I can’t agree with your reply #757, where you say that Totalitarian Agriculture produces food the same way as any other form of agriculture.

Reading about different types of cultivation, I see that agriculture is a way of cultivating by catastrophe, where people till the soil to emulate the effects of a flood (and this method doesn’t tolerate diversity on the landscape) while permaculture/horticulture is cultivation by participating in ecological succession and aiding in building up the soil and fostering diversity in the landscape.

In the response #551, you wrote: “I’ve never said that Leavers and Takers can be distinguished by the way they get their food. They can be distinguished by what they DO with their food. Among Leaver peoples, food is free for the taking. Takers keep it under lock and key so that you have to work for it.”

If locking up the food is a trait that can be used to identify a culture as Taker, why isn’t the act of getting the food through Totalitarian Agriculture such a trait as well?

I was wondering how the current religious/Islamist extremists fit into the Takers v. Leavers struggle. My guess is that these fundamentalists are Leavers fighting back against Taker control.

But aren’t Leavers usually on the peaceful side of things? This makes it look like the Leavers are the “bad guys” by killing and trying to take over the world, or at least Western society.

I suppose these select few could be viewed as an anomaly in the system. What do you think?

Near the conclusion of Ishmael, you proclaimed that humans in the Taker culture have stopped evolving, because they do not live in the hands of the gods. This is the only idea of yours that I cannot wrap my mind around.

I don’t understand how or why evolution would cease for a segment of one species but not for another segment of the same species…especially considering the segment for which evolution supposedly has ceased contains the vast majority of the total species’ population.

In addition, how have the Leaver peoples evolved, and what proof do we have of that evolution?

The interpretation of the story about Cain and Abel and the story of creation was shocking to me. I do not doubt it is very logical as it manifests the antagonism between Takers and Leavers.

But then, it makes me wonder if there is a proof that Hebrews adopted the story of creation from their ancestors and that it actually originated among Semites. Maybe the fact that biblical story explains things so well is a coincidence.

I am very curious to find out more about it. I looked into historical atlases but it was hard to find the map similar to that which is in Ishmael.

I hope it is not the comment of a complete ignorant, but I am surprised that I have not heard this meaning of biblical stories before especially since it sounds so obvious when you hear it.

I agree with you when you say that prohibiting a behavior never eliminates the behavior; it is psychologically and historically sound. What I have trouble doing is formulating an alternative method.

When I explain this to people, they believe that I am crazy to think that laws don’t prevent behavior. They argue that without laws the world would turn to anarchy.

Could you cite an example of how a tribe might handle a homicide, especially when people frequently want revenge on the perpetrator of such a violent crime?

While reading After Dachau I began to wonder how the novel related to the stories of Ishmael, as I’d heard it was a distant cousin of the trilogy. Eventually I gave up and just enjoyed the story.

But, about a day after I finished, I realized that After Dachau was a long form, detailed example of how easily the Great Forgetting talked about in the trilogy could have come to be.

Was this one of the intentions of the story, or am I reading too much into it? Alternatively, am I just dense in believing my discovery to be a revelation as opposed to an obvious conclusion?

I have recently decided to give up dairy for health and animal welfare reasons. I cannot find any reference to dairy in Daniel’s books.

I recently read an opinion that the drinking of cows milk is little more than a cultural tradition. I was wondering when people in human history started consuming dairy products and their reasons for doing so.

I found an article from July 21, 2002 in The Sunday Times Magazine, UK “Cover feature: Is there a time bomb in your diet? Exploding the myths about milk.”

It included the paragraph: “Just 7,000 years ago, the first settled communities, with their new-found genius for growing crops and domesticating animals, were able to create a relative heaven on Earth, verily a ‘land of milk and honey’.” This phrasing reminded me of something familiar and wondered how it fitted in with “the great forgetting.”

I also gathered from this article that 7/10 people worldwide are lactose intolerant because dairy culture was largely confined to the Caucasian minority, and today most of humanity still thinks it a very peculiar practice to consume milk beyond the end of weaning, and even more peculiar to drink the milk of another species.

So is cow milk drinking a product of taker culture? Or am I rejecting a part of my Leaver culture ancestry by giving up all dairy milk.

I suppose what I am really asking about is whether it is true to say that people only started to drink dairy with the development or invention of the kind of agriculture that made people Takers or was animal milk part of human life before then.

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