Comment on Alpha males
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days agoI mean, your two types of freedom discourse is largely correct, but this is missing the point I am making.
My original point is that civilization essentially is a form of self-domestication.
Then comes someone to attempt to disprove this by basically turning this into a discussion of comparative freedoms and standards of living.
Sure, ok but thats a non sequitur, its talking around my point, my claim, instead of actually challenging it.
Yep, we generally have more freedom from starvation, disease, etc.
The trade off is that we have more requirements of other kinds and less freedoms of other kinds.
This has nothing to do with the fact of domestication, it has to do with determining whether or not it is good or desireable.
At no point have I said anything like ‘it was better before we invented cities and civilization and industrial technology.’
That would be a different claim, where what you point out would be relevant, but its not the claim I’ve made.
Also, captivity does not return nothing, strictly necessarily speaking within the original domain specific comparison of animal captivity, also the history of civilization very much includes the history of slavery, and yep, your definition of domestication agrees with what I am saying, have said.
You and underpantsweevil have both assumed I am making some kind of moral, ethical, ‘should be’ type claim.
Nope, I am not, I am just pointing out that civilized society is way different than 100k BCE society, and that if you time teleported a person from that era to our modern era, they’d likely describe the experience of integrating into our society as similar to being made into a pet, or perhaps highly ritualistic social role from their society, that they would feel like they were acting or performing in a world of millions of rules, and expected to do so all the time.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 days ago
You are using a motte-and-bailey switch right now.
Nobody was talking against the self-domestication point. That one is your bailey argument: A simple, easy-to-defend stantement that means very little and is largely correct.
The motte argument that everyone was contending was that domestication equals captivity. That one is a garbage claim that just doesn’t hold up.
You lead with the domestication equals captivity point and when you got called out on it you are now trying to switch from your motte argument to the bailey argument, claiming that this was what you were saying all along and not acknowleding that you switched arguments half-way in between.
And yes, equalling domestication and captivity is a moral, ethical, ‘should-be’ claim, and you repeated doing so in this last comment of yours as well by equalling the cuman condition with animal captivity while bringing up slavery in the same line which actually is quite close to animal captivity. The general human condition in 2025 does not equal slavery.
The only way you would seriously make that argument is if you either have no idea what slavery is (which I doubt) or if you want to claim that slavery is not “some kind of moral, ethical, ‘should be’ type” of problem.
And if you can’t see problems with slavery, we might have a bigger issue at hand.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Again, no, you’re wrong, you are thinking I made a claim I didn’t make, and at this point are just generally not able to read and parse what I am saying without imposing your own incorrect interpretation on it.
I am making a semantic, definitional, technical ‘claim’ or argument, not a moral one.
Also, specifically to slavery and captivity, If you think slavery existed before civilization, anthropological and historical data strongly suggest you are wrong, slavery came about with civilization.
For a more modern and widrspread comparison of animal captivity to modern human society, consider prisons, incarceration, whch also came about with civilization, particularly became more widesprrad with industrial civilization.
But anyway, I won’t be arguing with you on this anymore, as you are determined to continuously misconstrue what I am saying.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 days ago
If your point is semantic or definitional, then it needs to follow the semantics and definition of the word you are referring to. Not being able to steal things or consume services without paying for them is not captivity.
Your point is that you made up a definition and then claim that this definition is correct.