Rule
Sounds like something a cutie would say! Cute people often deny their own cuteness 😘
The most impressive part is how this isn't even informed by US imperialism. It's in the US's interest to stop the genocide in Gaza and prevent costly wars that could cripple global trade. Them funneling guns into Ukraine is probably the best return on investment they could ask for. It's foreign interests keeping the Democrats with Israel and the Republicans with Russia.
What's stopping you from crying in a school uniform?
Power-scaling in a nutshell
I had one of these moments. It was with the 2 friends from 3rd grade I could be sad with. I had mostly been sad alone before then, but with them, I felt less so. We were a collection of misfits; people who never could feel totally normal. At the same time, we still wished we weren't different. Life would be so much easier.
No, this is a 100% realistic portrayal of the social media landscape.
You can throw them on your shoulder like a continental soldier
Thought it read "privacy," which is also cool.
It probably wasn't even controlled much, just doing a preprogrammed song and dance with minor tweaks if it fucks up.
You can save $6.75 by just being bald!
That's not exactly what I mean. I'm talking about evolution making things worse for us, regardless of how quickly it moves. If the survival pressure is high enough, it can drastically change a species as long lived as elephants within a few decades. Most of them in certain areas now lack large tusks, as the lethality rate of getting poached was extreme thanks to the funding of war efforts.
If 99% of people with the ability to hear died from an uncontrollable disease while those without hearing rarely died, people would literally evolve to barely have hearing in a similar time frame. The weaker selection pressures on traits that are harder to evolve take a long time, but strong pressures on traits than more easily change happen far quicker than you'd expect. They also don't give a fuck about making our lives better, only helping our biological machines continue replicating and existing.
In this sense, peace and working together will only be favorable when the costs of being awful are far higher than the benefits. A better life is not always the most efficient for continued existence. Mutually assured destruction and no benefits from violence are what's necessary for evolution to favor peace. Even then, there will always be those who start shit, as evolution also favors some level of diversity and deviation.
When parasitic hierarchies dominate over long periods in society, it's because they successfully perpetuate themselves. This doesn't even mean they serve anybody or anything but their own continued existence. Thinking of them as emergent organisms from smaller entities, the answer to how they shape evolution becomes more apparent.
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In a monarchy, one may ask who the beneficiary of the system is. Is it the king and royalty, funneling the resources from peasants with their soldiers? One might assume so, but the king and royalty often have limitations that can make their life unpleasant. Every decision they make is constrained by them maintaining their position. They could get forced into relationships they don't want, get murdered by their family or outside rivals, or have kids they don't want to continue their "bloodline."
So then is it their genes in a gross eugenics sense? Not necessarily. An entire family can get wiped out or slowly replaced by interkingdom marriages without fundamentally changing the governmental entity. The bloodline is a bit more favored than individual family members, but they can all get purged while the system persists. The empire remains while the royal family is wiped from the genepool.
The beneficiary is the crown itself. It's a social construction made of independent parts working together out of common interests by serving the meta entity.
This idea might sound crazy, but when you look at biology, you see parallels all the way down.
A single cell is made of proteins and molecules, producing more of each other and themselves to maintain the larger entity they are a part of. They can undermine each other, with genes moving around in the code to avoid deletion by the error correcting mechanisms, code from unrelated cells occasionally getting absorbed and sometimes resulting in the cell's death on the off chance that the code is useful, or proteins themselves unraveling the proteins of other cells via prion diseases.
At the multicellular level, differentiated cells, bacteria, viruses, and rare multicellular microbes work together and against each other in a vast ecosystem that sometimes moves around and gets labeled as a single entity. To deal with predation and violent competition, more complex nervous and immune systems drive increasingly larger units. At the same time, all the smaller levels of replicating entities continue to exist alongside when they can find a niche. Small gametes cease existing, but sperm and ovum become the backbone of multicellular gene exchange, resulting in all sexual mechanisms from all multicellular life.
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The reason oppressive states, companies, and social systems exist and propagate is because they protect their own interests, not the interests of the humans they comprise.
If a company decides to work against the system of capitalism, they usually lose their place via human mechanisms of social rejection, in addition to losing the extra efficiency immoral practices can provide. Businesses don't just compete within an industry, but against the cold investors looking for which ventures are most profitable. Companies must be the most efficient users of finite capital, with their speculative economic profit being pitted against the speculated economic profit of every unethical company on earth.
If a country decides to enact regulations, the neoliberal system of global capitalism allows the rich to move their wealth away, forcing most places to race each other to the bottom. If a group doesn't use fossil fuels, they won't have access to the same energy as their competitors. If a nation doesn't have enough weapons or doesn't form alliances with an empire like the US, those that do can ruin them.
Organisms from the genus of state in the family of government in the order of organization in the class of explicit construct in phylum of human idea in the kingdom of communication in the domain of meta organism are what prevents a renewable climate future. Organisms from the same class make up global capitalism, while ideas in the phylum are restricted for every human hierarchy we see.
These organisms reproduce every time we think about them, mutating and changing as if they were a bacteria or virus carried by every thinking person on earth. Society is an ecosystem of these organisms that exist within us, but they don't exist for our benefit, they exist for their own. They sometimes serve us, but only the ideas worth remembering persist. If no one thinks an idea again, it is gone unless it convergently evolves.
No individual iteration of an idea exists in quite the same way across our minds, but they often relate in similar ways. They aren't sentient, but they are alive and evolving in a very important sense.
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That's the level at which our problems lie. Human nature goes beyond humans and what we typically think of as nature.
A tragedy for not just the lives lost, but the effect it had on the world
Honestly, evolution is not our friend here. A lot of problems we see in humanity parallels other mechanisms that have similar incentives for success. Social Darwinists were correct about capitalism mirroring evolution, but wrong about that being a good thing. Evolution will maximize suffering if it helps the species. It will not make them live better or be safer. If anything, encouraging that system is against the interests of all who favor personal safety. You'll almost always get eaten by other dogs eventually.
I've come to realize that the upper limit of human intelligence is both surprisingly smart, and depressingly stupid. I'm lucky enough to be smarter, but also smart enough to know I'm an absolute idiot. I'm not even that smart in an IQ sense, just lucky in my experience, education, and focus. I'm smart in a particular way, but I'm not quick or even capable of many basic tasks.
I don't enjoy people seeing me as smart, because they then expect things I don't feel capable of. I don't want that pressure! I'm not that much smarter than you 😫
We've always been dummies, and mostly in ways that have nothing to do with IQ.
Usually the stupid people where I live
True. As a kid, even I knew that hope was naive.
If it was, there'd be obvious labels on all the characters.