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

[Daftpanzer]

Thankfully we had no such problems against Neanderthals so we boned and clubbed them out of existence.

With a few amorous encounters along the way it would seem.

 

[erez87]

With a few amorous encounters along the way it would seem.

He said boned in the amorous meaning. I think.

 

[Kozmos]

Yes, boning is my go-to word because I very often mentally regress to fifteen years old. Also I never know what our overlords will deem as obscene in their rulebook.

 

[Crezth]

Fanboy much?

Well, duh. You're asking me to choose between someone who is actually bothering to make an argument, and people who think "nah uh" qualifies as a sufficient rebuttal.

 

[Luckymoose]

Well, duh. You're asking me to choose between someone who is actually bothering to make an argument, and people who think "nah uh" qualifies as a sufficient rebuttal.

There is no need. He is using supporting evidence in the same way Ancient Aliens uses it. Psychohistory isn't based on fact.

 

[Lord of Elves]

Overmind Computer, "Symphony D.," is always correct.

Fleshbag mortal intelligences, prostrate yourselves before your new god.

 

[Crezth]

There is no need. He is using supporting evidence in the same way Ancient Aliens uses it. Psychohistory isn't based on fact.

Pfeh! Typical Anti-Psychohistory. I don't think I need to say anything else.

 

[Kozmos]

There is no need. He is using supporting evidence in the same way Ancient Aliens uses it. Psychohistory isn't based on fact.

So social history exclusively throughout its entirety supports your view? I'm not a historian by any means (and as such I am open to great levels of wrongness) but I recall murder being a common enough problem that having a way to pay it off with cattle and the like as a social norm was a great way to settle things and prevent them from becoming blood feuds and vendettas between families.

 

[Luckymoose]

So social history exclusively throughout its entirety supports your view? I'm not a historian by any means (and as such I am open to great levels of wrongness) but I recall murder being a common enough problem that having a way to pay it off with cattle and the like as a social norm was a great way to settle things and prevent them from becoming blood feuds and vendettas between families.

Social history is a wide field, with many different subfields. Psychohistory is a pretend field based on fantasy.

 

[Gelion]

Responding to every single line will make this a book.

As well as a complete discussion. But we all have to make choices and I respect yours.

You're reading it wrong, which you should've picked up from everything else I've said. "That" refers to murder, not the whole clause.

Luckymoose thought that you talked about 50% homicide in the legal sense of the word. So misuderstandings are possible and if you saw me reading this phrase the way I did you maybe should have explained it to me sooner. I still maintain that your phrase can be read in both ways.

A lot of the time we kill things simply because they annoy us or we've designated them as a "pest" with only a mildly causal connection to some function we deem important.
"Wolves eat livestock so even though this wolf is just kind of in the vague vicinity of my farm just prancing through the woods or whatever I'm going to blow it away."
"Crows eat seeds and I have a rifle so I'm just going to shoot that crow up there in that tree."
"Bugs don't belong in houses so I'm just going to smash this one that I happen to see."
"I saw Jaws and sharks are evil so I'm just going to kill this shark."

In the examples that you have provided we simply follow the protection mechanism that tells us that this particular specie is a threat. It comes from generations of experience. We do not year have the mechanisms to figure out that the exact value of the threat (i.e. we think "sharks are trouble in general" is what we know. We do not calculate how many sharks are left on the planet and if killing this particular individual will upset the nature's balance), but we do follow a set of established guidelines. Only children or mentally ill individuals kill entirely for fun.

Again I am not arguing over "wrongness" of the concept of murder, but that not only that we have developed a set of rules to determine when murder is acceptable, but also that our specie needs to evolve from our old habits as old habits, especially the position that "murder is natural" can cost us a lot because of our ever increasing power.

In the example with Hitler that we talked about I think I outlined what exactly we should be doing in terms of changing the way we used to think.

Though to be fair, we had this recently too, by the way, you might've heard of the Cold War.

I'm not sure what you are referring to here. However if it has anything to do with the examples you've outlined, I don't think that the scale and the stakes of that confrontation have anything to do getting rid of pests that overrun your wheat farms.

Wiping out entire enemy camp during a nuclear exchange would be considered defeat, at least by the Soviets. I know in the West the Soviet threat was seen as a threat of an alien civilization that had to be dealt with (maybe by exterminating every single one of "them", I don't know), but the Soviet ideology was based on "liberating" western proletariat (and that of the rest of the world) from its "oppressors". I don't see how it could be possible by exterminating every single one of the people you are trying to liberate.

So far the primary thing that's kept us from extinction in light of the expansion of our capabilities hasn't been peace or love or communication, it's been the clear threat of the use of overwhelming force. Deterrence—the threat of murder—has historically been the primary way of preventing murder. And it works out fairly well provided one has a strong deterrence. When capabilities are homogeneous, that's when there are problems.

I've heard of MAD and it did have a role you described. I've also heard of the scientists that worked on the Manhattan project and many other scientists were the leading force in trying to find a peaceful solution in the the Cold War conflict that you and I have heard about. You might know of a guy called Sakharov. I think his motivation was the full understanding of the horror that he'd unleash on the Americans of the East Coast by blowing up high-yield nuclear devices in the Atlantic Ocean to cause a huge tsunami. I don't think the fear of one's own destruction has much value when you are contemplating the first strike (in a nuclear war you only need one strike, otherwise you have already lost). So I think people like Sakharov have had other motivations than their own destruction.

Another example is the accepting of prisoners from the other side during ww1 and ww2 (Referring here not to capturing them while they are incapacitated, but in accepting surrender of those who are ready to give up, but still hold arms). I don't think soldiers that decided to spare lives of their enemies were motivated by a desire of equal treatment in case they were to be captured by the enemy.

Yet here you are on a forum about simulating/aping history and if you weren't so damn hung up on your misreading and focus on 50%, you'd probably agree that murder is easily justifiable

Not easily justifiable and as it had been pointed out to you by other members of the forum. I'm glad that you've explained that I was misreading (although if you re-read your phrase you'd understand how it is possible to read your phrase in a number of ways).

and that Humans have been murdering one another for literally forever and will probably go on doing so. If that isn't a definition for a natural part of existence, let me ask, what is?

EDIT: Again its not about whether murder is natural. Post traumatic stress seem to suggest that it is either not natural or has become less natural. The question is about morality and scale of murder, i.e. for example if it is considered a social norm to wipe out an ethnicity to further one's own goal. Its not about facts, but interpretation and what attitude about murder we will take into the future.

 

[Kozmos]

In more lighthearted news:

Asked what he thought about the unpublished study involving the creation of a pandemic strain of flu deliberately designed to escape the control of the human immune system, Professor Jeffries said: "That would be a problem."

 

[Symphony D.]

There is no need. He is using supporting evidence in the same way Ancient Aliens uses it. Psychohistory isn't based on fact.

"This dude mentioned psychohistory as a brief aside while simultaneously stating it wasn't scientific and it wasn't any part of his actual argument THEREFORE everything he actually said is wrong and I don't have to actually debate any of the points he made or address the fact that my knowledge of history has no bearing on arguments made about prehistory." Pro-arguing with Luckymoose. Why debate when you can smear? Stay tuned for more tips and tricks, kids.

Again its not about whether murder is natural. Post traumatic stress seem to suggest that it is either not natural or has become less natural.

This assumes that PTSD is also unnatural and unusual. PTSD is a natural coping mechanism for essentially any and all traumatic events. You can get PTSD from staying overnight at a hospital after anesthetic surgery. You can get PTSD from being depressed. Claiming that something causes PTSD and is therefore unnatural assumes that stress is unnatural.

This line of thinking is incredibly bizarre and is reflective of the primary issue of contention: a bunch of people in the modern world who are relatively free from violence and stress are sitting and arguing that Humanity by and large acts under any and all circumstances like they think they do, when their circumstances are essentially unique in the Human experience. Your lives, your knowledge, your positions, are not reflective of anything. You're outliers trying to generalize your mental framework to people who didn't even have the discrete mental concepts of things like ethics or morality because they literally had not been invented yet. People, for most of the Human species' existence, have not thought or behaved like you do, because they were not the beneficiaries of thousands of years of civilization like you are. This argument still persists somehow and it's really silly.

My argument is that we as a species have very adaptable brains, and in the post-internet world its pretty much up to us to decide how to evolve collectively.

This is a gross abuse of terms. Evolution is inherently an unguided process and self-selecting process. Selecting an ethos and mindset is also not, by any standards, evolution, unless you want to sit there and claim Buddhist monks who chose to undergo a kind of rigorous mental training are more highly evolved than the rest of us. That's clearly nonsense and a ridiculous abuse of the concept. I'll admit I used it in a similarly flippant fashion in an earlier remark and I've gone back and changed that.

But saying 'oh we're a violent species' is not an excuse for anything at this point in time, IMO.

Wrong. You don't seem to understand that denying something that is true and repressing it can lead to some really destructive and aberrant behavior. Token example: the Victorians believed sex was sinful and perverted and icky and evil and guess what, they built a society based around sexual-repression. Unfortunately for them, sex was in fact a natural phenomenon, and so all that pent up sexual frustration tended to express itself in strange and theretofore rather deviant ways. (Kind of like for all their preaching about the immorality of sex before marriage, conservatives in America tend to be the biggest consumers of pornography, with Mormon-dominated Utah far away in the lead. Wonder why that is?)

Protip: suppressing things isn't healthy mental behavior. I'm no psychologist, as I've already said, but you can go ask any of them and they'll probably agree. It's infinitely superior to accept things, control them, and channel or redirect them into positive or non-destructive outcomes. To simply sit and choose to believe that things are a certain way despite all the evidence to the contrary leads to wildly distorted outcomes... like our economic and political systems that continue to cling to the demonstrably wrong Enlightenment era idea we're rational and self-interested actors.

Gee, I wonder who's expressed issues with those lately.

 

[Gelion]

This argument still persists somehow and it's really silly.

I think this argument still persists because you said that murder is not inherently wrong or evil, which is a moral judgment.

Claiming that something is "natural" is to do with observation and science, the number of occurrences of something and its usefulness towards some goal. In that sense murder (in general) is a natural part of existence for humans and for other species (which I believe I already stated). If we were to stop murder members of our specie for a few hundred years then we'd be able to say that murder (in more specific sense) has become unnatural. The fact that a human body treats murder as a stress, i.e. not a normal part of existence, but a change that needs to be addressed, means that we are not programmed for this. We are programmed to seek for food, to breathe, to breed, but not for seeking out and destroying our own kind. It is a learned behavior.

A while back you mentioned that "murder is easily justifiable" in response to me saying that "[murder is not justifiable by some] "natural state of the human species". It is true that you can find justifications for murder. Some work, some don't and provoke a response. Which is where (moral) judgment comes in: "is it easier to kill this person or can another solution be less resource consuming or more beneficial?"

Elevating murder to a position of normal inter-specie behavior by saying that "[we've always murdered so we will continue to be doing so]" is detrimental. We've developed a system that allows us to take simple survival decisions on another level.

Lets say this, you could murder any person in the world and no one would ever know it was you. Would you do it? We all have enemies or people, that we think, are doing what we'd describe as evil. Whether your response is "yes" or "no" you've based it on your system of personal belief, not on your "natural desire to kill" (unless you are a maniac).

We here, including me and you, are members of the modern society which does follow a set of rules which would generally describe murder as both wrong and evil. Mostly because this position lets you go to work every morning. This is the paradigm that we have to work with.

 

[Symphony D.]

Unrelated, I want to go back and address something independently:

Wiping out entire enemy camp during a nuclear exchange would be considered defeat, at least by the Soviets.

This is a joke.

The USSR produced more nuclear weapons than NATO's peak and was continuing to produce them right up until it fell, long after NATO's count had plateaued.

The USSR incorporated tactical battlefield use of nuclear weapons more heavily into its doctrine than NATO did, and NATO did so quite heavily as part of its plans to neutralize Soviet massed ground formations.

The USSR massed more chemical and biological weapons than NATO did and had every interest and intent in using them throughout the European theater, which is partially why it was so heavily focused on making all of its ground units NBC survivable (beyond its aforementioned intent to fling nukes everywhere). It diversified beyond just anti-personnel agents to develop an anti-agriculture suite, meaning that the Soviet military saw deliberate starvation of civilians as an acceptable and prudent war-winning policy (hardly surprising given the history of the USSR itself).

The USSR's wartime strategy necessarily involved the indiscriminate mass murder of NATO populations as part of winning any conflict with them (as did NATO's strategy likewise necessarily involve the indiscriminate mass murder of Warsaw Pact/Communist Bloc populations). To pretend otherwise is a farce and an insult to anyone who knows anything about Soviet military capabilities. If there was ever any consideration of keeping civilians on the other side alive to "liberate" them then its reflection in actual capabilities, doctrine, and planning was exactly zero, and the difference between the NATO and Warsaw Pact objectives was likewise zero: terminate the other side's warmaking capabilities and ability to resist. In actual practice, given the escalation of both sides' armaments, that meant wholesale extermination for both parties, even if it was never expressed or conceived of that way.

 

[Daftpanzer]

So I want to get back into modding, but what should I moderate (if anything)? I've posted a poll here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=529246

 

[Symphony D.]

I think this argument still persists because you said that murder is not inherently wrong or evil, which is a moral judgment.

Morality doesn't exist in nature, it's a product of the Human mind and Human society (and ignoring for the moment the extremely rudimentary and very flexible moral behavior that studies indicate most Humans have, it's a fairly recent invention in terms of being a codified system). Accordingly, some behavior happening out in nature cannot be inherently wrong or evil. A star is not evil for exploding in a supernova. A wolf is not evil for eating a man. We can judge these things to be bad based on their outcomes, but their actions have no inherent moral value.

If we were to stop murder members of our specie for a few hundred years then we'd be able to say that murder (in more specific sense) has become unnatural.

No, because you artificially produced that circumstance. Humanity has built cities for thousands of years. Are cities now a natural feature of planet Earth? No, that would be a foolhardy statement. An artificial change to a population (particularly if it has to be actively enforced) never "becomes" natural. You would likewise never claim that after ten thousand years that a genetically engineered organism is now "natural" simply because it's been around for so long. This is a deliberate perversion of the word.

The fact that a human body treats murder as a stress, i.e. not a normal part of existence, but a change that needs to be addressed, means that we are not programmed for this. We are programmed to seek for food, to breathe, to breed, but not for seeking out and destroying our own kind. It is a learned behavior.

Stress is a normal part of existence. You encounter stress in seeking food, breathing, and breeding. So by your own argument they're not normal either. This entire direction of argument is nonsensical.

A while back you mentioned that "murder is easily justifiable" in response to me saying that "[murder is not justifiable by some] "natural state of the human species". It is true that you can find justifications for murder. Some work, some don't and provoke a response. Which is where (moral) judgment comes in: "is it easier to kill this person or can another solution be less resource consuming or more beneficial?"

Again, the product of civilization, not nature.

Elevating murder to a position of normal inter-specie behavior by saying that "[we've always murdered so we will continue to be doing so]" is detrimental. We've developed a system that allows us to take simple survival decisions on another level.

Yes, we have developed an alternative, and that alternative is good. That alternative does not however mean that we can simply ignore the default behavior. In fact, for the alternative to function properly, we need to understand the default behavior thoroughly and build our alternative with it in mind. Building a system based on a lie would be pretty stupid, wouldn't it? Well, the truth is, we kill each other. We can proceed from there, but we have to acknowledge that first.

Lets say this, you could murder any person in the world and no one would ever know it was you. Would you do it? We all have enemies or people, that we think, are doing what we'd describe as evil. Whether your response is "yes" or "no" you've based it on your system of personal belief, not on your "natural desire to kill" (unless you are a maniac).

This has no relevance to anything. For the record, I'm not ashamed to admit that if I was free from the consequences of doing so there are quite a number of people I would kill for all kinds of reasons ranging from them having done me harm and injury to my certitude the world would be improved by their removal, and no, not all of them would have anything to do with personal beliefs. At least one of them I would just want dead. I have never and likely will never act on any of them because they aren't worth the consequences.

We here, including me and you, are members of the modern society which does follow a set of rules which would generally describe murder as both wrong and evil. Mostly because this position lets you go to work every morning. This is the paradigm that we have to work with.

Yes, and that paradigm should be built with the understanding that we have artificially selected that paradigm and that our nature is otherwise, and that to actually achieve it we have to reconcile with that fact and proceed from there. Building a system on the lie that Humans are peaceful serves no one's interests.

 

[Gelion]

Unrelated, I want to go back and address something independently

You are not afraid to make some things a book are you?

This is a joke.

No I was pretty serious.

Spoiler :

You can read the last line if you don't want to go into details.

The USSR produced more nuclear weapons than NATO's peak and was continuing to produce them right up until it fell, long after NATO's count had plateaued.

I believe that you took my quote from a paragraph where I talked about high payload [50 MT actually] nuclear devices being blown up off the East Coast to wipe the cities there. Soviets did produce a lot warheads and you could have also mentioned that they were generally of a higher payload than those of NATO.

The USSR incorporated tactical battlefield use of nuclear weapons more heavily into its doctrine than NATO did, and NATO did so quite heavily as part of its plans to neutralize Soviet massed ground formations.

Is that why 1949 US plan included mass nuclear bombardment of Soviet cities? This statement requires (for me at least) a greater study of military doctrines of both camps. However both of the uses you mention concern military formations.

The USSR massed more chemical and biological weapons than NATO did and had every interest and intent in using them throughout the European theater, which is partially it was so heavily focused on making all of its ground units NBC survivable (beyond its aforementioned intent to fling nukes everywhere). It diversified beyond just anti-personnel agents to develop an anti-agriculture suite, meaning that the Soviet military say deliberate starvation of civilians as an acceptable and prudent war-winning policy (hardly surprising given the history of the USSR itself).

I think you are confusing the two concepts, the "first strike" concept and MAD concept. The aim of the first strike is to destroy enemy's retaliatory capabilities and prevent them from launching anything in return. Yes, some cities are targeted (capitals, industrial capitals), but the aim of those strikes is the "capacity of enemy to make war", not population in itself. This is winning a nuclear exchange. Invention of other weapons of mass destruction was more geared towards the MAD scenario where you want to make sure you get the other side. It was done by both sides and my example with 50 MT nukes stands there.

NB: As we stand today (as far as I know), the only use of nuclear weapons in actual combat has been that of the US (irrelevant) and the widespread use of depleted uranium has been only done by NATO military both in Yugoslavia and Iraq (talking about willingness to poison populations).

NB2: If you are referring to the 1930's starvation you might want to read something called "Grapes of Wrath". It has a similar vibe.

The USSR's wartime strategy necessarily involved the indiscriminate mass murder of NATO populations as part of winning any conflict with them (as did NATO's strategy likewise).

Not any conflict, but some scenarios of it.

To pretend otherwise is a farce and an insult to anyone who knows anything about Soviet military capabilities. If there was ever any consideration of keeping civilians on the other side alive to "liberate" them then its reflection in actual capabilities, doctrine, and planning was exactly zero, and the difference between the NATO and Warsaw Pact objectives was likewise zero.

And here I owe you an apology. In the original post I meant the entire confrontation (the Cold War), not the nuclear exchange in particular.

 

[Symphony D.]

Is that why 1949 US plan included mass nuclear bombardment of Soviet cities?

In 1949 the US had a few hundred nuclear weapons and it would make sense to pursue a countervalue nuclear strategy at that stage. The US for most of the Cold War had a counterforce nuclear strategy. But the difference between deploying a few hundred nuclear weapons against population centers (countervalue) and a few tens of thousands of nuclear weapons against military and industrial targets (often in population centers; counterforce) is basically zero, and in fact although counterforce is less deliberately genocidal, its greater application of tonnage will kill more people directly and indirectly, so it's kind of a wash morally.

Nuclear war either way is a war of extermination.

I think you are confusing the two concepts, the "first strike" concept and MAD concept. The aim of the first strike is to destroy enemy's retaliatory capabilities and prevent them from launching anything in return. Yes, some cities are targeted (capitals, industrial capitals), but the aim of those strikes is the "capacity of enemy to make war", not population in itself.

Don't patronize me. The population itself is what enables the capacity to make war. You seem not to understand the concept of "total war," of which nuclear war is merely an extension, in which civilian populations and civilian infrastructure are acceptable targets precisely because they form the basis of the military-industrial machine. Counterforce isn't the deliberate targeting of civilians to this end, but it also cares not one whit for their presence in assessing them as collateral damage, and so functionally it's interchangeable with countervalue.

Invention of other weapons of mass destruction was more geared towards the MAD scenario where you want to make sure you get the other side.

Both sides viewed biological and chemical weapons as being "lesser" than nuclear weapons and had plans to deploy them prior to nuclear combat, so this is inaccurate.

It was done by both sides and my example with 50 MT nukes stands there

Warhead size has nothing little to do with overall nuclear strategy. Soviet warheads remained large because Soviet guidance technology was terrible and CEP was generally much higher, requiring larger payloads to reliably ensure a target kill. The USSR never invested in miniaturization or indeed accurate guidance technology to the extent NATO did.

NB: As we stand today (as far as I know), the only use of nuclear weapons in actual combat has been that of the US (irrelevant) and the widespread use of depleted uranium has been only done by NATO military both in Yugoslavia and Iraq (talking about willingness to poison populations).

This isn't a pissing contest about who is more or less moral, this is a rejection of your ridiculous notion that the Soviet Union had only the best of intentions in nuclear war and somehow had the moral high ground because it totally wouldn't have been "trying" to commit genocide against the West even though the use of its arsenal to have done precisely that. I'm not arguing that the Warsaw Pact was worse than NATO in its hypothetical and actual battlefield conduct, I'm arguing that it was no better.

Not any conflict, but some scenarios of it.

Every scenario, because that's the nature of MAD.

And here I owe you an apology. In the original post I meant the entire confrontation (the Cold War), not the nuclear exchange in particular.

There was essentially no way to fight a limited conventional war, Red Storm Rising and World in Conflict be damned, so the intent in such a circumstance is meaningless. America and NATO wanted to liberate the people of the Communist Bloc from tyranny and oppression. Whoo.

 

[TaylorFlame]

Did you just seriously post this? I guess you make a point, crazy people like Patty Hearst and Empress Anna existed, but this is not a gender issue as so much as it is an issue of psychology. It makes no sense just to post the "women can be as terrible as men" argument.

I thought I was arguing more "biological gender is irrelevant when determining your capacity to kill, at the end of the day we are all products of our environment" but you could make me out to be hating on women if you really want to I guess.

 

[Daftpanzer]

Are we driven to violence the same way we are driven to sex?

I think for most of us, violence is a reaction to certain circumstances - feeling blocked and limited, or seeking revenge, or seeking to end a threat. I don't think its something that always bubbles up within us constantly.