Looking for SOMETHING positive

zn wrote:

As a rule, though, people tend to desire hiearchy the more they base ideas about social order on fear.

Real or imagined fears.

…

that’s kinda what i’m trying to get at.

our shit’s emotional.

ya know. i’m just really down right now too.

and half of what i’m saying is born out of frustration.

but hey. forgive me. i’m human.

nyuk nyuk.

PA Ram wrote:

I’d say he had more supporters that didn’t vote than those that stayed home for Hildabeast. Next time don’t nominate a corrupt traitor.

So they loved him so much they stayed home? And more of her supporters showed?

And she got more votes.

I will never understand how the right can create such an airtight, unbreakable reality for themselves. Now he has more support but…they didn’t vote.

Okey dokey, then.

Carry on.

He was given no chance to win by the pundits and almost every poll. So yes I don’t doubt that it cost him votes from supporters who listened to the negative barrage against him and stayed home. Which is why the MSM relentlessly hammered him for 17 months. That is the “airtight, unbreakable reality”. Okey dokey?

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by bnw.

— X — wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Trump publicly encouraged Russia to hack into our electoral system. We know that the Russians did. We also know that Wikileaks focused solely on Clinton and the Dems, using Russian intel.

Well cool. If it’s that easy to manipulate an entire Country, maybe he can encourage Iran to just chill out and send lavish gifts to Israel. Shit, this is gonna be easier than I thought.

LOL

Billy_T wrote:

I’m guessing you won’t respond to this, bnw, cuz you ignored Trump’s Russian connection and his lies about that. But I’ll post it anyway:

Trump will be the first president in living memory to refuse to put his business holdings in a blind trust. And his holdings are worldwide, and he has massive debts with foreign banks.

Conflict of interest, much?

And, sorry, but saying his kids will be running his businesses, so it’s all good, is beyond bogus. You want to talk about “pay to play”? Trump has set the table for that to an unprecedented degree.

How would a blind trust prevent him from doing what you claim? You think he forgot to which banks he has “massive debts”? Prove the conflict of interest. Otherwise you’re just discriminating against anyone with foreign holdings or exposure, which even includes me. Disclosure: I am not a billionaire.

zn wrote:

InvaderRam wrote:

my guess is as the population increases the need for hierarchy increases.

That would assume that human beings are wired to have a need for hierarchy.

If you look at history and anthropology combined, human beings are not wired either for or against social hierarchy. That is you can find examples of everything. If you measure human beings by looking at examples of the kinds of social systems they construct, then, we have done absolutely everything.

In fact what you find about human social hard wiring by looking at examples across space and throughout time is that other than being social animals, we are actually not hard-wired for any one particular way of doing things. We contain endless possibilities that way.

Given that, there’s no reason to assume that population increases lead to a need for hierarchy.

As a rule, though, people tend to desire hiearchy the more they base ideas about social order on fear.

Real or imagined fears.

…

I agree with most of that.

More and more recent studies are actually showing humans are hard-wired for cooperation and empathy, and desire equality. Several recent studies deal with very young kids, most of whom actually get upset when food and toys are not distributed equally. It actually ticks them off, and the studies show they’d rather get rid of extra food and toys than have one kid receive more than the others. There appears to be a bias in favor of equality.

And those kids are saying this about their peers. It’s not just them demanding they receive as much as the other kids. It’s them saying it’s wrong that the other kids receive less, etc.

To me, the evidence points to this: Cooperation, empathy and the desire for equality are beaten out of us over time. These things are replaced by artificial calls to competition, aggression, inequality, indifference, etc. etc.

Yes, there has always been a small percentage that comes into the game already with close to sociopathic ways. But the vast majority of humans are taught to be selfish shits. Most humans aren’t born that way.

— X — wrote:

InvaderRam wrote:

personally i don’t think he’s a racist.

i think he’s an elitist. and that’s more scary to me.

but that’s just me.

and we mean nothing to a man like him.

He’s not. It’s a manipulation of people’s emotions perpetrated by the left. He’s no more racist than Killory is antisemitic. Just because she called an aid a ‘fucking jew bastard’ out of frustration doesn’t mean she wants to kill all the jews. But god forbid Trump said anything remotely like that and it was discovered. He’d be a Nazi sympathizer in a nanosecond.

X,

Blaming that all on “the left” is absurd. It’s even absurd to blame it all on the media, which tilts center-right. It’s just as wrong as what the Dems in their post-mortem are doing right now: Blaming Sanders, the media, millennials, “progressives,” etc. etc. Anyone but Clinton and the Democratic Party itself.

No one had to manipulate anyone regarding Trump’s racism, misogyny, xenophobia, etc. etc. Trump did all of that on his own. It’s on him. His words. His actions. His appeal to the alt-right.

I always find it humorous when people on the right, who generally love to talk about “personal responsibility,” refuse to take it.

Trump brought all of this on himself. No one else did this. It’s on Trump, and he and his followers should “man-up” and accept responsibility.

To me, the evidence points to this: Cooperation, empathy and the desire for equality are beaten out of us over time. These things are replaced by artificial calls to competition, aggression, inequality, indifference, etc. etc.

I can’t go along with that BT. What I was saying was that we contain the possibility for both. So we can be cooperative because we are capable of it, and we can be competitive and aggressive because we are capable of it. Those capacities are free-floating and indeterminate when we’re born but yes different social systems can push us in one direction or another, or sometimes both at once (so for example among themselves the Comanche were communitarian but then then profited from selling slaves and were just extraordinarily brutal to non-Comanche in general).

I don’t as a rule go along with arguments that we have this pure origin (eg. we’re inherently in favor of equality) that then gets altered by circumstances (eg. we are made competitive by circumstances). As a rule, way I see it, if something CAN be altered then it is INHERENTLY alterable. Which means there’s never a such thing as pure origin that gets distorted. It really just means we contain many possibilities, and can be shaped one way or another by circumstances (circumstances including the way social systems are set up).

…

Billy_T wrote:

zn wrote:

InvaderRam wrote:

my guess is as the population increases the need for hierarchy increases.

That would assume that human beings are wired to have a need for hierarchy.

If you look at history and anthropology combined, human beings are not wired either for or against social hierarchy. That is you can find examples of everything. If you measure human beings by looking at examples of the kinds of social systems they construct, then, we have done absolutely everything.

In fact what you find about human social hard wiring by looking at examples across space and throughout time is that other than being social animals, we are actually not hard-wired for any one particular way of doing things. We contain endless possibilities that way.

Given that, there’s no reason to assume that population increases lead to a need for hierarchy.

As a rule, though, people tend to desire hiearchy the more they base ideas about social order on fear.

Real or imagined fears.

…

I agree with most of that.

More and more recent studies are actually showing humans are hard-wired for cooperation and empathy, and desire equality. Several recent studies deal with very young kids, most of whom actually get upset when food and toys are not distributed equally. It actually ticks them off, and the studies show they’d rather get rid of extra food and toys than have one kid receive more than the others. There appears to be a bias in favor of equality.

And those kids are saying this about their peers. It’s not just them demanding they receive as much as the other kids. It’s them saying it’s wrong that the other kids receive less, etc.

To me, the evidence points to this: Cooperation, empathy and the desire for equality are beaten out of us over time. These things are replaced by artificial calls to competition, aggression, inequality, indifference, etc. etc.

Yes, there has always been a small percentage that comes into the game already with close to sociopathic ways. But the vast majority of humans are taught to be selfish shits. Most humans aren’t born that way.

how do we not know those kids are sharing because of learned behavior though? i’m always suspicious of those kinds of studies. too much bias inherent in those studies. humans will always see what they want to see.

of course i could just be seeing what i want to see, so i concede i could be dead wrong about this.

humans love to teach their own to be sharing and to be compassionate with each other. but when it comes to others we are taught to be fearful and guarded.

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by InvaderRam.
• This reply was modified 8 years ago by InvaderRam.

And if even one illegal immigrant murdered or raped a woman (and one did), then he’s not incorrect.

there’s just something so wrong with that statement.

he was fear mongering. that’s the way i saw it.

plain and simple. to me.

InvaderRam wrote:

And if even one illegal immigrant murdered or raped a woman (and one did), then he’s not incorrect.

there’s just something so wrong with that statement.

he was fear mongering. that’s the way i saw it.

plain and simple. to me.

I agree. Again, I think people are desperately trying to spin what he said into something acceptable. The only way to do that is to ignore what he actually said and rewrite it entirely.

[/quote]

zn wrote:

It might be worthwhile to explore what the alt-right IS.

It’s a very definite thing, and Trump went out of his way to court them and include them.

Every other republican candidate steered clear of them. Or at least in terms of visible actions, kept them at an arms distance. Trump sought them out and made them important in his inner circles. He treated them like allies, and that’s openly.

So then…who and what are they.

It is worth investigating if people are willing to surf sites like 4chan and the likes. It’s a disturbing movement, but it’s not anything new. It’s just old school bigotry with a man-bun. Hillary’s mistake was spotlighting it and stirring it up to somehow make a point about Trump himself. Had she just left that alone, and let Trump try to fend off the allegations of his indirect ties to that movement (laughable in and of itself), then she would have been much better off. She, herself, and not Trump, was the likely cause for their turnout at the polls, IMO.

— X — wrote:

zn wrote:

It might be worthwhile to explore what the alt-right IS.

It’s a very definite thing, and Trump went out of his way to court them and include them.

Every other republican candidate steered clear of them. Or at least in terms of visible actions, kept them at an arms distance. Trump sought them out and made them important in his inner circles. He treated them like allies, and that’s openly.

So then…who and what are they.

— X — wrote:

It is worth investigating if people are willing to surf sites like 4chan and the likes. It’s a disturbing movement, but it’s not anything new. It’s just old school bigotry with a man-bun. Hillary’s mistake was spotlighting it and stirring it up to somehow make a point about Trump himself. Had she just left that alone, and let Trump try to fend off the allegations of his indirect ties to that movement (laughable in and of itself), then she would have been much better off. She, herself, and not Trump, was the likely cause for their turnout at the polls, IMO.

He has direct ties, X. He chose one of its leaders as his campaign chair, as already mentioned. And it’s a lot more than just 4chan and the Men’s Right’s folks. Its primary bloc is white supremacists, who use the Orwellian phrase, “white nationalists” to hide that a tad bit. Breitbart, WND, Alex Jones — those people and groups, etc.

His ties to them are direct, and he wouldn’t have won the EVs without them, without the white militias like the Oath Keepers, etc. etc.

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Billy_T.

The Lowest Animal

by Mark Twain

I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the “lower animals” (so-called), and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man.

I find the result humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that the theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

In proceeding toward this unpleasant conclusion I have not guessed or speculated or conjectured, but have used what is com­monly called the scientific method. That is to say, I have sub­jected every postulate that presented itself to the crucial test of actual experiment, and have adopted it or rejected it according to the result. Thus I verified and established each step of my course in its turn before advancing to the next.

These experiments were made in the London Zoological Gardens, and covered many months of painstaking and fatiguing work.

Before particularizing any of the experiments, I wish to state one or two things which seem to more properly belong in this place than further along. This in the interest of clearness.

The massed experiments established to my satisfaction certain gener­alizations, to wit:

1. That the human race is of one distinct species. It exhibits slight variations (in color, stature, mental caliber, and so on) due to climate, environment, and so forth; but it is a species by itself, and not to be confounded with any other.

2. That the quadrupeds are a distinct family, also. This fam­ily exhibits variations–in color, size, food preferences, and so on; but it is a family by itself.

3. That the other families–the birds, the fishes, the insects, the reptiles, etc.–are more or less distinct, also. They are in the procession. They are links in the chain which stretches down from the higher animals to man at the bottom.

Some of my experiments were quite curious. In the course of my reading I had come across a case where, many years ago, some hunters on our Great Plains organized a buffalo hunt for the entertainment of an English earl. They had charming sport. They killed seventy-two of those great animals; and ate part of one of them and left the seventy-one to rot. In order to determine the differ­ence between an anaconda and an earl (if any) I caused seven young calves to be turned into the anaconda’s cage. The grateful reptile immediately crushed one of them and swallowed it, then lay back satisfied. It showed no further interest in the calves, and no disposition to harm them. I tried this experiment with other anacondas; always with the same result. The fact stood proven that the difference between an earl and an anaconda is that the earl is cruel and the anaconda isn’t; and that the earl wantonly destroys what he has no use for, but the anaconda doesn’t. This seemed to suggest that the anaconda was not descended from the earl. It also seemed to suggest that the earl was descended from the anaconda, and had lost a good deal in the transition.

I was aware that many men who have accumulated more millions of money than they can ever use have shown a rabid hunger for more, and have not scrupled to cheat the ignorant and the helpless out of their poor servings in order to partially appease that appetite. I furnished a hundred different kinds of wild and tame animals the opportunity to accumulate vast stores of food, but none of them would do it. The squirrels and bees and certain birds made accumulations, but stopped when they had gathered a winter’s supply, and could not be persuaded to add to it either honestly or by chicane. In order to bolster up a tottering reputa­tion the ant pretended to store up supplies, but I was not de­ceived. I know the ant. These experiments convinced me that there is this difference between man and the higher animals: he is avaricious and miserly; they are not.

In the course of my experiments I convinced myself that among the animals man is the only one that harbors insults and injuries, broods over them, waits till a chance offers, then takes revenge. The passion of revenge is unknown to the higher animals.

Roosters keep harems, but it is by consent of their concu­bines; therefore no wrong is done. Men keep harems but it is by brute force, privileged by atrocious laws which the other sex were allowed no hand in making. In this matter man occupies a far lower place than the rooster.

Cats are loose in their morals, but not consciously so. Man, in his descent from the cat, has brought the cats looseness with him but has left the unconsciousness behind (the saving grace which excuses the cat). The cat is innocent, man is not.

Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity (these are strictly confined to man); he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing; they are not ashamed. Man, with his soiled mind, covers himself. He will not even enter a drawing room with his breast and back naked, so alive are he and his mates to indecent suggestion. Man is The Animal that Laughs. But so does the monkey, as Mr. Darwin pointed out; and so does the Australian bird that is called the laughing jackass.

No! Man is the Animal that Blushes. He is the only one that does it or has occasion to.

At the head of this article we see how “three monks were burnt to death” a few days ago, and a prior “put to death with atrocious cruelty.” Do we inquire into the details? No; or we should find out that the prior was subjected to unprintable muti­lations.

Man (when he is a North American Indian) gouges out his prisoner’s eyes; when he is King John, with a nephew to render untroublesome, he uses a red-hot iron; when he is a reli­gious zealot dealing with heretics in the Middle Ages, he skins his captive alive and scatters salt on his back; in the first Richard’s time he shuts up a multitude of Jew families in a tower and sets fire to it; in Columbus’s time he captures a family of Spanish Jews and (but that is not printable; in our day in England a man is fined ten shillings for beating his mother nearly to death with a chair, and another man is fined forty shillings for having four pheasant eggs in his possession without being able to satisfacto­rily explain how he got them).

Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it. It is a trait that is not known to the higher animals. The cat plays with the frightened mouse; but she has this excuse, that she does not know that the mouse is suffering. The cat is moderate–unhumanly moderate: she only scares the mouse, she does not hurt it; she doesn’t dig out its eyes, or tear off its skin, or drive splinters under its nails–man-fashion; when she is done playing with it she makes a sudden meal of it and puts it out of its trouble.

Man is the Cruel Animal. He is alone in that distinction.

The higher animals engage in individual fights, but never in organized masses. Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and with calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out, as the Hessians did in our Revolu­tion, and as the boyish Prince Napoleon did in the Zulu war, and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.

Man is the only animal that robs his helpless fellow of his country–takes possession of it and drives him out of it or destroys him. Man has done this in all the ages. There is not an acre of ground on the globe that is in possession of its rightful owner, or that has not been taken away from owner after owner, cycle after cycle, by force and bloodshed.

Man is the only Slave. And he is the only animal who en­slaves. He has always been a slave in one form or another, and has always held other slaves in bondage under him in one way or another. In our day he is always some man’s slave for wages, and does that man’s work; and this slave has other slaves under him for minor wages, and they do his work. The higher animals are the only ones who exclusively do their own work and provide their own living.

Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy ex­pense to grab slices of other peoples countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in the intervals between cam­paigns, he washes the blood off his hands and works for the universal brotherhood of man, with his mouth.

Man is the Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Ani­mal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion–several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven. He was at it in the time of the Caesars, he was at it in Mahomet’s time, he was at it in the time of the Inquisition, he was at it in France a couple of cen­turies, he was at it in England in Mary’s day, he has been at it ever since he first saw the light, he is at it today in Crete (as per the telegrams quoted above), he will be at it somewhere else tomor­row. The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out, in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste.

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal. Note his history, as sketched above. It seems plain to me that whatever he is he is not a reasoning animal. His record is the fantastic record of a maniac. I consider that the strongest count against his intelligence is the fact that with that record back of him he blandly sets himself up as the head animal of the lot: whereas by his own standards he is the bottom one.

In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which the other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones–not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.

One is obliged to concede that in true loftiness of character, Man cannot claim to approach even the meanest of the Higher Animals. It is plain that he is constitutionally incapable of approaching that altitude; that he is constitutionally afflicted with a Defect which must make such approach forever impossible, for it is manifest that this defect is permanent in him, indestructible, ineradicable.

I find this Defect to be the Moral Sense. He is the only animal that has it. It is the secret of his degradation. It is the quality which enables him to do wrong. It has no other office. It is incapable of performing any other function. It could never hate been intended to perform any other. Without it, man could do no wrong. He would rise at once to the level of the Higher Animals.

Since the Moral Sense has but the one office, the one capacity–to enable man to do wrong–it is plainly without value to him. It is as valueless to him as is disease. In fact, it manifestly is a disease. Rabies is bad, but it is not so bad as this disease. Rabies enables a man to do a thing, which he could not do when in a healthy state: kill his neighbor with a poisonous bite. No one is the better man for having rabies: The Moral Sense enables a man to do wrong. It enables him to do wrong in a thousand ways. Rabies is an innocent disease, compared to the Moral Sense. No one, then, can be the better man for having the Moral Sense. What now, do we find the Primal Curse to have been? Plainly what it was in the beginning: the infliction upon man of the Moral Sense; the ability to distinguish good from evil; and with it, necessarily, the ability to do evil; for there can be no evil act without the presence of consciousness of it in the doer of it.

And so I find that we have descended and degenerated, from some far ancestor (some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance) insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirchless innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development–nameable as the Human Being. Below us–nothing. Nothing but the Frenchman.

Zooey wrote:

bnw wrote:

— X — wrote:

InvaderRam wrote:

personally i don’t think he’s a racist.

i think he’s an elitist. and that’s more scary to me.

but that’s just me.

and we mean nothing to a man like him.

He’s not. It’s a manipulation of people’s emotions perpetrated by the left. He’s no more racist than Killory is antisemitic. Just because she called an aid a ‘fucking jew bastard’ out of frustration doesn’t mean she wants to kill all the jews. But god forbid Trump said anything remotely like that and it was discovered. He’d be a Nazi sympathizer in a nanosecond.

Killory. Why didn’t I think of that?

Probably the same reason you didn’t think of Hildabeast.

I did think of Hildabeast. I thought of her losing the election and she did.

alt-right

from the wiki

The alt-right has no formal ideology, with the Associated Press stating that there is “no one way to define its ideology.” According to a 2016 description in the Columbia Journalism Review: “Because of the nebulous nature of anonymous online communities, nobody’s entirely sure who the alt-righters are and what motivates them. It’s also unclear which among them are true believers and which are smart-ass troublemakers trying to ruffle feathers.”

It has been said to include elements of white nationalism, white supremacism, antisemitism, right-wing populism, nativism, and the neoreactionary movement. Newsday columnist Cathy Young noted the alt-right’s strong opposition to both legal and illegal immigration and its hard-line stance on the European migrant crisis. Robert Tracinski of The Federalist has written that the alt-right opposes miscegenation and advocates collectivism as well as tribalism. Nicole Hemmer stated on NPR that political correctness is seen by the alt-right as “the greatest threat to their liberty.”

Commonalities among the loosely-defined alt-right include a disdain for mainstream politics as well as support for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

While the label of white nationalism is disputed by some political commentators including Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, prominent alt-right figures such as Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer and Jazzhands McFeels of Fash the Nation have embraced the term as the core philosophy their movement is based on.