Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I am working as a gold prospector. I go out one morning to pan for gold. I wade into the icy waters of an Alaskan river and begin the laborious task of sifting through the stones on the river bottom. After ten hours of work I find a single lump of gold, weighing some fraction of an ounce. I throw the lump in the pouch I keep around my neck. I pack up my gear and get ready to head home. But just as I turn away from the river, I hear a hissing noise and then a splash behind me. I turn around and see that the water is steaming in a certain place. I look there and, lo and behold, there is another lump of gold of the same size as the one I prospected: a golden meteorite has fallen from the sky! I grab it from the water and throw it also into my pouch. Now, I head to town to sell my gold to a buyer. When I dump out the contents of my pouch, I can't even recall which lump took ten hours of labor to acquire and which took almost none. Not only that, the buyer doesn't ask! He has n...

Since I first had to teach Marx in a history of thought class, I have come to appreciate him much more. His writings are full of interesting insights, and many of the critiques of him turn out to be critiques of a strawman. Marx is far better than I had thought! So it was with great interest today that I went to a lecture by a Marxist on the Marxist theory of value: maybe there were gems in there I had missed as well. No: the Marxist theory of value is far worse than I had suspected. The notion that only living labor can produce surplus value appears to be based on sheer assertion and definition. It seems to me could create an equally sound theory of value for my ideology of "Celticism": I define surplus value as something that is only produced by living Irishmen (and women... let's not be ethnocentric and sexist!), value which is then expropriated from them by the exploitative non-Irish. If you ask me, "So, industries that employ lots of Irish show the highes...