VerrKol Wrote:Flonne; You've conflated so many different issues in that post that I barely know where to begin.
A group of Trump supporters unexpectedly attacking a group of protesters is not a microcosm for international politics. Full stop.
The attack itself is not. The outcome, however, is.
VerrKol Wrote:You think it's weak that civilians are unable to defend themselves when attacked? I'd call it success. In a modern, well developed society, not every person should be required to defend themselves because it is rarely required. Violent crime and armed conflict are at low enough rates that not every citizen is required know self defense. That's why we have police officers and military. While I might advocate a modicum of basic self defense training for everyone, you seem to advocate that every citizen defend themselves as a soldier should. This is both unnecessary and counterproductive in an age when 1 missile can take out an entire city.
The police are actually only effective as a preemptive deterrent, they are much more effective as a psychological suppressant than they are as a physical one. This is why riots get so out of control so quickly, when people see that others in their direct vicinity are no longer being punished by the perceived deterrent, if they are also upset enough they will join in instead of considering the ramifications, thus validating their new thought process of "it doesn't matter if I do this pomegranate, they can't stop me" and undermining the entire point of the law enforcement structure. I respect the police and think they have a very hard and very important job, but they rely on that psychological suppressant factor to protect their lives more than any bulletproof armor ever could.
VerrKol Wrote:I don't believe there was ever a time when a small group of determined attackers couldn't surprise and significantly injure a larger group of average citizens. Stop idealizing a past full of "strong people" that never existed.
I incorrectly worded that, rather, I didn't get my meaning across; no, people were not stronger in the past, they were MORE RESILIENT. People have fake panic attacks when they hear a certain harmless word or action in today's society, can you imagine if that happened even a thousand years ago? Ten thousand? They had actual real pomegranate to worry about, like getting eaten by a pineappleing bear or killed by a rival clan. That does not make them stronger people, but it does definitely make them more resilient, more able to deal with hardship, more equipped to overcome obstacles that are thrown in their path. Rome fell because they became a bunch of hedonistic sacks of pomegranate just like what is happening right now around the world; they became fat, and lazy, and stupid, and even ENCOURAGED THESE TRAITS, because their success eventually bred too many consecutive generations in the ruling class who would much rather have sex with little boys and party year-round than actually manage their holdings.
The biggest problem is this; as an empire or country becomes more successful, they are able to more easily "defeat" Darwin's law, through safety/protection of citizenry from outside forces, healthcare, economic stability, and ability to provide food and water. These are all positive things, but humans are flawed in such a way that there will never be a lasting period of peace in this world because when you make life better you are in the long run actually making it worse, by creating masses of people who technically should have died to starvation or disease or murder in their youth because they were not resilient or cunning enough to make it. This actually touches on one of the key gripes I have with god if one happens to exist (which I believe should be the case due to the complexity of biological life, but it could be that nature is just legitimately good at building complex cell structures from nothing, hey), but that has nothing to do with this discussion; humans are currently irredeemably flawed, and even if you try to fix those flaws through scientific advancements to improve quality of life, they will self-"correct"(negatively) within a few generations and place us right back before the starting point, on many levels. I feel that the most important advancements science should be focusing on right now are in the field of genetics, in order to permanently cull many of those very harmful flaws from the DNA of all future generations; that is the only way I can see us as a species making real progress toward the future. Yes, that sounds like eugenics, and maybe at it's core it is, but I can see only positives to doing these things (under circumstances in which they are deemed to be both safe and MUCH more importantly used in a controlled environment with no private influence, the latter is where the historical precedent to eugenics went so far off the rails); we as a species have to at least be given a chance to reach the starting point toward reaching our potential, and we never will while those massive flaws in our nature still exist.
Most anthropologists would at least acknowledge that the majority of the systems of behavior that current humans have inherited from our tribal ancestors are heavily negative, mainly on an emotional/psychological level. The first thing the behavioral therapist I am seeing for my chronic anxiety said to me was to watch as little of the news as possible, which is hard for me but I am definitely cutting back on it; the reason for this is that, based on remnants of our previous system of behaviors, there was no way or even desire to hear information outside of the tribe of ~100 people, so every negative piece of news that you see is perceived on a psychological level as a direct assault on you or your family. When you hear someone is shot and killed, beneath the portion of your psyche that has been desensitized by decades of hearing such reports, one of your family members was just shot and killed in the back of your mind. Now imagine having dozens of your family members in harms way or even killed every single day, when the norm for our ancestors was for events like that to be once every couple months as a worst case scenario; the adrenaline our body is constantly pouring out while stressed is in high doses basically poisonous to the development of our brains. This is a huge tangent at this point so pineapple it, I'll just leave it at that, but the point is that our natures are not going to autocorrect themselves, they have to be forcibly fixed using scientific advancement or we will never make it as a species, the behaviors of our past are dragging us down.
This, however, is definitely relevant, and is the closing chapter on this entire political debacle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_...s_electors
They spent a month trying to get conservative state electoral college members to vote against Trump, and ended up pissing off the others so much that double the number of electors ended up voting against Hillary than people that voted against Trump. Assange's statement that the mainstream media is becoming increasingly irrelevant becomes truer every day.