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Frederick Roth's avatar

There is a very disturbing corollary to the last segment. I am a regular reader of fellow Substacker HolyMathNerd and she recently reviewed Rob Henderson's book. What truly blew my mind is her assertion that the practices of wokeism/performative denial of reality are not actually errors, but indeed a skill being deliberatively put to use to attain social advancement in an increasingly competitive milieu:

"signaling that one believes certain things while acting as if one believes other things—may eventually be recognized as a marker of intelligence and proper preparation for class climbing"

From: https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/agency-is-a-life-defining-skill

Place yourself inside the nomenklatura during Lysenkoism and the above capacities would be useful indeed. Also recall very similar themes in 1984 about willfully pursuing cognitive dissonance and using ambiguous language which carries whichever meaning that is desirable at-the-time. Modern terms like "inclusion" and "diversity" closely align to duckspeak.

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CP's avatar

I have some experience of Nigeria and the interaction, shall we say, between farmers and pastoralists. Part of the basis for the terrible trouble between them in the last fifteen years or so is the sharp reduction in the ability of cattle to produce milk. This is for a series of factors relating to the sparsity of vegetation meaning that the cattle aren't healthy enough to produce much. The pastoral people of Nigeria are the Fulani (along with a few much smaller group), who have even abandoned the use of butter for traditional rituals at things like weddings and initiation ceremonies.

Anyway, one of the Fulani responses to the strangulation pastoralism has suffered in the north has been the shift of pastoralism towards the centre and south, necessitated by the better vegetation and pasture but enabled by a mix of veterinary advances and mass deforestation meaning the tsetse fly is no longer to be feared. But a downside of this movement* is that there is very little market at all for dairy in the south. Upon investigating this I discovered that lactose intolerance amongst the Igbo and Yoruba people, two major groups of the south, are at astonishing rates of something like 80-90%. I suspect this means that southern Nigerian kids get something like zero dairy once they are off the breast. The northern Hausa, Kanuri and of course Fulani have much greater tolerance, as you describe.

*An expert on pastoralism told me that the rupture of the last couple of decades experienced by the Fulani of Nigeria is the biggest change ever experienced by any pastoralist group anywhere in the world, ever.

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