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Something Really Sexy for Her for Holloween:
http://tinyurl.com/q878y
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Humans are no more selfish than the rest of the animal kingdom but we are
also no less selfish than the rest of the animal kingdom. Our genetic code
records that fact and insures it. However humans are indeed more effective
in our selfishness. That is our Darwinian nature. And therefore we are
more devastating in our behavior. That said, SELF-SACRIFICE IS THE
IDEALISM OF FOOLS.
There is no Manifest Destiny in genes, no supernatural predestination or
predetermination but there is selfishness to the extent that humans like
all other animals have only limited purpose, which is survival.
As to the ownership of the land, you have no clue if you suggest that the
Jews came lately to it. Everyone comes lately to everywhere and settles
there because it is appropriate to their survival. Jews settled the land;
the Arabs did not. Arabs supported fascists and they used the land no less
so than Islam uses everything in it's wake. They failed in their conquest
of what is now Israel. Accept it. Israel has no obligation to retreat from
any land it now controls. It has every right to expel, to take, to control
whatever land it can to insure it survives. That is the way of the jungle,
because we do live in the jungle. What ever made you suppose we did not?
We need not sancify the law of the jungle. It is a fact; a truism which
scientists have a clearer understanding of today, more so than ever before -
and that is a disappointment to the left which thinks or would like to
believe in the inherent goodness of man. Unfortunately, that is not the
case. Altruism never really existed except as exceptions.
All animals do what natural selection programmed their ancestors to do
which is to look after the short term, which is why, it is most likely we
will fail at long term survival in spite of being sucessful at propagating
the planet with our species. 60,000 years since we most likely developed
syntax in our "Great Leap Forward" in Jared Diamonds' and Richard Dawkins'
view and quantum leaped into this future but the few hundred thousand
years of the life of our species is a moment in evolutionary time so that
imagined success of populating the planet - from 2,000 to 6 billion
humans, is not really so great an event: It is what animals do (replicate
and reproduce) and our brains and speech gave us an advantage.
To think about this time and what is moral and what is the fate of Israel
is merely an exercise in thought and logic and a rationalization. There is
little value to it. As John Rawls pointed out, Ethics and morality are
constructions and purpose is what we assign to them. The only purpose for
Israelis should be to continue to propagate and insure their own survival.
They owe no obligation to Arabs who have sworn to kill them and Arabs who
base their lives on the God myth. All animals look after their short term
interests, including their allies, their familes, their cronies,
themselves.
All of us are "brutal, barbaric," ... and "pillaging, raping and
slaughtering the weak" is what every "so-called" civilization has done. The
Jews were not the first nor the last. We have done that in Vietnam and in
Iraq. We did that in my wars. We do it in our wars. We do it because that is
the nature of us and the animals we resemble. The Torah merely records a
uniform track record of our species.
Darwin may have had an idea but not the awareness of our selfish genes.
While it is true that if any species has the ability of breaking away from
short term selfishness and of long term planning for the distant future it
is us but I don't see that happening. Certainly the Arabs did not have that
capability because as Golda once said, the "Arabs never miss an opportunity
to miss an opportunity." They have missed them all. There is no longer any
need nor justification for Israelis to make any more concessions to them.
Hank
On Mon, 8 May 2006, billy rainbow wrote:
>
> ---
>
> Hank,
> your invocation of Darwin is not only not true to the intent of the
> principles Darwin stated, but is done in almost exactly the same
> unfortunate way that "manifest destiny" was invoked to justify the
> genocide committed by the european invaders of north america.
>
> Legitimizing the argument you propose is tantamount to sanctifying
> the Law of the Jungle.
>
> By their own account, as detailed in the Torah, the hebrew invasion
> of Canaan was brutal, barbaric, and utterly inexcusable. Pillaging,
> raping and slaughtering the weak or those that can be taken by surprise
> is not an exercise of civilization, even when the victims are barbaric
> enough on their own.
>
> Dave Berry said;
>
> They can hold all the peace talks they want, but there will never be
> peace in the Middle East. Billions of years from now, when the Earth
> is hurtling toward the sun and there is nothing left alive on the
> planet except a few microorganisms, the microorganisms living in the
> Middle East will be bitter enemies.
>
> If the view you present of biological struggle is correct, then we
> are surely doomed. The world will without doubt end in a cataclysm, if
> not now with BushCo and Ahmadinejad arguing over who's vision of the
> Apocalypse is correct, then not too many decades hence as the weapons
> get bigger, more effective and the fools who control them more bigoted,
> arrogant, and determined to demonstrate their tragically mistaken
> concepts of how much more superior their "survival" traits are.
>
> Among the principles stated in Darwin's work is that any species
> will expand its numbers and range to the limit of its environment to
> support it, at which point the species declines and either adapts in
> order to be more viable or simply waits until its numbers and range have
> been reduced enough, and its environment recovered to the point that
> conditions are right once more for expansion.
>
> That works well enough when the limiting factors are all natural
> products of the environment and relative to the species the planet
> itself is infinite. Humans however, have not only propagated all over
> the entire earth in such numbers that even their by products create
> global changes, but have developed means of exterminating each other
> that are capable of rendering the entire biosphere uninhabitable for
> anything more sophisticated than a cockroach, those hardy creatures with
> over 600 million years of history whose chances of surviving humanity's
> self-destruction aren't actually that good.
>
> What's unrealistic is to continue thinking that might makes right.
> To say that those who can through force of arms or depth of guile are
> entitled to displace and even exterminate "lesser" people is to abandon
> the evolutionary advances our minds provide in favor of a return to the
> times of tooth and claw.
>
> It's easy to make statements about how Israel - or America - should
> be entitled to all they can grab when your an Israeli or an American.
> Empires never last, though. If you'll look through the economic
> discussions going on today you'll find that the predictions are that
> come 2100 this will be remembered as the Chinese Century, with perhaps a
> nod to India. The arabs are eventually going to have all the WMD they
> want. What they don't develop themselves some capitalist will sell
> them, as to a certain degree some Americans - and Israelis - have
> already done. Perhaps not always directly or with complete intention,
> but just the same, and all you have to do is look at Cheney and BushCo's
> other board members to see how utterly agnostic they are when it comes
> to making a profit.
>
> Would you say that BushCo is thereby demonstrating its superior
> survival characteristics? They certainly are rich and powerful. Right
> on top. They can play both sides of any issue they want and back it up
> with the lives of soldiers in the world's most imposing armies, who
> stupidly die for the lies and greed of people who program them with
> fairy tales about freedom, patriotism and honor.
>
> Regrouping behind the 1967 boundaries is as much as anything an
> exercise Israel needs to undertake to demonstrate its commitment to
> civilization and the progress humanity needs to make in order to survive
> in a similarly shrinking world. The Israelis, like so many of the rest
> of us, are squatters on someone else's land who need to demonstrate what
> valuable guests they are, what irreplaceable citizens of the greater
> world about them, or eventually be overwhelmed by, if not the forces
> amongst which they squat, then their own excreta upon which they squat.
>
> In truth everyone must take their dose of that medicine. Some have
> more to take than others, and far too many have yet to be educated to
> the point that they can even understand the need. But that medicine is
> exactly what gives us as a species the edge that may yet let us survive
> on this planet; the ability to adapt by force of will to conditions
> designed by reason that contradict the biological constraints that have
> ruled until now.
>
> Are we dogs fighting over a dirty scrap of meat? Or are we
> intelligent enough to find something else to eat?
>
> Peace,
>
> billy rainbow
>
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