You're making the mistake of thinking of "nature" and "evolution" as intelligent, reasoning systems, and that every evolutionary adaptation exists for a purpose. Evolution doesn't do things for "reasons," things just happen.
Remember that cephalopod brains are donut shaped and their digestive tracts go right through the middle and if they eat something too big they'll have an anyeurism. Pandas and koalas evolved special diets that serve no evolutionary purpose and both would be extinct if humans didn't find them cute. Sloths have to climb down from trees to take a shit. Female hyenas give birth through a pseudopenis that often ruptures and kils them. Horses can't vomit and if they swallow something toxic, their stomach ruptures. Also their hooves and ankles are extremely weak and not well designed to support their weight. Numerous species like the fiddler crab and peacock have evolved sexual displays that are actively harmful to their survival.
And as for humans, our spines are not well adapted for walking upright, our retinas are wired backwards, and we still have a useless appendix and wisdom teeth. The recurrent laryngeal nerve has an unnecessarily long and complex route branching off the vagus and travelling around the aorta before running back up to the larynx.
Evolution is not smart. Evolution isn't even stupid. It isn't trying to keep you alive and it isn't even capable of caring if you die. Yes we should absolutely fuck with it, because we don't want to live in a world where we still die of sepsis and parasites and plagues because "we don't want to mess with evolution."
Evolution has lead to optimization and efficiency many times. It rarely trends to maximization or the largest possible efficiency, since those conflict with "good enough". Protein structure and function is a common example.
> It rarely trends to maximization or the largest possible efficiency, since those conflict with "good enough".
Sometimes things get trapped in a local minima. Particularly when a seemingly inconsequential detail at a much much earlier stage becomes a dependency of lots of downstream stuff, but then it turns out that this just so happens to conflict with a better option in the here and now.
More commonly, the "perfect" solution is extremely brittle while the (supposedly) "good enough" solution is incredibly robust to all sorts of environmentally inflicted bullshit. In other words, most of the time evolution is practical while the humans criticizing the outcome are ignorant idealists.
Not even good enough: "population reproduced faster then it died".
That's it: and it's separate from good enough because that can include things like "happened to live on the part of the island which didn't get obliterated by a volcanic eruption at the only point in history that volcano ever erupted".
>koalas evolved special diets that serve no evolutionary purpose
Koalas biggest problem is us? Like they seem perfectly adapted to their niche. Eat lots of leaves that nobody else is adapted to use as food, and once a year, run very fast to outpace the bushfire that your principle food source needs to reproduce.
Are their hooves, though? The fossil record clearly shows a progression in their ancestors from having feet with many toes to the single "toe" they have now.
Huh, that's really interesting. But I suppose it doesn't apply to the amber alert thing. In that situation, evolution probably was an intelligent reasoning system that existed for a purpose and we must be subverting it (a bad idea). There's always an exception to every rule, I suppose.
This was believed in the 20th century, but we now believe the appendix is actually useful, and is basically a fail-safe in case the intestinal flora are wiped out; some will survive in the appendix and repopulate the intestine.
Which is an incredibly specious conclusion because when would the gut fauna ever be wiped out? For the evolutionary history of mankind, antibiotics did not exist, and people without an appendix (such as myself) have no medical need for any special treatment after going on antibiotics.
Just a reminder, Donald Trump is mentioned over a million times in the Epstein files. He likely not only raped but participated in the murder of children. He probably had Jeffrey Epstein killed as well. Don't let yourself get distracted. None of this alien shit is real. Donald Trump being a rapist, pedophile and criminal is real. His administration's coverup of Epstein's crimes and his own complicity is real.
I’m the same guy who told you those things about the Greys you freaked on, and I find you posting in this way.
Cute that our whole thread was flagged, isn’t it?
On one hand Trump is incentivized to share that there has been “contact”, since he and Bannon looted the most ultra secret enclaves of American intelligence programs (in a way inaccessible to all prior presidents, yes including “unless they kept it from the president” Obama.)
On the other hand, the true true revelation about those aliens that Americans are criminally insane aggressors.
The “Grey” they mutilated and murdered has over 100,000 clones. Oops.
I know people are curious, though we aren’t just about to be friends. Not to the fault of the Greys, who are jilted yet fundamentally altruistic.
An apology would be equivalent to the president admitting that what you say is true. Though it isn’t.
I don’t like Trump for other reasons, though I know from “insider sources” that Trump is neither a rapist or a pedo.
He’s a reckless irresponsible jerk arse who let Bannon destroy Americas own intelligence infrastructure.
We don't have the free market. We've never had the free market. Every economy has always been under some degree of regulation and centralized control simply by virtue of existing within the context of a society and government that enforces laws and levies taxes.
The government has never controlled the means of production for the most part except for “natural monopolies” like utilities, cable etc where everyone should be served and it doesn’t make sense to try to have two companies building out infrastructure
Government spending and the deficit has increased by approximately $800 billion since Trump came into office. It certainly hasn't gone down. Weird that none of the DOGE apologists seem to care anymore. Trump adding billions of dollars to the deficit in increased military spending in 2026? Not a peep.
Even if one assumes DOGE was doing exactly what they claimed to be doing (they were not) and take the government's most generous claim of how much "waste" they cut and how much they saved at face value ($150 billion, which is nonsense - the verified estimates I've seen cite maybe $1.5 billion at the most) and ignore the actual cost of DOGE (unknown, but estimated at at least $10 billion to cover paid leave for employees, other estimates I've seen go as high as $135 billion) then it was still entirely pointless.
But it doesn't matter to them because they don't actually care about cutting government waste, they care about cutting "woke" and "DEI" and anything they can associate with leftists or Democrats. Elon Musk literally described DOGE as "dismantling the radical-left shadow government"[0]. It was never about money, it was always about entrenching right-authoritarianism and purging the government of wrongthink.
The whole thing is a sham. The real purpose of DOGE is to enact radical ideological changes that Congress has been unwilling to implement, by strategically sabotaging parts of the executive branch that the Heritage Foundation has a problem with.
Yes, when you set aside Musk buying Twitter and using it to platform white supremacists and extremists to help get Trump elected in exchange for benefits to his companies and direct control over private regulatory and financial data that allowed him to gain potential advantage over his competition and punish his enemies, naming your fake government office after your memecoin is also a problem.
People probably don't focus on that because it's the least worst aspect of any of this. Also the President of the United States rugpulled the public on two memecoins and wiped out $4 billion, and no one talks about that either.
There definitely has been a pattern of shoddy behavior, but it's been difficult to find a smoking gun of DOGE exfiltrating the data at many agencies. I am looking to see if there are more revelations to come out of DOGE's activities at SSA for instance.
That said, lack of evidence isn't necessarily exonerating. DOGE's MO has often been to take over the CIO and/or front office of the agency to ensure there is nothing to monitor them. It's basically like if the CEO of the bank sends all the security guards home and lets robbers in through the side door. You can't prove they took anything necessarily (my bank metaphor falls flat here, because data can be copied but if money were stolen, you could count it), but also it IS often shady as hell too.
You need to understand the political and cultural history. Environmentalism has been associated with leftist, feminist and communist ideology going back to the hippies and the antiwar movement (which makes it easy for many Americans to mistrust by default.) When Trump said he believed global warming was a Chinese hoax (remember that?) he was echoing a belief amongst the right that environmentalism and "global warming" was a plot to undermine American business and sovereignty, and that climate science supporting anthropogenic climate change was manufactured by "cultural Marxist academics" to push that agenda.
This conspiracy thinking has been pushed by Republicans, right-wing think tanks, coal, oil, manufacturing and like industries attempting to undermine public trust in climate science since at least the 1970s.
reply