Okay, I have a theory that a certain number of geeks love to cook and are really very good at it. I've been cooking since I was eight and I can make almost anything without looking at a recipe. I may be wrong, but I imagine some very good cooks post here.
One resource I can't recommend highly enough is Cook's Illustrated magazine, put out by the folks who do the PBS show, America's Test Kitchen. It has no advertisements, just in depth recipes and reviews you can trust. In each recipe, the highlight common problems and the solutions they've found through experimentation. They also tell about the failures and why they failed, and the science behind what went right and wrong.
The lady must have made a lot of sponge cakes to get it right without a recipe. Baking is far harder to get right than cooking, and sponge cakes can be very tricky. In baking, a difference of 1/4 teaspoon in some ingredients, or 10 degrees, or for puff pastry, the humidity, can totally change a recipe.
Cooking science isn't just about what happens to food when we prepare it. Food scientists know that different people react to different flavors differently. Some people can't even taste certain flavors.
His El Bulli restaurant beat out Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck in the Restaurant Top 50. He is also considered a pioneer of molecular gastronomy and has written several books on the subject. He was featured on Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, with dishes like cotton candy fish.
No, I am judging behavior, not people. And I'm not placing a moral judgment, I'm saying the behavior detracts from the sum total of human happiness and freedom and thus is maladaptive for humanity as a species. Nice try though.
The amount of time that's passed becomes less relevant if life requires certain physical conditions that didn't exist or existed far less frequently early on in the universe. Perhaps life requires certain concentrations of heavy metals. Maybe we're one of the first.
If 10% of all Slashdot accounts are current, and 25% of all posts relating to women in math and science are derogatory, what percentage of people that post to slashdot are going to get laid tonight?
I am not trying to fit the word 'anarchism' into my political philosophy. You are the one who is woefully uneducated regarding the history of western political thought. Your complete lack of knowledge coupled with your tone of absolute certainty and admonishment would be humorous were it not so common.
What I am saying is a matter of historical record. From Bakunin to Trotsky, anarchists for the last hundred and fifty years have been using the word as I have. I don't have time to educate you right now, so please use wikipedia as a starting point: Anarchism. It covers the basics of anarchism, the different broad classes and specific schools of thought, and gives some good links to external sources.
Anarchism predates libertarianism by a hundred years. You appear to have only heard the negative propaganda spread by governments. Try not to speak with certainty on subjects about which you are totally uneducated.
And syndicates should stick together to keep free riders from benefiting from the public good of social responsibility. Make it part of the contract. If you want to join, you have to agree never to do business with anyone who does not contribute to ensuring everyone has the basic necessities of life. That, too me, is the key piece that would let social anarchism compete on a level playing field within an individualist anarchist system.
How do you rebut the point that the terms of the contract are not disclosed when buying a console? Should one party have the right to enforce a contract that the other party has not agreed to, and doesn't even know about? That seems very authoritarian of you. It's almost as if you believe that anyone with money and power should be able to dictate terms unilaterally to those of us without. That's not really what you believe, is it?
If game console manufacturers business model depends on limiting your freedom to use the device you purchase, shouldn't this be stated more clearly? Especially when it goes against all expectations about what the sale of an electronic device means? But that would hurt their profits.
So really, this 'business model' that you are defending is based on misleading the consumer. You are defending outright fraud.
That's not anarchism. You do know that libertarianism is a just a minor sub-branch of individualist anarchism, right? Anarchism means no heirarchy and no initiation of force, not no organization or laws.
Oh, of course the extraction of the resource isn't free rent. The problem I have is excluding the rest of us from the resource without compensation. We could, without need to claim it exclusively, have used the land that resource was on. How are we party to any contract requiring us to stay off? How did they put the necessary investment into what was unowned land without first owning it? And without mixing their labor with it, by what justification do they claim ownership?
How we regard natural resources forms the basic split between individualist anarchists such as libertarians and social anarchists such as anarcho-syndicalists.
Punishing freeloaders does not require a person in power. It requires individuals that have the power to withdraw the rewards of cooperation on an individual, case by case basis. In the economic experiments I spoke of, no one test subject was in charge, and yet people naturally recognized when they were in a situation that promoted cooperation and took it on themselves to punish free riders.
You claim that a central government is the enemy and not the savior. I agree. I'm an anarcho-syndicalist myself. The one place you and I probably differ is in the belief that individuals have a right to claim natural resources as private property. This belief only benefits property holders. I'm no communist, I believe in personal property, and democratic control of natural resources. But private property is theft. It is one person claiming rights to a resource before they have even worked on it, and excluding everyone else from using it.
I believe in use-right of natural resources. If you are using a resource responsibly, as determined by your impact on others around you, then you should have a right of control over that resource. But no one should be allowed to be a landlord and reap a profit for no labor. If you aren't using it, and just collecting rent from the people who are, that is theft. Fencing off private property amounts to initiation of force, and justifies retaliation.
There is a reason we organize into groups, and it isn't so the powerful have an easy flock of sheep to cull for profit. It is to share risk and reward in a fair and egalitarian (not equal, egalitarian) manner.
We always, and only do what we want to do, in that moment. It may not have been what we wanted to do the moment before, and we may regret it after, but we can do nothing else. I don't think it is the violence that is enjoyable, so much as the adrenaline rush. I get the same feeling from riding a roller coaster or skiing, without the regret.
Violence and adrenaline rushes are only half the issue. The other part is oppression. Violence without oppression is not so bad. The main detrimental effect of having this 'famine' mode locked in culturally is the mentality of heirarchy, dominance and oppression it encourages. Cultural surveys have shown there are really only two cultures in the world, and you've probably only seen, lived in, and heard about one of them. Based on cultural surveys, I think (for instance) the Milgram experiments would have turned out very different in a feast-mode culture.
Modern economic experiments show that a small percentage of people are always selfish and try to take advantage of others. A slightly larger percentage are never selfish and will always try to act cooperatively. The majority will swing both ways, depending on their culture. In cultures that foster cooperation and punish free riders, most people are cooperative and do not desire power and dominance. In cultures that foster competition and allow people to take unfair advantage, most people act selfishly and competitively and seek out positions of power and dominance. You can even see it in our closest relatives. Compare and contrast Chimpanzee and Bonobo (Pygmy Chimpanzee) culture and behavior. Chimps are hierarchal, Bonobos are cooperative.
Nothing in nature determines how we should be. It determines how we are, and what kinds of obstacles and advantages we have to deal with in getting where we want to be. The only way to determine how we should be is to look at what is most advantageous for the individual, because that is the only way to get people to go along without resorting to force. Based on surveys that measure happiness, highly competitive societies are not as good as cooperative societies at producing human happiness, for most people.
The minority of highly competitive individuals are obviously going to be happier in a society that rewards competitive behavior and enables them to take unfair advantage of others, but why should the rest of us go along with a system like that when it won't make us happier, and it lets us be taken advantage of?
I'm a dick because I've had good experiences here being a dick. Originally, I was a dick to relieve stress. But I started to notice that I ended up in better conversations many times when I was deliberately confrontational than when I tried to be conciliatory and get my point across in a 'nice' way. But that's probably just dickish rationalization.
I didn't mean your parents beat you. You said you were picked on, and studies show peer groups have more impact on developing character than parents.
Love of violence is built into people, but when times are good, that drive lays dormant. People focus on cooperation and building alliances. Specific environmental and social factors conspired to keep that violent, competitive part of ourselves activated when it normally wouldn't be. The love of violence you are seeing is certainly natural in some sense, but its expression in modern society is unnatural.
I find it interesting that you can empathize with a tree, but find violence enjoyable. Every time I've been forced to violence, I feel good because I feel like justice is served (I wouldn't be forced to violence if justice were not at stake) but I feel sick at heart imagining the other person, the pain they must have in their lives to have been forced into violence, and the pain I have caused them.
What?!? Someone smarter than me that would marry me does in fact prove I'm smart. They are smart enough to see through my bullshit, and they still want me. If I'm smarter than my mate, maybe I'm not that smart. Maybe I'm just fooling myself, and her. I'd rather know the truth about my intelligence than believe some unchallenged fantasy.
I had a feeling you'd been beaten as a child. I never was. My parents were, you guessed it, hippies who never hit me once. In grade school, I was in the gifted programs so I never had to deal with violent dumb fucks. I was also very physical, and bigger than most kids my age.
When I entered high school and encountered violence for the first time, it was bullies picking on my friends, not me. I stood up to them and kicked their asses. After a few times, the word got out. Was it fun? In a way, but it felt bad at the same time. I've never had my empathy beaten out of me, so I can't help but feel for the person I'm fighting. After a fight, I feel pumped up, but sick.
I'm not a complete pacifist. I try to practice least violence, not non-violence. If someone were trying to kill me, the least violent option might be to kill them first. I'm no moral absolutist, either. There is no ultimate moral scale by which to measure events. Every scale is created inside the universe, based on conditions that arise. But there are things that are absolutely 'better' in some specific sense, for some specific group or individual. 'Better' meaning 'more efficacious in satisfying the needs of that group or individual.'
Violence is not efficacious in satisfying the basic needs of humanity. Studies seem to show that your view of the natural level of human violence is incorrect. Read The Continuum Concept for a view of what a human society that is not subjected to oppression is like. If the mother child bind is not broken, if children are not ritually brutalized (spare the rod, spoil the child, WRONG!) then children do not rebel against their society or each other. In these kinds of tribes, competitive games are unknown. Even in games like tag, if a child isn't having fun, the other children will slow down and let them 'win.'
Violence comes into play when young males see no place for themselves in society. They launch low level 'wife raids' against other tribes, which by todays standards look more like an extreme sport than warfare. A few die, population pressures are eased, and the gene pool gets a nice stir. We essentially have two modes of being, the cooperative 'feast' mode, and the competitive 'famine' mode.
But large scale violence is never seen in the archaeological record before 4,500BC. There are not fortifications, no body armor, no weapons that aren't also used for hunting. This time period corresponds with the desertification of northern Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The theory I've heard is that before we developed agriculture, we simply moved in the face of famine. After, we had organization and a surplus. When famine came, for the first time we had the motivation and the ability to wage large scale war. But this kind or real war leaves people with post traumatic stress (by the way, if people enjoy violence, why PTSD?)
And famine means infants don't develop proper myelin sheaths on their nerves. So we had a whole generation of PTSD parents raising a generation of brain damaged children. The culture of violence, heirarchy, and famine became locked into the human psyche. Even when it would have been more efficient to go back to the cooperative 'feast' mode, we couldn't. What you are seeing is a dysfunctional situation. We are locked into emergency mode.
People evolved from animals that were already social. We have the roots of cooperative behavior deep in our genes. You don't even need to reproduce yourself: if your behavior helps, on average, two or three close relatives procreate, then you have, in effect, passed on your complete set of genes to the next generation. It's survival of the fittest genes, not individuals.
I'm not sweeping anything under the rug, as you can see I have a very developed intellectual framework that explains the situation. You have no analysis that explains the complexity of human nature. You've been beaten into thinking that oppression and violence are good things, but I guarantee that picked on child inside you is cringing. You've so
Blue Laws of the Colony of Connecticut
on
Blue Blu-ray
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I thought it came from the term blue law, which is any law designed to enforce a moral standard. I believe that term derives from the original Blue Laws of the Colony of Connecticut.
Well, first off, I'm not making a snap judgment about tjstork. I'm basing my judgement on many many posts besides this one. I'm being aggressive because the guy has some messed up ideas about the way the world works, and I'm tired of people like that spreading their mental garbage to others. He wants to say what he thinks about reality? Fine, but he better be ready to hear what I think about what he thinks. Too many people think freedom of speech implies freedom from criticism. Sorry, but no.
Criminality is a difficult subject as there is so much emotionalism and misunderstanding around it, and so many people's jobs depend on it never being properly understood. The prison guards' union is the biggest in the country. Certainly people have various motivations for criminal behavior. But when offered the opportunity to be productive and respected members of society, most criminals would not choose crime. You mention a bunch of motivations and claim that they could only fulfill these through criminal actions. I say that all the motivations you mentioned could be satisfied through other means than crime, more successfully, more productively and without the risk, for most people. But for criminals, that is the only way they know to satisfy those desires. So, we're both right.
I say all this as someone who is a victim of violent crime. I can't see out of my left eye. I have no anger or animosity towards the people who did it to me. I understand the societal factors that drove them to that course. If it were up to me, I would hope for rehabilitation. ]
To me, tjstork's kind of thinking is the root of almost all suffering in the world. That sort of thinking brutalizes people. It's an internal oppressor one can never escape from and never please. No one would ever accept oppression from others if they hadn't first oppressed themselves internally. Tjstork actively supports that kind of thinking. I've had the fortune to meet a number of people who've gotten free from that kind of thinking through various different paths. It is possible. But that thinking does not deserve respect. It does not deserve sympathy, or coddling. It deserves to be called out forcefully every time it is encountered.
The world is a loving, cooperative, and fundamentally supportive place. I never said it wasn't also brutal, cruel, and selfish. But IMHO human society exists to make the world more the former and less the later, and cherry picking examples of competition and brutality from the natural world in order to excuse those behaviors in humanity is destructive and antisocial. People with tjstork's world-view are incapable of seeing the good side of the world, and are subtly threatened by it. Which is why they dismiss that possibility as a fantasy of fuzzy headed thinkers.
A lot of how you are treated depends on your personal set of life experiences and the value judgments you've placed on every single moment of your life. I can get along with anyone, in any culture. I've traveled all over the world and been in places that people claim are very dangerous, especially to a white guy. Aside from one incident, which happened in one of the whitest, safest places on earth, I have never had any problems. I find love, openness, honesty, sharing, cooperation, and support pretty much every where I look. It makes the insanity, brutality, and competition a little easier to take.
Therefore, if tjstork can see how his attitude is destroying his life, and change it, perhaps he will find more of those things I mentioned. I hope so, but at the very least I don't want him poisoning other people's minds. It's like finding a virus on your computer, you'd want to clean it up before it infected any others. I don't expect any of this to sink in now. Assuming I am right though, he will continue to encounter unhappiness in his life, and perhaps he will recall what I said and create a better outlook for himself.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I have a theory that a certain number of geeks love to cook and are really very good at it. I've been cooking since I was eight and I can make almost anything without looking at a recipe. I may be wrong, but I imagine some very good cooks post here.
One resource I can't recommend highly enough is Cook's Illustrated magazine, put out by the folks who do the PBS show, America's Test Kitchen. It has no advertisements, just in depth recipes and reviews you can trust. In each recipe, the highlight common problems and the solutions they've found through experimentation. They also tell about the failures and why they failed, and the science behind what went right and wrong.
The lady must have made a lot of sponge cakes to get it right without a recipe. Baking is far harder to get right than cooking, and sponge cakes can be very tricky. In baking, a difference of 1/4 teaspoon in some ingredients, or 10 degrees, or for puff pastry, the humidity, can totally change a recipe.
Cooking science isn't just about what happens to food when we prepare it. Food scientists know that different people react to different flavors differently. Some people can't even taste certain flavors.
His El Bulli restaurant beat out Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck in the Restaurant Top 50. He is also considered a pioneer of molecular gastronomy and has written several books on the subject. He was featured on Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, with dishes like cotton candy fish.
No, I am judging behavior, not people. And I'm not placing a moral judgment, I'm saying the behavior detracts from the sum total of human happiness and freedom and thus is maladaptive for humanity as a species. Nice try though.
The amount of time that's passed becomes less relevant if life requires certain physical conditions that didn't exist or existed far less frequently early on in the universe. Perhaps life requires certain concentrations of heavy metals. Maybe we're one of the first.
If 10% of all Slashdot accounts are current, and 25% of all posts relating to women in math and science are derogatory, what percentage of people that post to slashdot are going to get laid tonight?
Damn it, slashcode ate my link: Anarchism. Shoulda previewed!
I am not trying to fit the word 'anarchism' into my political philosophy. You are the one who is woefully uneducated regarding the history of western political thought. Your complete lack of knowledge coupled with your tone of absolute certainty and admonishment would be humorous were it not so common.
What I am saying is a matter of historical record. From Bakunin to Trotsky, anarchists for the last hundred and fifty years have been using the word as I have. I don't have time to educate you right now, so please use wikipedia as a starting point: Anarchism. It covers the basics of anarchism, the different broad classes and specific schools of thought, and gives some good links to external sources.
Anarchism predates libertarianism by a hundred years. You appear to have only heard the negative propaganda spread by governments. Try not to speak with certainty on subjects about which you are totally uneducated.
And syndicates should stick together to keep free riders from benefiting from the public good of social responsibility. Make it part of the contract. If you want to join, you have to agree never to do business with anyone who does not contribute to ensuring everyone has the basic necessities of life. That, too me, is the key piece that would let social anarchism compete on a level playing field within an individualist anarchist system.
"Spore will ship when it is actually fun to play, instead of feeling like a session of tweaking a very complicated spreadsheet."
And just for good measure, sing a few bars of Alice's Restaurant, so they know it's a movement!
How do you rebut the point that the terms of the contract are not disclosed when buying a console? Should one party have the right to enforce a contract that the other party has not agreed to, and doesn't even know about? That seems very authoritarian of you. It's almost as if you believe that anyone with money and power should be able to dictate terms unilaterally to those of us without. That's not really what you believe, is it?
If game console manufacturers business model depends on limiting your freedom to use the device you purchase, shouldn't this be stated more clearly? Especially when it goes against all expectations about what the sale of an electronic device means? But that would hurt their profits.
So really, this 'business model' that you are defending is based on misleading the consumer. You are defending outright fraud.
Retaliatory force. Duh.
That's not anarchism. You do know that libertarianism is a just a minor sub-branch of individualist anarchism, right? Anarchism means no heirarchy and no initiation of force, not no organization or laws.
Oh, of course the extraction of the resource isn't free rent. The problem I have is excluding the rest of us from the resource without compensation. We could, without need to claim it exclusively, have used the land that resource was on. How are we party to any contract requiring us to stay off? How did they put the necessary investment into what was unowned land without first owning it? And without mixing their labor with it, by what justification do they claim ownership?
How we regard natural resources forms the basic split between individualist anarchists such as libertarians and social anarchists such as anarcho-syndicalists.
As long as I can stab someone in the face through it.
Wow, SciAm is backing me up left and right today. Here's an article that corroborates my views on leadership.
FYI, SciAm has an interesting article explaining the economic research I was talking about.
Punishing freeloaders does not require a person in power. It requires individuals that have the power to withdraw the rewards of cooperation on an individual, case by case basis. In the economic experiments I spoke of, no one test subject was in charge, and yet people naturally recognized when they were in a situation that promoted cooperation and took it on themselves to punish free riders.
You claim that a central government is the enemy and not the savior. I agree. I'm an anarcho-syndicalist myself. The one place you and I probably differ is in the belief that individuals have a right to claim natural resources as private property. This belief only benefits property holders. I'm no communist, I believe in personal property, and democratic control of natural resources. But private property is theft. It is one person claiming rights to a resource before they have even worked on it, and excluding everyone else from using it.
I believe in use-right of natural resources. If you are using a resource responsibly, as determined by your impact on others around you, then you should have a right of control over that resource. But no one should be allowed to be a landlord and reap a profit for no labor. If you aren't using it, and just collecting rent from the people who are, that is theft. Fencing off private property amounts to initiation of force, and justifies retaliation.
There is a reason we organize into groups, and it isn't so the powerful have an easy flock of sheep to cull for profit. It is to share risk and reward in a fair and egalitarian (not equal, egalitarian) manner.
We always, and only do what we want to do, in that moment. It may not have been what we wanted to do the moment before, and we may regret it after, but we can do nothing else. I don't think it is the violence that is enjoyable, so much as the adrenaline rush. I get the same feeling from riding a roller coaster or skiing, without the regret.
Violence and adrenaline rushes are only half the issue. The other part is oppression. Violence without oppression is not so bad. The main detrimental effect of having this 'famine' mode locked in culturally is the mentality of heirarchy, dominance and oppression it encourages. Cultural surveys have shown there are really only two cultures in the world, and you've probably only seen, lived in, and heard about one of them. Based on cultural surveys, I think (for instance) the Milgram experiments would have turned out very different in a feast-mode culture.
Modern economic experiments show that a small percentage of people are always selfish and try to take advantage of others. A slightly larger percentage are never selfish and will always try to act cooperatively. The majority will swing both ways, depending on their culture. In cultures that foster cooperation and punish free riders, most people are cooperative and do not desire power and dominance. In cultures that foster competition and allow people to take unfair advantage, most people act selfishly and competitively and seek out positions of power and dominance. You can even see it in our closest relatives. Compare and contrast Chimpanzee and Bonobo (Pygmy Chimpanzee) culture and behavior. Chimps are hierarchal, Bonobos are cooperative.
Nothing in nature determines how we should be. It determines how we are, and what kinds of obstacles and advantages we have to deal with in getting where we want to be. The only way to determine how we should be is to look at what is most advantageous for the individual, because that is the only way to get people to go along without resorting to force. Based on surveys that measure happiness, highly competitive societies are not as good as cooperative societies at producing human happiness, for most people.
The minority of highly competitive individuals are obviously going to be happier in a society that rewards competitive behavior and enables them to take unfair advantage of others, but why should the rest of us go along with a system like that when it won't make us happier, and it lets us be taken advantage of?
I'm a dick because I've had good experiences here being a dick. Originally, I was a dick to relieve stress. But I started to notice that I ended up in better conversations many times when I was deliberately confrontational than when I tried to be conciliatory and get my point across in a 'nice' way. But that's probably just dickish rationalization.
I didn't mean your parents beat you. You said you were picked on, and studies show peer groups have more impact on developing character than parents.
Love of violence is built into people, but when times are good, that drive lays dormant. People focus on cooperation and building alliances. Specific environmental and social factors conspired to keep that violent, competitive part of ourselves activated when it normally wouldn't be. The love of violence you are seeing is certainly natural in some sense, but its expression in modern society is unnatural.
I find it interesting that you can empathize with a tree, but find violence enjoyable. Every time I've been forced to violence, I feel good because I feel like justice is served (I wouldn't be forced to violence if justice were not at stake) but I feel sick at heart imagining the other person, the pain they must have in their lives to have been forced into violence, and the pain I have caused them.
What?!? Someone smarter than me that would marry me does in fact prove I'm smart. They are smart enough to see through my bullshit, and they still want me. If I'm smarter than my mate, maybe I'm not that smart. Maybe I'm just fooling myself, and her. I'd rather know the truth about my intelligence than believe some unchallenged fantasy.
I had a feeling you'd been beaten as a child. I never was. My parents were, you guessed it, hippies who never hit me once. In grade school, I was in the gifted programs so I never had to deal with violent dumb fucks. I was also very physical, and bigger than most kids my age.
When I entered high school and encountered violence for the first time, it was bullies picking on my friends, not me. I stood up to them and kicked their asses. After a few times, the word got out. Was it fun? In a way, but it felt bad at the same time. I've never had my empathy beaten out of me, so I can't help but feel for the person I'm fighting. After a fight, I feel pumped up, but sick.
I'm not a complete pacifist. I try to practice least violence, not non-violence. If someone were trying to kill me, the least violent option might be to kill them first. I'm no moral absolutist, either. There is no ultimate moral scale by which to measure events. Every scale is created inside the universe, based on conditions that arise. But there are things that are absolutely 'better' in some specific sense, for some specific group or individual. 'Better' meaning 'more efficacious in satisfying the needs of that group or individual.'
Violence is not efficacious in satisfying the basic needs of humanity. Studies seem to show that your view of the natural level of human violence is incorrect. Read The Continuum Concept for a view of what a human society that is not subjected to oppression is like. If the mother child bind is not broken, if children are not ritually brutalized (spare the rod, spoil the child, WRONG!) then children do not rebel against their society or each other. In these kinds of tribes, competitive games are unknown. Even in games like tag, if a child isn't having fun, the other children will slow down and let them 'win.'
Violence comes into play when young males see no place for themselves in society. They launch low level 'wife raids' against other tribes, which by todays standards look more like an extreme sport than warfare. A few die, population pressures are eased, and the gene pool gets a nice stir. We essentially have two modes of being, the cooperative 'feast' mode, and the competitive 'famine' mode.
But large scale violence is never seen in the archaeological record before 4,500BC. There are not fortifications, no body armor, no weapons that aren't also used for hunting. This time period corresponds with the desertification of northern Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The theory I've heard is that before we developed agriculture, we simply moved in the face of famine. After, we had organization and a surplus. When famine came, for the first time we had the motivation and the ability to wage large scale war. But this kind or real war leaves people with post traumatic stress (by the way, if people enjoy violence, why PTSD?)
And famine means infants don't develop proper myelin sheaths on their nerves. So we had a whole generation of PTSD parents raising a generation of brain damaged children. The culture of violence, heirarchy, and famine became locked into the human psyche. Even when it would have been more efficient to go back to the cooperative 'feast' mode, we couldn't. What you are seeing is a dysfunctional situation. We are locked into emergency mode.
People evolved from animals that were already social. We have the roots of cooperative behavior deep in our genes. You don't even need to reproduce yourself: if your behavior helps, on average, two or three close relatives procreate, then you have, in effect, passed on your complete set of genes to the next generation. It's survival of the fittest genes, not individuals.
I'm not sweeping anything under the rug, as you can see I have a very developed intellectual framework that explains the situation. You have no analysis that explains the complexity of human nature. You've been beaten into thinking that oppression and violence are good things, but I guarantee that picked on child inside you is cringing. You've so
I thought it came from the term blue law, which is any law designed to enforce a moral standard. I believe that term derives from the original Blue Laws of the Colony of Connecticut.
Well, first off, I'm not making a snap judgment about tjstork. I'm basing my judgement on many many posts besides this one. I'm being aggressive because the guy has some messed up ideas about the way the world works, and I'm tired of people like that spreading their mental garbage to others. He wants to say what he thinks about reality? Fine, but he better be ready to hear what I think about what he thinks. Too many people think freedom of speech implies freedom from criticism. Sorry, but no.
Criminality is a difficult subject as there is so much emotionalism and misunderstanding around it, and so many people's jobs depend on it never being properly understood. The prison guards' union is the biggest in the country. Certainly people have various motivations for criminal behavior. But when offered the opportunity to be productive and respected members of society, most criminals would not choose crime. You mention a bunch of motivations and claim that they could only fulfill these through criminal actions. I say that all the motivations you mentioned could be satisfied through other means than crime, more successfully, more productively and without the risk, for most people. But for criminals, that is the only way they know to satisfy those desires. So, we're both right.
I say all this as someone who is a victim of violent crime. I can't see out of my left eye. I have no anger or animosity towards the people who did it to me. I understand the societal factors that drove them to that course. If it were up to me, I would hope for rehabilitation. ]
To me, tjstork's kind of thinking is the root of almost all suffering in the world. That sort of thinking brutalizes people. It's an internal oppressor one can never escape from and never please. No one would ever accept oppression from others if they hadn't first oppressed themselves internally. Tjstork actively supports that kind of thinking. I've had the fortune to meet a number of people who've gotten free from that kind of thinking through various different paths. It is possible. But that thinking does not deserve respect. It does not deserve sympathy, or coddling. It deserves to be called out forcefully every time it is encountered.
The world is a loving, cooperative, and fundamentally supportive place. I never said it wasn't also brutal, cruel, and selfish. But IMHO human society exists to make the world more the former and less the later, and cherry picking examples of competition and brutality from the natural world in order to excuse those behaviors in humanity is destructive and antisocial. People with tjstork's world-view are incapable of seeing the good side of the world, and are subtly threatened by it. Which is why they dismiss that possibility as a fantasy of fuzzy headed thinkers.
A lot of how you are treated depends on your personal set of life experiences and the value judgments you've placed on every single moment of your life. I can get along with anyone, in any culture. I've traveled all over the world and been in places that people claim are very dangerous, especially to a white guy. Aside from one incident, which happened in one of the whitest, safest places on earth, I have never had any problems. I find love, openness, honesty, sharing, cooperation, and support pretty much every where I look. It makes the insanity, brutality, and competition a little easier to take.
Therefore, if tjstork can see how his attitude is destroying his life, and change it, perhaps he will find more of those things I mentioned. I hope so, but at the very least I don't want him poisoning other people's minds. It's like finding a virus on your computer, you'd want to clean it up before it infected any others. I don't expect any of this to sink in now. Assuming I am right though, he will continue to encounter unhappiness in his life, and perhaps he will recall what I said and create a better outlook for himself.