Cancer of the world (Split from “e-mobility devices banned from city buses in Erie Pennsylvania”)

[Robse]

4 minutes ago, Cerbera said:

That's your house that's killing them, or rather the fact that it means they can't get away. The reason cats play with prey is actually part of nature's balancing act ensuring that at least 50% of animals who are initially caught have further chances of escape, and when not in an enclosed environment a lot of the time they do, and kitty is left empty-pawed. 

My little cat is old and pathetic now, and all the wildlife knows she can't be bothered anymore, but when she used to bring them in (in her youth) she used to bang them about a bit, and then lose interest, leaving them to run and hide about the house, where they had just about enough time and energy left to find somewhere I couldn't get to them before expiring of shock, and filling my house with the smell of death until I could finally locate them ! I 'm rather glad those days are over...

Our cat is a true killer cat.  These mice haven't got one chance of surviving once she's got hold of one. No mouse have ever been able to escape this cat. It's play until death, and then they (as extra bonus) get eaten, except the head.  And this is often not all: from time to time, we are presented 1, 2 or 3 mice head, arranged a la lit de parade , just outside the entrance door.

[Boofheadeu]

find another forum.

this is euc

bye

 

[Freeforester]

1 hour ago, Robse said:

and my stupid cat will take a living mouse with her inside our house just to play with it until it dies..  already 8 times this week 🙄, perhaps a distinct between intelligence and instinct?

Dogs have masters; cats have staff.

[Paul D]

On 6/29/2023 at 10:51 AM, Planemo said:

Somewhat, yes. Even with rules. A modern society without rules is Mad Max on a mass scale. Humans are simply too self centered and cant be trusted unless on a small scale eg Amish/small tribes in Africa/Inuit nomads etc.

Humans are, in general, a selfish-based disease and a blight on this planet to every other living organism, even themselves.

Rules are needed for the majority to keep our sorry asses in check.

1st world citizens are way too narcissistic to live in a society without rules. Theres no turning back from that thanks to social media and capitalism so get used to it.

5 upvotes and yet this content is absurd. Have you redistributed all your belongings and abandoned any form of social media including this forum?

[Paul D]

On 6/30/2023 at 1:36 AM, Planemo said:

A personal attack, well done. And succinctly supports my point.

The largest water supplier in the UK was privatised and paid its CEO's millions in dividends. Its now £14 billion in debt. So the government/taxpayers will have to pick up the pieces whilst great swathes of the UK's waters can't be entered due to raw sewage warnings. A further kick in the teeth is hearing narcissists up in arms due to not being able to get their daily dip whilst not giving a jot about the damage to marine/coastal life.

Who is the narcissist here?  There are actions you can personally take to relieve the pressures on our society. Are you planning on taking any of them?

[Robse]

I see a pattern in this thread, slowly emerging, which surely is a sort of self-confirmation of the main message in the thread.

[Funky]

[Paul D]

🍿

[mrelwood]

Man, I hate cats even more than I thought I did. Which wasn’t a small amount.

(Sorry, I accidentally left this topic at General Discussion. It obviously belongs under Off-Topic.)

Edited July 2, 2023 by mrelwood

[Paul D]

2 minutes ago, mrelwood said:

Man, I hate cats even more than I thought I did. Which wasn’t a small amount.

(Sorry, I accidentally left this topic at General Discussion. It obviously belongs under Off-Topic.)

Why not just nuke it?  And thanks BTW🍆

[0000]

First of all, respect for the lengthy and thoughtful responses.

20 hours ago, Planemo said:

I'm not sure that the drive to survive is an argument against the selfishness of humans though when the end result is also to the benefit of those creating said cures.

I agree, however I never said humans weren’t selfish, or that they were unique in their selfishness as organisms competing for limited resources, or even defined selfishness as inherently bad (although my wording may have implied which wasn’t my intent). I basically said that we were unique in the capability to act outside of animalistic selfishness, but given what @mrelwood said definitely has merits so my supposition there needs work.

In fact, I believe people have the right to be selfish. A demonstrative example: imagine if all human beings decided that should any predator want to claim their lives for sustenance, they inherently would choose to not be selfish and gives up their lives to sustain the predator valuing selflessness over life. How would the human race survive this level of pathological altruism that puts the livelihood of others’ before themselves? Clearly there is some level of selfishness required in order to continue existing, and this example should logically establish that selfishness as a trait isn’t inherently bad.

I think we can agree it really is and always has been up to humanity to find a balance as to what constitutes the right amount of selfishness for, hopefully, peaceful coexistence. However, we, particularly those without an excess of resources, are now all tripped up with in a complex web of incentives driving toward negative outcomes over time for the majority of people as wealth is increasingly concentrated upward over time.

20 hours ago, Planemo said:

But I genuinely feel that the ratio of decent/non decent humans is skewed much too far to the non-decent side.

I can agree with this to some extent, more so in it’s application toward the ruling class (the great power, great responsibility sentiment). I think it’s easy to feel this way when you observe that the rules, incentives, and risk vs reward balance isn’t favoring your personal situation and you take a harder look at “the system” increasingly from the perspective of being on the outs. I’ll speak for myself only, but I definitely feel this way. And this is coming from someone who’s living much closer to the global seat of financial power, the money printer of “freedom” we call the USD world reserve currency which allows relatively financially privileged Americans to import valuable products and energy for exporting worthless unrepayable debt paper. Consumption without the necessary accompanying production, a negative expression of selfishness playing out on a global scale.

Frankly, it’s a wonder more EU-natives (or former) don’t publicly take a harder stance at being made a sort of American vassal, subject to the whims of an increasingly centralized and disconnected global bureaucracy as the value of their local labor is simultaneously ground down by the ever increasing forces of automation, globalization, and most importantly, monetary inflation. It’s definitely not a uniquely UK problem, the destruction of the value of labor and purchasing power, nor is the complete lack of political representation in basically any so-called “sovereign” state for the labor class (as opposed to the ownership class), but you definitely have it pretty bad comparatively so my sympathies there.

20 hours ago, Planemo said:

UK governments furlough scheme which was absolutely raped by fraudsters and those wishing to cash in on either not having to work or, continuing to work and still cashing in on it anyway. Rules were broken left, right and centre, those doing so only for the benefit of themselves, not others. Again, I'm not surprised it happened, what did surprise me was the sheer numbers of those doing it.

Well, there’s a reason the country here was founded on the principles of limited government and separation of powers (that is until “we” lost our monetary sovereignty in 1913 I’d argue), as it was commonly recognized that greed, fraud, and corruption go hand in hand with power (with the power to coin being the greatest of powers). The abuse of “free” resources redistributed by the state (by force) is always a completely predictable result.

Sure, the fraudsters deserve our contempt, but why place sole blame upon the scammers, particularly foreign scammers with practically no responsibility to the scammed tax-payers, who saw an opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense and naivety of the voting public? Some blame also lies with those who continue to believe in the state (the monopoly of force) as a legitimate vehicle for “equitable” redistribution and a responsible fiscal caretaker (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary). And even more blame to those officials who helped facilitate the procedural failures through negligence, incompetence, or perhaps even maleficence that allowed for the abuse.

Here in Washington state we had vast unemployment financial fraud overseen by Suzy Levine, who as (figure)head of the states Employment Security Department, helped facilitate the “loss” of hundreds of millions of bennies to scammers. Her punishment was a new federal position at the Labor Dept within the Biden administration (the nepotism probably as a result of her large campaign donations and ethnicity given a disproportionate amount of the Biden admin is ethnically Jewish). People don’t need to know the details of this random singular anecdote, but the point is here in America corruption is rife, there is no shining beacon on the hill in “Democracy” land, and there hasn’t been for quite a while.

Besides all of this, if we’re going to talk abuses in the era of the state-sponsored COVID panic, abusing stimulus money doesn’t quite rank as high as the state asserting dominion and broadly endorsed private sector coercion over individual’s rights to choose their own medical interventions IMO. That is, if you place value on the lives sacrificed in WW2 to give humanity the Nuremberg Code which required voluntary informed consent regarding human experimentation I suppose. Not saying you don't, but a great many people were taking the government's position in mandating or, at the very least, facilitating experimental injection compliance by way of coercion with the threat of their job/position in the balance.

20 hours ago, Planemo said:

I've seen that relatively large numbers of people can do it, it just seems to go to $hit in most densely-populated areas, or what many would class as '1st world' countries where the drive to obtain money/trinkets outweighs their morals/decency.

I’m going to go way out on a limb and say something, by now, that is very original (not) – I think it’s only going to get worse in these densely populated areas. This for a lot of different reasons, and I mentioned some of the economic ones earlier. No matter how you want to slice the problems and divvy up the blame, many of these places have some serious unsolvable issues exacerbated by the density/proximity of peoples sometimes with wildly different expectations of what constitutes acceptable cohabitation.

I think the inevitable result from the chaos is an increasing and 100% predictable result for authoritarian action to force order. This likely being one major goal as individual rights and freedoms not surviving the, I’d argue, planned authoritarian transition. What I’m saying is it’s a bit naive to think that morals and decency really ever ruled the land, but perhaps we were fortunate to live, for a brief time anyway, in which we could pretend this was so. Funny enough, it probably seems like I’m straying pretty far from my original point not to condemn humanity as a blight on the whole – I’ll have to see if I can get back to that later.

20 hours ago, Planemo said:

And people must be living under a rock if they don't see epic levels of narcissism all over Faceache/Twatter. 

100% with you there. It’s exactly why I deleted my FB account over ten years ago now. Introspecting on my older posts I realized the platform was just encouraging exactly that, and I didn’t like what even I was tending to do on there as a result. It was really like a “what the hell am I doing here” kind of thing.

20 hours ago, Planemo said:

You may be right, I can't say I have noticed that though

There are plenty of examples, but one of the most explicit is Mr. Anderson’s interrogation of Neo in the Matrix (and I like this film).

20 hours ago, Planemo said:

But you're correct if that is indeed whats happening, it serves no purpose.

Getting people to voluntarily limit their birthrates absolutely serves a purpose, many even. Hell, even with your own anecdotes you see the value in wanting to move away from your dense problem-filled city to a ranch in the middle of nowhere. “There’s too many people.” You’ve heard it before, you may have even said it at times. Now imagine people with incomprehensible amounts of personal wealth and resources actually able to do something about that. It shouldn’t be hard to imagine, we saw a new class of humans born this last century, jet-setting billionaires, amongst whom some have infamously made the population of the planet seemingly an area of intense focus. (1.5 min clip)

In fact there is a fantastic 4-part documentary series on exactly that individual if you want some good insight in how and why some of these kind of global citizens try to affect policy that effectively results in population management. In any case, I would say that it’s a little bit of a failure of imagination and not putting in the time to research how there have always been powerful interests focused on managing the labor force of their particular fiefdom, no matter where the borders end. Besides the profit motive and territorial expansion, you could easily argue that warring was always a method respective leaders could use to cull an excess of non-productive peasants.

20 hours ago, Planemo said:

I am not going to insult your intelligence by suggesting that you wouldn't know about the worldwide environmental damage caused by humans, my point is that much of the good that some are doing now to try and help mother nature shouldn't have happened in the first place, and that it only did so because huge numbers of people can't be trusted to think of anything other than themselves and their fat pockets.

I agree presumably to some extent - industrial activity as one example that can be especially damaging especially to local ecosystems. I was listening to Rogan’s podcast with RFK Jr. the other day and was surprised to hear how prolific the amount of chemical dumping was here in America and the shear number of lawsuits regarding mercury contamination RFK Jr spearheaded. Luckily intense regulation and litigation pushed all that industrial activity overseas so problem solved (Ha!) But seriously, I remember the ozone layer depletion and resultant refrigerant legislation anecdotes from school too being particularly concerning. The one I don’t buy whatsoever is the anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.

I’ve used this chart before on the forum, it's a great example of why human activity has never and will never match, in the foreseeable future, what nature can achieve regarding massive environmental changes over time. Just look at the geography, the formation of mountains, canyons, formerly submerged land turned to deserts, the original landmass of Pangea, drastic changes will continue on the planet with or without humans being around to pontificate their relative insignificance. I'm also completely unconcerned about the climate slightly warming over time. Research uncomplicated by climate grifters and by extremely wealthy people intensely interested in global population management has shown that higher levels of carbon dioxide (we're talking .04% of the atmosphere here) supports greater amounts of plant life and a greener planet. I would much prefer to live in a warmer climate than an environment heading into an ice age, either way, human beings are along for the ride regardless of the "carbon footprint" and since my salary (or lack therof) doesn't depend upon statements otherwise, I can say this with confidence.

20 hours ago, Planemo said:

As an example, covid sort of put the final nail in the coffin for me, the level of selfishness and self entitlement exhibited by such a high ratio of people just showed me the sheer numbers I am talking about

I’ll end this massive post on this – COVID brought about a kind of finality too in my perspective, but based on what you said possibly for the opposite reason. I was utterly surprised how many people allowed themselves to be manipulated and convinced by entrenched and monetarily-conflicted interests to sign themselves for an experimental pharmaceutical product, especially with seemingly zero consideration to their (or their children's) own personal risk factors regarding the virus which were well-established very early on for each age category. None of the assertions made by politicians and so-called experts panned out, and pretending that every single individual was responsible for everyone else's potentially substandard immune system, particularly when individuals exhibited no signs of sickness was the stupidest argument in the world. No injection refuser, for the entire duration of the declared pandemic, ever prevented any other person from taking the injection and thus being put in a state not to have to worry about the uninjected. And yet it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated. El-oh-fucking-el, What. A. Joke.

Even today more info continues (and will continue) to come out exposing an unprecedented and fatal level of duplicity leveraged against populations who were coerced into taking these jabs such as this Danish study that found that there was a batch dependent level of safety amongst their populations’ administration of mRNA injections. Which, unsurprisingly to the conscientious objectors and according to the data, you absolutely wanted to be amongst the “placebo” group. I could write on this all day with many other anecdotes (hell just take a stroll through the r/CovidVaccinated for firsthand anecdotes of the unlucky that didn't manage to contribute to #DiedSuddenly), but suffice to say, for me this was the nail in the coffin in terms of how I felt about the legitimacy of my own government. From my perspective, I feel completely justified in not following unjust laws administered by unjust would-be rulers given that they leaped over the red line with guns blazing.

I’m really not making my original case, but despite all this, I don’t feel that humanity is a blight. It’s simply really hard to achieve an acceptable compromise between individual and collective needs. Unfortunately all of the authoritative solutions proposed by our global-citizen ruling class “elite” involve coercion in the form of massive surveillance through data analytics, automated enforcement, prolific censorship in the name of safety, and most importantly, a centralized control of individual finances through CBDCs; a digital-enforced neo-feudal slave society.

But humans certainly aren’t a blight... shit. Well I'm not anyway and I don't think you are either!

Edited July 2, 2023 by Vanturion

[Paul D]

39 minutes ago, Vanturion said:

First of all, respect for the lengthy and thoughtful responses.

I agree, however I never said humans weren’t selfish, or that they were unique in their selfishness as organisms competing for limited resources, or even defined selfishness as inherently bad (although my wording may have implied which wasn’t my intent). I basically said that we were unique in the capability to act outside of animalistic selfishness, but given what @mrelwood said definitely has merits so my supposition there needs work.

In fact, I believe people have the right to be selfish. A demonstrative example: imagine if all human beings decided that should any predator want to claim their lives for sustenance, they inherently would choose to not be selfish and gives up their lives to sustain the predator valuing selflessness over life. How would the human race survive this level of pathological altruism that puts the livelihood of others’ before themselves? Clearly there is some level of selfishness required in order to continue existing, and this example should logically establish that selfishness as a trait isn’t inherently bad.

I think we can agree it really is and always has been up to humanity to find a balance as to what constitutes the right amount of selfishness for, hopefully, peaceful coexistence. However, we, particularly those without an excess of resources, are now all tripped up with in a complex web of incentives driving toward negative outcomes over time for the majority of people as wealth is increasingly concentrated upward over time.

I can agree with this to some extent, more so in it’s application toward the ruling class (the great power, great responsibility sentiment). I think it’s easy to feel this way when you observe that the rules, incentives, and risk vs reward balance isn’t favoring your personal situation and you take a harder look at “the system” increasingly from the perspective of being on the outs. I’ll speak for myself only, but I definitely feel this way. And this is coming from someone who’s living much closer to the global seat of financial power, the money printer of “freedom” we call the USD world reserve currency which allows relatively financially privileged Americans to import valuable products and energy for exporting worthless unrepayable debt paper. Consumption without the necessary accompanying production, a negative expression of selfishness playing out on a global scale.

Frankly, it’s a wonder more EU-natives (or former) don’t publicly take a harder stance at being made a sort of American vassal, subject to the whims of an increasingly centralized and disconnected global bureaucracy as the value of their local labor is simultaneously ground down by the ever increasing forces of automation, globalization, and most importantly, monetary inflation. It’s definitely not a uniquely UK problem, the destruction of the value of labor and purchasing power, nor is the complete lack of political representation in basically any so-called “sovereign” state for the labor class (as opposed to the ownership class), but you definitely have it pretty bad comparatively so my sympathies there.

Well, there’s a reason the country here was founded on the principles of limited government and separation of powers (that is until “we” lost our monetary sovereignty in 1913 I’d argue), as it was commonly recognized that greed, fraud, and corruption go hand in hand with power (with the power to coin being the greatest of powers). The abuse of “free” resources redistributed by the state (by force) is always a completely predictable result.

Sure, the fraudsters deserve our contempt, but why place sole blame upon the scammers, particularly foreign scammers with practically no responsibility to the scammed tax-payers, who saw an opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense and naivety of the voting public? Some blame also lies with those who continue to believe in the state (the monopoly of force) as a legitimate vehicle for “equitable” redistribution and a responsible fiscal caretaker (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary). And even more blame to those officials who helped facilitate the procedural failures through negligence, incompetence, or perhaps even maleficence that allowed for the abuse.

Here in Washington state we had vast unemployment financial fraud overseen by Suzy Levine, who as (figure)head of the states Employment Security Department, helped facilitate the “loss” of hundreds of millions of bennies to scammers. Her punishment was a new federal position at the Labor Dept within the Biden administration (the nepotism probably as a result of her large campaign donations and ethnicity given a disproportionate amount of the Biden admin is ethnically Jewish). People don’t need to know the details of this random singular anecdote, but the point is here in America corruption is rife, there is no shining beacon on the hill in “Democracy” land, and there hasn’t been for quite a while.

Besides all of this, if we’re going to talk abuses in the era of the state-sponsored COVID panic, abusing stimulus money doesn’t quite rank as high as the state asserting dominion and broadly endorsed private sector coercion over individual’s rights to choose their own medical interventions IMO. That is, if you place value on the lives sacrificed in WW2 to give humanity the Nuremberg Code which required voluntary informed consent regarding human experimentation I suppose. Not saying you don't, but a great many people were taking the government's position in mandating or, at the very least, facilitating experimental injection compliance by way of coercion with the threat of their job/position in the balance.

I’m going to go way out on a limb and say something, by now, that is very original (not) – I think it’s only going to get worse in these densely populated areas. This for a lot of different reasons, and I mentioned some of the economic ones earlier. No matter how you want to slice the problems and divvy up the blame, many of these places have some serious unsolvable issues exacerbated by the density/proximity of peoples sometimes with wildly different expectations of what constitutes acceptable cohabitation.

I think the inevitable result from the chaos is an increasing and 100% predictable result for authoritarian action to force order. This likely being one major goal as individual rights and freedoms not surviving the, I’d argue, planned authoritarian transition. What I’m saying is it’s a bit naive to think that morals and decency really ever ruled the land, but perhaps we were fortunate to live, for a brief time anyway, in which we could pretend this was so. Funny enough, it probably seems like I’m straying pretty far from my original point not to condemn humanity as a blight on the whole – I’ll have to see if I can get back to that later.

100% with you there. It’s exactly why I deleted my FB account over ten years ago now. Introspecting on my older posts I realized the platform was just encouraging exactly that, and I didn’t like what even I was tending to do on there as a result. It was really like a “what the hell am I doing here” kind of thing.

There are plenty of examples, but one of the most explicit is Mr. Anderson’s interrogation of Neo in the Matrix (and I like this film).

Getting people to voluntarily limit their birthrates absolutely serves a purpose, many even. Hell, even with your own anecdotes you see the value in wanting to move away from your dense problem-filled city to a ranch in the middle of nowhere. “There’s too many people.” You’ve heard it before, you may have even said it at times. Now imagine people with incomprehensible amounts of personal wealth and resources actually able to do something about that. It shouldn’t be hard to imagine, we saw a new class of humans born this last century, jet-setting billionaires, amongst whom some have infamously made the population of the planet seemingly an area of intense focus. (1.5 min clip)

In fact there is a fantastic 4-part documentary series on exactly that individual if you want some good insight in how and why some of these kind of global citizens try to affect policy that effectively results in population management. In any case, I would say that it’s a little bit of a failure of imagination and not putting in the time to research how there have always been powerful interests focused on managing the labor force of their particular fiefdom, no matter where the borders end. Besides the profit motive and territorial expansion, you could easily argue that warring was always a method respective leaders could use to cull an excess of non-productive peasants.

I agree presumably to some extent - industrial activity as one example that can be especially damaging especially to local ecosystems. I was listening to Rogan’s podcast with RFK Jr. the other day and was surprised to hear how prolific the amount of chemical dumping was here in America and the shear number of lawsuits regarding mercury contamination RFK Jr spearheaded. Luckily intense regulation and litigation pushed all that industrial activity overseas so problem solved (Ha!) But seriously, I remember the ozone layer depletion and resultant refrigerant legislation anecdotes from school too being particularly concerning. The one I don’t buy whatsoever is the anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.

I’ve used this chart before on the forum, it's a great example of why human activity has never and will never match, in the foreseeable future, what nature can achieve regarding massive environmental changes over time. Just look at the geography, the formation of mountains, canyons, formerly submerged land turned to deserts, the original landmass of Pangea, drastic changes will continue on the planet with or without humans being around to pontificate their relative insignificance. I'm also completely unconcerned about the climate slightly warming over time. Research uncomplicated by climate grifters and by extremely wealthy people intensely interested in global population management has shown that higher levels of carbon dioxide (we're talking .04% of the atmosphere here) supports greater amounts of plant life and a greener planet. I would much prefer to live in a warmer climate than an environment heading into an ice age, either way, human beings are along for the ride regardless of the "carbon footprint" and since my salary (or lack therof) doesn't depend upon statements otherwise, I can say this with confidence.

I’ll end this massive post on this – COVID brought about a kind of finality too in my perspective, but based on what you said possibly for the opposite reason. I was utterly surprised how many people allowed themselves to be manipulated and convinced by entrenched and monetarily-conflicted interests to sign themselves for an experimental pharmaceutical product, especially with seemingly zero consideration to their (or their children's) own personal risk factors regarding the virus which were well-established very early on for each age category. None of the assertions made by politicians and so-called experts panned out, and pretending that every single individual was responsible for everyone else's potentially substandard immune system, particularly when individuals exhibited no signs of sickness was the stupidest argument in the world. No injection refuser, for the entire duration of the declared pandemic, ever prevented any other person from taking the injection and thus being put in a state not to have to worry about the uninjected. And yet it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated. El-oh-fucking-el, What. A. Joke.

Even today more info continues (and will continue) to come out exposing an unprecedented and fatal level of duplicity leveraged against populations who were coerced into taking these jabs such as this Danish study that found that there was a batch dependent level of safety amongst their populations’ administration of mRNA injections. Which, unsurprisingly to the conscientious objectors and according to the data, you absolutely wanted to be amongst the “placebo” group. I could write on this all day with many other anecdotes (hell just take a stroll through the r/CovidVaccinated for firsthand anecdotes of the unlucky that didn't manage to contribute to #DiedSuddenly), but suffice to say, for me this was the nail in the coffin in terms of how I felt about the legitimacy of my own government. From my perspective, I feel completely justified in not following unjust laws administered by unjust would-be rulers given that they leaped over the red line with guns blazing.

I’m really not making my original case, but despite all this, I don’t feel that humanity is a blight. It’s simply really hard to achieve an acceptable compromise between individual and collective needs. Unfortunately all of the authoritative solutions proposed by our global-citizen ruling class “elite” involve coercion in the form of massive surveillance through data analytics, automated enforcement, prolific censorship in the name of safety, and most importantly, a centralized control of individual finances through CBDCs; a digital-enforced neo-feudal slave society.

But humans certainly aren’t a blight... shit. Well I'm not anyway and I don't think you are either!

Why spend so much time addressing this?  Pearls before swine. 

[0000]

17 minutes ago, Paul D said:

Why spend so much time addressing this?  Pearls before swine. 

A few reasons and I can't agree with that characterization --

1. Well (enough ^{gotta be careful with backhanded complements heh}) moderated forums are one of the few places left you can have long-form discussions with links and get into to things a little deeper than most of the other digital spaces and social media platforms people beat drums and screech at each other on.

2. I remain optimistic people can be enlightened through discussion or seeing new information and I like having the opportunity to improve on my own ideas by hearing other points of view if they or anyone else reading takes the time to provide better counter-arguments.

3. I haven't yet been banned for posting my opinions online here and that has some kind of personal value as catharsis in this absurd clown world.

Edited July 2, 2023 by Vanturion

[Paul D]

14 minutes ago, Vanturion said:

A few reasons and I can't agree with that characterization --

1. Well (enough ^{gotta be careful with backhanded complements heh}) moderated forums are one of the few places left you can have long-form discussions with links and get into to things a little deeper than most of the other digital spaces and social media platforms people beat drums and screech at each other on.

2. I remain optimistic people can be enlightened through discussion or seeing new information and I like having the opportunity to improve on my own ideas by hearing other points of view if they or anyone else reading takes the time to provide better counter-arguments.

3. I haven't yet been banned for posting my opinions online here and that has some kind of personal value as catharsis in this absurd clown world.

I appreciate that sentiment, but I have not had the experience in my day to day life that there is any reconciliation between the folks that view humanity as a plague vs others that that don’t agree. In fact I’ve already dehumanized them. So fight the war of ideas if you want, but I’m done trying to convince morans. 

[0000]

I still think it's the only way even if what I'm personally doing isn't really effective, at least for someone concerned with more than the own individual well-being. I don't know about you, but much of my survival and quality of life still depends largely upon presumably indoctrinated/programmed/indebted people putting in the work to make the critical supply chain function. Plus, it's pretty much a given we are all susceptible to be programmed with wisdom or with self-defeating idiocy, primarily the latter evidently in the west for some time now, particularly in our youth. I certainly consider myself then as part of the heavily indoctrinated until well into my 20s, but was able to eventually see myself out of that illusion of comfortable default compliance thanks largely to exposure to information on the net and a curiosity to know how the world works.

I don't know man, I watched a couple videos the other day from a satellite (I'm assuming) in Ukraine of conscripts stepping on landmines needlessly getting their limbs blown off to keep Raytheon stock healthy or the RSN equivalent (among other reasons of course). Personally I don't think things will go well for me or really humanity in general if we give up completely on reason. I wouldn't want to start over from scratch again. Living as the Amish do, it's a tough pill to swallow.

I'm almost certain they'll attempt to force that choice though. There won't be any alternative to push back against that digital slavery paradigm if there is no longer any way to reason with and in what constitutes the commons. We'll either be chained by their whims or chained to the land, that is, if outside groups can even hold and defend it under whatever "laws" they push through.

[mrelwood]

3 hours ago, Vanturion said:

In fact, I believe people have the right to be selfish.

…
Clearly there is some level of selfishness required in order to continue existing, and this example should logically establish that selfishness as a trait isn’t inherently bad.

I think there’s a clear distinction between being selfish and attempting to survive.

Google dictionary for “selfish”:

(a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for other people; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure.

”Profit or pleasure“, not “survival”.

Then there’s selfishness vs. self care. If helping others would cause me a considerable amount of problems, I’m not selfish if I refuse to help. For example, a friend needs money, but if I’d lend them some I wouldn’t have money to pay the rent.

Hence, I claim that selfishness is not a trait that is beneficial or welcome at any dose.

 

 Other parts of your posts I have nothing to comment on, as I agree with almost everything.

Edited July 2, 2023 by mrelwood

[0000]

@mrelwood, you raise some interesting points as always - some good discussion to be had here too.

8 hours ago, mrelwood said:

For example there are numerous where a dog tries to save a fish on dry ground. You can’t claim that it was taught to do that.

Well not necessarily. With dogs in particular, they have been purposefully bred by humans to retain certain companionable traits as a inherent characteristic of their breed such as the propensity to protect (life and property/territory). Therefore many dog breed’s propensity to protect life that you see in all of those videos are a product of collective human will expressed over many centuries of purposeful breeding for domestication.

So you could make the case that altruistic actions you’ve shown like protecting the life of other unrelated creatures by domesticated animals, dogs most commonly, may in fact be a learned behavior originating from human will. What I’m saying is I disagree that the matter is as black and white as you say since you could argue some of those clips are effectively tainted examples. The dogs in the clips wouldn’t even exist without consistent human intervention to achieve symbiotic cohabitation.

Somewhat similarly even for wild animals in the zoo, especially those born into captivity. They are well-fed by humans and are repeatedly exposed to humans and human behavior by living in an unnatural environment which undoubtedly has an effect in suppressing their otherwise natural programming, perhaps even elevating their behavior at times to act in ways we would recognize as humane or human-like.

8 hours ago, mrelwood said:

And animals are definitely capable of doing selfless good acts. There are many YT videos of dogs and other animals trying to save humans and other animals from harm.

Besides all of the dog clips, the 10 minute video has numerous examples of adult animals protecting their own offspring, but those examples fit entirely within acting in it’s programmed nature as well since there is nothing more natural, amongst most mammals, than acting to ensure the survival of their own offspring even at risk of injury.

My original point was to define a distinction between humans and animals that recognizes human beings, or at least their potential, as uniquely worthy of elevated consideration, also now that we're getting more into it, particularly when it comes to individual rights. There are other distinctions I vaguely recall from a low-level anthropology course such as our prolific tool use and use of language.

Anyway, it’s an interesting thing to talk about as animal rights are increasingly coming into the consideration of global governance crowds who are currently working on drafting global not a treaty treaty which has the effect of subverting the respective national sovereignty of it’s signatories.

Don't get me wrong, I’m all for conservation, ethical treatment of animals, and limiting industrial farm/meat processing abuses. However, I’m absolutely not for equating or elevating animal rights to human rights, at least until each animal species can demonstrate the sentience to argue for it’s own equal rights.

[Freeforester]

3 hours ago, Vanturion said:

First of all, respect for the lengthy and thoughtful responses.

I agree, however I never said humans weren’t selfish, or that they were unique in their selfishness as organisms competing for limited resources, or even defined selfishness as inherently bad (although my wording may have implied which wasn’t my intent). I basically said that we were unique in the capability to act outside of animalistic selfishness, but given what @mrelwood said definitely has merits so my supposition there needs work.

In fact, I believe people have the right to be selfish. A demonstrative example: imagine if all human beings decided that should any predator want to claim their lives for sustenance, they inherently would choose to not be selfish and gives up their lives to sustain the predator valuing selflessness over life. How would the human race survive this level of pathological altruism that puts the livelihood of others’ before themselves? Clearly there is some level of selfishness required in order to continue existing, and this example should logically establish that selfishness as a trait isn’t inherently bad.

I think we can agree it really is and always has been up to humanity to find a balance as to what constitutes the right amount of selfishness for, hopefully, peaceful coexistence. However, we, particularly those without an excess of resources, are now all tripped up with in a complex web of incentives driving toward negative outcomes over time for the majority of people as wealth is increasingly concentrated upward over time.

I can agree with this to some extent, more so in it’s application toward the ruling class (the great power, great responsibility sentiment). I think it’s easy to feel this way when you observe that the rules, incentives, and risk vs reward balance isn’t favoring your personal situation and you take a harder look at “the system” increasingly from the perspective of being on the outs. I’ll speak for myself only, but I definitely feel this way. And this is coming from someone who’s living much closer to the global seat of financial power, the money printer of “freedom” we call the USD world reserve currency which allows relatively financially privileged Americans to import valuable products and energy for exporting worthless unrepayable debt paper. Consumption without the necessary accompanying production, a negative expression of selfishness playing out on a global scale.

Frankly, it’s a wonder more EU-natives (or former) don’t publicly take a harder stance at being made a sort of American vassal, subject to the whims of an increasingly centralized and disconnected global bureaucracy as the value of their local labor is simultaneously ground down by the ever increasing forces of automation, globalization, and most importantly, monetary inflation. It’s definitely not a uniquely UK problem, the destruction of the value of labor and purchasing power, nor is the complete lack of political representation in basically any so-called “sovereign” state for the labor class (as opposed to the ownership class), but you definitely have it pretty bad comparatively so my sympathies there.

Well, there’s a reason the country here was founded on the principles of limited government and separation of powers (that is until “we” lost our monetary sovereignty in 1913 I’d argue), as it was commonly recognized that greed, fraud, and corruption go hand in hand with power (with the power to coin being the greatest of powers). The abuse of “free” resources redistributed by the state (by force) is always a completely predictable result.

Sure, the fraudsters deserve our contempt, but why place sole blame upon the scammers, particularly foreign scammers with practically no responsibility to the scammed tax-payers, who saw an opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense and naivety of the voting public? Some blame also lies with those who continue to believe in the state (the monopoly of force) as a legitimate vehicle for “equitable” redistribution and a responsible fiscal caretaker (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary). And even more blame to those officials who helped facilitate the procedural failures through negligence, incompetence, or perhaps even maleficence that allowed for the abuse.

Here in Washington state we had vast unemployment financial fraud overseen by Suzy Levine, who as (figure)head of the states Employment Security Department, helped facilitate the “loss” of hundreds of millions of bennies to scammers. Her punishment was a new federal position at the Labor Dept within the Biden administration (the nepotism probably as a result of her large campaign donations and ethnicity given a disproportionate amount of the Biden admin is ethnically Jewish). People don’t need to know the details of this random singular anecdote, but the point is here in America corruption is rife, there is no shining beacon on the hill in “Democracy” land, and there hasn’t been for quite a while.

Besides all of this, if we’re going to talk abuses in the era of the state-sponsored COVID panic, abusing stimulus money doesn’t quite rank as high as the state asserting dominion and broadly endorsed private sector coercion over individual’s rights to choose their own medical interventions IMO. That is, if you place value on the lives sacrificed in WW2 to give humanity the Nuremberg Code which required voluntary informed consent regarding human experimentation I suppose. Not saying you don't, but a great many people were taking the government's position in mandating or, at the very least, facilitating experimental injection compliance by way of coercion with the threat of their job/position in the balance.

I’m going to go way out on a limb and say something, by now, that is very original (not) – I think it’s only going to get worse in these densely populated areas. This for a lot of different reasons, and I mentioned some of the economic ones earlier. No matter how you want to slice the problems and divvy up the blame, many of these places have some serious unsolvable issues exacerbated by the density/proximity of peoples sometimes with wildly different expectations of what constitutes acceptable cohabitation.

I think the inevitable result from the chaos is an increasing and 100% predictable result for authoritarian action to force order. This likely being one major goal as individual rights and freedoms not surviving the, I’d argue, planned authoritarian transition. What I’m saying is it’s a bit naive to think that morals and decency really ever ruled the land, but perhaps we were fortunate to live, for a brief time anyway, in which we could pretend this was so. Funny enough, it probably seems like I’m straying pretty far from my original point not to condemn humanity as a blight on the whole – I’ll have to see if I can get back to that later.

100% with you there. It’s exactly why I deleted my FB account over ten years ago now. Introspecting on my older posts I realized the platform was just encouraging exactly that, and I didn’t like what even I was tending to do on there as a result. It was really like a “what the hell am I doing here” kind of thing.

There are plenty of examples, but one of the most explicit is Mr. Anderson’s interrogation of Neo in the Matrix (and I like this film).

Getting people to voluntarily limit their birthrates absolutely serves a purpose, many even. Hell, even with your own anecdotes you see the value in wanting to move away from your dense problem-filled city to a ranch in the middle of nowhere. “There’s too many people.” You’ve heard it before, you may have even said it at times. Now imagine people with incomprehensible amounts of personal wealth and resources actually able to do something about that. It shouldn’t be hard to imagine, we saw a new class of humans born this last century, jet-setting billionaires, amongst whom some have infamously made the population of the planet seemingly an area of intense focus. (1.5 min clip)

In fact there is a fantastic 4-part documentary series on exactly that individual if you want some good insight in how and why some of these kind of global citizens try to affect policy that effectively results in population management. In any case, I would say that it’s a little bit of a failure of imagination and not putting in the time to research how there have always been powerful interests focused on managing the labor force of their particular fiefdom, no matter where the borders end. Besides the profit motive and territorial expansion, you could easily argue that warring was always a method respective leaders could use to cull an excess of non-productive peasants.

I agree presumably to some extent - industrial activity as one example that can be especially damaging especially to local ecosystems. I was listening to Rogan’s podcast with RFK Jr. the other day and was surprised to hear how prolific the amount of chemical dumping was here in America and the shear number of lawsuits regarding mercury contamination RFK Jr spearheaded. Luckily intense regulation and litigation pushed all that industrial activity overseas so problem solved (Ha!) But seriously, I remember the ozone layer depletion and resultant refrigerant legislation anecdotes from school too being particularly concerning. The one I don’t buy whatsoever is the anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.

I’ve used this chart before on the forum, it's a great example of why human activity has never and will never match, in the foreseeable future, what nature can achieve regarding massive environmental changes over time. Just look at the geography, the formation of mountains, canyons, formerly submerged land turned to deserts, the original landmass of Pangea, drastic changes will continue on the planet with or without humans being around to pontificate their relative insignificance. I'm also completely unconcerned about the climate slightly warming over time. Research uncomplicated by climate grifters and by extremely wealthy people intensely interested in global population management has shown that higher levels of carbon dioxide (we're talking .04% of the atmosphere here) supports greater amounts of plant life and a greener planet. I would much prefer to live in a warmer climate than an environment heading into an ice age, either way, human beings are along for the ride regardless of the "carbon footprint" and since my salary (or lack therof) doesn't depend upon statements otherwise, I can say this with confidence.

I’ll end this massive post on this – COVID brought about a kind of finality too in my perspective, but based on what you said possibly for the opposite reason. I was utterly surprised how many people allowed themselves to be manipulated and convinced by entrenched and monetarily-conflicted interests to sign themselves for an experimental pharmaceutical product, especially with seemingly zero consideration to their (or their children's) own personal risk factors regarding the virus which were well-established very early on for each age category. None of the assertions made by politicians and so-called experts panned out, and pretending that every single individual was responsible for everyone else's potentially substandard immune system, particularly when individuals exhibited no signs of sickness was the stupidest argument in the world. No injection refuser, for the entire duration of the declared pandemic, ever prevented any other person from taking the injection and thus being put in a state not to have to worry about the uninjected. And yet it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated. El-oh-fucking-el, What. A. Joke.

Even today more info continues (and will continue) to come out exposing an unprecedented and fatal level of duplicity leveraged against populations who were coerced into taking these jabs such as this Danish study that found that there was a batch dependent level of safety amongst their populations’ administration of mRNA injections. Which, unsurprisingly to the conscientious objectors and according to the data, you absolutely wanted to be amongst the “placebo” group. I could write on this all day with many other anecdotes (hell just take a stroll through the r/CovidVaccinated for firsthand anecdotes of the unlucky that didn't manage to contribute to #DiedSuddenly), but suffice to say, for me this was the nail in the coffin in terms of how I felt about the legitimacy of my own government. From my perspective, I feel completely justified in not following unjust laws administered by unjust would-be rulers given that they leaped over the red line with guns blazing.

I’m really not making my original case, but despite all this, I don’t feel that humanity is a blight. It’s simply really hard to achieve an acceptable compromise between individual and collective needs. Unfortunately all of the authoritative solutions proposed by our global-citizen ruling class “elite” involve coercion in the form of massive surveillance through data analytics, automated enforcement, prolific censorship in the name of safety, and most importantly, a centralized control of individual finances through CBDCs; a digital-enforced neo-feudal slave society.

But humans certainly aren’t a blight... shit. Well I'm not anyway and I don't think you are either!

‘Tragedy of the commons’ being the less perjorative description of the sorry state of affairs, but yes, ‘safe and effective’, trust “the science” etc - both being shorthand for “don’t research matters yourself” - anyone who does soon finds out that very clever, properly scientifically-minded people who have conducted the research for humanity in the name of good science find out that the ‘man-made-carbon-dioxide-based climate crisis’ is a beyond stupid proposition, just as the whole autoimmunity tsunami perpetuating excess mortality still has, er, nothing to do with mRNA based injections despite this reason being the basis of the earlier abandoned attempt at producing a similarly mRNA “vaccine” against the original SARS virus back 20 years (link here), but one great boondoggle for the types @Planemo may be describing, albeit wholly at the expense of those willing to suspend objectivity and place their trust in what they’re being told, in the same way as the proposition served up by the same actors in both the hilarious silver screen production ‘Don’t look up’ and the rather less humorous daily propaganda/malinformation but purportedly equally ‘sincere’ warnings about the ‘dangers of carbon dioxide’ are accepted as ‘fact’ rather than looked into objectively by otherwise reason-able, though all-too trusting people.

Clever minds have demonstrably debunked the Malthusian scenarios, so the grifters and eugenecists have to resort to other means in which to achieve their ends.    The exploitation of the inherent willingness of their human subjects to generally ‘trust’ that which they are being told without question so they may remain in a state of ‘blissful’ ignorance calm worked equally well historically (or at least pre-Nuremberg, which was of course a long time ago, and we are so much more ‘wise’ these days), and is therefore deployed again, against the naive; ’sedatives such as ‘Strictly’ and ‘Love Island’ seem to be preferable to the educational BBC2 Horizon, Kenneth Clarke’s Civilization, etc.    Bread, Jabs and Circuses for all!

Edited July 2, 2023 by Freeforester

[sbb]

3 hours ago, mrelwood said:

Man, I hate cats even more than I thought I did. Which wasn’t a small amount.

You should look up the behavior of mink and ferrets

 

 

[Planemo]

6 hours ago, Paul D said:

5 upvotes and yet this content is absurd.

6 hours ago, Paul D said:

Who is the narcissist here?  There are actions you can personally take to relieve the pressures on our society. Are you planning on taking any of them?

4 hours ago, Paul D said:

Why not just nuke it?

3 hours ago, Paul D said:

Why spend so much time addressing this?  Pearls before swine. 

Why not just nuke it? Because the forum doesn't revolve around you possibly? What was I saying about narcissists...?

You clearly have beef with me. Thats totally fine.

But please, for the love of God, set your profile to 'ignore' me.

Live long and prosper.

[mrelwood]

 

1 hour ago, Vanturion said:

Well not necessarily. With dogs in particular, they have been purposefully bred by humans to retain certain companionable traits as a inherent characteristic of their breed such as the propensity to protect (life and property/territory). Therefore many dog breed’s propensity to protect life that you see in all of those videos are a product of collective human will expressed over many centuries of purposeful breeding for domestication.

That is an interesting point of view for sure. I can’t claim that I have any ammo to argue for nor against, but at first this does seem a bit far fetched for me. I’m not sure if such a non-specific “protect all life” feature can be bred for or taught. After all, even if I had had a dog for my whole life, I’m not sure if they would’ve catched my intent to save all life forms. While definitely the base intent of mine, I don’t think it would’ve been visible to my dog in any way. I haven’t had the chance to save (m)any animal lives. I could just as well be wrong on this though.

1 hour ago, Vanturion said:

you could argue some of those clips are effectively tainted examples.

Oh, absolutely. I even catched a few where they directly commanded a dog to do the individual steps in a similar video, also titled “animals helping other animals”. But there are some videos among the bunch that have changed my view on things.

1 hour ago, Vanturion said:

Somewhat similarly even for wild animals in the zoo, especially those born into captivity.

Again, it’s hard for me to think that they’d get the intent. “Humans give me food, hence I should protect all life forms” doesn’t sit right with me.

1 hour ago, Vanturion said:

living in an unnatural environment which undoubtedly has an effect in suppressing their otherwise natural programming

Definitely. I’m not sure that makes them life savers either. Take the ferret example @sbb linked to above. I can’t imagine them saving any form of life no matter how much human interaction they were saturated with.

1 hour ago, Vanturion said:

adult animals protecting their own offspring, but those examples fit entirely within acting in it’s programmed nature

I agree, they were a bit out of place in that regard. While bad examples can be found in large numbers, going through “animals helping other animals”, some of the videos do give one something to think about. I seem to recall whales protecting humans from sharks for example. (Maybe not with those exact search words though.)

I can agree that there is a difference in the ratio of humans helping animals vs animals helping animals that can make it a differentiating trait. What I wanted to argue against was that animals wouldn’t have any capability to do that.

 

1 hour ago, Vanturion said:

However, I’m absolutely not for equating or elevating animal rights to human rights

I absolutely agree! I actually had this exact argument with an ex of mine a long time ago. And, well, she became my ex... 

Edited July 2, 2023 by mrelwood

[0000]

@Freeforester eloquently put, nice!

1 hour ago, Freeforester said:

nothing to do with mRNA based injections despite this reason being the basis of the earlier abandoned attempt at producing a similarly mRNA “vaccine” against the original SARS virus back 20 years (link here)

Most everyone who made any effort at all to "do their own research," myself included, has a veritable library of links saved to studies, articles, and other publications refuting many of the absurdly false claims and suppositions of The Authorities®, but it all didn't seem to matter because the media apparatus at large managed to turn the very act of reading, which is literally "doing your own research," into a fucking pejorative. If you even dared to present contradictory evidence, only contempt, disdain, and censorship awaited. What an incredible time, I'll certainly never look at the world the same way for the rest of my life.

I mean, if their prescribed solution was so necessary, how in the hell did I ever survive without my 6 or is it 7 booster shots now, much less only get sick once with a minor 2-day fever where I didn't even bother to break out the thermometer for in the last 3 years? Sorry, a rhetorical question to no one in particular here.

1 hour ago, Freeforester said:

Clever minds have demonstrably debunked the Malthusian scenarios, so the grifters and eugenecists have to resort to other means in which to achieve their ends.

Yep, people are given an easy out by the managers of public opinion, corporate media, to dismiss any contradictory evidence or dissenting opinions as the ravings of lunatics and malcontents unworthy of consideration with a ever-evolving host of labels and stereotypes they constantly signal to the public to show who in society deserves our 5 minutes of hate.

If you never have to challenge your own world view, they'll allow you an existence of comfortable ignorance, that is unless you're unlucky enough in the batch lottery to drop dead from a heart complication at the age of 19 at soccer practice ultimately because the teleprompter readers repeated the words enough times to make it stick ^{safe and effective.} And here I thought people learned that peer pressure to do drugs was bad, mm'kay.

1 hour ago, Freeforester said:

(or at least pre-Nuremberg, which was of course a long time ago, and we are so much more ‘wise’ these days)

On my brief California tour this winter I was walking through the university campus of San Luis Obispo, taking in the sights and random snippets of conversation on my walk. One of the things I overheard from what must have been a freshman kid with his friends "I think we are the smartest generation in human history" - said with complete conviction too. I mean, you'll always have the arrogance of youth, but I thought it was acutely amusing all things considered.

1 hour ago, Freeforester said:

Bread, Jabs and Circuses for all!

Frankly I'm surprised at times we still are able to exchange worthless pieces of paper for valuable necessities like food these days. "We" certainly employ a lot of non-native immigrants to work the fields here as the natives don't tend to value the risk/reward trade-offs of such labor-intensive endeavors. Everything keeps trucking along as long as the food still somehow makes it to the grocery shelves so the show must go on!

Edited July 2, 2023 by Vanturion

[0000]

3 minutes ago, mrelwood said:

I agree, they were a bit out of place in that regard. While bad examples can be found in large numbers, going through “animals helping other animals”, some of the videos do give one something to think about. I seem to recall whales protecting humans from sharks for example. (Maybe not with those exact search words though.)

Dolphins certainly (so long and thanks for all the fish), probably whales as well. Which definitely goes to your point..

8 minutes ago, mrelwood said:

But there are some videos among the bunch that have changed my view on things.

I think these aquatic mammals demonstrate a lot of comparatively high natural intelligence and possibly in another simulation they could have evolved into the dominant planetary life-form. Or not, maybe an evolutionary dead end, I definitely have no expertise to say either way. Anyway, I think it is reasonable and even ethical to afford some special consideration for those creatures who tend to demonstrate higher levels of natural intelligence particularly if they aren't natural predators of human beings. Many domesticated animals already enjoy special privileges simply through their relationships to human beings, some more lucky or fortunate than others. But the meat of the matter is - what is the relationship and, more consequently, the legal status of animals relative to human beings. Thankfully it looks like we agree on that too!

14 minutes ago, mrelwood said:

What I wanted to argue against was that animals wouldn’t have any capability to do that.

Yes and I'll concede this point as everything I said above doesn't take away from the fact that there are animals that are capable of acting outside of the law-of-the-jungle behavioral paradigm regardless of whether it was somehow human-induced or not.

[Planemo]

5 hours ago, Vanturion said:

Clearly there is some level of selfishness required in order to continue existing, and this example should logically establish that selfishness as a trait isn’t inherently bad.

Agreed. And I think we both agree that it's the 'level' of selfishness which can the problem.

5 hours ago, Vanturion said:

I think we can agree it really is and always has been up to humanity to find a balance as to what constitutes the right amount of selfishness

Totally agree, but I also think it's relatively easy (for what is by default supposed to be an intelligent human) to decide, without too much effort, whether something is overly selfish or not without intervenention from others but many seem incapable of doing it. The other problem you have is that people who might generally not be overly selfish have a trait of following someone else's selfishness when surrounded by it. I know some rather nice people that turn into animals when caught up in the horrendous driving antics of the commute. As I say, I choose not to and chill, my driving and etiquette unaltered as if I was driving down an empty country lane. Why do otherwise decent people get caught up in it? I honestly don't know.

5 hours ago, Vanturion said:

Sure, the fraudsters deserve our contempt, but why place sole blame upon the scammers

It's easy to slip into laying some blame at the facilitators, and whilst I agree to some extent, the buck stops with the scammers IMO. We all have an individual choice and just because I can get away with something doesn't for a second mean that I would do it. I think the phrase is 'being able to get to sleep at night'? And there we have it, it's easy to get shut-eye when an individual has low morals.

5 hours ago, Vanturion said:

100% with you there. It’s exactly why I deleted my FB account over ten years ago now.

Same here. and I've never used Twitter or in fact any other similar platform. I do enjoy the odd forum though, like this one, where the vast majority of people are decent and respectful, even if opinions don't match. Conversely, I have seen the Facebook version and the postings there are made in a completely different manner....

5 hours ago, Vanturion said:

There are plenty of examples, but one of the most explicit is Mr. Anderson’s interrogation of Neo in the Matrix (and I like this film).

I see what you mean. And I too am a massive Matrix fan! And, as you have probably guessed, I do somewhat agree with Agent Smith, as does pretty much everyone in the comments it seems..

5 hours ago, Vanturion said:

The one I don’t buy whatsoever is the anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.

We'll agree to disagree on that one. And thats cool. But certainly, neither am I saying it's all caused by humans either. All I will say is that what concerns me is the speed of change, not the actual change itself.

5 hours ago, Vanturion said:

I’ll end this massive post on this – COVID brought about a kind of finality too in my perspective, but based on what you said possibly for the opposite reason. I was utterly surprised how many people allowed themselves to be manipulated and convinced by entrenched and monetarily-conflicted interests to sign themselves for an experimental pharmaceutical product, especially with seemingly zero consideration to their (or their children's) own personal risk factors

I was one of the vaxxed. I had 2. But I would never say it was the right thing for someone else to do. It was a choice I had, and I took it. Somewhat fittingly (back to selfishness) a work colleague flat-out refused it. He also knew that the company were giving 10 days off (full paid) to anyone who contracted Covid, or lived with anyone who contracted it...

So the guy managed to get 50 days paid leave (two parent, 3 kid family) by claiming he was positive (which the company didn't require confirmation of) whilst I and my colleagues held the fort, none of us testing positive in this time. To add insult to injury, just as the CEO's decided that they were going to revoke the 10 day rule I and my colleagues all tested positive. All our symptoms were incredibly minor so we were required to attend work, same as if we had minor colds. For those that did feel pretty rough (in other depts) their time off went down as sick leave, hitting their sickness records accordingly.

This sort of scamming by my '50 day' colleague was rife, same as the furlough scheme.

5 hours ago, Vanturion said:

I’m really not making my original case

No you're not

5 hours ago, Vanturion said:

It’s simply really hard to achieve an acceptable compromise between individual and collective needs.

For me, I don't see it as that difficult, at least in theory. Humans certainly have the capability of living a perfectly harmonious life even without lawmakers breathing down our necks. But as I have tried to put forward, theres just too many of us around who don't care enough about our fellow humans. And thats the problem.

5 hours ago, Vanturion said:

But humans certainly aren’t a blight... shit. Well I'm not anyway and I don't think you are either!

You certainly aren't! I just wish there was more morality in general. It seems you think the ratio is OK. And thats OK

I agree with a lot of everything else you wrote, and very eloquently put too. Cheers.

[mrelwood]

I think this topic and the incredibly respectful (and insightful) discussion/argument between @Vanturion and @Planemo is a real joy to read. It’s very rare to see such politeness despite (some) differing views. I have deep appreciation for this kind of interaction. High praise to you guys, you rock!