Episode 31
31: The Roots of Our Rage
(00:00) Intro and T-shirts
(07:53) The News: Republicans are responding with predictable bluster, sedition, and lies to the first week of Joe Biden’s historic presidency. They’re doubling down on every aspect of Trumpism and seeking to punish and purge those who are insufficiently loyal. And there’s peak whining in the fever swamp, about Biden’s agenda, and conservatives being “cancelled” and “rounded up.” And of course, they all stepped right into the “unity” trap he set for them.
(24:33) This week in white supremacy, a whites-only church in Murdock, Minnesota is driving residents of color to leave town.
(29:12) The leader of the Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio has been outed as a major-league police informant.
(31:58) The Department of Homeland Security issued a rare, if not unprecedented terror alert asserting a heightened threat of domestic terrorism in the coming months.
(36:20) The upcoming impeachment trial, cabinet confirmations, and the drama that took place as control of the Senate passed from Republican to Democratic leadership.
(46:03) The Robinhood investment clusterfuck that happened this week. No, it’s not some shining example of the “little guy” fighting back against Wall Street. It’s just another failure of unregulated capitalism, and we’ll discuss why.
(01:00:30) The Roots of our Rage: A continuation of our series on "The Goodness Paradox" we began in part 2 of Episode 29. In Chapter 2, “The Two Types of Aggression,” we discuss reactive vs. proactive aggression a bit more deeply, and the intersection of these concepts with the law. Specifically in regard to how we punish premeditated murder vs. spontaneous manslaughter that often results from contests over character or status in honor cultures.
(01:15:40) Chapter 3, “Human Domestication,” we discuss theories and definitions of human domestication from Aristotle, to Rousseau, to Darwin, to the surprisingly accurate understanding provided by anthropologist Johann Blumenbach in the early 19th century. We talk about how competing erroneous claims about human domestication were used by Nazis to justify racial superiority, and also to argue that domestication has made humans soft and unfit. Leftists also tend to espouse terrible ideas about human domestication to support the “noble savage,” and other anti-civilization tropes.
(01:42:03) Chapter 4, “Breeding Peace,” we talk about experiments on selective fox breeding that were run in the 20th Century by Soviet geneticist Dmitri Belyaev. Belyaev discovered that selecting foxes for low aggression also triggered a range of other mutations, that have been observed across many species, including humans. These mutations seem to have to do with changes in the placement of neural-crest cells that are present in developing embryos.
(01:51:40) Outro
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Show notes:
Part 1 of our series on "The Goodness Paradox" by Richard Wrangham
"The Goodness Paradox" (book) by Richard Wrangham
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