[ExI] battle tanks to a five yr old

[Tomasz Rola]

On Mon, 4 Jun 2012, Kelly Anderson wrote:

> On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 2:17 PM, Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:
> > On Mon, 28 May 2012, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> >> On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 1:28 PM, Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:
> >> > You may not like my diagnosis, but to be frank, you never mentioned you
> >> > only wanted to read optimistic ones.
> >>
> > First things first - congrats for using on this noble list such words as
> > "ass" and "pussy". Welcome to the club, let's this tradition continue in
> > the name of calling things by their real name, while we fearlessly drink
> > vodka and eat sausages.
> 
> LOL. I'm not afraid of any word that conveys the proper tone and idea.

Ho ho.

> > To sum it all in short, I don't buy the idea that we, as a species, are to
> > be less and less violent.
> 
> I think it has more to do with memes than genes.

Memes, really. We should already know ourselves better than hoping for 
good memes. We are prone to fabricate and believe all kind of memes 
whenever there is promise of any material gain in them. The truth or facts 
are expendable in such cases, of course.

> > Especially if thanks to democracy and wealth,
> > because I somehow fail to see how they can make me more benign.
> 
> Have you been to an elementary school lately? Have you seen the
> anti-bullying campaigns they are shoving into the heads of our kids?
> That kind of brain washing is what turns boys into pansies. And I
> think it works.

Well, how can you be sure it works? You don't attend elementary school, do 
you? I would rather suspect some forms of bullying went underground. 
"Experts" cannot spot it now, so they can tout about success and receive a 
paycheck, perhaps?

> > In a meantime, wars are going on like they did, in parts of the world less
> > covered by the news - because it sometimes happens, I hear, that a
> > journalist is given an easy to decide proposition, either stay and be
> > killed or STFU and go away.
> 
> But wars in out of the way places are fought with less scary weapons,
> in areas with somewhat more sparse populations, and the total number
> of deaths per capita, globally, goes down.

Maybe it goes, but I would like to see a statistics saying so. Even if 
there is one that can't be questionned, all it is saying is something like 
"for now, in current conditions/economy violence per capita goes down". 
But statistics cannot identify reason for this, or predict the trend is 
persistent.

The "end of violence" BS is touted from time to time. Guess what happens 
next.

BTW, unless you have some kind of revolutionary data, "deaths per capita" 
is exactly 1.0 and this did not change AFAIK. :-)

> > I must add, there is a group of people - and I think it is easier to find
> > them in the so called middle class - that very easily gets entrapped into
> > all kind of hiperoptimistic bullshit. Last time I noticed this, it was the
> > idea of human/life/intelligence friendly Universe. Holy frak. If
> > supernovas, neutron stars sending gravitation waves and magnetic pulses,
> > black holes and their death-ray jets, gamma ray bursts and, oh, huge
> > asteroids - we exist only thanks to being not close enough to all those
> > (... blah blah blah ... :-) )
> 
> You can worry about all of that stuff, OR you can say, it's been a
> very long time (if ever for some risks) since we've faced that, so
> statistically, we are reasonably safe.

Statistically, we are not safe. We just happen to not know enough.

I can learn, but I don't worry because it is useless.

> And go on living. It's called optimism. It isn't hyperoptimism for me to 
> live in the kill zone radius of the Yellowstone volcano. If it goes off 
> most of you will die slowly, while I will have a merciful quickish 
> death.

Uh, this is optimism? It looks more like a realism to me.

Optimists are - to me only, I guess - a bit like mental cases. Something 
like, "property prices in Yellowstone went down 100-fold for no apparent 
reason, let's buy a house there, it's a bargain".

> > So, this idea that one day we will become those angelic creatures, good
> > and nice... No, I don't think so. Rather, I think we humans are beasts and
> > in best case, we can become self-controlling beasts.
> 
> Or, eventually, they'll implant something in our heads to make us
> controlled beasts. They'll take away our ability to react violently.
> We may even sign up for it in exchange for something we can't imagine
> at this point.

This I can believe. But doing this kind of control will frak us out of 
history in not very long time. Few hundred years at best.

> > Now, a problem. Self-control seems to be unfashionable.
> 
> How so???? It's all the rage!

I fail to see this "rage". Or we understand this differently. For me, 
self-control requires lots of work performed over oneself. Gallons of 
sweat, maybe spiced with tears. I am not granted this by watching TV and 
having Facebook page. BTW, I am not there yet.

> > I have, however, heard other stories, counterweighting those grim options
> > mentioned. Like of Mr Gichin Funakoshi, who started learning Karate at the
> > age of 13 to improve his poor health, later became master himself but
> > fought his first real life fight age 72 (AFAIR - I have read it megayears
> > ago and cannot find anything on the net) when he helped a woman attacked
> > by a thug. Now that's the man. He did not go on killing journey, just
> > practiced the art for his whole life.
> 
> And as far as I know, self defense with the martial arts is a rarity,
> statistically speaking. I'm not against the martial arts for self
> control, for inner peace, for physical fitness. But to protect
> yourself, it isn't the greatest bargain in the world in terms of money
> or time.

Maybe because learning MA makes one avoid "stressful situations" more and 
behaving better in those that cannot be avoided.

But, for a successful defence, one needs to be in better shape and have 
more mental control of surroundings than attacker(s). MAs can deliver 
here. It can't guarantee anything, however :-).

> > I can also see a problem with idea that some external body would do better
> > in controlling our impulses than we ourselves could. It sounds very close
> > to what religions like us to believe. And there is plenty of evidence,
> > they can easily fail. The fallacy of many people is that when this
> > external entity changes, they expect the outcome changes too. However, the
> > controlling of impulses was never the goal of external entities,
> > especially when we consider they would become obsolete once impulses
> > finally came under control.
> 
> The Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes explains a lot of the decrease in
> violence. Before the dispassionate third party, in the form of the all
> powerful state would dish out just rewards, there were cycles of
> vengeance and revenge. The Leviathan stopped those cycles, and brought
> with it a more peaceful way to deal with conflict.

There were cases of all-powerful dispassionate states, which after all 
turned out to be something totally else. I don't think I will believe such 
state is possible, as long as it is constructed from selfish members, 
each trying to prolong their own genes at expense of everything else. If 
members cannot face what they are and what is their purpose, this doesn't 
make them better, only more ignorant and dangerous.

Were there any cases of such states which did as they promised?

> > So, maybe one day I will go after this book but I doubt I will run after
> > it.
> 
> I hope to finish reading it in a few months... it takes a while when
> you read ten books at a time...

Well, if you read it and find something convincing, I will gladly read 
about it here. Especially if you can prove this is not some kind of shady 
propaganda aimed at monetary gains of some yet-to-be-seen group.

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **