We have a son, why would I ask her a question that heavily infers her infant son is or will inevitably be a dangerous, vicious monster more murderous than a bear that she should feel unsafe around?
Literally the premise of the question, random man or random bear, who do you feel safer, the opposite of in danger, with?
"Sweetie pumpkin, do you think most men would murder/rape/eat you in a cannibalistic sense if they could? Like as much or more than a wild bear I mean..."
This question is making the rounds because it's an overtly ridiculous question to ask. I didn't ask her to do the cinnamon challenge either.
Its literally a hypothetical question being posed.
A hypothetical, by its nature, has no victims.
I also have no doubt that if these same women were abducted by some faceless squid gamey organization and subjected to this premise for real, with some random confused dude abducted from a gas station in one cage, and some random confused bear abducted from the woods in another, the number of them proudly declaring "I choose bear!" would drop to next to none.
This was just presented as yet another roundabout opportunity for the ever popular "ladies? Men are pigs/dogs: yes or no?"
"Men as a rule are such scum, I'd rather spend the night with a wild animal that routinely kills and eats people given the choice!" -These women
"Why cant I find a good man?!" -Also these women
As a happily married man, I would want nothing to do with a woman that has such overt hatred towards my gender. If my wife started playing the "as a rule, men are subhuman scum more dangerous to me than wild carnivorous animals" game, I would eventually divorce her, regardless of whether she considered me to be one of the good ones.
This is good from an ecological perspective though, if you aren't on team human at least. Women hating men means less humans, which would be better for most life on earth, including bears.
I agree he's too old, and I wish by now he would have mentored someone to stand behind to replace him.
It's not like we aren't already irreparably fucked, but losing having any rational voice in the Senate will feel like another blow to our corporate owned zombie of a nation.
That said, not like our single digit collection of leftist Congress people are able to do anything but spin wheels. The Neoliberals have more respect for their old guard Republican opposition than for people like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.
Wouldn't these mothers and infants rather die in the streets as rugged individuals who tried and failed than turn to evil socialist initiatives?
Who the fuck would choose live together over die alone? Better death than cooperation! Bettter nation states undermining one another to get moooaaaar for their respective winner classes than a species working towards its filthy COMMUNal common good!
Humans:
I don't mean it that literally. I mean just observing swaths of people putting straws into drinks, putting ointments on scrapes, etc might make them extrapolate and try similar actions using what's available to them.
It's not much of a reach for a primate seeing a human manipulate and dig with a shovel, and use that as inspiration to manipulate a bamboo shoot to scratch their own back.
We homosapiens spent 180,000 ish years wandering around in the dirt like idiots before it occurred to some of us that we could grow food in one place, thus beginning the path to civilization. Even we need examples to extrapolate from.
The difference might be in primates in captivity learning from humans using tools around them all day every day. Primate see primate do trial and error.
One seen doing it spontaneously in nature might be more significant.
"Cancel D-Day or ve vill gas all ze Jews!"
Kind of an empty threat considering that's what you were actively doing anyway...
I imagine they would make excellent fertilizer.
Plays Circle of Life from Lion King
A free market can and has existed through most of human history.
A free market is simply the one with the most might is free to take what they want from those that can't defend themselves from them.
Modern capitalists just sent that ideology to a marketing team to give us the illusion of checks and protections. As an example, you're certainly free to hire a lawyer to sue the company that poisoned your kid with their product or externalities, and they're free to send one of several litigation teams from their LEGAL DEPARTMENT to destroy you and your sliding scale attorney, or coerce you to settle for some token pittance fraction of the damage done... in exchange for your legally mandated silence, of course.
Because we the sucker peasants of the west have largely been propagandized by the owner class from birth into embodying this meme:
Why do vaccines need to be made by private companies for private profit at all? Why not publically funded research at universities and agencies that charge reasonably for use, where that capital is either turned into more public research or other commons? Other than the fact that we starved public research almost to death to cut private industry for private profit's taxes.
Also private industry does NOT belong in basic utilities everyone needs AT ALL.
There should not be a single power plant or utility that's for private investor profit. It's too important to have any allegiance other than serving the citizenry full stop. There should be no private investor in a position to advocate sticking it to captive customers (or our sole shared communal habitat), who need any common utility like elec-fucking-tricity, to increase their quarterly private profit expectations. But here we are.
Hi, I just poisoned you. Would you like to buy a possible cure? It's very expensive and probably won't work, but trust me, its the only way!
NEOliberals absolutely would. I'm not accusing the minority within the majority members like Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez of such things.
https://apnews.com/article/business-nancy-pelosi-congress-8685e82eb6d6e5b42413417f3d5d6775
Both parties literally put blinders on for places like Saudi Arabia because they're good customers for our military industrial complex.
If we can fight the owners to keep our shitty back breaking jobs and win, we should have fought the owners to rebuild our economy for automation profits to largely benefit the people from the bottom up.
If we the peasant masses even can win against the tiny owner class oligarchs, lets fight for the right thing. And if we can't win, well then it's all masturbation anyway and they'll do what they want.
It's irrational to fight for "we demand to continue to break our backs making your shit instead of robots so we can continue to subsist on menial laborer wages with broken backs!" in any event. That's some coal miner excuse for logic.
Externality: Noun - Capitalist term for "I already got your fucking money, so my mess is your problem you fucking sucker peasants 🖕🤑💰"
Automation isn't the enemy.
As ever, the owner class that hoards and wages economic war on you though automation for their exclusive benefit at their society's expense are your enemy, whether you would fight them or not.
Arguing that we should "save" back breaking, repetitive unnatural movement, manual labor jobs that break human bodies by the time they're 40 is the WRONG hill to die on. Fight for the citizenry to reap the benefits of automation through taxation, not to keep shitty jobs robots can do faster and better. Fight to change the economy so that everyone doesn't need meaningless jobs machines can do better so we can have actual time to live our lives.
Taxing the fuck out of automation would let everyone win, because a heavily taxed robot is still far cheaper for the company than a human or possibly several humans for that one robot would be, so automation is here either way. We can riot to change our economy to benefit from this technology as we should, or we can be steamrolled yet again by the dictates of the affluent who will demand and get all the benefits and none of the responsibility if not confronted and countered on revolutionary terms.
Please pick the former. There's no dignity or meaning to be had shuffling boxes around in an Amazon warehouse. Begging the owners to let us try to continue to compete with literal purpose built repetitive labor machines is not the way.
Good thing we (the US) lost the war, or this lady would probably have her own team of lobbyists running their country.
https://incendar.com/baby_boomer_deathclock.php
This was in 1992. I like how George's example, that we only help one another after a flood, no longer even applies in the US, as you have people arguing some people from some places shouldn't be helped even after a natural disaster.
George's comedy specials helped raise me from a young age when no one else was doing any raising. I consider him to be one of the greatest minds, social commentators, and philosophers of the 20th century, and I've yet to recognize a contemporary near his level. I'll always be grateful to have had the honor to see him twice before he died.
I see a lot of people enjoy his brilliant bits, but with the way the world is and where its going, imho in the name of enthusiastic greed, I personally find a lot of peace, and a lot less depression when I choose to aspire to George's genuine divorce and detachment from "caring about the outcome."
Enjoy the freakshow, folks!
Bonus: I've seen so many comments in his bit videos wishing for George's perspective on smartphones, well this was near his end (2008), smartphones were just arriving, and his opening words briefly address in passing what he thought about the latest tech obsession.
If you're unwilling to earnestly, critically examine/scrutinize your beliefs, and discard them in failing that scrutiny or in light of new information, you are doomed to stagnate as a individual.
An important sentiment in these times of belligerent, entrenched ideologies imho.
Suicide rates increased in the U.S. to an 80-year high in 2022, with nearly 50,000 people committing suicide, according to federal data.
Just so we're clear, the villains won and had the heroes taken out back and shot a loooooong time ago. ❄️Happy Holidays❄️
(and in all seriousness, go watch It's a Wonderful Life if you haven't. It's a great time capsule of the competing values of its time that, imho, provides a lot of context for how we got... here. And it's a really good movie.
It couldn't be made today by a major studio, and if it got remade for name recognition, the core message would be completely gutted.)