This is beyond awful, beyond inhumane, beyond any regard for human rights and dignity. How is it that no one like the U.N. is monitoring the situation to ensure Israel complies with the cease-fire and withdraws its military? This is an indictment of the civilized world that such a genocide is allowed with no consequences in the 21st century.
This is beyond awful, beyond inhumane, beyond any regard for human rights and dignity. How is it that no one like the U.N. is monitoring the situation to ensure Israel complies with the cease-fire and withdraws its military? This is an indictment of the civilized world that such a genocide is allowed with no consequences in the 21st century.
Beyond awful and inhumane? No, this is as human as it gets. It is tragic, but there is nothing more in line with human history than this. Our entire existence has been shaped by conflicts just like this—wars, territorial struggles, and violent power shifts. Expecting a toothless international system to change human nature is naive at best.
The U.N. or any other international body ensuring compliance? Let’s be honest—history has shown time and time again that these institutions hold little real power when it comes to stopping conflicts. They can issue statements, draft resolutions, and condemn actions, but at the end of the day, enforcement only happens when the right geopolitical interests align. Otherwise, it’s just theater.
And if you think Gaza is some unique, unprecedented horror, take a step back. Right now, in Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are committing genocide, massacring entire ethnic groups. In China, over a million Uyghur Muslims have been forced into internment camps since 2014 in what is effectively ethnic cleansing. Russia has deported up to 1.6 million Ukrainians, including 260,000 children—wiping out communities by force. Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims are still being murdered and displaced, and Ethiopian forces in Tigray have used famine and mass killings to target ethnic Tigrayans. Azerbaijan just ethnically cleansed over 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. And let’s not forget Western Sahara, where Morocco has systematically displaced and oppressed the native Sahrawi people for decades.
What’s happening in Gaza is brutal, but it’s not some aberration of humanity—it is humanity. Expecting it to suddenly stop because we’ve declared ourselves “civilized” ignores the very nature of our species. If anything, Gaza gets the most attention, while other ongoing genocides barely make the news. That’s not to say one is more justifiable than another—it’s just to point out that this isn’t unique, and outrage tends to be selective.
At the end of the day, we’re just slightly overclocked primates—hairless apes with two times the neurons, the ability to sweat, and a tendency for violence. Don’t expect too much.
To set the record straight, Russia has annexed the Donbas, a longtime pro-Russia-part of Ukraine whose citizens have been relentlessly punished by the pro-West regime put in place in 2014 by our own Victoria Nuland, a proud neocon. Russia did this for its own survival, knowing that the Nuland plan was to provoke Russia and weaken it (see Rand Corporation report from 2019 for full details) through war and sanctions, then carve it into Western-controlled fiefdoms. The point was to seize Russian natural wealth, which is vast. Our country is run by corporations; our politicians are bought and paid for. Our media serves the interests of their corporate sponsors and spins the facts in precisely the way you have illustrated in your comment.
I remember reading an article recently where private prison owners—just that combination of words sounds bizarre from a European perspective—were petitioning the government to lock up more people because they were losing money. That sounds like slavery with extra steps, but whatever, that’s just business as usual over there.
The truth is, none of this is new. If we dig into the oldest written records, they’re about the exact same things we’re dealing with today—power struggles, exploitation, people being treated as disposable. Different time periods, different methods, but the core mechanics never change. People act like we’ve evolved beyond all this, but in reality, it’s just a more polished version of the same old game.
Same shit, different era. Expecting it to magically change because we slapped some new labels on it is just wishful thinking.
And your point is what? It's always been like this so why bother to try and change things for the better? If you are right, then we die trying to make a better world. If you are wrong, then we die not having tried. It's a point, but not one I consider worth considering.
My point is that this kind of reaction—"Oh my God, this is so unbelievably inhumane, I can’t comprehend it"—is honestly kind of retarded. If you’re over 30, you lived through the Rwandan genocide, where some lunatics imported boatloads of machetes, handed them out to everyday people, and those same people hunted down and hacked their neighbors, friends, and even family members to death. This wasn’t just a random event—it was systematic and horrifying. People were massacred not because of any personal conflict but simply due to their ethnic identity—often based on something as trivial as a surname. Imagine being told to butcher your friend or neighbor with a blunt machete simply because they were categorized as Tutsi.
And it didn’t stop there. Once the Tutsi forces returned, they launched their own retaliatory killings—what you might call a genocidal uno reverse card. It’s the kind of raw brutality that shakes people, but if you know anything about history and geopolitics, this isn’t an anomaly. These kinds of horrific events are built into the patterns of human conflict.
Look at army ants. They don’t fight all the time—most of their activity is peaceful and cooperative. They build, forage, and take care of their colony. But when war comes, they fight hard enough and often enough to be called "army ants." Humans are no different. We have peaceful moments, cooperation, and progress, but violence, territorial disputes, and power struggles are always just beneath the surface. It’s predictable, even if we don’t like to admit it.
So, no, this isn’t surprising or "unbelievable." It’s part of our nature. We might as well be called "army hominids."
When people call what’s happening in Gaza "unbelievably inhumane," it shows a lack of historical and global perspective. Don’t get me wrong—it is genocide by definition, and the suffering is tragic. But in terms of scale, it’s far from the worst atrocities humanity has inflicted on itself.
Take Dresden in 1945. Over the course of three days, around 25,000 civilians were killed in Allied bombings. In one night, the firebombing of Tokyo killed somewhere between 100,000 to 150,000 people, leaving a million homeless. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki wiped out around 200,000 people in an instant and through subsequent radiation exposure.
Even when it comes to population displacement, Gaza is not an exception. The Nakba of 1948 resulted in over 700,000 Palestinians being forced to flee their homes, with around 15,000 killed. Around the same time, the expulsion of Germans after WWII displaced 12 to 14 million people, leading to up to 2 million deaths from forced marches, starvation, and disease.
Later, we had horrors like Pol Pot’s Cambodia, where between 1.7 to 2 million people were executed, starved, or worked to death between 1975 and 1979. And in Rwanda in 1994, around 800,000 people were slaughtered in just 100 days, with neighbors turning on each other with machetes over ethnic identity.
Now let’s talk about more recent atrocities. In Ukraine, over 2,000 people die every day because a midget in heels with a Napoleon complex can’t handle losing power. The civil war in South Sudan has caused over 400,000 deaths since 2013 and continues to destabilize the region. Meanwhile, North Korea has been systematically starving its population, and in Tigray, thousands have been killed amidst widespread reports of mass killings and sexual violence.
This isn’t meant to downplay the tragedy in Gaza. It’s about perspective. Humanity has repeatedly committed atrocities, often on far larger scales. And ironically, despite these events, we are still living in the most peaceful period in recorded history. Maybe that’s something worth considering before declaring any single event the worst we've ever seen.
This is beyond awful, beyond inhumane, beyond any regard for human rights and dignity. How is it that no one like the U.N. is monitoring the situation to ensure Israel complies with the cease-fire and withdraws its military? This is an indictment of the civilized world that such a genocide is allowed with no consequences in the 21st century.
Beyond awful and inhumane? No, this is as human as it gets. It is tragic, but there is nothing more in line with human history than this. Our entire existence has been shaped by conflicts just like this—wars, territorial struggles, and violent power shifts. Expecting a toothless international system to change human nature is naive at best.
The U.N. or any other international body ensuring compliance? Let’s be honest—history has shown time and time again that these institutions hold little real power when it comes to stopping conflicts. They can issue statements, draft resolutions, and condemn actions, but at the end of the day, enforcement only happens when the right geopolitical interests align. Otherwise, it’s just theater.
And if you think Gaza is some unique, unprecedented horror, take a step back. Right now, in Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are committing genocide, massacring entire ethnic groups. In China, over a million Uyghur Muslims have been forced into internment camps since 2014 in what is effectively ethnic cleansing. Russia has deported up to 1.6 million Ukrainians, including 260,000 children—wiping out communities by force. Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims are still being murdered and displaced, and Ethiopian forces in Tigray have used famine and mass killings to target ethnic Tigrayans. Azerbaijan just ethnically cleansed over 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. And let’s not forget Western Sahara, where Morocco has systematically displaced and oppressed the native Sahrawi people for decades.
What’s happening in Gaza is brutal, but it’s not some aberration of humanity—it is humanity. Expecting it to suddenly stop because we’ve declared ourselves “civilized” ignores the very nature of our species. If anything, Gaza gets the most attention, while other ongoing genocides barely make the news. That’s not to say one is more justifiable than another—it’s just to point out that this isn’t unique, and outrage tends to be selective.
At the end of the day, we’re just slightly overclocked primates—hairless apes with two times the neurons, the ability to sweat, and a tendency for violence. Don’t expect too much.
To set the record straight, Russia has annexed the Donbas, a longtime pro-Russia-part of Ukraine whose citizens have been relentlessly punished by the pro-West regime put in place in 2014 by our own Victoria Nuland, a proud neocon. Russia did this for its own survival, knowing that the Nuland plan was to provoke Russia and weaken it (see Rand Corporation report from 2019 for full details) through war and sanctions, then carve it into Western-controlled fiefdoms. The point was to seize Russian natural wealth, which is vast. Our country is run by corporations; our politicians are bought and paid for. Our media serves the interests of their corporate sponsors and spins the facts in precisely the way you have illustrated in your comment.
And the US is now sending "different" people to detention camps....again, and making slaves...again
I remember reading an article recently where private prison owners—just that combination of words sounds bizarre from a European perspective—were petitioning the government to lock up more people because they were losing money. That sounds like slavery with extra steps, but whatever, that’s just business as usual over there.
The truth is, none of this is new. If we dig into the oldest written records, they’re about the exact same things we’re dealing with today—power struggles, exploitation, people being treated as disposable. Different time periods, different methods, but the core mechanics never change. People act like we’ve evolved beyond all this, but in reality, it’s just a more polished version of the same old game.
Same shit, different era. Expecting it to magically change because we slapped some new labels on it is just wishful thinking.
And your point is what? It's always been like this so why bother to try and change things for the better? If you are right, then we die trying to make a better world. If you are wrong, then we die not having tried. It's a point, but not one I consider worth considering.
My point is that this kind of reaction—"Oh my God, this is so unbelievably inhumane, I can’t comprehend it"—is honestly kind of retarded. If you’re over 30, you lived through the Rwandan genocide, where some lunatics imported boatloads of machetes, handed them out to everyday people, and those same people hunted down and hacked their neighbors, friends, and even family members to death. This wasn’t just a random event—it was systematic and horrifying. People were massacred not because of any personal conflict but simply due to their ethnic identity—often based on something as trivial as a surname. Imagine being told to butcher your friend or neighbor with a blunt machete simply because they were categorized as Tutsi.
And it didn’t stop there. Once the Tutsi forces returned, they launched their own retaliatory killings—what you might call a genocidal uno reverse card. It’s the kind of raw brutality that shakes people, but if you know anything about history and geopolitics, this isn’t an anomaly. These kinds of horrific events are built into the patterns of human conflict.
Look at army ants. They don’t fight all the time—most of their activity is peaceful and cooperative. They build, forage, and take care of their colony. But when war comes, they fight hard enough and often enough to be called "army ants." Humans are no different. We have peaceful moments, cooperation, and progress, but violence, territorial disputes, and power struggles are always just beneath the surface. It’s predictable, even if we don’t like to admit it.
So, no, this isn’t surprising or "unbelievable." It’s part of our nature. We might as well be called "army hominids."
Different animals, same patterns.
When people call what’s happening in Gaza "unbelievably inhumane," it shows a lack of historical and global perspective. Don’t get me wrong—it is genocide by definition, and the suffering is tragic. But in terms of scale, it’s far from the worst atrocities humanity has inflicted on itself.
Take Dresden in 1945. Over the course of three days, around 25,000 civilians were killed in Allied bombings. In one night, the firebombing of Tokyo killed somewhere between 100,000 to 150,000 people, leaving a million homeless. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki wiped out around 200,000 people in an instant and through subsequent radiation exposure.
Even when it comes to population displacement, Gaza is not an exception. The Nakba of 1948 resulted in over 700,000 Palestinians being forced to flee their homes, with around 15,000 killed. Around the same time, the expulsion of Germans after WWII displaced 12 to 14 million people, leading to up to 2 million deaths from forced marches, starvation, and disease.
Later, we had horrors like Pol Pot’s Cambodia, where between 1.7 to 2 million people were executed, starved, or worked to death between 1975 and 1979. And in Rwanda in 1994, around 800,000 people were slaughtered in just 100 days, with neighbors turning on each other with machetes over ethnic identity.
Now let’s talk about more recent atrocities. In Ukraine, over 2,000 people die every day because a midget in heels with a Napoleon complex can’t handle losing power. The civil war in South Sudan has caused over 400,000 deaths since 2013 and continues to destabilize the region. Meanwhile, North Korea has been systematically starving its population, and in Tigray, thousands have been killed amidst widespread reports of mass killings and sexual violence.
This isn’t meant to downplay the tragedy in Gaza. It’s about perspective. Humanity has repeatedly committed atrocities, often on far larger scales. And ironically, despite these events, we are still living in the most peaceful period in recorded history. Maybe that’s something worth considering before declaring any single event the worst we've ever seen.
agreed - I wonder what world Pinker was looking at