Poly familiesFollow

Ah, child-like "rubber/glue" retorts to avoid admitting the truth again. They worked when you were a little boy so why wouldn't they work now, right?


And throwing temper tantrums about wheels because you can't admit they existed, right?


The interest in it for the Inca culture was more the extent and sophistication of it than "Hey, look! Terraces!".

Again, try to push past your 5th grade social studies understanding.

They had all of sub-Saharan Africa beat out!

The conversation of whether or not being hard wired or not depends on what you are considered being hard wired.

I think it's safe to say that jealousy is a natural reaction that can be controlled. I can't imagine anyone NOT being jealous in some form or fashion in a relationship with more than 2 people. I have many friends, some with benefits, and I control my jealously by reminding myself that I'm doing the same thing. Even though the end result is that I'm not jealous, a lot has to do with the level of the relationship we have and the probability of having a future together.

Some people might want to be in poly relationship, but you would be a fool to believe that it's possible to have found and live in "true love" and not express some form of jealousy. If you subscribe to "true love", the definition in itself contradicts the thought of being hardwired any other way than monogamous.

Well, you were completely befuddled and confused about the wheels as well so I wouldn't use you as a barometer.

I don't believe I ever said I don't experience jealousy, nor was that in any way the subject of this thread. I'm pretty sure you're the first person to bring it up, but that's fine.

Jealousy is absolutely an emotion that can be controlled, and it does have it's usefulness. Now, in my experience, monogamous people usually feel jealousy because they fear losing their significant other. That tends to be why some people don't like their partner having friends of the opposite sex, or getting together for dinner with an ex, etc. In the poly world, you don't have to worry about losing your S.O. because they become interested in someone new, so why be jealous?

Another cause of jealousy tends to be the thought of your S.O. doing X with another person. Whether that be kissing, sex, foreplay, whatever. Now I'm not saying this is true for everyone, but I think a large part of the reason people get upset by these thoughts, is because they have this idea that they own their partner. It might not even be a conscious thing, but it's still there. Look at the way people in a relationship speak about each other. "This is MY husband/wife." "You're MINE." Or to quote the Song of Songs from the bible, "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine." I'm sure there are some other examples, but I can't think of them at the moment. This is possessive language, you are indicating that you own your partner and that they are your possession. Of course poly folks are guilty of this sort of language as well, as it's an ingrained part of our culture.

Poly folks try to look at jealousy from a different angle though. Everyone feels jealousy from time to time, it's a normal human emotion. What matters is what you do with that emotion. I try to use it as a self examination tool. When I feel jealousy, I ask myself why. Am I not getting enough attention from my partner? Are my needs being met? Or is this just a little petty thing that doesn't really matter? If I feel like my needs aren't being met, it's a good time for me to talk to my partner and let them know how I feel so we can rectify it.

Also, you mention "true love." I'm assuming you are referring to the idea that there is one match out there for everyone, i.e. a "soul mate." No, I don't believe in these things. I've seen my own mother love two different men, and never stop loving either of them. My dad passed away when I was a senior in high school. My mom had been with him since she was 16 years old, for over 30 years. She has never stopped loving him. But she did find someone else that she could love, and she got remarried. My mom and my step-dad will have been married 9 years this May. She has told me herself that she doesn't love my step-dad any less than she loves my dad, she just loves them in different ways. People often say this about their children too. That's how I look at poly. I don't believe in "one true love," I believe in compatibility. Does my personality mesh well with this person, do we have things in common that we can talk about? Do I enjoy spending time with them? This is the foundation for any relationship, but that doesn't mean that a relationship that starts as a friendship cannot evolve into a romantic relationship. I think it's important for you to be friends with your partners and/or lovers. Otherwise, how are you going to stand each other when the passion is gone?

One last thing, there is another emotion I would like to briefly mention, as a comparison to jealousy. I'm not sure if this term exists outside the poly world, as this is the only place I've heard of it. Compersion, which is the feeling of happiness you get from watching/knowing someone you love experiencing pleasure with another. It might sound like b.s., but I have felt this before. I can see a partner of mine cuddling or kissing another partner of theirs, and have that vision make me feel happy. I am happy that they are happy, even if they derive that happiness from someone else.

Don't worry, it was a reply to Alma. He'll go off on a whole new tangent.

Yes. No one's disputing that the floating farms were great ideas and helped the city grow (literally, since they basically extended the size of the island it was on artificially). But that only worked in one place. To say "their farming techniques were many times more efficient" you really need to take into account all the techniques across their entire civilization and not just what they did in one location were it worked due to geography.

Once you get outside the lake valley itself, population density dropped dramatically and farming efficiency did as well. The overall effect was that even with the use of the Chinampas, the Aztec living in the main island were reliant on tribute from the surrounding tribes outside the valley. And given the lack of food production efficiency in the rest of the empire, expansion was limited dramatically. They'd hit a wall in terms of what they could do, but their population was still growing in the center of the empire. The result was that they had to become increasingly more brutal with the tribes on the outer edges (and more even towards the central tribes around the lakes themselves).

This set up the conditions which Cortez took advantage of to topple their rule. But honestly, even if he hadn't shown up, their civilization as unsustainable.



Yeah. Because they had advanced metallurgy and had long before cleared tons of land for farming and made that land more fertile along the way. Has it occurred to you to wonder why the population in that same lake valley was several times greater by the 18th century (I'm going to stick to pre-rail/car periods)? Because they cleared land in the rest of what is now Mexico, and made lots of those inefficient European style farms which allowed for the capital region to grow to much greater population levels than when the Aztecs were using their techniques.

Know why this was possible? Roads and carts and land clearing capability. It allows for the transportation of goods much farther and faster without being reliant on where the land happens to have placed rivers and lakes.



Yes. Do you also understand that the entire population of the Americas in the 1500s was about the same as the entire population of Europe? At the risk of stating the obvious, Europe is a hell of a lot smaller than North, Central, and South America. As tends to happen, population grows to the extent to which the existing supply of food can sustain it. Europe was no different than anywhere else in that regard. So when they suffered a disruption, it caused lots of problems.

I'll point out that while the Aztecs were somewhat protected from this due to the farming methods used in the valley, it also limited them in terms of expansion and sustainability. They were already heavily dependent on tribes outside the valley, so it's not like they were immune to the same factors. They might not have starved in the valley, but the tribes outside would, and the result would be harmful (eventually) to the ruling folks as well.



Are you kidding? While we often speak of the model of Feudal Europe as being noble landowners and peasants working on the land, the reality is that there was *always* a middle class. There were always artisans and professionals whose skills were valued and thus could earn a living which afforded them a greater standard of living than just what a single noble might provide directly to someone working on his land. In the countrysides and small villages, there was little of this (but I doubt there was much of a middle class in the smaller tribes and towns in the Aztec empire either. In the larger towns and cities though, there were tradesmen who owned businesses similar to what we'd see today. There were innkeepers, artists, merchants, and all manner of what we'd refer to as middle class.



Apparently my understanding of what Feudal Europe looked like is far better than yours. While all people living or working in a given area were subjects to whatever lord controlled it, not everyone fit into the classic "landowner/landworker" model. I'm not going to claim that Feudal Europe had a huge middle class, but it's absurd to argue that it didn't have one at all. Whether a larger or smaller percentage of the population fit into that class in Europe versus the Aztec Empire is pretty much speculation IMO. I don't know. But neither do you.


But we can say that the number of what we'd label as arbitrary killings by the Aztec rulers was much much higher than anything seen in Europe at the time. There wasn't a whole lot of human sacrifice going on in Europe at the time. And certainly, the practice of killing off rival populations or defeated enemies hadn't been the norm in Europe for quite some time either. You pretty much have to go back to Rome to find a civilization in Europe in which the ruling state demanded human tribute of its vassals to be used as slave labor or for entertainment in death games.


The kind of political structure the Aztecs had wasn't much different than what me might find in Ancient Mesopotamia, or Egypt, or Africa, or Asia. It was certainly not "advanced" in any meaningful way.

Edited, Feb 1st 2012 2:32pm by gbaji

They were used all over the empire, with terrace forming the basis of farming in areas that were distinctly mountainous, so without the ability to create swamplands. Notice I said create. They didn't just create these islands where they found lakes and swamps--they TURNED areas into lakes and swamps.

And you seem REALLY confused about what happened after the Europeans came over. Guess what? Their efficiency was VASTLY lower, to the point where they often had food problems even while utilizing slave labor. They could't evolve--they couldn't react. They brought over their traditional livestock without understanding why it wouldn't do well in their area, and struggling for hundreds of years to try and make it work (it never did well).

Oh, also, the population density in the new world was, generally speaking, equal or higher than Europe. It was almost NEVER lower. You seem to be picturing a Europe where there are towns as well as cities. The problem with that is that it wasn't the case. What we call cities WERE the towns. 97% of the population lived on manors, where they had huts a good mile at least from other peasants, and couldn't possibly afford to feed large families (which was common until the 1700s).

Because this was false:


It's funny how this isn't true.

About artisans, no there weren't. Artisans were ALWAYS peasants. Until the Renaissance, it was unheard of in Europe for people to exist outside of their 3-class system. Many peasants learned practical skills, like blacksmithing. But this never earned a livable wage. They usually received a small stipend from their lord in exchange for reduced farming requirements. Each manor needed a blacksmith, a shoemaker, maybe a weaver or tailor-type worker. But that had never been a full-time job. It was only just starting to change in the period we are talking about. And it was certainly NEVER true of "feudal" Europe.

There WAS an emerging class of intellectuals, essentially writers and lawmakers. But the massive majority of these people were nobility, and the rest were clergy, so it didn't challenge the natural order.



Well, I go to the University whose cultural history program is ranked 9th in the nation, with the general history department ranking 20th. I'm about to graduate with a 4.0 in history, having taken classes and developed personal relationships with many of the preeminent scholars in the field. And this is what ALL of them happen to think is the case.

I know you just HATE experts, but I'm inclined to believe them over a random dumbass on the internet.

ALWAYS.

You know why it's not worth having any sort of discussion with you?

Because any human with a brain knows why:



Is absurd. You think it's clever to turn your argument circular. The rest of us know it's pathetic.





Oh you and your conspiracies.

Merchants, bards, and the rest (outside of a few cities like Venice) were peasant class. There was no middle class (there weren't economic classes at all). Tradesmen existed, but trade was not common in the middle ages, especially following the plague periods. Now, these classes WERE rapidly growing now that Europe was beginning to enter the Renaissance period, but that was only beginning to spread to the rest of Europe (and feudalism still largely applied to everyone outside of cities which, again, had only about 50,000 people or less. Remember the numbers YOU cited for the population of Europe. That's an extremely small percentage of the world at large. Outside of Italy, there wasn't any strong perception of a professional class until 1600 or so.

And what you are completely ignoring is that the discoveries of the new world, as well as trade routes to India and other areas, had a massive impact on turning Europe INTO a trade based society. Until they discovered the new world, they had nothing to trade.

Literally. They couldn't get spices from the Middle East, because they didn't have anything the Ottoman Empire wanted--they were way too wealthy to care about simple European products. It wasn't until Europeans started using New World territories to grow and sell new products that they began to develop a trade-based society.

And if your head wasn't so far up your ***, you'd realize that FUEDALISM isn't an economic system--it's a legal system that officially created and structured three separate classes. There was no "middle" class, there were those who prayed, those who fought, and those who ruled. It wasn't until feudalism was abolished that economic based classes could begin to form. And these classes struggled against the MANORIAL economic systems left behind.