There are people that don’t get the big picture about endangered species. It’s not always completely about the actual animal being discussed. It’s also a warning sign that this particular animal hasn’t been able to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. And if it can happen to that animal, maybe the environmental changes can affect us humans. I’m all for not caring about giant pandas too much. Not to the point where I’m being pestered to donate money to save them, the same way I don’t want conspiracy grifters trying to pester people to give them money with no resulting benefit to myself. At least if you are supporting an artist creating something you enjoyed there’s a hope that doesn’t always go unfulfilled that you will get more art in the future you will enjoy.
Proper critical thinking requires long term thinking. A giant panda got to where it is today by a long time of being a panda and doing panda things leading to more pandas. And when the panda things don’t work anymore there isn’t that same long timeframe to adjust the behavior to old panda things becoming new panda things. It’s super easy for pandas to not spend time mulling over what the future of pandaism holds; living each day one panda day at a time.
I’ve read that humans are on the endangered species list. A half joking and half serious attempt to describe how to deal with the current crop of problems that demonstrate our complete inability to separate short term “putting out the fire” versus long term “maybe we shouldn’t be as stupid as pandas”. Our inability to get along as we compete for available resources. Some point to the 1950’s as the time when humans became endangered. I get the point, although I disagree. Super fast technology advances building on what we already knew. Shooting arrows at a long distance is far less dangerous to the shooter than standing right next to someone who has a sword approximately the same dimensions as your sword. Now we can chuck nuclear bombs super long distances and fly unmanned aircraft super long distances from the comfort of a reinforced command bunker. And Roland Emmerich hasn’t given us any alien panda enemies to inspire us to join up against a common alien panda foe. That bastard.
In honor of gematria and all other conspiracy grifting I offer this take. That world relies on emotional clickbait. Every day it seems that someone in the Zachosphere is promoting their best, most amazing decode ever. There’s no such thing as nostalgia in the conspiracy grifter mindset. If past events are spoken of it’s only because today’s celebrity death was a ritual to mock you for a known past event. There’s no need for nostalgia, every day is a bad day and something wrong that happened will spread like a wildfire through the panda’s favorite source of bamboo. Most of our problems are the lack of thinking about the future of non pandas. But how did we get here? What exactly was the event that put us on the endangered species list? When alien panda archaeologists examine the remnants of human civilization what will they find?
Humans are way too self important to actually place themselves on a list of endangered species. That’s because our brains tell us that we are self important as individuals, not as a society so much. Less intelligent animals have the base desires of filling that ache of the empty belly to worry about. And the occasional need for dogs to destroy their human’s stuff. Fire can rightfully be pointed to as the starting point, but more specifically it’s the cooking of food with fire that’s the real culprit. Unleashing enormous amounts of nutritional value on an unsuspecting world. Killing off nasty pathogens. Tenderizing portions previously indigestible, aiding digestion. Improving the taste. And now a primary part of eating is social leading to tremendous waste as we prepare portions far larger than necessary so we can sit across the table from others and argue about who has the cuter pets.
More smarter, better fed people made more smarter better fed people which made more smarter better fed people. Which over some hundreds of thousands of years led us to admiring the fattest, stupidest role models that haven’t advanced beyond the stage of panda thinking level of competition for resources. Now you know why Gordon Ramsay is so angry all the time. The cognitive dissonance of being involved in this has been eating away at him for a long time.
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