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Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented

243 points · 192 comments · wglb

  1. georgemcbay · · focus · HN ↗
    Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal.

    Sure, we've got them beat on language and planning, but we're currently in the process of being passed up on both those fronts by multi-dimensional arrays of floating point numbers sitting inside of sand. So, like, how special is that then, really?

    1. warumdarum · · focus · HN ↗
      Life is inheritly expansive and colonialist. The trees war the grass for the light by throwing shade. So people have these little plot-armor, little stories justifying endless expansion- having three kids, who consume thanks to modern industrialized society energy and nutrients like a medieval village and do the same. Without these "Im-good" self-repairing stories, people would stop having kids and wither and die. To demand people to be rational there, is to start a death cult.

      These whales sing songs about how sharks have no souls and the metal fish dwellng on the surface mauled there ancestors.

      1. 9dev · · focus · HN ↗
        Surely you realise that there’s a balance between “stop reproducing and die to avoid harm to the world” and “consume all resources available for short-sighted gluttony”.

        There are absolutely ways to lower our impact and lots of smart people working on figuring out how this can be made to work at scaley

        1. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

          [deleted]

        2. warumdarum · · focus · HN ↗
          So far, it appears those smart people have created a ideological caused self-extinction of western civilizations and thus a take-over by unapologetic expansionist imperialist cultural systems. Not very smart and not very longterm loadbearing.. it seems those "smart" people are mostly ideological driven and unable to work with the flawed, half-animal humans given.
        3. tekne · · focus · HN ↗
          Honestly -- I think the deeper point here is Nietzsche's: there's nothing wrong about winning. Nothing wrong about conquest. Nothing wrong with having three kids and outcompeting your neighbor.

          This cultural meme spreads because short term gluttony is not, in fact, winning: if you eat your seed-corn, next year you starve. And winning is not about quantity either, but quality: I unapologetically want to shape the light-cone in my image, and my image recoils at torment.

        4. asgeesg · · focus · HN ↗

          [dead]

      2. krupan · · focus · HN ↗
        The show Pluribus explores this idea. I can't wait for more episodes
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