Does the internet lead to better Ameican language?

[Philosophy Explorer]

But really good insults, creative ones, are rare.

I thought Hex and Hobbled had the corner on that (well maybe not Hobbled so much).

PhilX

[Philosophy Explorer]

Throwback to the dinosaurs.

That´s at least something I have never heard before. Did you make it up yourself, PhilExplo ?

We could start a competition of interesting insults. Posters could vote for the ones they like best.

I don't think the throwback phrase is particularly creative as I've heard it in other forms before. Interesting insults has worked before (e.g. "yo momma" jokes that have been used in comedy so it's had its moment in history).

With the internet, it's seen a fraction of its potential.

PhilX

[Obvious Leo]

I reckon the quality of insult on this site is woeful. The empty-headed name-calling is unsophisticated and reflects a lack of creativity and imagination. The best exponents of the art of insult in the world are teenage girls and this appears to be the case across all cultures for obvious evolutionary reasons. It's all about finding your opponents weakness and inserting the gentle barb. Then when you see the barb find its target you sink the boot in without mercy. In this way you will get to reproduce.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

I reckon the quality of insult on this site is woeful. The empty-headed name-calling is unsophisticated and reflects a lack of creativity and imagination. The best exponents of the art of insult in the world are teenage girls and this appears to be the case across all cultures for obvious evolutionary reasons. It's all about finding your opponents weakness and inserting the gentle barb. Then when you see the barb find its target you sink the boot in without mercy. In this way you will get to reproduce.

I haven't noticed this phenomenon. Could you give some examples? I know that American teenage girls are probably the most evil force in the universe, with American children being the most obnoxious, but other than that the teenage girls I've encountered have been nice.

[Obvious Leo]

the teenage girls I've encountered have been nice.

Me too. I've always got on wonderfully well with teenage girls but I have little recent experience of these things and would be ill qualified to judge even if I were in contact with them all the time. I am an old bloke and they would rightly have every reason to suppose that charming me would be more productive than pissing me off so I would not be observing them in their natural habitat which is the company of other teenage girls. They seem to reserve their most exquisite nastiness for those who actually pose a direct threat to their own status in their own social milieu and this phenomenon has been well documented. Indeed the pervasive influence of the modern social media has exacerbated this problem to the extent that it has now become a serious and often life-threatening issue for many young adolescent females. Cyber-bullying is now acknowledged as the leading cause of eating disorders, self-harm and suicide in this vulnerable demographic.

I never had daughters myself but both of my sons reported similar anecdotal stories at the time when they went to high school. The boys could get into plenty of fights with each other but these almost never developed into long-term antipathy and they would just as likely be sharing a smoke after school as usual. The girls, on the other hand, could not only carry a grudge indefinitely but would be continuously urging other girls to conspire with them in their hostility. This is by no means unusual in primate behaviour.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

the teenage girls I've encountered have been nice.

Me too. I've always got on wonderfully well with teenage girls but I have little recent experience of these things and would be ill qualified to judge even if I were in contact with them all the time. I am an old bloke and they would rightly have every reason to suppose that charming me would be more productive than pissing me off so I would not be observing them in their natural habitat which is the company of other teenage girls. They seem to reserve their most exquisite nastiness for those who actually pose a direct threat to their own status in their own social milieu and this phenomenon has been well documented. Indeed the pervasive influence of the modern social media has exacerbated this problem to the extent that it has now become a serious and often life-threatening issue for many young adolescent females. Cyber-bullying is now acknowledged as the leading cause of eating disorders, self-harm and suicide in this vulnerable demographic.

I never had daughters myself but both of my sons reported similar anecdotal stories at the time when they went to high school. The boys could get into plenty of fights with each other but these almost never developed into long-term antipathy and they would just as likely be sharing a smoke after school as usual. The girls, on the other hand, could not only carry a grudge indefinitely but would be continuously urging other girls to conspire with them in their hostility. This is by no means unusual in primate behaviour.

The internet certainly brings out the worst of human behaviour, in every group. Female teenage bullying and bitchiness has definitely got much worse here with the increased American influence. I wouldn't put it down to natural behaviour though, more cultural behaviour and mind-set.

[Obvious Leo]

VT. There's certainly a veil of anonymity about the internet which brings out the worst in people and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't susceptible to it myself from time to time. We allow ourselves a license to say things to others online which would never have been regarded as acceptable in the entire history of the human discourse and this intrinsic anarchy is a double-edged sword which brings with it a suite of potential benefits and problems which we as a species have never had to confront before. Where it will lead is anybody's guess but the drama currently being played out in the middle east may well be merely the tip of a very deep iceberg because it will never be possible to stuff the free speech genie back into the bottle. We may have to do the unthinkable and learn how to grow up to use this power responsibly as individuals rather than have our ethical standards on such matters imposed on us by an external authority.

On my good days I remain optimistic that ultimately the benefits of such a ubiquitous personal freedom will outweigh the potential liabilities but on my bad days I am reminded of this quote:

"The survival value of human intelligence has never been satisfactorily demonstrated"....Michael Crichton

And also this one:

"Homo hominis lupus est"...Plautus. ( Man is the wolf of man).

It seems likely that we are at the brink of a precipice in our evolutionary history where we will either sink or swim. It could well be that any civilisation which develops the capacity to engineer its own extinction will inevitably do so and that this is the legacy which we are passing on to our grandchildren.

Nevertheless, generally a calming toke of quality home-grown washed down with a glass of red is enough to steer my thoughts away from such dark places.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

VT. There's certainly a veil of anonymity about the internet which brings out the worst in people and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't susceptible to it myself from time to time. We allow ourselves a license to say things to others online which would never have been regarded as acceptable in the entire history of the human discourse and this intrinsic anarchy is a double-edged sword which brings with it a suite of potential benefits and problems which we as a species have never had to confront before. Where it will lead is anybody's guess but the drama currently being played out in the middle east may well be merely the tip of a very deep iceberg because it will never be possible to stuff the free speech genie back into the bottle. We may have to do the unthinkable and learn how to grow up to use this power responsibly as individuals rather than have our ethical standards on such matters imposed on us by an external authority.

On my good days I remain optimistic that ultimately the benefits of such a ubiquitous personal freedom will outweigh the potential liabilities but on my bad days I am reminded of this quote:

"The survival value of human intelligence has never been satisfactorily demonstrated"....Michael Crichton

And also this one:

"Homo hominis lupus est"...Plautus. ( Man is the wolf of man).

It seems likely that we are at the brink of a precipice in our evolutionary history where we will either sink or swim. It could well be that any civilisation which develops the capacity to engineer its own extinction will inevitably do so and that this is the legacy which we are passing on to our grandchildren.

Nevertheless, generally a calming toke of quality home-grown washed down with a glass of red is enough to steer my thoughts away from such dark places.

You look around the internet and people seem to be frothing at the mouth in their desire to 'nuke' this or that country. It's bound to happen one day. If I didn't have children I would say 'fuck the lot of them, the planet is a lot better off without the cancer of humanity.'

[Obvious Leo]

I also have grandchildren, VT, and with grandchildren comes a messiah complex. Grandparents have to save the world.

[Hobbes' Choice]

"Homo hominis lupus est"...Plautus. ( Man is the wolf of man).
.

"Homo Hominis lupus Londinium est " Warren Zevon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDpYBT0XyvA

[Obvious Leo]

Hobbes. Naturally Plautus was a playwright and not an evolutionary biologist so he probably imagined he was composing a metaphor with his pithy one-liner. However that homo sapiens should be both predator and prey of itself is a self-evident fact derived from well-understood evolutionary principles. The only serious predator the intelligent upright ape had to fear on the savannah was a more intelligent upright ape so the survival of the fittest became the survival of the smartest. It must have been quite a bloodbath because homo tripled its brain size in less than 100,000 generations, a phenotypic change unprecedented in the mammalian world. We developed our unique talent for long-distance running and our hairlessness by running away from a bloke with a knife and fork.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Hobbes. Naturally Plautus was a playwright and not an evolutionary biologist so he probably imagined he was composing a metaphor with his pithy one-liner. However that homo sapiens should be both predator and prey of itself is a self-evident fact derived from well-understood evolutionary principles. The only serious predator the intelligent upright ape had to fear on the savannah was a more intelligent upright ape so the survival of the fittest became the survival of the smartest. It must have been quite a bloodbath because homo tripled its brain size in less than 100,000 generations, a phenotypic change unprecedented in the mammalian world. We developed our unique talent for long-distance running and our hairlessness by running away from a bloke with a knife and fork.

You're wasting your time talking to that p****. He can barely read.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Hobbes. Naturally Plautus was a playwright and not an evolutionary biologist so he probably imagined he was composing a metaphor with his pithy one-liner. However that homo sapiens should be both predator and prey of itself is a self-evident fact derived from well-understood evolutionary principles. The only serious predator the intelligent upright ape had to fear on the savannah was a more intelligent upright ape so the survival of the fittest became the survival of the smartest. It must have been quite a bloodbath because homo tripled its brain size in less than 100,000 generations, a phenotypic change unprecedented in the mammalian world. We developed our unique talent for long-distance running and our hairlessness by running away from a bloke with a knife and fork.

Yeah. I've got a BA in Ancient History and Archaeology. I chose a "Human Origin" module, and had a special interest in Neanderthal's disappearance.
Your view is rather black. When we were exclusively Hunting and Gathering, co-operation of the humans species was a far more important factor than conflict. Despite being smart, individually the naked ape was pretty much the weakest predator on the savanna. Populations were low, and mobility high. But there are great examples of disparate groups coming together and trading stone axes and information. Some of these items travelled thousands of miles.

The real time for human conflict was the moment people started to mark out plots of land for agriculture around 10kbp. Then we had central food collection; bureaucracy; organised religion; military conscription and hierarchy. And of course, for the first time in history, true warfare.

[Obvious Leo]

This is the standard narrative, Hobbes, and I don't deny that I'm greatly overstating the case for self-predation. In fact my story is as much a mockery of Darwin's model of natural selection as anything else. I don't deny that gene selection is a significant factor in heredity but in isolation it has no explanatory value. Gene adaptability and thus gene expression are the predominant determinants in gene behaviour so Lamarck's ideas are experiencing a resurgence in a more sophisticated narrative.

My own training was in biochemistry and although I haven't worked in the field for many years I've always kept up with the literature. New technology has made this one of the most exciting fields in research science and my guess is that in the next few decades science should be able to tell us exactly how homo managed to evolve so astonishingly quickly to the top of the tree of sentience, because this is a question which still remains unanswered.

"The survival value of human intelligence has never been satisfactorily demonstrated".....Michael Crichton.

I think if we don't manage to figure out how we got to be so smart then it might mean that we've outsmarted ourselves. There's only one place for top-order predators to go and that's into oblivion.

[Hobbes' Choice]

This is the standard narrative, Hobbes, and I don't deny that I'm greatly overstating the case for self-predation. In fact my story is as much a mockery of Darwin's model of natural selection as anything else. I don't deny that gene selection is a significant factor in heredity but in isolation it has no explanatory value. Gene adaptability and thus gene expression are the predominant determinants in gene behaviour so Lamarck's ideas are experiencing a resurgence in a more sophisticated narrative.

My own training was in biochemistry and although I haven't worked in the field for many years I've always kept up with the literature. New technology has made this one of the most exciting fields in research science and my guess is that in the next few decades science should be able to tell us exactly how homo managed to evolve so astonishingly quickly to the top of the tree of sentience, because this is a question which still remains unanswered.

"The survival value of human intelligence has never been satisfactorily demonstrated".....Michael Crichton.

I think if we don't manage to figure out how we got to be so smart then it might mean that we've outsmarted ourselves. There's only one place for top-order predators to go and that's into oblivion.

Darwin himself never gave up on Lamarck until about 1871 when he finally abandoned his fruitless attempts to prove it with his cousin Galton, by the cruel mutilation of rabbits. There simply is NO mechanism for the acquisition of characteristics by this means. I'm afraid you will have to stick with sexual, domestic, and natural selection as the sole means of evolution. Lamarck is history.

(Please don't start on about epigenetics. There is a lot of misinformation about that at the moment. I have it a good authority ( I know a prof in Cardiff who is working on it) that all epigenetic phenomena is about genes switching. The genome is unaltered.)

Women having awe for male's hunting success and being smarter than other males is probably all you need to explain the explosion of intelligence. And men's love of tits is all you need to understand way the human breast is unfeasibly large. The conscious and active selection of some mates and the rejection of others by thinking individuals is a powerful force of selection. I take it that this is what you are referring to.
It also very effectively explains why the Neanderthal characteristic are gone from the modern populations.