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It's pancakes and waffles.
"Genocide A is bad."
"So you're saying you support Genocide B?!?!?"
Tribalism is great because its actually sportsism.
Tribal relations are varied and nuanced among plethora tribes, but Sports is a zero-sum A-B, the limit of ways things can be.
I've always hated sports. Sports fans to me appear to be little more than neanderthals. "Think with your muscles, not with your brain, cause life is a zero-sum game. My team better than yours. If you ain't first you're last."
Philosophically speaking, every part of that is just the complete opposite of everything I believe in.
The meta of this is if you put philosophy toe-to-toe against sports. In that case, philosophy is better. A sports fan might say "but athletes can score more points than philosophers!" But a philosopher would say "What kind of points? What game are we even playing? What's the objective? How does one win?" and question the assumption that "points" and "winning" would have anything at all to do with physical prowess in the first place.
Sports demand real cognition, not less than philosophy, arguably more, since it happens live, under time pressure, with a body that must execute the conclusion instantly. A point guard reading a defense while the shot clock runs down is doing applied game theory. A boxer managing distance is running live Bayesian updates on an opponent's intent every half-second. "Think with your muscles" gets it backwards: muscles are just the output device: what's upstream is pattern recognition and split-second reasoning under uncertainty, the kind philosophers usually get to do slowly, with a pen and no clock.
As for competition being some corrupted, zero-sum betrayal of philosophy's higher aims, Nietzsche would say you have it exactly backwards. He didn't see struggle as an unfortunate feature of life to be reasoned away; he saw it as life's basic structure. "Life is will to power," and where there's no resistance to overcome, there's no growth. "What does not kill me makes me stronger" wasn't a locker-room slogan to him, it was near his actual metaphysics.
He also admired the Greek agon, the competitive contest underlying their tragedy, philosophy, and athletics alike. In "Homer's Contest" he argued the Greeks needed structured competition to keep ambition from curdling into destruction, the contest channels will to power into something generative rather than annihilating. Sport isn't philosophy's opposite; it's an old technology for making competition survivable, even beautiful.
So framing this as philosophy-versus-sports, which wins, may be the more "neanderthal" move, it smuggles in the same zero-sum, must-crown-a-victor logic you're accusing sports fans of, just relocated to the seminar room. Nietzsche's real challenge wasn't ranking pursuits; it was asking why you need a hierarchy at all, rather than seeing both as arenas where the same drive, to test yourself against resistance and become more, gets expressed.
So framing this as philosophy-versus-sports, which wins [...] smuggles in the same zero-sum, must-crown-a-victor logic you're accusing sports fans of
That's why I called it "the meta," it was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating. I was poking fun at myself for the seeming inconsistency there. I probably could have left out that entire last paragraph and it would have been better but sometimes I forget that my oddball humor doesn't always come across the way I intend it to
I believe the scientific consensus among historical anthropologists is, and I quote in an Australian accent for some reason:
"we're a right bunch of dickheads we sure are, ain't we"
Actually, it's the exact opposite.
Humans are a communal species who, if not for the arbitrary social institutions which sprang up within the last 5000 years of humanity's 120000 years on this planet that incentivize us to go against our nature, have an unending capacity for empathy and solidarity. If we didn't, we never would have formed communities to begin with.
Read Graeber.
homo sapiens genocided our competitors
We also intermingled and incorporated them into our society in equal capacity. Anyone with a nut allergy has genes that were associated with neanderthals. All humans of non-African descent contain 1-2% neanderthal DNA in their genome. It's just a coincidence that we outbreed them to the point they, over the course of millennia, faded as modern homo sapien became the dominant species.
The DNA presence only confirms that there was interbreeding happening, not what kind of conditions they were happening under. Knowing what I know about our species, especially from the early days, IMO its equally likely that we intermingled via war/conquest (in the form it would have existed for hunter/gatherer societies) and incorporated via slavery. My guess is that history contains examples of both (peaceful and violent exchanges) for each of Neanderthal, homo erectus, and Denisovians, plus maybe others that history isn't as aware of, depending on how diverse hominids got before homo sapiens got settled in everywhere.
Our species is capable of the full spectrum from good to evil and even today we have a large amount of psychopaths in leadership positions.
Though we are the first species to be aware that other species have gone extinct and wonder how much of that was directly because of us. And it's not like any homo sapiens that exist today have any responsibility for what happened to species that went extinct before recorded history began anywhere on this planet.
Slavery wasn't really a thing in pre historic Hunter gatherer society:
"Somewhat more convincing are statistical surveys of large numbers of societies that show that slavery is rare among hunter-gatherers, is sometimes present in incipient agricultural societies, and then becomes common among societies with more advanced agriculture. Up to this point slavery seems to increase with increasing social and economic complexity."
Which makes sense, the benefit of slavery is that the master can expropriate all the surplus a person can generate, but hunter gatherers don't really generate surplus. Combine this with the difficulty of keeping someone against there will without a state and people specialized in violence to keep them in line and slavery isn't really that viable.
In general hunter gatherer tribes were anarchic as consensus and social cohesion were necessary both to make sure you don't starve and to be able to fight off other tribes
That is not a question we have an actual answer to yet though. So any strong claim like that is based entirely on your own personal opinions, not facts.
We also genocided ourselves in prehistory
Thank you for pointing to Graeber. "Dawn of Everything" was such a good book, it really changed my view on humanity.
Even primitive folks have weapons and combat injuries appear in ancient archeological records too.
They also have plenty of archeological evidence of taking care of the sick or elderly even when doing so would be a resource drain, which means they cared enough about the sanctity of life to help someone who was I need even if it was not mutually beneficial to do so.
I never said conflict doesn't happen.
No nation on earth is without blood on their hands, is that so hard for us regular working people to see?
"The world is built with genocide" - Bo Burnham
Saying the first one is how you get banned from tankie communities.
The problem is also a lot of people refuses to do good things because said good things is something that is done by someone who is perceived to be bad.
Isn't that exactly the point of the person on the top right? They're defending against the "Communism bad" stance, by trying to communicate that it isn't exactly a fair stance when talking about atrocities as it's always powerful, authoritarian nutcases doing them. It's not like it's part of the communist agenda to be fucking horrible.
I think the logic is that if bad thing (A) (e.g. genocides) happens in both communist and capitalist societies then its not the communism that's the factor causing bad thing (A)
No, because it's often said to deflect any criticism of second-world governments. Like "Nuh uh, Stalin wasn't bad! Just look at the Trail of Tears!"
Am so happy my nations of England and Spain have never done anything...............
😳
USA has committed way more genocidal acts than just that.
No way, thanks for the head's up. WHO KNEW
Most people don't know because rewriting history is a long standing American tradition.
Yeah but if you want to see some real proper genocidal acts then we gotta break out da history books and head to checks notes everywhere on earth.
Sentinel island is only known for small scale murders rather than full on genocide, tbf.
USA's CIA had toppled a lot of democratically elected governments and replaced them with brutal authoritarian regimes that lasted decades. Basically they let the natives of respective countries do the killings.
Yes that is bad, and it does not excuse anyone else’s atrocities.
Very based idea, but let's make sure we focus the bad to handle the current happening right fucking now and we can stop it bad from continuing to happen.
polity
High horsing around
Spend billions constantly smearing and badmouthing the enemy rival regime
"You're no better"
"NOOOOO a historian would just say ok and not challenge our propaganda!"
PS: This is of course satire. Since the rise of the historians, all hypocrites have been killed.
PPS: Just read this and I think it puts the hypocrisy of OPs meme better than my bullshit:
It reminds me of what Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter said in his acceptance speech in 2005 critiquing the Iraq War and U.S. foreign policy:
“It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Very based and kill all the hypocrites pilled!
My country has committed countless acts that would be considered atrocities either now or at the time. We had several groups of second-class citizens, dabbled in genocide, were religiously tolerant, sided with nazis, sided with communists, convinced muslims that alcohol is okay, foiled plans of every ally and enemy we came into contact with, our president endorsed Trump and was endorsed by Trump, successfully invaded russia twice, enlisted animals into army and had pedophiles among clergy.
And we still have several movements, modern or historical, portraying us as the good guys and calling us "Jesus of nations"
Which country are you speaking of?
Ha! I expected people o try to guess...
spoiler
Poland!
Oh, that country
Yup, we exist, despite evidence of it being frankly unlikely
