• naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 months ago

    Humans are wonderful. Not always good, not always reasonable, but wonderful.

    We are rich, nuanced, vibrant beings. A small portion of us are defectors but by and large we are community focused and willing to give when we feel we are not being taken advantage of.

    Unless you think all your friends, yourself, and your family are garbage it is inconsistent to assume a random sampling of humans would not display the same prosocial traits you find in them.

    The one thing we are incapable of doing though is handling power.

    • exanime@lemmy.today
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      5 months ago

      All these claims are simply taking a look at a different angle.

      It’s like saying “cars pollute” and you reply with “but have you seen the beautiful colours they come in and how much faster than mules they are”

      You are not wrong but neither are the people claiming humans are, as a herd, fairly dumb and incredibly selfish

      • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 months ago

        neither are the people claiming humans are, as a herd, fairly dumb and incredibly selfish

        wtf? by what standard?

        Humans frequently band together during disaster, humans care for their young and old, humans don’t typically engage in cannibalism of the weak, humans rarely fight to the death or even serious injury, we live in cities of millions with astonishingly low rates of violence etc etc

        where is this terrible selfish stupid behaviour? what standard are you comparing the species to? we’re more violent than orangutans but they’ve never set up water sanitation so I think we can call ourselves smart and we’re less violent than chimps or gorillas… are you comparing us to fictitious ideal beings or what?

        • exanime@lemmy.today
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          5 months ago

          wtf? by what standard?

          if the climate change inaction (or worse, sabotage) did not convince you, I am certain the COVID behaviour should have

          Humans frequently band together during disaster

          If they are directly affected sure… otherwise people may throw some money (which is usually promptly embezzled) and move on

          humans care for their young and old

          Their own young, sure let’s say that is the common majority. Their own old? a lot more questionable. Other people’s LOL… can’t tell you how many people complain about their taxes feeding other people’s children. But this is not an argument against what I claimed… what I said was basically echoing what Tommy Lee Jones beautifully said in MIB, in a nutshell: a human (as an individual) can be AMAZING, but humans (as a herd) tend to default to he lowest common denominator and that sucks!

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkCwFkOZoOY

          humans don’t typically engage in cannibalism of the weak

          what do you think capitalism is?

          humans rarely fight to the death or even serious injury

          Ok, now you are joking… no matter how old you are, I know with 100% accuracy that you have never lived in a world where, somewhere, there was a military conflict and people were being slaughtered… I know because we have not had such a time since 1816 (and that may just have been an absence of records)

            • exanime@lemmy.today
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              5 months ago

              Again you are missing the point.

              I know many great individuals, it’s the masses I fear

              You won’t know the masses by knowing a few people. You learn by studying history and looking at statistics

              • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                5 months ago

                “The masses” are just individuals. You sound like a 20 year old who just discovered atheism and started reading the paper.

                • exanime@lemmy.today
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                  5 months ago

                  I’m actually quite older… And as you get older you’ll see how the masses do not act as their individual parts

                  • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                    5 months ago

                    There’s no fucking antenna that pops out of people’s heads and overrides their thoughts when considered in abstract. That’s Murdoch rag level of boomer bullshit.

                    Idk what broken arse society you feel like you’re from but humans everywhere work towards the collective all the time. You try to come up with some derranged “actually we don’t support the vulnerable” because propaganda about costs is written about and yet even in the face of that people continue to not attack each other in the streets. Oh capitalism is cannabalism is it? fucking derranged take but even so you just conveniently ignore how that system is enforced by a tiny minority and billions of people struggle against it or try to tame it. Oh climate change inaction huh? yes sure if you judge us all by the fucked up leaders of states but what about all the protests? what about all the climate scientists? The journalists writing about? what about the fact that greenwashing is an effective marketing strategy?

                    Like I’m sorry that Shazza and Bazza on the street don’t know how to tackle massive structural issues but it is absolutely a lobotomised take to think that means they’re not decent creatures.