[ExI] beheadings etc

[Mirco Romanato]

Il 26/02/2015 03:40, Keith Henson ha scritto:

> Think about it.  Why do people have wars at all?  What is the purpose?
>  We share the war trait with chimps, but humans are not in war mode
> with everyone one else all the time like chimps are.

These chimps are Physicians, Engineers, talk many languages and travel
many lands.

You comparing them to chimps is disingenuous. Chimps do not formally go
to war, do not convert the individuals of the other tribe, do not ponder
about the right way to go at war and if the reasons to go at war are
good or not, right or not, permissible or not.

It could be reassuring, for an highly intelligent person, to classify
these people as "chimps" or "chimps like". But "chimps like" behavior is
not a protracted effort lasting years, decades or centuries.

It could be reassuring to think the reason to go at war are poverty,
desperation or hopelessness, but this do not make it true.

A chimps like behavior would last few days/weeks, at most. Would exhaust
itself pretty fast and would be aimed to the neighbors, not far away
people. A Saudi would not travel from England to Africa, along windings
ways, to reach Libya, just guided by his monkey brain. He would not go
in a self sacrificing mission alone to kill his enemies.

Resource limits are, often, a poor excuse to a war. Because people are
not chimps. Because wars during historic times are not waged by a
chimp's minds. Who did it was selected out of the gene pool thousands
years ago already. Because very high functioning sociopaths can be only
on the top and also them dislike to have other sociopaths near.


> It's hard to think of a section of the world with higher population
> growth or poorer resources prospects than that section of the middle
> east.  It is no wonder they are trying to kill all the other human
> groups.

Poverty never caused killing sprees. If it did, there would be a
massacre every day in the US and in Europe.
Envy, hate, rage, gluttony are better explanations.

But, as much as disagree with your conclusions about the causes, there
is any solution to this problem?

I suppose, if poverty is the cause, showering them with money or
material goods should tranquillize and sedate them. But apparently don't.
Any other suggestion?

What is the solution when a horde of killing monkeys start ravaging the
countryside and start showing up in the mall or in the university
offices (like it did in Virginia Tech)?

> To go into war mode humans have to be infested with a meme set that
> dehumanizes the other group(s).  IS certainly has that, but remember
> that the causality runs from the environmental signal to an amplified
> xenophobic meme.

> Before you think I am particularly picking on the Arabs, the pre WW II
> Germans were in a similar spot, and they had a  similar response as
> did the Cambodians and the Rwandans to similar signals.

>> Basically, the IS is the Nazism of Islam.
> Evolved human behavior is mechanistic.

In reality, it appear that a few Nazis took ideas from Islam and then
Islam (Muslim Brotherhood) took ideas from Nazism. It is a cross
pollination chimps are not famous for.

IS are the talking the talk and walking the walk Muslims.
The majority is just talking the talk (with other Muslims) and let
someone else walking the walk.

Mirco