But I need to excuse my bad behavior and shitty ideas with an intellectual lacuna that brooks no argument. Do you have some better alternative?

From the time of the Natufians, beginning around 13100 BC , up to the Early Bronze Age IIb around 3200 BC, there are only a handful of violent deaths indicated by skeletal remains:

Guess the Bronze Age Collapse never happened. The Sea Peoples never swept through coastal cities raiding and plundering in the Mediterranean. Egypt and Assyria never dominated their neighbors. All those books I read were wrong. Even in Egyptian tombs, the extensive records of wars are all wrong.

Listen up. New information. All reports of societies duking it out in ancient history didn't happen. It's time to realign our understanding of human nature. War is a modern concept. In fact, I'm gonna go even further and declare that until the USA and our genocidal partner attacked Iran this year, there had never been a war EVER. Tell your friends.

We’ve said the word exploit so many fucking times they’ve lost all damn meaning!

I apologize for the exploitives.

And must be excused by intellectual lacunae?

Have they ever heard of github?

Right, and imo most people just want to get along. We just need a way to defend the commons from the shitty people rather than make them trillionaires.

Aka republicans

We should. And in an ideologically pure society we would. I honestly think people try.

But you don't have to be a manipulative person to see the value of this argument, like the comic is suggesting. You simply need to look at the world you want to make through a defensive lens. The truth is, even if we built a society where it was not the norm to be manipulative and exploitative, there would still be manipulative and exploitative people - and in such a society they would quickly climb to the top of the social hierarchy and reclaim power. And the world would decline back to what it was.

This is not an argument for inaction, imo. Its an argument for vigilance. But it also means we cannot consider ourselves "above" or "beyond" the undesirable traits of humanity, because that would make us victims of the cruel and the selfish. It also means the acceptance of checks and balances on power, which sadly... don't always stick around.

Uh, NO, the best reason to have children is that the line must go up and the social security system is going to be partially unfunded within six years!

I am above drinking, eating, and defecating.

I will proceed to live the rest of my life without doing any of those things.

Just other people. Obviously I'm better than them. Maybe better than the gods.

There's no thing like an American leftist because there's no left in the US.

What does extracting social capital mean?