Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Grand Theft Auto and Human ability to Concern themselves with Animals

After playing many video games since childhood, I came to realize many different things about video games including that there is a lot of violence and entertainment usually comes from challenge. However, after playing Grand Theft Auto and recognizing all of the scare towards our society (believing children and teenagers will grow up thinking this behavior is okay).


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-j-bushman/dont-buy-your-kid-grand-theft-auto-v-for-christmas_b_4440477.html

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/grand-theft-auto-is-good/

Here are a couple links if you want to read some about it yourself.

The whole ordeal boils down to: down buy Grand Theft Auto for your child because it is bad for their development and can cause increases in angry and violent thoughts....

Now the Aspects of Grand Theft Auto:
-You go around shooting people
-You steal from anywhere or anyone
-You get chased by the cops and you try not to get killed
-You can indulge in different "foul" play throughout the game while they give you nonsense objectives on harming others or destroying things (usually).

Now, the hype of not buying this for your children seems to be completely based upon this: the children may harm other people (or things created by people) like they are allowed to do inside the video game. 

So, humans in present day society are concerning themselves over other humans hurting them and other aspects of human life that animals can simply not grasp (according to the hype over this game and the research done behind it).

As the years have gone by, I can almost say that people in America, specifically, seem to be spending increasingly more of their time doing their jobs and worrying about aspects of human life (being in a car crash or being kidnapped and how to get to the next level on a video game or obtaining a high GPA).

Is OUR strive for knowledge (which is increasing inevitably) causing us to not concern ourselves with other species on this planet? (aside from pets obviously). Is this what is leading us to continually ignore animal's needs as it relates to their longevity? 


EX: We are destroying the planet we live in order to "advance" as quickly as possible.
EX: We are destroying our planet, currently, because we need to drive to work (to work on things usually not related to animals at all and only for people).
EX: We create advancements in technology to slaughter our cattle more efficiently while the resources for cattle and new technology is scarce, precious, and valuable. 

I find this an interesting insight into why animals in our society seem to be "suffering" and humans are continually fine with this. (To understand what i mean by suffering... if you show anyone a video of the inside of a cattle factory, they will be disgusted... and they will feel bad for the cow... that's what I mean). 

2 comments:

  1. I concur with what you're saying in the sense that if our human society continues in the way it is, it will only be beneficial to us and the planet will suffer for everything we do. Not only through the depletion of our natural resources, but the ecology of our planet is suffering as well. All of the things we do to advance human society (building new towns, cities, factories, etc.) is taking away from the natural ecology that animals need to survive.
    Of course we learned that some animals can adapt to this new urban environment, (like the crows we discussed in class) but this isn't the case for all of the animals. We have also learned that there is a possibility of preserving at least some of the animals in zoos, but this would not the their natural habitat and we would destroy the system of what all this animals habitually do in the wild, so they wouldn't be the same. My question is would there ever be a time where we could live in harmony with the planet (and everything on it) without destroying it?

    Apparently not in a capitalistic society like ours 8)

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    Replies
    1. Interesting question! I would have to say this: Not in our Life time and probably not for many more!

      I believe humans are too smart for their own good and our excitement for invention and innovation far outweighs our care for our world (as a whole population). As we push to expand our knowledge we push to destroy our world and everything in it. With not even close to a half million years on this planet, Humans have been able to nearly destroy it completely (and this is taking into consideration all of the time we took as "dumbies" (neanderthals) where we didn't have any technology and such. For a comparison, Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for more than 200 million years (no language, "small brains", and no technology.

      Who is winning really now? We believe that we are utilizing this planet to the best of our ability and making new "advancements" very quickly. Our Advancements will mean nothing when we run out of resources to replenish ourselves. This is why I say our obsession with Human-like activities and ideas is drawing us to our extinction.

      Even further, the unfortunate aspect of life that humans control all of the Earth causes me to believe that our ignorance in preservation will lead us to a demise and the demise of a lot of other species that in all actually seem to be better off than we are.

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