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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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Are dogs aliens? I must admit I've never seen a wolf piloting a flying saucer, but my lab has sent many a normal saucer flying. Unfortunately, they were only domesticated between 20-40k years ago, not 200k.

Dogs sure, but also cats, fishes, turtles, snakes, anything people own as pets and that you could conceivably find in a living room. Some of them can barely be considered "domesticated" (I would say even something as pedestrian as cats actually fits this definition of "barely domesticated" and are basically one step away from being straight-up feral in the manner of their wild counterparts, see Gwern's post about cats here for a firehose of info about how dogs are indisputably superior to cats. Yes this is a fact). Then there's of course the fully wild animals we routinely coexist with like mice, rats or birds.

@Hoffmeister25 I wasn't talking about other humans or referring to them as aliens, though I get your takeaway - the wording is a bit vague and I could see how it could be interpreted that way in retrospect. That being said, "alien" is not too far distanced from how I see most people. Freudian slip maybe.

I think @problem_redditor was referring to “other humans” as aliens.