Reply #96: Nobody on the pedestal sounds good to me

[Chulanowa]

However, "bring people down to earth"? That would indeed be nice, but I'm not an idealist.

Remember that we're animals, first and foremost. We eat, defecate, and breed. To our omnivorous perceptions, everything is food. To our nomadic natures, everywhere is a toilet. And to our ever-ready genetals, "now" is always a great time to get busy. In our heads, we know better, of course, but these base urges are hard for us to deny. Even the most virtuous among us is, at heart, a hungry, horny mammal looking for somewhere to take a crap where he hopes to not step in it.

To our credit, we can train ourselves to resist these urges. But then, someone always ruins it by breeding, and then we have to try to train THAT bunch of rugrats how to not crap where they sleep, and they always get it wrong... Just ask your grandparents. And their grandparents. Each successive generation has always been a bunch of screwups.

When you get down to earth, we're still a bunch of self-centered chimpanzeess with a hair loss problem who travel in packs. Sadly what you speak of - Making people more selfless and world-aware - would require a hell of a lot of tinkering with our biological building blocks, and then the extinction of everyone who didn't share this selfless nature, as they would certainly abuse the heck out of the new guys.

Thankfully for the world around us, species in the homo genus tend to smart themselves to death rather rapidly. Sapiens has probably already reached its zenith. While all our modern medical advances are great for the society we live in, they are a continuing disaster for the longevity of the species as a whole, and even the generation of a successor species. Let me put it this way - there's a reason polio was around, and why our bodies start breaking down at about age 60. I'd say we've got another couple thousand years of downhill coasting before finally hitting the big brick wall that we helped introduce the dodo to.

On the earth or in the clouds, humans will be what humans are, and that's a digestive tract wrapped in meat and put on a pair of locomotive appendages. We will eat our way through this planet. Saying "God told us to" is just what people came up with to assauge the guilt when they realized the juicy, tender mammoth weren't likely to come back.

No, I suppose it's not a really rosy picture I paint. This is why there are religions, disciplines, and codes of thought from day one of human history - to try to be something other than a marauding band of opposable-thumbed miscreants. Humans are destroyers, bloom, not just the ones with testicles. Women have taken part in the massacre of species, the massacre of other humans, ruination of what we consider the best environment ever, and you betitted lot still seem to not be doing much more than we bedicked lot to draw a halt to these sort of practices. Individualy, sure, there's women out there, just as there are men. But, until I see you gals stand up, at least the majority, and actually do something that's different than what the guys are doing, I'm maintaining that we all suck equally

Cruising on a uterus is no different than cruising on a penis. You didn't give yourself that thing, and it doesn't make you anything more special than the ravenous ape with a giant head that you are - along with hte rest of us.