Ok gonna do a long meadering thread.

Tldr I've seen hella Ted talks lately.

And y'all.

Here goes.

I started out wanting to learn little things to help me at work like better communication, trauma informed teaching, etc.

And next thing I know I'm learning things like how animal species have concepts of justice and politics stuff

I'll circle back to the politics stuff bc it's huge.

And my main point.

But I wanna talk about animals to hook y'all first.

So.

Some researchers were in Alaska doing science and going on like ice bergs and this fog rolled in and they were like fuck.

And ice bergs can calve at any moment (break) or flip over. With no warning.

So they're sitting there scared and a wild orca appears.

And the orca does a bunch of attention getting shit and keeps swimming back and forth.

Finally they get curious, and follow. The orca stays in sight, way close, bc fog.

And leads them to their boat. And then leads their boat to shore.

Because orca that's why.

Another. They were testing capuchin monkeys.

They would have the monkeys trade pebbles for treats.

They would put two monkeys in side by side cages and give one a good treat (grapes) and one a meh treat (cucumber) and the cucumber monkey would get upset and the grape monkey would refuse to eat their grape until the friend got one too

Elephants know the difference between locals, whites, tourists, and hunters. And react accordingly.

Wildcats adopt babies of other species.

Apes reconcile.

After fighting, rival apes make up with each other.

They did an experiment I think in Nepal with teaching meditation.

They had kids lay with a rock (small) on their belly and focus on breathing the rock up and down.

And then added topics like kindness, compassion, changes they want to make, happiness, flowers, whatever.

And they did this for ten minutes a day up to twenty minutes a day.

And tested the kids by giving them stickers to give away. They said you can give them to
- best friend
- classmate
- stranger
- kid you hate

Meditating made the kids more likely to give stickers evenly.

So then they looked at morality. And evaluated animals for morals.

And they came up with five sort of aspects of morality.

1) harm reduction
2) reciprocity/justice
3) in group loyalty
4) respect for authority
5) individual choice/autonomy

And they found that animals value these things too just like humans.

But they also found that humans and animals of various kinds place different value levels on these five.

Politics time

Despite being the "small government" "mAh FrEEdOmS" party, Republicans top values are

Respect for authority
In group loyalty.

And the lowest value for Republicans (this from mass surveys of over 20,000 people) was harm reduction.

While Liberals top values were

Harm reduction
Reciprocity

And lowest value was

Respect for authority

And to me that really explains everything you need to know about the parties.