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Re:We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures by throwaway7312 on Tuesday October 11, 2016 @10:32AM (#12684691)
If we're blaming culture for male violence, "animal culture" would seem the more fitting one, since violent males are a feature throughout the animal kingdom and exceptions are, well, the exception. American culture is not much different from iguana culture or toucan culture in this respect.
Re:We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures by qntty on Tuesday October 11, 2016 @11:02AM (#12685002)
Yeah, there are definitely a lot of similarities between humans and other animals in that respect, but that's the problem. It should worry us that humans, an animal capable of resolving conflicts in many different ways, chooses violence so often.

To put it another way, if throwing feces was common behavior among humans, you might say "this isn't a human problem, it's a primate problem." And you'd be right, in a sense. But the key point is that throwing feces (as well as violence) is more easily avoided behavior for humans than for chimps. A human might choose to yell to express a level of anger than chimps only express with feces throwing (I might be uninformed about the feces-throwing behaviors of chimps, but you get the point). When we fail to take advantage of opportunities to avoid violence, we should ask ourselves why.

Re:We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures by taeric on Tuesday October 11, 2016 @11:32AM (#12685308)
My question is if we are going astray looking for a "human" solution to what is ultimately an "animal" behavior. :)

That is, I agree it is not an excuse to say "animals do it." But, it is also somewhat askew to me to have a barrier to our explanations that do not involve "humans are just animals."