Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is sharply protesting against growing criticism from top ally the United States over his leadership amid the war with Hamas.
How can we get to the root of our problems if we continue to group people from different regions as separate and distinct?
We’re all the same species. We’re humans dehumanizing humans to make killing humans easier under the leadership of a tiny fraction of our species fighting to go down in history. Same as it ever was.
Even when we do our absolute best to be good to each other, we still break ourselves into groups. “You can’t wear braids, that’s cultural appropriation!” The person who says that means well, but ultimately we have to stop treating each other as, well, other.
The only thing that makes us any different is actually something that we should strive to see as similarity. That is which individuals from which time influenced what area and how that don’t really matter and was just luck (or bad luck) of the draw.
So what if 3,000 years ago some dude thought it was cool to paint stripes on his face and wear a big hat which lead to millions painting stripes on their faces while wearing big hats over there in a distant land.
It’s the same damn thing as some dude over here thinking that a white wig and a big frilly shirt was rad and millions following in his footsteps.
It really is simple. Our cultures are built from people who came and went before us and folks following them and spreading the rad (or ugly) shit they did.
Our culture has to reach a point where it is considered a collective and shared human culture.
Who fucked who, where, and how much influence they left on their descendants and how much we give a shit about the where isn’t helping us. If an alien abducted 10 humans from different regions they wouldn’t even give a thought to how our history separates us. They’d just have 10 of a species from the planet earth.
I hope we get it together one day. It breaks my heart that those people are suffering so terribly right now. The malnourished kids in those photos remind me of the ones from the holocaust.
It would be nice if the people in power could relate their suffering to that of their grandparents. It really would.
The diversity we have as a species is -and always has been- our greatest strength. It means a subset of us can usually do at least “ok” under any given situation.
The same thing is what made some poxy little island able to rule a vast swathe of the planet. The UK took the best of everything it encountered, and added it to it’s own, like the Borg. Of course, like everywhere else that’s run by plutocrats, in an effort to keep us all divided anything “foreign” is currently bad, and to be shunned.
The UK took the best of everything it encountered, and added it to it’s own, like the Borg.
The Empire was built from the Agricultural and Industrial Revolution, and the +15 year head start the British got over the rest of the world. The coupling of massive domestic economic growth with an international system of spoils and conquest lead to the Age of Sail and the gilded era for Britain, not an adherence to objective, rational facts and ideas.
The advantage of developing earlier lead to much of the leading research, science and practices coming from Britain, but they certainly had enough hubris to ignore better ideas that weren’t their own
Easiest suction is to make first contact and turn an entire alien species into the ‘other’ we always need to have and hate. Humanity will learn to cooperate by force then
Only since around 600BC when coin turned money from a quantitive measurement of debt into a protection racket against soldiers, mercenaries and thugs (military colonialism wouldn’t be possible without this redefinition of money). Yeah, there were always societies with ruthless hierarchies, but they weren’t the norm. Yeah, there was always inequality in wealth or physical ability, but wealth wasn’t always used to lord over and deprive from eachother. The norm for most of humanities 200,000+ years were societies of cooperation, a colourful carnival of experimental politics of the likes we couldn’t even dream of nowadays. Ruthless and brutal hierarchies famously collapse because communities actively decided to abandon them, move elsewhere, and create something new and better. Human history is marked by stories of societies who reject arbitrary authorities, the ability to go elsewhere, and most of all have the expectation that wherever they go they’ll be cared for. None of these freedoms exist anymore, so the question is how and why did we lose these freedoms? And who benefits from these losses of freedoms? After accepting that society is what we make of it, defined by rules on how to live amongst one another in a bottom->up direction, then why are we so eager to blindly accept arbitrary authority, stay put, and fear our neighbors?
It just proves to me that people are people.
How can we get to the root of our problems if we continue to group people from different regions as separate and distinct?
We’re all the same species. We’re humans dehumanizing humans to make killing humans easier under the leadership of a tiny fraction of our species fighting to go down in history. Same as it ever was.
Even when we do our absolute best to be good to each other, we still break ourselves into groups. “You can’t wear braids, that’s cultural appropriation!” The person who says that means well, but ultimately we have to stop treating each other as, well, other.
The only thing that makes us any different is actually something that we should strive to see as similarity. That is which individuals from which time influenced what area and how that don’t really matter and was just luck (or bad luck) of the draw.
So what if 3,000 years ago some dude thought it was cool to paint stripes on his face and wear a big hat which lead to millions painting stripes on their faces while wearing big hats over there in a distant land.
It’s the same damn thing as some dude over here thinking that a white wig and a big frilly shirt was rad and millions following in his footsteps.
It really is simple. Our cultures are built from people who came and went before us and folks following them and spreading the rad (or ugly) shit they did.
Our culture has to reach a point where it is considered a collective and shared human culture.
Who fucked who, where, and how much influence they left on their descendants and how much we give a shit about the where isn’t helping us. If an alien abducted 10 humans from different regions they wouldn’t even give a thought to how our history separates us. They’d just have 10 of a species from the planet earth.
I hope we get it together one day. It breaks my heart that those people are suffering so terribly right now. The malnourished kids in those photos remind me of the ones from the holocaust.
It would be nice if the people in power could relate their suffering to that of their grandparents. It really would.
Sorry I’m all over the place.
I disagree. You’re pretty on target with that.
The diversity we have as a species is -and always has been- our greatest strength. It means a subset of us can usually do at least “ok” under any given situation.
The same thing is what made some poxy little island able to rule a vast swathe of the planet. The UK took the best of everything it encountered, and added it to it’s own, like the Borg. Of course, like everywhere else that’s run by plutocrats, in an effort to keep us all divided anything “foreign” is currently bad, and to be shunned.
The Empire was built from the Agricultural and Industrial Revolution, and the +15 year head start the British got over the rest of the world. The coupling of massive domestic economic growth with an international system of spoils and conquest lead to the Age of Sail and the gilded era for Britain, not an adherence to objective, rational facts and ideas.
The advantage of developing earlier lead to much of the leading research, science and practices coming from Britain, but they certainly had enough hubris to ignore better ideas that weren’t their own
Easiest suction is to make first contact and turn an entire alien species into the ‘other’ we always need to have and hate. Humanity will learn to cooperate by force then
Only since around 600BC when coin turned money from a quantitive measurement of debt into a protection racket against soldiers, mercenaries and thugs (military colonialism wouldn’t be possible without this redefinition of money). Yeah, there were always societies with ruthless hierarchies, but they weren’t the norm. Yeah, there was always inequality in wealth or physical ability, but wealth wasn’t always used to lord over and deprive from eachother. The norm for most of humanities 200,000+ years were societies of cooperation, a colourful carnival of experimental politics of the likes we couldn’t even dream of nowadays. Ruthless and brutal hierarchies famously collapse because communities actively decided to abandon them, move elsewhere, and create something new and better. Human history is marked by stories of societies who reject arbitrary authorities, the ability to go elsewhere, and most of all have the expectation that wherever they go they’ll be cared for. None of these freedoms exist anymore, so the question is how and why did we lose these freedoms? And who benefits from these losses of freedoms? After accepting that society is what we make of it, defined by rules on how to live amongst one another in a bottom->up direction, then why are we so eager to blindly accept arbitrary authority, stay put, and fear our neighbors?