No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
This perspective is really interesting to me
I have admit,I tend to agree. I make comments like "individual people are smart, but people at large.. they're idiots" it's the way I can rationalize how we're facing a rematch of Biden v Trump in the US the year.. And other things that defy reason
But in weighing the positives and the negatives of the totality of our impact - how many good small acts does it take to overcome a Khmer Rouge? What about when those loving families are torn apart by religion, patriotism, morality etc and the angels fight? Conflict, like death and taxes, seems undeniable - maturity, much less so
Ok, take the counter argument then - if I am an average person in, say, Russia right now, how much personal risk am I morally obliged to take in order to fight against the Russian state and the war in Ukraine? Stacking up the abstract evil being done elsewhere against the very concrete reality of my own mortality, if the angels are fighting and nothing I can do can have any real impact, then what good is it me getting in the middle of it?
I've kinda stretched this beyond the absurd, and tbh I do think that individuals have some responsibility to not stand idly by and watch evil happen.
To actually address your original question, I don't think Smith's characterisation of humans as a virus is terribly apt - viruses are mindless, selfish and greedy; they arrive in an area and consume and consume until there is nothing left, even if it kills them. Humans behave like this some times, but they are also capable of peace and cooperation and can learn - the fact that you have access to the internet using equipment and systems that took the collective efforts of hundreds of millions of people working across centuries, the fact that you didn't die of smallpox or TB as a child, and the fact that on average you as less likely to die violently than you ever have been in history proves this.