This would imply that the measure of progression / advancement is civility, and that we are going to progress and become more civil given more time. That seems to be a fallacy also, it may be that evolution does not optimise for civility at all, after all being civil is not going to help you to crush your enemies or attract a mate in this environment.
Mating choices will reflect and perpetuate this--in a violent, corrupt society, the physically strong, cunning, and ruthless will be the most sought after. In a more altruistic society, people who produce the most value for others (and therefore receive the most favors in kind) will have the highest status.
So evolution in this sense isn't really outside of our control. If we help each other and discourage violence, evolution will reinforce that, making society more peaceful and altruistic over time. On the other hand, if we make it so corruption and cruelty are the best ways to get ahead, people's behavior is likely get worse and worse.
you.class == caveman.classI don't think the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was racially motivated.
> in America we aren't as far gone (but there are people in America who probably wouldn't mind killing other groups).
I agree. I think the definitely-not-fascist leftists in USA are dangerously close to lynching whites. Oddly, so many American whites are deluded into believing leftist activism mania is about making a cute incremental improvement rather than burning it all to the ground.
That national socialism (combined with 20th century eugenics) could become as popular as it did in Nazi Germany had been surprising to me. Given the state of the modern leftist cult, it's no longer surprising. People can actually be deluded to such an extent!
This is a really broad and very specific statement. Genuinely curious what you base this on.
Are you not exposed to this behavior/news somehow?
I think it is a bit different with status without power. It seems to me that this type is a more "popular" goal now.
The opposite could be true as well: the goal of a minority is to gain wealth, recognition and power and in doing so they hurt everyone else around them.
That's why supporting SENS foundation, and any other research aiming to prolong human lifespan is the most important investment now.
But i can't agree that the desire to gain wealth, recognition and power is a bad thing by itself, it only becomes a problem if someone doesn't understand that free and independent people living their and lives discovering new science will eventually give orders of magnitude more wealth and power to everyone than a conquerer ever can take by force.
This kind of communication is based on narrative. The ultimate problem is that when you have a conflict of evidence and narrative, you have people that want to keep theirs. So instead of changing the narrative, they change the evidence.
Find a way to be able to change your own narrative, and survive, given conflicting evidence, and you may be able to help change the world.
It's different though. We're the good guys.
So has genocide...
> there was no formal declaration or ability for them to fight back
The last formally declared war by the US was WWII, and the second Iraq war was absurdly asymmetrical, they effectively had no "ability for them to fight back", we murdered countless civilians. And go ahead and try to find actual numbers regarding those deaths. There are wide discrepancies between US official numbers, US approved media numbers and numbers from other watch groups. If you think our use of force in the middle east is anything like 'officially declared war between nations' you need to spend more time researching.
That's just Iraq, there's a plenty of campaigns right now all through out the middle east. And let's not forget the massive funding of Israel and their perpetual work to drive the Palestinians from their homes. Read up on that and tell me that's not genocide. But if you critique that publicly you'll face immense political backlash.
And don't get me started on the way our governments still actively work to destabilize first nations communities and cultures in the US. We unquestionably committed genocide against native populations in our history as a country but you're naive if you think we still aren't working to actively destroy what culture remains (Canada is equally if not no more so guilty of this).
> and it’s happening largely in secret
The US and China have very different forms of propaganda, but the fact that you think that the US is largely innocent of crimes like these should give anyone reading a sense of how powerful US propaganda and media control really is.
As external observers it’s easy to think of Iraq as a horrific civil war. Yet, it maintained positive population growth so that’s not what happened. It’s more accurate to consider things in terms of Mexican gangs and lack of social order than civil unrest.
No. The difference is that the US did not set up concentration camps in Iraq. That's an important detail, I think.
Which ones should be talking? The regimes that clearly don’t care or the struggling people, many of whom barely have adequate internet.
If you were to somehow take a caveman’s baby, bring it back to the current time and raise it to full adulthood you would not be able to tell the difference it and “us”.
Any progress we’ve made with regard to human rights is purely cultural and not innate ...and it can disappear in the blink of an eye.
You can bet that any horrible thing you can imagine happening some vile cnut somewhere has done to some other poor sap.
We have also never fully acknowledged what the Spanish, British, and later USA did to the native populations of North and South America in the preceding centuries. Yes it's true that disease did much of the work without anyone lifting a finger, but that's only true in the early days. Later on there was plenty of intentional slaughter including bounties to encourage it.
When I look at the way Twitter erupts into ideological witch hunts or things like the Qanon cult, I realize that we have not changed. If any of those mobs got actual power we'd see the same things repeated against whatever groups (real or imaginary) they hate. Civilization is a thin veneer.
Morality and ethics are learned behaviors that are distilled from societal mores. If "thou shall not kill" or some equivalent in another religion didn't exist, for example, I'd argue killing would be natural in society, and nobody would question it. That is why certain tribal and indigenous peoples performed human sacrifices and had various rituals involving bloodsport. To those tribesmen, killing is not something abnormal within the tribe. Why would killing someone from another tribe matter to them?
My biggest problem with secular thought and especially the "pop atheist" variety is that it seems to often lead to is=ought. Regardless of the reality behind any form of theism, theistic thought never accepted that equality. It's always posited that there must be a "better than the way things are now." Some secularists dismiss that as wishful thinking and a coping mechanism, but if so why bother building or doing much of anything beyond the simple core of eat, shit, fight, and fuck?
And when Germany invaded West and East, they found plenty of locals will to help them.
We like to think things are different now, but big picture, they really aren’t.
Blown up rail lines leading to the camps? Would the Germans have said “oh, well let them go then.” No, they would have found other ways to murder them.
It’s not that different than China. You want to stop the genocide? Well, prepare for a major war with millions of deaths on both sides.
Sadly it seems to be backed up by Elliott’s famous experiment. [2] Where you tell one group of kids that they are superior to another group with different eye colour.
after they were plunged into poverty by the reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versailles. Plunder any first world country like that and expect the same.
Since we're not, until someone convince me the violinist argument is not receivable[0], i would continue to support women wanting early abortion.
Hopefully valuing life and allowing people to choose will become just the default.
Not the gp, but my position is that equating a fetus to a person is a fallacy based in the idea that it's a potential person. Which however means it's actually not one. Human beings have language, thought, self-awareness, memories, knowledge, experience, friends, family, hopes and fears. A fetus, wild speculations aside, has none of these. A dna is just a long molecule, not necessary and not enough to attribute humanity. A developed brain and a sense of self instead are both necessary and sufficient. A fetus has neither.
> The Senate just passed a bill that further sanctions China by authorizing the Treasury Department to identify Chinese banks and financial firms which enable the Communist Party regime, and punish them by restricting their access to the US dollar and visas for their executives.
> Unlike past Chinese sanction bills, the restrictions will apply not just to individuals, but the banks that employ them. And it will apply not just to Chinese-owned banks, but subsidiaries of American companies operating in the country.
> “According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do,” Mr. Bolton wrote.
On the other hand, he also signed the Uyghur Human Rights Act.
Edit: For the downvoters, I am not 'whatabout-ing' or trying to diminish these terrible crimes committed by China's government. But I think it's naive to expect any credible US-led action against it while the leader of the US is committing similar crimes on a lesser (but still massive) scale.
Slightly different scenario, no?
And since you can't: please stop making transparently false accusations on HN.
But he's not a very subtle chap. I doubt he could restrain himself to stick to a line.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-china/trump-praises...
Or by getting the US out of the TPP, which was meant to reduce China's influence on that part of the world?
Or by asking him to help him get re-elected?
The problem is that they seem really only willing stand up (incompetently) over trade issues. Trump, himself at least, has never seemed to care at all about human rights issues (foreign or domestic).
There is no indication of that.
Just decade after WWII British government did yet another genocide in Kenya. Concentration camps, floggings, torture and rapes. After that there has been many others.
Even China itself, as bad as it is, is enormously improved from the genocidal days of Mao.
This is just the present manifestation of human nature. I assume, just as genocides and war has occurred in the past, they will continue to occur in the present and future, and we will never achieve world peace until human nature itself is changed, perhaps through some future genetic engineering that would make everyone exceedingly docile.
what could be more docile than an ant? but an ant nest is a psycho. i think you might have the whole thing flipped on its head, at least. mass violence requires mass discipline, and you can only discipline a subject that's docile.
From the Wiki article, the UN definition of Genocide is met if...
...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. — Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2[5]
I'm not a fan of China, but the UN bar for genocide is so low that it's essentially meaningless.
The word itself means gene-killing.
Whether china is actually trying to wipe out or is being oppressive isn't clear when the UN definition is used.
No, it means (in the etymological sense rather than the denotative sense, since the UN definition is the primary denotative use in the modern world) race-killing. The “geno” is from the Greek “genos” meaning “race”, not from the English “gene” (the English “gene" ultimately is descended from “genos” also, through the German “pangen" a hypothesized ultimate unit of heredity, which etymologically is “all-race”.)
> Whether china is actually trying to wipe out or is being oppressive isn't clear when the UN definition is used.
The convention for the prevention and punishment of genocide includes certain forms of group oppression as well as direct killing because historically those kinds of group oppression usually precedes and paves the way for direct killing, and are also themselves an indirect means of killing (by reducing ability to survive and thrive.).
On the other hand, it's a bit of a tricky point because China has nation-wide policoes about fertility (the one child policy and its regional variations) so it's not clear if the Uighurs are especially singled out or simply punished for not respecting a national law.
> Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.
> But while equal on paper, in practice Han Chinese are largely spared the abortions, sterilizations, IUD insertions and detentions for having too many children that are forced on Xinjiang’s other ethnicities, interviews and data show. Some rural Muslims, like Omirzakh, are punished even for having the three children allowed by the law
> Leaked data obtained and corroborated by the AP showed that of 484 camp detainees listed in Karakax county in Xinjiang, 149 were there for having too many children - the most common reason for holding them.
> Seven former detainees told the AP that they were force-fed birth control pills or injected with fluids, often with no explanation. Many felt dizzy, tired or ill, and women stopped getting their periods. After being released and leaving China, some went to get medical check-ups and found they were sterile
> But while equal on paper, in practice Han Chinese are largely spared the abortions, sterilizations, IUD insertions and detentions for having too many children that are forced on Xinjiang’s other ethnicities, interviews and data show. Some rural Muslims, like Omirzakh, are punished even for having the three children allowed by the law
Yes, so are the Han actually complying more with the law (which seems very probable, since they're culturally aligned with the state)? Or is this "largely spared" already taking in account relative percentages of non-compliance? It's not clear.
> Some rural Muslims, like Omirzakh, are punished even...
This is very vague ("some" followed by the name of a single person is not really a strong statement).
The interesting fact is, the one child policy, in all its year of existence, never applied to Uighars and non-Han muslims.
Makes me think these camps are precisely what they say they are, "to nonviolently deal with extremists and separatists".
The alternative would be an Afghanistan-like war to rid certain areas of extremist groups which would probably result in major collateral damage and more innocent casualties.
Sino China was involved in WW2, yet look at this.
Remember China had a hand in crafting this definition.
Forgive my naiveté, but aren't we supposed to be past this type of thing as a species already? Wasn't that the whole point of the 20th century - to show us all the things we shouldn't be doing?