One of the easiest ways to get the Penguin snarktillery on standby is condescension. This is dripping with it - I generally match tone for tone, so let’s go with it.

My point is that patriarchy seems to have accelerated technological growth through competition. As Elle points out, this warlike tribe arrives from the Steppe and egalitarianism takes a back seat for a few thousand years. It just happens to be the same few thousand years that everyone went from pottery to the nuclear bomb. So perhaps, from a utilitarian point of view - we now live in a world where more people are alive, there is less famine, better living standards and not everyone dies in childbirth quite so much. Perhaps there’s something inherent in competion and particularly male competion (via warfare) that hasn’t all been terrible doom and gloom for the human race. So there’s that.

Right, let’s presume for a second that you aren’t an idiot. Let’s rephrase a de Santis question so you can think about it without getting your social justice arousal levels raised. If you offered every African American today the opportunity to reset their family history and instead be born in Africa. Do you think the take up rate would be 100%? 50%? 10%? Do you think American descendants of slaves would click their fingers and become African? If not, why not?

I think a decent chunk would, but most wouldn’t… and that is because the nation state which emerged off the back of slavery is not the same thing as endorsing slavery. There are emergent good properties from terrible things - because most social issues are complicated. Now those complexities have to be questioned, explored and discussed without weaponised offence, without polemicists and without everyone going off like a bomb because they’re unable to differentiate between feelings, facts, and opinions.