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[–] 30 points 2 months ago* (16 children)

I believe the scientific consensus among historical anthropologists is, and I quote in an Australian accent for some reason:

"we're a right bunch of dickheads we sure are now, ain't we"

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  • [–] 17 points 2 months ago* (15 children)

    Actually, it's the exact opposite.

    Humans are a communal species who, if not for the arbitrary social institutions which sprang up within the last 5000 years of humanity's 120000 years on this planet that incentivize us to go against our nature, have an unending capacity for empathy and solidarity. If we didn't, we never would have formed communities to begin with.

    Read Graeber, famed historical anthropologist who wrote two entire books on this very subject.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    homo sapiens genocided our competitors

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    We also intermingled and incorporated them into our society in equal capacity. Anyone with a nut allergy has genes that were associated with neanderthals. All humans of non-African descent contain 1-2% neanderthal DNA in their genome. It's just a coincidence that we outbreed them to the point they, over the course of millennia, faded as modern homo sapien became the dominant species.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    The DNA presence only confirms that there was interbreeding happening, not what kind of conditions they were happening under. Knowing what I know about our species, especially from the early days, IMO its equally likely that we intermingled via war/conquest (in the form it would have existed for hunter/gatherer societies) and incorporated via slavery. My guess is that history contains examples of both (peaceful and violent exchanges) for each of Neanderthal, homo erectus, and Denisovians, plus maybe others that history isn't as aware of, depending on how diverse hominids got before homo sapiens got settled in everywhere.

    Our species is capable of the full spectrum from good to evil and even today we have a large amount of psychopaths in leadership positions.

    Though we are the first species to be aware that other species have gone extinct and wonder how much of that was directly because of us. And it's not like any homo sapiens that exist today have any responsibility for what happened to species that went extinct before recorded history began anywhere on this planet.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Slavery wasn't really a thing in pre historic Hunter gatherer society:

    "Somewhat more convincing are statistical surveys of large numbers of societies that show that slavery is rare among hunter-gatherers, is sometimes present in incipient agricultural societies, and then becomes common among societies with more advanced agriculture. Up to this point slavery seems to increase with increasing social and economic complexity."

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    Which makes sense, the benefit of slavery is that the master can expropriate all the surplus a person can generate, but hunter gatherers don't really generate surplus. Combine this with the difficulty of keeping someone against there will without a state and people specialized in violence to keep them in line and slavery isn't really that viable.

    In general hunter gatherer tribes were anarchic as consensus and social cohesion were necessary both to make sure you don't starve and to be able to fight off other tribes

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Yeah, I don't think they would have been like modern slaves but more like bully/bullied relationships where those at the bottom aren't forced to do labour but get targetted for various forms of abuse, including sexual, which would have sometimes resulted in a child.

    They probably wouldn't be abused by everyone in the group. Other apes like chimps show sympathy to individuals that get picked on by more dominant individuals, so I'd expect some of us were like that back then, too. But other apes also demonstrate that some individuals can just be assholes or otherwise decent but can get in bad moods.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Even primitive folks have weapons and combat injuries appear in ancient archeological records too.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    They also have plenty of archeological evidence of taking care of the sick or elderly even when doing so would be a resource drain, which means they cared enough about the sanctity of life to help someone who was I need even if it was not mutually beneficial to do so.

    I never said conflict doesn't happen.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    They still are today. I thought you wanted to make the point of the people from the past being fundamentally different/pure.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    No, I was objecting to the misanthropic point that "humans are inherently bad".

    This quote from Graeber said it best.

    We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

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  • [–] 27 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    It's pancakes and waffles.

    "Genocide A is bad."

    "So you're saying you support Genocide B?!?!?"

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Tribalism is great because its actually sportsism.

    Tribal relations are varied and nuanced among plethora tribes, but Sports is a zero-sum A-B, the limit of ways things can be.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I've always hated sports. Sports fans to me appear to be little more than neanderthals. "Think with your muscles, not with your brain, cause life is a zero-sum game. My team better than yours. If you ain't first you're last."

    Philosophically speaking, every part of that is just the complete opposite of everything I believe in.

    The meta of this is if you put philosophy toe-to-toe against sports. In that case, philosophy is better. A sports fan might say "but athletes can score more points than philosophers!" But a philosopher would say "What kind of points? What game are we even playing? What's the objective? How does one win?" and question the assumption that "points" and "winning" would have anything at all to do with physical prowess in the first place.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Sports demand real cognition, not less than philosophy, arguably more, since it happens live, under time pressure, with a body that must execute the conclusion instantly. A point guard reading a defense while the shot clock runs down is doing applied game theory. A boxer managing distance is running live Bayesian updates on an opponent's intent every half-second. "Think with your muscles" gets it backwards: muscles are just the output device: what's upstream is pattern recognition and split-second reasoning under uncertainty, the kind philosophers usually get to do slowly, with a pen and no clock.

    As for competition being some corrupted, zero-sum betrayal of philosophy's higher aims, Nietzsche would say you have it exactly backwards. He didn't see struggle as an unfortunate feature of life to be reasoned away; he saw it as life's basic structure. "Life is will to power," and where there's no resistance to overcome, there's no growth. "What does not kill me makes me stronger" wasn't a locker-room slogan to him, it was near his actual metaphysics.

    He also admired the Greek agon, the competitive contest underlying their tragedy, philosophy, and athletics alike. In "Homer's Contest" he argued the Greeks needed structured competition to keep ambition from curdling into destruction, the contest channels will to power into something generative rather than annihilating. Sport isn't philosophy's opposite; it's an old technology for making competition survivable, even beautiful.

    So framing this as philosophy-versus-sports, which wins, may be the more "neanderthal" move, it smuggles in the same zero-sum, must-crown-a-victor logic you're accusing sports fans of, just relocated to the seminar room. Nietzsche's real challenge wasn't ranking pursuits; it was asking why you need a hierarchy at all, rather than seeing both as arenas where the same drive, to test yourself against resistance and become more, gets expressed.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    So framing this as philosophy-versus-sports, which wins [...] smuggles in the same zero-sum, must-crown-a-victor logic you're accusing sports fans of

    That's why I called it "the meta," it was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating. I was poking fun at myself for the seeming inconsistency there. I probably could have left out that entire last paragraph and it would have been better but sometimes I forget that my oddball humor doesn't always come across the way I intend it to

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  • [–] 18 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    No nation on earth is without blood on their hands, is that so hard for us regular working people to see?

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    Saying the first one is how you get banned from tankie communities.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (7 children)
  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    I was accused of "Orientalism" last week and banned for three days from the community (Memes@lemmy.ml) with all of my comments nuked because I said Xi Jinping and the CCP are bad (largely due to what they're doing to the Uighurs) and that the Xinnie the Pooh meme isn't inherently racist (though as I said in the nuked thread, it definitely could be used for racist purposes that I hadn't even realized a connection for initially because anti-Asian racism orientalism is simply a blind spot for me).

    This week I had a comment removed for "Electoralism" from LeftyMemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com because I said Kamala Harris turning towards supporting the DSA is a good thing that we shouldn't drag her for.

    Obviously the first accusation is pretty transparent as far as guessing what orientalism is (as well as the real reason for the ban), but I had to look up what electoralism even is. After reading the Wikipedia article I'm 99% sure it doesn't fit what I said in the slightest, and I'm 100% sure I don't know what rule I violated over there.

    So anecdotally in my brief time here, Lemmy moderators do seem to be much more removal/ban-happy than the Reddit moderators I'm used to, but at least it's way easier for competing communities to out-compete the crummy ones. If your city's subreddit (i.e. /r/tampa) goes to shit because one moderator power-trips and the others could not give a flying fuck if they had a gun to their heads, you're just out of luck. There is no such thing as tampa@differentredditdomain.whatever. You have to pick from some off-brand /r/tampa2, /r/realtampa, /r/bettertampa, etc. Then the /r/tampa moderators report you for "brigading" and you're on the admin shit-list.

    Anyway, I guess the lesson I learned about Lemmy is that Memes@lemmy.ml and LeftyMemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com have one or more overzealous tankie moderators. Very well, that's what the block feature is for, especially if they don't answer my appeals like I expect will happen. There are other meme communities.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    USA has committed way more genocidal acts than just that.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    USA's CIA had toppled a lot of democratically elected governments and replaced them with brutal authoritarian regimes that lasted decades. Basically they let the natives of respective countries do the killings.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago

    The problem is also a lot of people refuses to do good things because said good things is something that is done by someone who is perceived to be bad.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Am so happy my nations of England and Spain have never done anything...............

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Isn't that exactly the point of the person on the top right? They're defending against the "Communism bad" stance, by trying to communicate that it isn't exactly a fair stance when talking about atrocities as it's always powerful, authoritarian nutcases doing them. It's not like it's part of the communist agenda to be fucking horrible.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago
    [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    Very based idea, but let's make sure we focus the bad to handle the current happening right fucking now and we can stop it bad from continuing to happen.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    My country has committed countless acts that would be considered atrocities either now or at the time. We had several groups of second-class citizens, dabbled in genocide, were religiously tolerant, sided with nazis, sided with communists, convinced muslims that alcohol is okay, foiled plans of every ally and enemy we came into contact with, our president endorsed Trump and was endorsed by Trump, successfully invaded russia twice, enlisted animals into army and had pedophiles among clergy.

    And we still have several movements, modern or historical, portraying us as the good guys and calling us "Jesus of nations"

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    Which country are you speaking of?

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Ha! I expected people o try to guess...

    spoilerPoland!

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    High horsing around

    Spend billions constantly smearing and badmouthing the enemy rival regime

    "You're no better"

    "NOOOOO a historian would just say ok and not challenge our propaganda!"

    PS: This is of course satire. Since the rise of the historians, all hypocrites have been killed.

    PPS: Just read this and I think it puts the hypocrisy of OPs meme better than my bullshit:

    It reminds me of what Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter said in his acceptance speech in 2005 critiquing the Iraq War and U.S. foreign policy:

    “It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

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