Neanderthals were savage. So were humans at the time.
I’m sure you’re being facetious, but I’ll take someone who goes to the shooting range every week or two over LEO, any day of the week.
Over the years I’ve noticed that people who regularly shoot generally hold the average LEO in low regard, in their level of training, marksmanship, and behavior at public shooting ranges.
1 Like
One would think, but sadly one often sees stories of misbehaved cops who bounce around from department to department.
1 Like
He’s trying to learn “trigger discipline.” Practice, Practice, Practice.
What percentage of LEOs are ex-military?
EDIT:
Ugh. (probably derailing, but these quotes are horrible)
“(Working as) a cop would be my fallback if I can’t do something else,” said Disla, who has served three deployments of 10 months or longer to Iraq and Afghanistan, “simply because I was an infantryman and those are my skills. Anything you want to see in a soldier, you want to see in a policeman.”
“I could see how somebody would think that would be an easy transition,” he said at a recent jobs fair at the Concord Hilton. "It’s familiar. I work with guns, I know how to use them, why not get a job that uses the same equipment?
“A lot of them get out, they’re intelligent, they use the G.I. Bill to get a degree,” he said. “It’s like, ‘I can do more than pull a trigger.’”
1 Like
No apologies needed or expected, I’m frequently unclear myself.
(a) Neanderthals were human, just like the other human clades around at the time.
(b) What do we mean by “savage”? Unless you’re French and using the word to mean “hunter gatherer”, it’s pretty meaningless.
1 Like
I am reminded of Terry Pratchett’s Commander Vimes, explaining to the Ankh-Morpork aristocracy that policemen are not soldiers.
Anyone who thinks that the core of police work is weapons training should fail the entrance tests. A police force is there to keep the peace, not to win battles. At the end of the day, the police should be members of the community, not an alien control force.
11 Likes
Mind you, I’d be entirely unsurprised if cats carried on like that.
1 Like
Hard to believe we’re 50 posts in and the obligatory hasn’t already been said: Christ, what an arsehole.
1 Like
Hrm. I’m not sure how I feel about this as an argument, since some dog breeds manifestly are smarter than others.
I’m not really going anywhere with this, it just struck me.
1 Like
This menso.
Well, the tools we find associated with Neanderthals shows much slower technological progression than modern humans. They may not have been less intelligent than us, but it would seem pretty clear that they were less imaginative than modern humans, and were not as good at refining technologies as we were even during the time when modern humans and Neanderthals co-existed.
They may have been of equal intelligence, and just content with a few tools that seem to be sufficient, while modern humans were always looking for that one little modification to get the edge on Og in the next cave over.
Savage simply means that they are from the forests, cognate with the contemporary English-language word “sylvan”.
This itself was used as an ethnic slur by the Romans, along with the similar term “pagan”. Meaning basically that anybody who lives in rural areas instead of the more cosmopolitan reach of The Empire was a hick. That those who voluntarily live in such remote areas are innately hostile, untrustworthy, and lacking of refinement.
2 Likes
I originally read that as “Low Earth Objects” and wondered what it had to do with anything.
5 Likes
(a) Perhaps I should have specified Homo Sapiens Sapiens instead. I’m sure you realise I meant modern Human.
(b) Ferocious. Brutal. Red in tooth and claw.
Savage, both noun and adjective. It means a little more today than it did during its 1250-1300 roots, as words often do,
which means we no longer use the Roman terms of ‘savage’, ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’ as ethnic slurs, merely descriptors.
1 Like
Dogwinned, eh? 
1 Like
I’m not really sure how dog breeds map into the ‘race is a construct’ thing.
On the one hand, they are an elegant and undeniable demonstration that you can get substantial phenotypic and behavioral differences(that, for the most part, ‘breed true’ reasonably reliably) from a fairly pitiful subset of canine genetic diversity(that’s why the researchers trying to nail down the timeline and location of wolf domestication have had to go through the arduous process of sampling assorted unkept village mutts to get useful genetic data).
On the other hand; without the AKC and friends enforcing arbitrary breed ‘standards’, and people enforcing selective breeding fairly attentively; dogs merrily mate their way into ISO-standard-mutt configuration pretty quickly.
Given that human gene flow is…perhaps more varied and subtle than polite geneology would lead you to believe; it seems fairly likely that most of us are closer to ISO-standard-mutt; even if we have a few salient features that look like one ‘breed’ or another.
1 Like
I think anthropologists would suggest to you that you are writing nonsense. If you want ferocity and brutality you really need educated people, which is why hunter gatherers are faced with extinction in the face of land theft and habitat destruction. It wasn’t the native Australians, Canadians or Americans that exterminated the white man, was it?
The one culture that did stand up to the white invaders were the Maori, and they were not hunter gatherers but themselves members of an expansionist, aggressive Polynesian culture.
2 Likes
