I've just watched "Hotel Rwanda" and have decided that human beings deserve everything we get. Mother Nature does her best to try and give us the good kicking we deserve, and where she fails, we take up the slack. I'm at at loss to think of any other animal on the planet that goes to the lengths we do to try and kill each other.
Location: A Whilom nimble brain. With 31 million posts.
Age: 73
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Know what you mean.
We can't get much telly here so watching a lot of movies.
"Three Kings" with George Clooney et al. A mixture of futility of war statement' with more than a hint of catch 22's surrealistic decent into madness. Did little to cheer one up.
I just watched "Hotel Rwanda" a few days ago, Jerricho. Very sobering indeed.
I came away wondering (and concluding, actually) that our "civilization" might be very, very fragile.
There is great danger in an "us" vs "them" environment, isn't there? Especially when the two sides are somewhat artificially created. Aren't we all humans?
Jer, it does have an effect on the soul that movie, doesn't it? More so cause it being a true story and all.
The violence we are capable of, the gratuitous cruelty.... most scary thing to me is that apparently, under sufficiently trying circumstance, we are all willing and able to torture, abuse and kill eachother.
Same time, always some magical folk about to restore some fragile faith in man's capacity for good against all odds.
Tin, you really need to get with the programme mate. Jobs change, people change, and that post was way out of order to my mind.
Which brings me to somethign else. While in no way comparing its severity, look at what people are capable of right here on PPRuNe. They go for the jugular, they intentionally attempt to cut off eachother's proverbial balls, they fight, upset and taunt eachother. WTF?
Would not have been a problem if we had given the bad guys a taste of AC130... Of course, CNN dont like video footage of civvies with guns getting chewed up by 20mm
The problem is there are way to many of us talking monkeys walking the earth, way way to many, look for things to get a lot worse, evolution will out,survival of the fittest and all that. As individuals and small groups human being can be and often are altruistic,they will do good works without thought of reward or benifit, but collectively the human race is clinicaly insane.
Ah, the old 'futility of war' argument. Wonder how long this one will run
Actually Blades, that wasn't the intention of me posting this at all.
Human beings would have to be the dumbest "intelligent beings" on the planet. I don't want to go all tree hugging hippie and say we should live in teepees and eat lettuce and grass (ORAC ) singing "Kumbyah". It's just at times we don't use the brains we were given.
I'll use another example. Yesterday Mrs J and I went down to the local animal shelter with the intention of maybe getting another dog. What I saw there literally had me in tears. There was a black collie cross there that some asshole had used as a football and chucked out his car while driving. The physical wounds had healed, but this poor thing was shit scared of everything. I have never seen an animal cower the way this poor thing did when I tried to take him from his cage for a walk.
Location: South of the North Pole, north of the South Pole...
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If more people had lived amongst sabre-toothed lions, hairy mammoths and Neanderthals like I have...they might have a bit more respect for their fellow creatures today! Bunch of decrepit biped leftovers, that's just about all that remain these days
Yeah - we're the top of the food chain all right...
...to such an extent that we're slowly but surely getting the planet straigtened out, paved, polluted & deprived of ressources. As Mr. J says - no need to go hug the trees - it's mankind that need hugging, caus' it's mankind that's under threat
So being top of the food chain is not always a good strategy for survival (unless accompanied by superior intelligence & ability to plan more than 4 years ahead at a time).
Now, as to the top of the food chain, I once saw an argument that being top of the food chain does not gurantee you are the most successful species. The most sucessful species is...
Grass!
It covers 60% of the landmass, humans culture it, use it as food (corn) & do everything to ensure its survival (5-fold harvest? Not so good... 20-fold harvest? Excellent!) & propagation. Humans were merely invented to enforce the propagation of grasses, intelligence was added to make the process more efficient.
Then, of course, the were some side effects to that intelligence stuff... (e.g. genocide, SUV's & sushi), but by then it was too late. So now the grass better enjoy us while we're around. Another 1000 years (if that long) and the grass will be on its own again
We have just come out of the cave, evolutionary speaking. The lower reaches of the brain are beyond good & evil - to be cruel, you need intelligence of some sort. Therefore, even though intelligence may be seen as a destructive & negative force in some ways, it is self-regulating (it'll wipe us out in the end) - unless we wise up & start using our intelligence in a conscious manner.
