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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

If your intent wasn’t to start a political flame war, what is the insight you’re providing here?

Every animal needs to survive and will do anything to get by including scavenging. That’s nature. At this very moment, millions of things are getting eaten alive. Welcome to the brutality of Mother Nature.

It’s not very charitable to say something deeply provocative and putting a note to defend. It only reflects your prejudice.

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> Every animal needs to survive and will do anything to get by including scavenging.

Yea, and so do nations. The descriptors they used feel conformable describing both the nation and the mascot. It's not deeply provocative. It is a comparison that is interesting to read, because it describes how nations and animals can act similarly, but on difference scales.

Except nations are a completely made up concept by groups of humans, rather than a deep survival drive of the individual when pushed into a life or death scenario.

> Except nations are a completely made up concept by groups of humans

Every division of the universe into distinct constituents is a completely made up concept by groups of humans, including “humans” and “groups” thereof.

And what are individual humans but groups of cells trying to stave off entropy and survive just a bit longer?

Animals categorize as well, e.g. food or not, threatening or not.

Ospreys only scavenge if it's that or starve. Bald eagles scavenge by preference and will harass or kill other raptors, frequently including ospreys, rather than do the difficult and dangerous work of taking prey themselves.

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