They kill stuff, they kill things for food, they kill other predators that compete with them for prey.
No, they don’t. Wolves hunt and kill for food. They will kill other canids that challenge their territory. But they don’t kill their competitors. They don’t go out to eliminate all other predators. They’ll defend themselves in a fight, but they don’t wage war. No wolf pack has ever tried to wipe out humans the way humans have tried to wipe out wolves. Wolves don’t wage war.
Ranchers, hunters etc. see wolves as competition, as predators would.
Wolves kill coyotes in their territory, and they only act like that towards other canids. Humans killing wolves isn’t like wolves killing coyotes; you’d have to look for wolves challenging every bobcat that wanders into their territory, or, to be still more accurate, wolves leaving their territory to go kill all the bobcats that exist anywhere. Because that’s what human ranchers and hunters are doing, and that’s something that you won’t see any other predator doing.
Wolves aren’t “bleeding hearts,” and neither are they interested in maintaining ecological balance. They’re just interested in doing what wolves do. But that doesn’t mean hunting down competition. You defend your territory from encroachment by other canids, and you hunt your dinner. That’s a far cry from the campaign towards extinction that we’ve adopted as a matter of policy. That’s the difference between a predator’s life, and waging war.
People showing primitive traits of aggression, predation, territoriality are labeled as "conservatives"
Those aren’t primitive traits you’re talking about. You’re conflating a widespread hunt to kill anything that might compete with you and drive them to extinction with a wolf defending its territory against other canids. The comparison is absurd. Ranchers and hunters aren’t acting primitive in this regard; this is what Daniel Quinn called (repetitively) “totalitarian agriculture,” and it stretches far beyond the behavior of any predator. To live as an animal is to take your life from others, every day. What makes that work is that every animal gives back more than it takes; usually, day-to-day defecation and tending of plants keeps the gap from getting too big, so that your death can pay back your remaining debt. But the domesticated human takes far more than he gives back. The domesticated human doesn’t just defend territory against other primates, but actively goes beyond his territory to wipe out all wolves everywhere. Can human and wolf territories overlap, the way wolf and bobcat or wolf and bear territories overlap? Because wolves don’t go eradicating all predators even from their own territories; just other canids. Can you imagine domesticated humans returning that favor?
Today’s modern political conservatives do not conserve primitive traits. They sometimes hide behind a thin veneer, but they’re every bit as civilized as the rest of us. You’re not talking about a predator’s behavior here, no matter how much you try to twist it around so that it kinda-sorta looks like it: you’re talking about a domesticate’s war.
Have you been to many Reservations? I have lived in close proximity to three of them and they are pretty much full of garbage and denuded of game. The woods are overhunted and the lakes overfished. The native Corporations of Alaska like to clear cut, also.
Just to make sure I understand you correctly–are you seriously suggesting that the conditions on the modern American reservation (which Hitler cited as one of his inspirations for the Holocaust) are the fault of the Indians? That seems too insane even for you, so I want to make sure I’m actually understanding this properly; even you can’t actually believe that…
To conserve habitat, you need a system of domination.
Which is precisely why Homo habilis went extinct so quickly, and why there are no humans alive today.
Seriously, Ted, how do you square that with the fact that only systems of domination have ever destroyed habitat in the first place?
When people were all living in seperate little dispersed tribes, concerning themselves with their own little habitat and speaking different languages than their neighbors, there was no sense of ecology. No concern for the planet. There was some vague cosmology and their tribes place in it and nothing beyond that.
Explaining the genius of the system and how it worked so well is not a counter-point to the fact that it worked well. With each localized culture tied so intimately into its landbase, humans, like any other animal, were native to their habitat, reflecting and enmeshed in its ecological order. No, there was no sense of ecology, because ecology was all there was. What else could there be? Ecology didn’t need conservation or a lot of deep thought, it was part of you, and you were part of it. It was the whole world around you.
sir free range organic human, I am almost lost for words every time I read one of your posts of late, and this one is no different.
You may have missed the previous escalation on Ted’s blog, which has been largely removed I believe, but after some initially interesting posts, Ted started down a road of barely-concealed white supremacy, linking to various white supremacists like Steve Saylor, and frequently writing about the barbaric vigor of the Germanic race and other such non-sense. Sounds like not much has changed, but so you know where he’s coming from, you can get most of his talking points from Stormfront or any number of other neo-Nazi hate sites.
To be honest most of the 'bleeding heart' stuff doesn't fit with me at all.
Nor I, but Ted’s been on a “liberal bleeding heart” kick for a long while now. If you disagree, or even think that violence has a place in the natural world, just not as the ubiquitous prescence it has today, then you’re a liberal bleeding heart. If you’re unwilling to admit that primitive societies were dominated by strong men who beat up those below them and went to war constantly just because of your piddly “lack of any evidence of anything remotely like that,” then you’re a liberal bleeding heart who doesn’t have the stomach for primitive life.
It’s really, really tiresome.
The fact is tho, no truly primitive culture puts up fences.
Wolves certainly defend territory. They don’t put up fences, but they leave very distinct scent marks to let other canids know to steer clear. Primitive humans don’t though; the same land may be home to band A in the summer and band B in the winter, since each band has its own seasonal cycles you could think of it as annually shifting territories, or you could think of it as territories that overlap seasonally.
It's as if the word troll comes to mind..
No, he appears to actually believe all this. And if that’s not a scary thing to consider…
