While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

[Symphony D.]

But I guess that doesn't really "jive" with this "Social conditioning is the only thing holding me back from stabbing you to death for shits and giggles!" thing you're doing.

Never said it was for fun, way to fail.

 

[Lord of Elves]

Never said it was for fun, way to fail.

This is a pointless assertion to make. If your argument is that random and indiscriminate murder is a hallmark of the human condition that has been watered down by the socializing efforts of "Civilization" and its institutions then we might as well consider murder for its own sake -- "just because" -- a natural human impulse that is only constrained by the process of socialization, or by some ridiculous assertion that modern man has developed some kind of novel evolutionary refusal to kill.

This just isn't true. Any book on military history will tell you that.

 

[J.K. Stockholme]

On a tangentially related note, I've become curious with all this talk of murder how many fictional people have died (from unnatural causes) in sum from all NESes. Did more people tend to get in earlier NESes?

 

[Lord of Elves]

On a tangentially related note, I've become curious with all this talk of murder how many fictional people have died (from unnatural causes) in sum from all NESes. Did more people tend to get in earlier NESes?

I'm gonna go ahead and assert the number is ridiculously large and impossible to know for certain (has there ever been an NES where someone has kept an effective casualty count for both military and civilian deaths?).

Good work. Everyone go home to your dead families, who are dead.

 

[Symphony D.]

random and indiscriminate

Never claimed it was those, either. You're continuing to fail. I have articulated that people had a much greater propensity to use violence (and accordingly to kill, the logical conclusion of doing violence) to settle their disputes. You can huff and puff all you want but until you show me some goddamn numbers attached to an anthropological study you're continuing to cite me modern and historical figures regarding domesticated examples of the Human animal while I am talking about the prehistoric Human animal out in the wild, and I am rejecting your idea that one can study wolves by examining dogs. Is that clear? I don't think it is, because I've said it at least three times. Reread it a few more times.

No. One. Cares. About. Modern. Examples. They. Aren't. Relevant. To. The. Conjecture.

...

Let's redirect this since some people can't keep their eyes on the prize. Would anyone seriously argue that tribal society was better than modern society? There were until extremely recently some benefits it had, I'll admit. But would anyone prefer to be living in 50,000 BC as opposed to right now? How about in recorded history? 400 BC? 1200 AD? Any time in particular?

How many of you would enjoy replicating some of the features of those halcyon bygone times by imploding the modern world order? I mean a lot of you like playing warlords and despots on the internet, anybody eager to go try it out in real life? You might even be good at it despite your insistence that you're totally not interested in killing!

Who wants to see the world burn? Anybody? Any takers? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

 

[Lord of Elves]

You're watering down your argument significantly. Everyone with their head on straight agrees that tribal societies were more violent than contemporary society. But this is such a ridiculously vanilla assertion I have a hard time believing you intended to go into this defending the idea that the past was more violent than the present. I don't think anyone is contesting that.

You also need oxygen to live, or so I've been told.

 

[Thlayli]

I'd rather live in the 1880's if they had antibiotics.

Personally, the thing that *I* find amusing is that humanity is generally taken in aggregate for the purpose of these arguments; let's be honest, most of the discussion up until this point has focused on *male* humans. The Second Sex proven right again, loath as I am to admit it.

For males, the argument Symphony articulated is probably correct, but I doubt you could make it for the whole of the species, you know, since women, both tribally and currently, *really* don't tend to kill people.

 

[Symphony D.]

You're watering down your argument significantly. Everyone with their head on straight agrees that tribal societies were more violent than contemporary society. But this is such a ridiculously vanilla assertion I have a hard time believing you intended to go into this defending the idea that the past was more violent than the present. I don't think anyone is contesting that.

I can see you missed the part of this discussion where a whole bunch of people responded with "NUH UH SYMPHONY, JUST BECAUSE HUMANS WERE TOTALLY INTO MURDERING ONE ANOTHER ALL THE TIME FOR 94% OF HUMANITY'S EXISTENCE DOESN'T MEAN MURDER IS NATURAL, HUMANS HATE MURDERING ONE ANOTHER, I DON'T EVEN NEED TO PROVE YOU'RE WRONG EVEN THOUGH I'M NOT GOING TO DISPUTE ANY OF THE STATEMENTS BEHIND THE OVERARCHING CLAIMS."

I haven't watered down anything. I've been repeating the same thing over and over again and people have been denying or misunderstanding it. Humans in the default murder one another, that's what they do. We've progressed actually quite a fair bit beyond that already and should probably be pretty proud of what we've achieved. But a lot of it's an active effort and not a passive one, and when we slip and go back down the slope, we tend to revert toward our old pattern of behavior. Go back and look at the last three pages. I've been saying the same damn thing on each of them.

 

[Lord of Elves]

I'd rather live in the 1880's if they had antibiotics.

Personally, the thing that *I* find amusing is that humanity is generally taken in aggregate for the purpose of these arguments; let's be honest, most of the discussion up until this point has focused on *male* humans. The Second Sex proven right again, loath as I am to admit it.

For males, the argument Symphony articulated is probably correct, but I doubt you could make it for the whole of the species, you know, since women, both tribally and currently, *really* don't tend to kill people.

I think we can dismiss the two paragraphs below it based on the assumption that the bolded and underlined statement is truthful.

Thlayli's priorities (setting aside his assertions vis a vis those, you know, womenfolk) continue to be concerning in the extreme.

 

[Symphony D.]

Considering women have, acknowledged at the time or not, always been an integral part of maintaining and operating the societies that warred, and indeed those societies would not have been able to war for any sustained period of time without them, absolving them of complicity in conspiracy to war is sort of gauche.

 

[Lord of Elves]

Considering women have, acknowledged at the time or not, always been an integral part of maintaining and operating the societies that warred, and indeed those societies would not have been able to war for any sustained period of time without them, absolving them of complicity in conspiracy to war is sort of gauche.

Yeah, you know, women's work. In those kitchens, and stuff. Making sandwiches ... for men. We're all being friendzoned by those contraceptive-popping, kitchen-dodging prostitutes! Run for the hills.

Background checks for birth control, not guns! Rand Paul 2016

 

[Thlayli]

Considering women have, acknowledged at the time or not, always been an integral part of maintaining and operating the societies that warred, and indeed those societies would not have been able to war for any sustained period of time without them, absolving them of complicity in conspiracy to war is sort of gauche.

That sort of seems like weaseling out of the argument, though. All of your arguments are based in biology, and the aggression pheromones, the muscle mass, all of the physical preparation for war is rooted in the male biology, not the female.

You *can* argue an inherent predominance to violence based on evolutionary competitiveness for the males of the species, but saying that women are inherently violent cause they help men fight seems to disregard the obvious truth. Since women are incapable of physically overcoming men in most circumstances, their co-optation was never a matter of choice, but of coersion.

Women have a totally different role in this violence matrix, both as goals of violence and of victims of it. They aren't *really* proper participants. And when they are participants in violence, that's as much a modern affectation as the domesticated male.

 

[Symphony D.]

Look man Rosie the Riveter had a boltgun and made tanks, if she really wanted to break that glass ceiling she'd have just done it, she was asking for that $0.77 on the dollar!

That sort of seems like weaseling out of the argument, though. All of your arguments are based in biology, and the aggression pheromones, the muscle mass, all of the physical preparation for war is rooted in the male biology, not the female.

Specialized societal roles freed men up to go fight (and also tended to increase efficiency, again, freeing more people up to fight). QED, complicity by existence. Nobody is innocent.

 

[Lord of Elves]

That sort of seems like weaseling out of the argument, though. All of your arguments are based in biology, and the aggression pheromones, the muscle mass, all of the physical preparation for war is rooted in the male biology, not the female.

You *can* argue an inherent predominance to violence based on evolutionary competitiveness for the males of the species, but saying that women are inherently violent cause they help men fight seems to disregard the obvious truth. Since women are incapable of physically overcoming men in most circumstances, their co-optation was never a matter of choice, but of coersion.

Women have a totally different role in this violence matrix, both as goals of violence and of victims of it. They aren't *really* proper participants. And when they are participants in violence, that's as much a modern affectation as the domesticated male.

Do you even realize the implications of your argument?

By your own standards, you fail manhood. Go out and lift more weights, till more fields and kill more bears, then come back and tell us about male aggression, muscle mass and the "violence matrix." What complete and utter nonsense.

"Muerte a los intelectuales!"

 

[Thlayli]

Innocence and guilt is neither here nor there; I'm just saying that from a basic biological standpoint, assuming humans are acted on by the same impulses (if slightly modified) as other mammalian species, violence is a specialized competitive tool utilized by, at most, 50% of the population.

Didn't see any women looting storefronts when Katrina went down.

 

[Symphony D.]

Innocence and guilt is neither here nor there; I'm just saying that from a basic biological standpoint, assuming humans are acted on by the same impulses (if slightly modified) as other mammalian species, violence is a specialized competitive tool utilized by, at most, 50% of the population.

"Women have never cheered, endorsed, espoused, facilitated, or promoted violence executed primarily by men ever in the entire history of Humanity."
—Thlayli, CivFanatics Forums, 2014

 

[Thlayli]

Do you even realize the implications of your argument?

By your own standards, you fail manhood. Go out and lift more weights, till more fields and kill more bears, then come back and tell us about male aggression, muscle mass and the "violence matrix." What complete and utter nonsense.

"Muerte a los intelectuales!"

You're out of your depth here, boyo. Not every argument has an ideological agitprop behind it.

But feminist theory doesn't account for the fact that only male deer clash horns.

 

[Lord of Elves]

You're out of your depth here, boyo. Not every argument has an ideological agitprop behind it.

But feminist theory doesn't account for the fact that only male deer clash horns.

All arguments have consequences. Own up to the world your beliefs would create.

Humans =/= deer. Appeal to nature is a logical fallacy.

 

[Symphony D.]

All of your arguments are based in biology

I've made it pretty clear the factors in question throughout the history of this process are almost entirely sociocultural and therefore psychological, not biological. There may be some genetic or epigenetic component to the conditioning not to solve problems thorugh killing but it's likely not terribly important in comparison and I wouldn't really know either way about that.

 

[Thlayli]

Psychology is still a biological phenomenon, albeit one that we talk about in pseudo-scientific generalities since we don't understand the underlying neurology very well.

All I'm saying is that a violence gradient exists between males and females. I'd be willing to postulate back to saying that, in early humanity, the role of 'violence-doer' was restricted to a fairly small caste of males within the group, while other males were able to pass on their genes through other methods.

The fact that some men aren't as physically tough as others means that other genes besides the strength necessary to do violence are being selected for. Which means that, in that distant past, not all human males were equally violent. But this is conjecture.

What isn't conjecture, however, is the biological truth that not all humans are equally violent, due to gender differences.