I had a post some time back about the difference between my attitude to kitchen cleanliness and that of my wife and daughter, roughly the difference between a chemist and a biologist or priest. My question is 'does this surface contain enough bad stuff so that contact with it will make food dangerous'' Theirs is 'is this surface polluted.' It describes the behavior of many partisans; I have not noticed it to be especially common among unmarried female partisans but your experience may differ; Vance's comment on 'childless cat ladies,' later retracted under fire, suggests that his may. Kipling's argument is a counter to Adam Smith's, more than a century earlier. Smith argued that the invention of gunpowder was favorable to civilization because it made warfare more capital intensive (his concept but not his terminology). Before that, the barbarians were a threat to the civilized. After, the civilized were a threat to the barbarians. It will be interesting to see the effect of the...
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