It’s seems to me that the problem is with human nature. We are hierarchical animals. We want to win. We are inherently violent. We don’t actually like to live in peace. We get bored. We show dominance by bullying. We create drama. We create enemies in our minds and then fight them in the public square (now virtual).
Most of all, we want to be proved right and prove our enemies wrong.
Civilization is an antidote to these destructive human tendencies. And civilization is falling apart, along with our natural environment. There are too many of us who are fighting for supremacy. And we would rather see everything destroyed than allow our rivals to succeed.
Sorry to get so philosophical, but it sucks that we are still ape-like. Thousands of years of civilization have sadly not overcome that.
Like you say, we have to fight this devolvement. We have to fight for a civil society.
And Donald Trump is one of several chimpanzees who wants to lord it over us all.
Let’s not allow this. But it also means getting over ourselves and agreeing to cooperate.
Unfortunately, that’s a tall order for most humans.
No argument. I would add that one of the most intolerable feelings in the world is that we're wrong, in a way that pokes a hole in our self-image. Being corrected on a fact we stated that we got wrong, when we're invested in being 'the expert'. Or realizing we're perceived a different way than we perceive ourselves. What scares me about the right and left extremes is how invested they are in being 'right', that their *ideologies* are beyond reproach. How do you move forward and cooperate with others when they're evil because they don't believe this or that?
Both sides are so convinced they're 'right' that they can't fathom the idea that they might be at least a *little* wrong, that their ideology might need some tweaks here and there? Especially as humans evolve every day and what was right (to the best of our knowledge) in the past is no longer so, or no longer serves us? Even worse, we're so 'right' that we can see how hideously wrong we are, and how we are becoming what we claim to fight. Hence the racism, misogyny, and lack of commitment to genuine human rights we see on the far left. Hence the ossified commitment to fallacy from the Bible we see on the Christian Right, slavishly believing in the infallibility of a demonstrably fallible book. I'm surprised more of them aren't Flat Earthers, although I did talk to a Christian late last year who enlightened me a bit on how fundamentalist Christian thought is beginning to evolve very slowly toward an acceptance of dinosaurs and the fact that Satan didn't plant them there to confuse Christians, and that no person ever met a dinosaur.
I do think the left, especially the Democrats, have been way too wishy-washy and let the right get away with so much. Like I've argued that staying with an abusive partner gives them permission to continue abusing you, so too would I argue that liberals gave the Right permission to further abuse their power *and expect impunity* because of letting George Bush and his cronies get away with war crimes. That was one of the most serious breaches of government action I've seen in my life - way worse than Nixon's crimes. And we let them get away with it. *All of it*.
So yeah, no surprise that we now have to stiffen our spines and stand up to Trump and his MAGAts and finally draw some moral lines in the sand. "Enough is enough. You've gone too far. No one is above the law." I'm hoping all the Jan 6 convictions have convinced the MAGAts that they will suffer real consequences if they get violent. And if they do, I hope the Biden administration will have the balls and labia to go after them, too, despite it being the year before an election. I'm not sure they will.
Yes, fighting irrational aggression driven by delusional certitude is a lot of effort. Civilized people would rather not fight. That’s why bullies win so much. And they get results quickly, which their followers like. The horrible consequences can’t be seen for years. And once they are seen, they are quickly forgotten ( I’m thinking of Mike Harris’s “common sense” revolution in Ontario in the late ‘90s). Doug Ford is doing the same as Harris, only worse. But everyone has forgotten the people who literally died because of Harris’s policies.
So we on the moderate left have to be more aggressive. Because it’s almost too late.
I love that fundamentalist Christians are starting to accept evolution. That only took 200 years!
That shows me that social changes have to happen more slowly than progressives would like. Otherwise, there can be a violent backlash like we’re seeing today.
But we’ve allowed too much to happen and we have to do some damage control. The bullies have gotten away with too much for too long.
What makes me hopeful is that the younger generation is pissed and won’t put up with this bs much longer. They have nothing to lose. The Republican old guard has everything to lose and they will not give up without a massive fight.
The same part of North America has to take them on. We are in the majority.
Wait, I didn't say Christian fundamentalists were beginning to accept evolution - not based on that one conversation - just that they were beginning to accept certain realities. Like, that dinosaurs existed, and that humans may not have been around to see them. How they're going to work it out is beyond me but it was interesting. The conversation was on a client's sales campaign I'm on in which I was talking to an online retail store, localized somewhere in the West, where they did fossil digs to get kids interested in science. The guy explained how that worked and i was careful not to be challenging or combative - my role was salescritter, not truth activist - and it was actually a good exercise for me to just listen to what the guy had to say. If we had met at a cocktail party I would have asked more questions but for this purpose I kept it to how his org & my client's might partner together in the future.
You're right that civilized people don't like to fight, and that can be immensely harmful. It allows bullies to rule the playground. At some point you've got to become George McFly and whack Biff. And funny, Biff never gave him any more shit.
The Biden administration hit back hard at the insurrectionists and arrested the shit out of them. So as we worry about Trump's call for 'death and destruction', maybe...there's a little less appetite for that on the right than there was a few years ago.
That gal Nashali Alma I wrote about a few weeks ago? The one who fought off her rapist? She could have gotten hurt! But she fought back and she didn't get (seriously) hurt and she didn't get raped either. I called the cops on my neighbour's problematic male guest (you know that story) and worried he might come after me. But he didn't. Sometimes bullies do hit back, hard. Sometimes we get hurt or killed for fighting back. But it's somehow heroic when men die for their cause, and to save others' lives, but not when women do it.
We hit back at the Jan 6 perps, and so far, it appears we have sent them a serious message about what we're going to take...or not. We can't be, to be blunt, pussies anymore.
Let's just make sure we don't turn into the bullies, consequentially.
Amen. We have to know when to fight and when to just ask questions. We always have to watch the tendency to slip into bullying. We’re all capable of it.
It’s seems to me that the problem is with human nature. We are hierarchical animals. We want to win. We are inherently violent. We don’t actually like to live in peace. We get bored. We show dominance by bullying. We create drama. We create enemies in our minds and then fight them in the public square (now virtual).
Most of all, we want to be proved right and prove our enemies wrong.
Civilization is an antidote to these destructive human tendencies. And civilization is falling apart, along with our natural environment. There are too many of us who are fighting for supremacy. And we would rather see everything destroyed than allow our rivals to succeed.
Sorry to get so philosophical, but it sucks that we are still ape-like. Thousands of years of civilization have sadly not overcome that.
Like you say, we have to fight this devolvement. We have to fight for a civil society.
And Donald Trump is one of several chimpanzees who wants to lord it over us all.
Let’s not allow this. But it also means getting over ourselves and agreeing to cooperate.
Unfortunately, that’s a tall order for most humans.
No argument. I would add that one of the most intolerable feelings in the world is that we're wrong, in a way that pokes a hole in our self-image. Being corrected on a fact we stated that we got wrong, when we're invested in being 'the expert'. Or realizing we're perceived a different way than we perceive ourselves. What scares me about the right and left extremes is how invested they are in being 'right', that their *ideologies* are beyond reproach. How do you move forward and cooperate with others when they're evil because they don't believe this or that?
Both sides are so convinced they're 'right' that they can't fathom the idea that they might be at least a *little* wrong, that their ideology might need some tweaks here and there? Especially as humans evolve every day and what was right (to the best of our knowledge) in the past is no longer so, or no longer serves us? Even worse, we're so 'right' that we can see how hideously wrong we are, and how we are becoming what we claim to fight. Hence the racism, misogyny, and lack of commitment to genuine human rights we see on the far left. Hence the ossified commitment to fallacy from the Bible we see on the Christian Right, slavishly believing in the infallibility of a demonstrably fallible book. I'm surprised more of them aren't Flat Earthers, although I did talk to a Christian late last year who enlightened me a bit on how fundamentalist Christian thought is beginning to evolve very slowly toward an acceptance of dinosaurs and the fact that Satan didn't plant them there to confuse Christians, and that no person ever met a dinosaur.
I do think the left, especially the Democrats, have been way too wishy-washy and let the right get away with so much. Like I've argued that staying with an abusive partner gives them permission to continue abusing you, so too would I argue that liberals gave the Right permission to further abuse their power *and expect impunity* because of letting George Bush and his cronies get away with war crimes. That was one of the most serious breaches of government action I've seen in my life - way worse than Nixon's crimes. And we let them get away with it. *All of it*.
So yeah, no surprise that we now have to stiffen our spines and stand up to Trump and his MAGAts and finally draw some moral lines in the sand. "Enough is enough. You've gone too far. No one is above the law." I'm hoping all the Jan 6 convictions have convinced the MAGAts that they will suffer real consequences if they get violent. And if they do, I hope the Biden administration will have the balls and labia to go after them, too, despite it being the year before an election. I'm not sure they will.
Yes, fighting irrational aggression driven by delusional certitude is a lot of effort. Civilized people would rather not fight. That’s why bullies win so much. And they get results quickly, which their followers like. The horrible consequences can’t be seen for years. And once they are seen, they are quickly forgotten ( I’m thinking of Mike Harris’s “common sense” revolution in Ontario in the late ‘90s). Doug Ford is doing the same as Harris, only worse. But everyone has forgotten the people who literally died because of Harris’s policies.
So we on the moderate left have to be more aggressive. Because it’s almost too late.
I love that fundamentalist Christians are starting to accept evolution. That only took 200 years!
That shows me that social changes have to happen more slowly than progressives would like. Otherwise, there can be a violent backlash like we’re seeing today.
But we’ve allowed too much to happen and we have to do some damage control. The bullies have gotten away with too much for too long.
What makes me hopeful is that the younger generation is pissed and won’t put up with this bs much longer. They have nothing to lose. The Republican old guard has everything to lose and they will not give up without a massive fight.
The same part of North America has to take them on. We are in the majority.
Wait, I didn't say Christian fundamentalists were beginning to accept evolution - not based on that one conversation - just that they were beginning to accept certain realities. Like, that dinosaurs existed, and that humans may not have been around to see them. How they're going to work it out is beyond me but it was interesting. The conversation was on a client's sales campaign I'm on in which I was talking to an online retail store, localized somewhere in the West, where they did fossil digs to get kids interested in science. The guy explained how that worked and i was careful not to be challenging or combative - my role was salescritter, not truth activist - and it was actually a good exercise for me to just listen to what the guy had to say. If we had met at a cocktail party I would have asked more questions but for this purpose I kept it to how his org & my client's might partner together in the future.
You're right that civilized people don't like to fight, and that can be immensely harmful. It allows bullies to rule the playground. At some point you've got to become George McFly and whack Biff. And funny, Biff never gave him any more shit.
The Biden administration hit back hard at the insurrectionists and arrested the shit out of them. So as we worry about Trump's call for 'death and destruction', maybe...there's a little less appetite for that on the right than there was a few years ago.
That gal Nashali Alma I wrote about a few weeks ago? The one who fought off her rapist? She could have gotten hurt! But she fought back and she didn't get (seriously) hurt and she didn't get raped either. I called the cops on my neighbour's problematic male guest (you know that story) and worried he might come after me. But he didn't. Sometimes bullies do hit back, hard. Sometimes we get hurt or killed for fighting back. But it's somehow heroic when men die for their cause, and to save others' lives, but not when women do it.
We hit back at the Jan 6 perps, and so far, it appears we have sent them a serious message about what we're going to take...or not. We can't be, to be blunt, pussies anymore.
Let's just make sure we don't turn into the bullies, consequentially.
Amen. We have to know when to fight and when to just ask questions. We always have to watch the tendency to slip into bullying. We’re all capable of it.