Okay. Good to know. BTW, things look more blunt in typing without tone of voice. I'm not miffed or angry, and not feeling hostile if that's how it came off. Actually asking. Maybe I need to use more smiling emoticons. :-)
I don't demonize our basic survival instincts. (And I can't know for sure what I'd do if I had to use them: just knowing me I'm betting I'd be among the first to not survive. Which would be fine with me, I don't want to live in that world.) I also don't glorify them, or use them as an excuse to "go native" and kill things because "waall, it was good enough for muh daddy, and muh daddy's daddy: it's Family Truhdisuhn."* But being a NYC born-and-bred city girl, I know that -- absent The Apocalypse and The Sky Falling -- the rules of the concrete jungle are different. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to know how to survive if one has to. Then again, how often does one "have" to? Unless one likes to go camping on snowbound mountaintops, or have oneself dropped with only a pocketknife and a paperclip into the middle of a Canadian wilderness. :-)
*(yeh, I admit to having my fair share of East Coast Urban snobbery. Or standards, depending on who's doing the judging. :-) Slavery used to be a tradition. Genital mutilation is a tradition. Stoning wives that are raped is a tradition. I'm sick of the excuse of "that's how we've always done it, so it's still a viable response to our environment." (Or the other Biblical excuse of "God gave Man 'dominion': as an agnostic slouching towards atheism, that leaves me unconvinced.) I heartily disagree with the tradition rationale. Clearly. :-) And no, not saying YOU are using that excuse. It's just the one I usually get when this kind of conversation comes up.)
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-01-06 09:05 pm (UTC)I don't demonize our basic survival instincts. (And I can't know for sure what I'd do if I had to use them: just knowing me I'm betting I'd be among the first to not survive. Which would be fine with me, I don't want to live in that world.) I also don't glorify them, or use them as an excuse to "go native" and kill things because "waall, it was good enough for muh daddy, and muh daddy's daddy: it's Family Truhdisuhn."* But being a NYC born-and-bred city girl, I know that -- absent The Apocalypse and The Sky Falling -- the rules of the concrete jungle are different. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to know how to survive if one has to. Then again, how often does one "have" to? Unless one likes to go camping on snowbound mountaintops, or have oneself dropped with only a pocketknife and a paperclip into the middle of a Canadian wilderness. :-)
*(yeh, I admit to having my fair share of East Coast Urban snobbery. Or standards, depending on who's doing the judging. :-) Slavery used to be a tradition. Genital mutilation is a tradition. Stoning wives that are raped is a tradition. I'm sick of the excuse of "that's how we've always done it, so it's still a viable response to our environment." (Or the other Biblical excuse of "God gave Man 'dominion': as an agnostic slouching towards atheism, that leaves me unconvinced.) I heartily disagree with the tradition rationale. Clearly. :-) And no, not saying YOU are using that excuse. It's just the one I usually get when this kind of conversation comes up.)