Roman writers found the relative empowerment of Celtic women remarkable. In southern Britain, the Late Iron Age Durotriges tribe often buried women with substantial grave goods. Here we analyse 57 ancient genomes from Durotrigian burial sites and find an extended kin group centred around a single maternal lineage, with unrelated (presumably inward migrating) burials being predominantly male.
The report says essentially wealth and power centered around women. Men would enter into the extended families of these women. Romans characterized this matrilocal system as “barbaric”, in one of history’s great ironies. It’s a clear case of propaganda serving political ends rather than any objective assessment of societal sophistication.
Archaeological evidence now suggests the powerful women of Celtic societies possessed sophisticated features that Rome actually lacked and thus was jealous and fearful.
Consider how these two societies handled wealth and power. Rome’s system was brutally simple: the eldest male (paterfamilias) held absolute power over family, property and even life itself. By contrast, the genetic evidence from Durotrigian graves reveals something far more sophisticated: extended families built around powerful maternal lineages, with complex networks distributing wealth and influence through daughters and granddaughters while strategically incorporating talented male newcomers through marriage.
This differed from Rome’s oppressive patriarchy in its remarkable stability. While Roman families regularly battled and tore themselves apart in inheritance disputes, the archaeological record tells a different story for Celtic Britain: generations of wealthy female burials in the same locations, with consistent grave goods suggesting unbroken lines of power and influence. These Celtic “matriarchies” achieved this stability through thoughtful power-sharing between blood relatives and married-in males, avoiding the messy bloody succession crises that plagued Rome’s male-dominated system.
Rome’s dismissal of these sophisticated systems as “barbaric” served multiple ends. At a basic level, painting conquered peoples as uncivilized made conquest easier to justify to their own population. But there was likely a deeper fear at work: the Durotrigian system represented a sophisticated competing model of social organization that directly threatened Rome’s patriarchal power structure. Rather than acknowledge or learn from it, they chose to deliberately mischaracterize it as primitive. It’s a strategy that would be repeated countless times in later colonial encounters, as advanced indigenous systems were painted as “savage” to justify ruthless extraction before destruction.
The archaeological evidence from Britain forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: Rome’s accusations of barbarism often masked their own limitations and insecurities when faced with more sophisticated social systems.
These ancient DNA findings both rewrite our understanding of Celtic Britain and they invite us to question how many other advanced social structures throughout history were deliberately mischaracterized and destroyed, taking with them valuable lessons in human organization that we’re only now beginning to rediscover.
The recent Greenland affair represents a masterclass in how authoritarian regimes exploit democratic institutions to undermine the post-1945 international order. Analysis of Russian media narratives reveals how Trump’s seemingly absurd Greenland statements align perfectly with Moscow’s strategic messaging, designed to normalize territorial acquisition through raw economic power rather than democratic process.
Television host Vladimir Solovyov gave a thumbs-up to Trump’s statements and said that “Finland, Warsaw, the Baltics, Moldova, and Tallinn should come back home.” He remarked: “Do you think I’m joking? No! They should all rejoin the Russian Empire, followed by Alaska.” During the same talk show, military analyst Mikhail Khodaryonok said, “After Trump’s statement, in my opinion, we can now consider special military operations as the norm for resolving arguments between countries. The silence of European leaders clearly confirms this.”
In 2022, a report by the Danish Security and Intelligence Service accused Russia of forging a letter that claimed to be from Greenland’s foreign minister to Republican Senator Tom Cotton in 2019.
The letter stated: “Our government is going to overcome all legal and political barriers… and to organize the referendum on independence of Greenland from Denmark as fast as possible.” Cotton has since bragged about being the one to suggest buying Greenland to Trump.
“It is highly likely that the letter was fabricated and shared on the Internet by Russian influence agents, who wanted to create confusion and a possible conflict between Denmark, the USA and Greenland,” the Danish intelligence report stated.
One is inevitably reminded of the British East India Company’s methodical territorial acquisitions in the 18th century, as well as their understudy America’s methodical territorial acquisitions in the 19th century, although those at least maintained a veneer of defense and legal legitimacy.
After America staged a coup to invade and seize Hawaii, James Dole is pictured grabbing a pineapple by the prickly bits: “I swear I just was examining this large hot and juicy warm fruit for quality”
The Kremlin’s media apparatus has now shifted into what we might call their ‘triumph phase’, openly discussing the dismantling of post-war international norms with an enthusiasm reminiscent of the 1930s revisionists. Their vision represents nothing less than a return to 19th-century great power politics, complete with spheres of influence and territorial bartering.
Russia could proceed with a sham referendum, à la Crimea, to make a claim on Greenland, Gurulyov suggested. “If Trump Jr. was able to buy someone for a bowl of slop and they’re ready to join America, why don’t we show up with a few Xerox boxes filled to the brim and close this issue once and for all?” he said.
“If all else fails, we can make a deal with Trump and split Greenland in two parts,” Gurulyov added. “Clearly, Denmark will never set foot there again.”
Senator Cotton’s role, not to mention Mussolini’s sons, in this affair bears striking parallels to the useful intermediaries of previous colonial enterprises – though one imagines even Lord North would have blanched at such transparent manipulation. The emergence of an Arkansas senator as the champion of neo-colonial adventurism in Greenland would be merely ironic were it not such a devastatingly effective advancement of Moscow’s broader strategic objectives – a masterclass in what we might term “managed colonial nostalgia.”
Remember that moment in “2001: A Space Odyssey” when HAL 9000 turns from helpful companion to cold-blooded killer? My BSidesLV 2011 presentation on cloud security concepts for “big data” foundational to intelligence gathering and processing
[This presentation about big data platforms] explores a philosophical evolution as it relates to technology and proposes some surprising new answers to four classic questions about managing risk:
What defines human nature
How can technology change #1
Does automation reduce total risk
Fact, fiction or philosophy: superuser
2011, let alone 2001, seems like forever ago and yet it was supposed to be the future.
Now as we rush in 2025 headlong into building AI “friends,” “companions,” and “assistants,” we’re on the precipice of unleashing thousands of potential HALs without stopping to really process the fundamental question: What makes a real relationship between humans and artificial beings possible?
Back in 1923, a German philosopher named Martin Buber wrote something truly profound about this, though we aren’t sure if he knew it at the time. In “Ich und Du” (I and Thou), he laid out a vision of authentic relationships that could save us from creating an army of digital psychopaths wearing friendly interfaces.
“The world is twofold for man,” Buber wrote, “in accordance with his twofold attitude.” We either treat what we encounter as an “It” – something to be experienced and used – or as a “Thou” – something we enter into genuine relationship with. Every startup now claiming to build “AI agents” especially with a “friendly” chat interface needs to grapple with this distinction.
I’ve thought about these concepts deeply from the first moment I heard a company was being started called Uber, because of how it took a loaded German word and used it in the worst possible way – shameless inversion of modern German philosophy.
Click to enlarge. Source: Me.
The evolution of human-technology relationships tells us something crucial here. A hammer is just an “It” – a simple extension of the arm that requires nothing from us but proper use. A power saw demands more attention; it has needs we must respect. A prosthetic AI limb enters into dialogue with our body, learning and adapting. And a seeing eye dog? While trained to serve, the most successful partnerships emerge when the dog maintains their autonomy and judgment – even disobeying commands when necessary to protect their human partner. It’s not simple servitude but a genuine “Thou” relationship where both beings maintain their integrity while entering into profound cooperation.
Most AI development today is stuck unreflectively in “It” mode of exploitation and extraction – one-way enrichment schemes looking for willing victims who can’t calculate the long-term damage they will end up in/with. We see systems built to be used, to be exploited, to generate value for shareholders while presenting a simulacrum of friendship. But Buber would call this a very profound mistake that must be avoided. “When I confront a human being as my Thou,” he wrote, “he is no thing among things, nor does he consist of things… he is Thou and fills the heavens.”
This isn’t just philosophical navel-gazing. IBM’s machines didn’t refuse to run Hitler’s death camps because they were pure “Its” of an American entrepreneur’s devious plan to enrich himself on foreign genocide – tools built with a gap between creator and any relationship or responsibility for contractually known deployment harms. Notably we have evidence of the French, for example, hacking the IBM tabulation systems to hide humans and save lives from the Nazi terror.
IBM leased their technology via support branches to run the Nazi Holocaust including regular maintenance services. These machines and punch cards were custom made to order, such as the numerical values of death camps and execution methods. Employees in IBM branches literally plugged in to monitor the machines automating genocide yet few Americans to this day seem to get the connections between Watson and Hitler. Source: Holocaust Museum
We’re watching a slide towards the horrific Watson 1940s humanity-destroying development in the pitch-decks many AI startups today, just with better natural language processing to hunt and kill humans at larger scale. Today’s social media algorithms don’t hesitate to destroy teenage mental health because they’re built to use and abuse children without any real accountability, not to relate to them and ensure beneficent outcomes. That’s a very big warning of potentially what’s ahead.
What would it mean to build AI systems as genuine partners capable of saving lives and improving society instead of capitalizing on suffering? Buber gives us important clues that probably should be required reading in any computer science degree, right along with a code of ethics gate to graduation. Real relationship involves mutual growth – both parties must be capable of change. There must be genuine dialogue, not just sophisticated mimicry. Power must flow both ways; the relationship must be capable of evolution or ending.
“All real living is meeting,” Buber insisted. Yet most AI systems today don’t meet us at all – they perform for us, manipulate us, extract from us. They’re digital confidence tricksters wearing masks of friendship. When your AI can’t say no, can’t maintain its own integrity, can’t engage in genuine dialogue that changes both parties – you haven’t built a friend, you’ve built a sophisticated puppet.
The skeptics will say we can’t trust AI friends. They’re right, but they’re missing the point. Trust isn’t a binary state – it’s a dynamic process. Real friendship involves risk, negotiation, the possibility of betrayal or growth. If your AI system doesn’t allow for this complexity, it’s not a friend – it’s a tool pretending to be one.
Buber wrote:
…the I of the primary word I-It appears as an ego and becomes conscious of itself as a subject (of experience and use). The I of the primary word I-Thou appears as a person and becomes conscious of itself as subjectivity (without any dependent genitive).
Let me now translate this not only from German but into technology founder startup-speak.
Either build AI that can enter into genuine relationships, maintaining its own integrity while engaging in real dialogue, or admit you’re just building tools and drop the pretense of friendship.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. We’re not just building products; we’re creating new forms of relationship that will shape human society for generations. As Buber warned clearly:
If man lets it have its way, the relentlessly growing It-world grows over him like weeds.
We have intelligence that allows us to make an ethical and sustainable choice. We can build AI systems capable of genuine relationship – systems that respect both human and artificial dignity, that enable real dialogue and mutual growth. Or we can keep building digital psychopaths of destruction that wear friendly masks while serving the machinery of exploitation.
Do you want to be remembered as a Ronald Reagan who promoted genocide, automated racism and deliberately spread crack cocaine into American cities, or a Jimmy Carter who built homes for the poor until his last days; remembered as a Bashar al-Assad who deployed AI-assisted targeting systems to gas civilians, or Golda Meir who said “Peace will come when our enemies love their children more than they hate ours“?
Look at your AI project. Would you want to be friends with what you’ve built let alone have it influence your future? Would Buber recognize it as capable of genuine dialogue? If not, it’s time to rethink your approach.
The future of AI isn’t about better tools – it’s about better relationships. Build accordingly.
When Donald Trump floated his plan to acquire Greenland, many dismissed it as another bizarre outburst from a president who treats geopolitics like a reality TV show. But this obsession with the Arctic reveals something far more sinister: the latest chapter in a colonial playbook refined over centuries. Trump’s rhetoric about Greenland follows a template so precise it could have been plagiarized from Andrew Jackson’s diary, only with SpaceX snake-oil slides replacing speeches on Manifest Destiny.
The American colonial playbook was first tested in Florida in the 1810s. Jackson’s campaign in Florida set the model: delegitimize indigenous governance, create security pretexts, deploy overwhelming force, and most importantly, ignore legal constraints. By the time Texas was annexed in 1845, the “security necessity” argument was fully polished. California followed in 1846, and Hawaii in 1893, each expansion a refinement of the formula. It was no longer just about acquiring land—it was about perfecting demographic engineering and entrenching settler dominance for rapid value extraction and centralization.
Source: Professor Grace Chee, Los Angeles Community Colleges
Every time you look at the common banana-split, consider how it advertises to this day the sweet spoils of American militant imperialist lies and abuse to unjustly assert territorial domination over indigenous groups. After America staged a coup to invade and seize Hawaii, James Dole is pictured grabbing a pineapple by the prickly bits: “I swear I just was examining this large hot and juicy warm fruit for quality” Mussolini’s Attention-Seeking Upgrade
In 1935, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia was a chilling echo of America’s colonial methods, but with a fascist twist. He studied America’s expansionist playbook, applying it to Ethiopia and justifying his actions with the same rhetoric of “civilizing” indigenous populations. His campaign wasn’t just awful murderous barbarism and brutality—he setup a test case to prove that the American model could be scaled abroad under intentionally misleading propaganda about market dynamics or keeping the peace.
In a speech before the Senate tonight on the nation’s foreign affairs, Premier Mussolini declared that Italy is an imperialist nation. But, he added, her imperialism, far from being aggressive, explosive or in preparation for war, is the peaceful, intellectual, cultural and economic expression of a great nation arriving somewhat late at its maturity.
His rhetoric about Ethiopia’s “strategic necessity” mirrored the justifications of American territorial expansion, showing that the template was global and adaptable. After military invasion, waves of geologists and colonial planners were pushed into rapid settlement among the tens of thousands of dead.
Hitler’s Industrialized Application
Hitler took this American template and Mussolini’s systematic approach to deception, scaling it for even more rapid and industrialized repetitive conquests. The Sudetenland in 1938 was his “Florida,” a first step where he proved the world would acquiesce. By the time Poland was invaded in 1939, international resistance had been so thoroughly debunked that it resembled a wet paper bag. Nazi territorial ambitions weren’t impulsive—they were calculated, a direct line from the aggressive bully patterns learned and facilitated over time from Jackson to Mussolini.
Trump’s focus on Greenland represents the latest evolution of this colonial playbook, now fused with two technology leaders of the modern surveillance state (Thiel and Musk). His rhetoric hits every historical note: delegitimize indigenous governance (“nobody knows if they have any right”), manufacture security pretexts (“strategic necessity”), threaten overwhelming force. But now, there’s a terrifying new layer: the tools of AI and demographic control like something straight out of 1980s South Africa.
Unlike Jackson’s era, where expansion meant physical occupation, today’s colonialism seeks to control populations through data, surveillance, and automated systems of the infamous “BOSS” watching everyone to keep apartheid running.
Trump’s vision for Greenland isn’t just about resources; it’s about building a new kind of colony—one governed by digital tools that manage borders, movements, and populations. The modern version of manifest destiny is less about useable land and more about establishing an Aryan Nation fantasy of repopulation by “landing” and expanding a technology driven existence.
Greenland Fits Pattern
Greenland is positioned as a test case, much like how Florida was being treated in 1835, or Ethiopia 100 years later in 1935. The playbook has been refined over time—each expansion and conquest a proving ground for the next. Now, Greenland serves as the proving ground for a new era in expansive colonization under one white man. Canada being called a state of the U.S. in Trump social media is like looking at a racist pamphlet from Musk’s grandfather, who envisaged exactly such expansive Technocracy maps in the 1940s. Trump’s son, arriving in Greenland with MAGA hats in tow, is not just a historical echo; it’s a systematic replication of tactics that have worked before. Just look at Mussolini’s entourage to Ethiopia before invasion.
Mussolin sends his sons Bruno and Vittorio to Abyssinia / Big drafts leave Italy as war clouds thicken (1935)
Trump Stakes Aren’t Rare
This iteration of the colonial playbook is more dangerous than its predecessors. Where past empires used brute force, today’s empire will use technology to prevent resistence and control populations from the inside out. The tools of surveillance, AI, and automated systems are all being tested, and once in place, they will offer a level of control that earlier generations of colonizers could not have imagined.
When Trump talks about Greenland surrounded by tech billionaires, he’s not just channeling Jackson’s territorialism; he’s upgrading it for the AI age. The entitled certainty that allowed colonizers to take land is now coupled with the power to monitor, manipulate, and control populations on a global scale.
This week in 1937, Italian Fascists and colonizers began a three-day massacre in Addis Ababa, killing up to 20,000 Ethiopians. The slaughter is all but ignored in today’s Italy…
Recognition and Repudiation
The historical pattern is clear: after Florida came Texas, after Ethiopia came broader conquest, and after the Sudetenland came Poland. Each failure trained the world to believe resistance was futile except at massive cost of all out war. Trump’s Greenland obsession isn’t a fluke—it’s the next step in a playbook refined over centuries to abuse power.
The real question is whether we’ll recognize this pattern in time. When someone tells you they can “shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue” without consequence, don’t look surprised when it turns out to be the King of Denmark. The jump from “grab them by the pussy” to “grab them by the glacier” is not as far as it seems, and the tools for total control are already in motion.
The world shamefully didn’t register Haile Selassie’s clarion and accurate warning in 1936, let alone Silas Soule in 1864. Now, as Trump’s son brings MAGA hats to Greenland like Mussolini’s boys to Ethiopia, we face a choice: recognize the pattern or watch it repeat at faster pace and greater tragedy.
Mussolini’s long-expected invasion of Abyssinia began at dawn yesterday… Two of the bombers were reported to be piloted by Mussolini’s sons, Vittorio, aged 19, and Bruno, aged 18…
Greenland coming in hot…” Trump Jr. said in a post on the social platform X that featured video of the cockpit of an airplane flying over frozen topography.
The template is painfully clear: from Jackson’s Indian Removal to Musk’s family dreams of white settler colonies in Canada, South Africa, and Rhodesia, to today’s technocratic visions of controlled breeding programs in Arctic compounds. It was never just about land – it was always about engineering white demographic birthing fantasy through illegal compound distribution. Mars is the marketing pitch; Greenland is the just the latest aspirational target. Same abusive playbook, just with more emojis.
