THE BEARS WILL CONQUER US ALL

For the first ten seconds it was cute. Then I remembered reading about how zoo animals develop repetitive behaviours to deal with the stress of captivity, and I couldn’t help wondering whether this is the bear’s version of writing emo poetry.

Last time I did math gun > stick, so I think we’re good.

Kata is an ineffective training method. Until they realize this, the bears will continue to lose the Kumite.

Of COURSE Colbert was right. He’s an improvisational genius with a stable of good writers who does a clever bit mostly in character. Like sci-fi, if you make enough predictions, some are bound to be right.

Cute bear, Katherine F makes a good point about it probably being depressed.

Apparently bears watch Star Wars too.

Andrew: Nicer rebuttal. You have just rationalized my fully guilt-free enjoyment of this video.

I’ll worry about AIDs and baby rape in Africa or even emo kids getting attacked in Mexico before I start worrying about some bear being sad.

So basically you’re saying that you don’t give a shit about animals so long as something worse is happening elsewhere?

By that logic, you shouldn’t care if your neighbor gets robbed either, because it’s not as bad as AIDS or baby rape and you’re indifferent to all but the most serious tragedies.

Yeah, and your emotional issues pale in comparison with more pressing issues too. That doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t care about you.

If Katherine had compared what the bear’s repetetive behaviour to an autistic human being rocking back and forth all day instead of to “emo poetry”, would you be this apathetic?

You can look at the bear and think about how being confined might be making it absolutely miserable and think “gee, that’s too bad” and still worry about the stuff Andrew mentioned, you know. But instead you make jokes about a bear–one that we all thought was pretty cute the first time we saw this video–wanting to maul itself (and you know, maybe things are bad enough for it that it DOES want to die).

I’m glad that Zenrage understands, at least.

OK, that’s good to know. It looks like a nice enough space, but you can’t really get a good sense from the limited part we’re seeing, so I wondered what it was like.

Anyway, thank you.

I’m referring to the emotional needs of an autistic human being suffering from distress versus the supposed emotional needs of a freakin’ bear. Anthropomorphism can only go so far, people.