Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/29/sad-but-delightful-animals-f.html
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Well the penguin one makes perfect sense. In the arctic, body fat is essential for survival. There are no penguins at Malibu.
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“Monkeys grow less social as they age.”
That fact just made a monkey out of me.
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Frat boys vomit on the females they want to mate with too, sad but delightful human animal fact.
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When a “fact” can be sad, you know that you are overlaying your personal problems upon your perceptions of the world!
Incidentally, all peacocks are male, that’s why they are called cocks. A female peafowl is a peahen.
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personal problems? I don’t know about that. I mean, you can be indifferent to genocide (I mean, lots of people apparently are *sigh*), but is feeling bad about it a personal “problem”? m-w defines that as “a matter or situation regarded as unwelcome or harmful and needing to be dealt with and overcome.”
I suppose if you were Vulcan that might be true, but for most of us, I have a hard time believing that “finding a fact to be sad” is a personal problem. Sorry.
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Why not? You are a person, and feeling badly because genocide occurred can certainly sound as if there is a problem.
A chronic difficulty in people’s reasoning that I encounter, which I think causes real harm, is the impulse of using facts and opinions interchangeably. That’s what CBT seems to largely involve - when something happens which one feels badly about, it is an uphill battle to understand and act if one cannot distinguish between the event and their feelings about it. It is not the facts which are sad - I am! It might sound like tedious semantics to some, but it makes all the difference in how one conceptualizes about it and what one can actually do.
Also, as regards this topic, I think it is a bit of a stretch to compare genocide (generally understood as intentional destruction of life by humans) and a non-intentional fact which simply describes how some organisms are. If I couldn’t close my fist, it would mean that my hand was injured, and I would be sad about that, because my normal functionality has been compromised. But a monkey was never able to make a fist before, so this is normal. These examples are “sad” because they rely upon anthropomorphising other organisms as a tactic for teaching facts about them. It is good because it is educational, but bad because it (debatebly, I suppose) exploits and normalizes a harmful cognitive flaw to get there. It does not seem harmful to most people because they neither notice it, nor want to notice it.
Well, I do not claim to be speaking on behalf of anyone else, and certainly not most people. But I do not take your observations personally. Choosing to not believe something need not be a cause for sorrow, indeed it can be quite liberating.
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I find these facts interesting and I like the drawings. Many of them do not fit my criteria of sad though.
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Pedantry points for popobawa4u!
I am really torn over which of these species should be my spirit animal.
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Also recall the mating cry of sorority girls: “I am SO drunk!”
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