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Designated Norwegian
      
Last Seen: Today @ 5:56 PM
Posts: 3,328 Visits: 10,686
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First Lieutenant
      
Last Seen: 9/17/2008 9:34 PM
Posts: 1,966 Visits: 4,411
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Grognard fantôme
Last Seen: Today @ 7:08 AM
Posts: 7,242 Visits: 9,608
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| | Most things humans can do, some other animal can do too: make tools; plan; deceive; love; hate; symbolize; be deluded; aspire; cogitate about temporally or spatially displaced things; string together symbols into creative arrangements; understand syntax; count and do simple arithemetic; exhibit cruelty; exhibit compassion and even self-sacrifice. We like to think we are the only animal who has the capacity to be reasonable, to do the best thing for the greater good, but I really don't think that it is true. The only difference is we do _ALL_ of it, better than any of them can do any of it, and many of them can only do some of it. In short: as long as we stand behind our technology, we have been the baddest bad arse critter on this rock for about a million years I'd say. At least 500,000. Nothing else can compare to us in being bad ***. When 90% of the rest of life of Earth is extinct because of our degradations of the planet--be they industrial, military, etc.--we will still be here, making more babies, having our fun, and somehow managing to figure out how to keep going doing our thing, probably extracting nutrients from rocks using bacteria or something . . . The irony is, while most other animals appear fairly childlike and limited in their ability to be reasonable, to do the best thing for the greatest possible good, we humans clearly (at least on a case-by-case basis) have the capacity to unerringly do the right thing, even when it involves tremendous self-sacrifice. We've got no one to blame but ourselves. |
-- "'The front' is wherever you stop running away. Get used to it. This is what modern warfare looks like." K T Cat |  |  |
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