not the low quality blabber that cro-magnons have been giving out and reading about Mongols, and thinking in their own little minds that, that's that; now they know the facts! Best sources are first hand extremely comprehensive eyewitness accounts of the Mongols by a couple of Iranians, and in the Persian language. And not just dotted down by ordinary men, but written and compiled by masters of their own who themselves were eyewitness to it.
"Theft" is near the answer but not exactly it. It was the advent of ownership by one side, and no comprehension of it from the other side, that created the conflict. So you may say farmers "stole" the land by claiming it was theirs now. But that's not what farmers themselves thought of it. That's what nomads thought of it.
Nomads didn't fight farmers for their wheat either. They needed no such strange and unusual item for consumption. In fact they were always better fed than the farmers. It was the necessity of feeding their animals that got them into conflict with the settlers. The world was (and in fact is and will be) nobody's, and it offered grass for their animals. And they needed to feed their animals.
The fuck up had begun after the concept of ownership was concocted, not when surplus product was available to "steal."
For nomads, animals were everybody's. Wild or domesticated. They didn't need to cut others' access to anything in their lives beyond the immediate family cell. That's what human is. But settlers changed that, and as a result, pretty soon they're going to ask you to pay for the air you breathe. They already started it when laws for annual car inspection took effect. You had to pay more for having a better car, cause the air in the city was now somebody else's property. You couldn't do anything you wanted with it.
I had a book that was originally an extensive research of a social scientist into the laws that members of such pastoral nomads had to abide by. It was a jewel of a work. Very carefully studied and discovered and thought out aferwards, based on the author's first hand observation of the remainder of such people that were still conducting that way of life inside Iran. Unfortunately I don't remember the title or the author. It got destroyed together with a few hundreds of more or less other jewels of books, when my ex mother in law failed to protect them in her barn from water damage.
I tried a few times to find the book, with no avail.
That book, said even the form of married life among the members were unique and very different from the form it acquired among settlers (which is to a good extent ridiculous and defective). You'd find out how the marital life of human had been for eons, and to what strange pile of crap it was turned into, by the settlers and their confused and almost insane idiosyncrasies, all foreign to human.
That form of marital relations, to a lesser degree, is still practiced among Kords of Iran, because Kords are the latest of people in that region who gave in to a settler's form of life.
But I may still find the book one day. Requires a bit of luck. I remember its size and the color it's cover, and the approximate number of pages (between 200 and 300). And it was not written for laymen. It was really the book form of some extensive scientific research published somewhere in their journals. Probably combining several papers by the author and possibly others as well. Quite an interesting book that I had stumbled upon in Half Price Books in mid 1980s.
It was the kind of stuff that CIA would have in its library :) Back then anyway. Now they can live by bullshit alone, they think.