All We Are Asking

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Yesterday, when I was fortunately still too ill to engage extensively, I ran across someone on Twitter who was waxing mournfully (in one of the comments on a post about there being no such thing as noble savages) about why can’t all humans be peaceful and eschew war and aggression. When I pointed out that that if we were peaceful and non-agressive, we’d not have got where we are, he then came back with hopes that we might someday all live in peace and non-aggression and said that was something worth working for. At which point I said this would imply killing all humans and went off to do other things.

What shocks me about what he said and my reaction is that this is the sort of thing people kept saying, writing about — moaning about — in novels and books when I was little, and, being thoroughly immersed in this, if someone had said this to me when I was 20 or so I’d have said “yes, of course.”

But now all I can feel towards such pap is impatience.

I’m sick and tired of people who whine, moan, and throw themselves on the floor like my kids when they were two, about why oh why humans can’t be peaceful and non aggressive.

Sure, okay, maybe humans could be…. I don’t know. I’m having real trouble coming up with an Earth animal who isn’t aggressive. Because most animals who aren’t aggressive and don’t seek to expand their range, sooner or later go extinct.

Even sheep and for that matter bunnies are aggressive to an extent.

But on the serious side, if we were non-aggressive and non-violent, and if we had evolved in the kind of world where a species like that could survive…. we might be very peaceful, but we would not be human.

And the same goes for us all living in peace and harmony, someday. I truly can’t imagine everyone in the world living in peace and harmony. It’s a variant of “if only everyone” and there’s absolutely no chance of that happening, ever.

I don’t see any point hating on humans for being what they are. And I don’t see any point waiting for humans to be completely different, unless there is some kind of transformative religious event.

Do I hope for a future in which fewer innocent humans are killed? Yes. Do I have hope that life will get better for everyone. And yes, I’ll work for each human to be as free and capable of pursuing happiness as possible, because free and prosperous societies tend to maximize safety and health for innocent humans and the powerless.

But … working for peace for everyone — EVERYONE — would mean working for human extinction.

And that I’m not willing to work towards.

Aliens might be very well, but they’re not humans. And humans are as we are and there’s no use willing us to be something completely different. That way lies hatred of humanity because we can’t be perfect, and then crazy crap like voluntary extinction.

Humans are not perfect. Again, absent some religious transformative example, we will never be perfect. But as we are, this is my species, and as such I’m going to root for it.

And you know what, if some alien shows up promising us peace forever, I’m going to assume they want to kill us all.

In fact, if there are aliens, I recommend that we stay just as fractious as we are. Because I will bet you money no species climbed to the top of the evolutionary chain in some other planet, and built a space ship to come here without being at least as aggressive as we are, and possibly more.

And again, I’m going to to side with the humans.

Aggressive apes we might be, but look how far we’ve come. And everything we’ve built, just the way we are.

If I have to pick, I’ll pick humans being as they are and colonizing the stars.

Until someone gives me a believable version of world peace that doesn’t mean we’re all dead or lobotomized.

210 thoughts on “All We Are Asking”

    1. “By the data to date, there is only one animal in the Galaxy dangerous to man—man himself. So he must supply his own indispensable competition.”

      Without that competition we would stagnate, and something else would displace us eventually.

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  2. Even sheep and for that matter bunnies are aggressive to an extent.

    You’re right. Take a look a medieval illuminated manuscripts. Those rabbits were downright bloodthirsty!

    And of The Rabbit of Caerbannog, we will not speak.

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    3. Recently saw a video (possibly fake, but fits with reality) of herbivore species lunching on some other animal that just happens by. That all life on earth (the video clips were all of mammals, but the principal applies everywhere) will be opportunistically carnivorous. The soundtrack had a lot of moments like “see the cute fuzzy bunny – oh my GD just ate that lizard”.

      Just as our hostess says, anyone who doesn’t compete, soon becomes a postscript to those that do.

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      1. No. Even herbivores will eat protein when they can. Other animals are protein. I raised bunnies growing up. Yeah…. they’ll eat smaller, more helpless things. Sometimes their own babies.

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      2. I’ve seen pictures of cows, goats, and pigs, eating snakes.

        Also brings up a point. Pet snake trade has been devastating Florida Everglades, and other southern state swamps. Invasive. Top predator. Very little goes after the snakes. Alligators and crocodiles will take on adult pythons, etc. Turns out copperheads take on adult constrictors too. Baby constrictors are being taken by possums, armadillos, raccoons, baby alligators and crocodiles. The environment is fighting back.

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  3. Our greatest and most developed ability—our skill at hunting—has, in most Western cultures, been under attack. Well over 99 percent of the time man has been on earth, he has been a hunter by profession. Today, man does not hunt for food in modern societies as he did in his recent past. Today, he hunts for the vestigial, ancestral memory of the thrill of the hunt itself. Even though his basic weapon is the ability to make weapons through brain capacity, haven’t you ever wondered why human eyes face forward as do those of every other land predator or bird of prey? Think of the herbivores, the prey, the nonmeateaters such as deer or cattle or bluebirds. They have side-facing, defensive eyes. This alone is enough to qualify man, despite the denials of the Bambi-ites, as predators.

    “Death In the Long Grass”, Peter Capstick.

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    1. Human eyes key on motion above all else.

      We are a biological targeting computer and weapon factory.

      When we finally hit the starlanes, we are probably the things that give Klingons and Kzinti nightmares.

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      1. Note that certain brands of toothbrush are banned in prisons, because they can be readily hardened and sharpened into quite lethal shanks.

        Cons make shanks out of turkey thighbones and dental floss. Bludgeons out of soap bars and socks. Even Paper Mache can be weaponized.

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      2. I came to the comments to mention Kzinti. Space orcs, bigod.

        I also find myself remembering the tripe that someone named Tepper published under the title “The Fresco.” Essentially, aliens come to earth and fix everything. The ideal under her pen is one where nanites control everything, right up to and including whether to have a beer. (Yes, *A* beer. If you’re a mean drunk, they trigger autoemesis on the first swallow. Like antabuse, but nastier.) Naturally firearms are disallowed unless you have never even once thought about sh00ting another human.

        But hey, it was PEACEFUL. Facium solitudinant, or however it’s phrased.

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        1. One that infuriates me is Damon Knight’s, Rule Golden, wherein a guy rescues an alien ambassador and goes on the run with him while the authorities try to capture them. Eventually the organism (?) the ambassador is carrying infects enough people to hit critical mass, and everyone becomes empathic. As in, the slaughterhouse employees feel every bit of the steer’s experience when the sledgehammer strikes. And of course they feel every trace of the pain/discomfort they cause others.

          At which point the aliens rain down rations of healthy, culturally appropriate vegetarian (synthetic?) fare so nobody starves and people begin to work toward making a just society because they have no other choice. The narrator totally approves, and especially of how the next generation turns out.

          The notion, for example, that sadists might, ah, enjoy enduring the pain of others never enters his mind.

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          1. Oh I can see that going so badly. For the aliens as well.

            Because humans would want revenge. It’s estimated sadistic tendencies are about 3% of the human population. That’s a lot of people.

            Just because you’re sadistic, doesn’t mean you don’t have morals. You already have the drive to Do Unto others….

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          2. :grimaces: The Sword’s Edge Chronicles by L.S. King have an empathic clan commonly called Rangers (real name Ch’shalna). One of the guys in the books – who gets his just desserts – uses his power to…amplify the sensations women have when being…entertainers for a noble lord and three of his soldiers.

            Darn tootin’ the sadists would come out to play if that power became widespread….

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        2. Or Max Erlich’s The Big Eye, where the scientists discover a rogue planet which will collide with Earth in two years. Whereupon everyone in the world snaps out of the “imminent nuclear war,” hysteria they have been enduring and work like beavers to solve all mankind’s problems and make everyone on the planet’s remaining time as pleasant as possible.

          Then the rogue misses – the scientists lied, because they knew nothing else would motivate Mankind to do the right thing….right.

          Erlich was not an SF writer, so it never occured to him, apparently, that hundreds of amateur astronomers would take photos, do their own calculations and call BS on the scientists. Or that an encounter with a rogue planet coming close enough to fill most of the sky on the night of the pass might cause, oh I don’t know, massive tides, storms, earthquakes, and so on.

          Just one of those books that’s so bad one’s suspension of disbelief eventually commits seppukku.

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          2. Ray Bradbury did it better in his short story “The Toynbee Convector.” An inventor makes a time machine, and reports visiting the future where we’ve solved our big problems and entered a golden age. Thus inspired, humanity reverses its recto-cranial inversion and starts creating the golden age they know is coming. The twist comes near the end of the inventor’s life, when he very quietly admits his machine never went anywhen. He told an aspirational fable, in hopes that we would live up to it, which we did.

            (I don’t guarantee this is a perfectly accurate synopsis: it’s been a long time since I read that collection.)

            Bradbury does not try to pick apart his scenario with cynical skepticism either, but since the story is told with Bradbury’s prose, and it’s pretty short, he gets by with it.

            Erlich wasn’t alone with that sort of idea. I believe President Reagan once said that the one thing that could truly unite humanity would be an alien invasion. (Harry Turtledove’s In the Balance series serves as a long counterargument.) I think James Carville, on the other side, expressed a similar idea. That makes one wonder whether some of his ideological soulmates decided to run the experiment with something a little less apocalyptic, and way smaller, than invading aliens …

            Republica restituendae.

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        3. Either it becomes Harrison Bergeron, or one hapless kid develops a nanite allergy and, aside from living hopped up on Claritin all the time, they don’t work on him either. He learns the source of the nanite plague, what human PTB are in collaboration with the aliens, and goes varmint hunting.

          Varmint, not game: game animals are generally regulated with set seasons and bag limits. Varmints are open-season, year-round.

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        4. Either it becomes Harrison Bergeron, or one hapless kid develops a nanite allergy and, aside from living hopped up on Claritin all the time, they don’t work on him either. He learns the source of the nanite plague, what human PTB are in collaboration with the aliens, and goes varmint hunting.

          Varmint, not game: game animals are generally regulated with set seasons and bag limits. Varmints are open-season, year-round.

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        5. There’s a series I recently re-read by James Alan Gardener wherein the conceit is that the League of Peoples—the alien group so incredibly advanced that we can do nothing about it—has decided that deliberately killing a sapient creature is a dangerous, non-sentient action, and makes the actor a dangerous non-sapient. That’s a quarantine offense; they won’t do anything about such creatures unless they cross into interstellar space. (Dangerous non-sapients—or those who knowingly transport such—just die, non-revivably.)

          He doesn’t pretend this makes people (or aliens) peaceful or even benign. It’s just a starting point for the type of mayhem that can happen in the spaces left by such a rule. There are seven books, and I wonder if he wanted to take the series further (and the publisher decided not to) or if he felt like he didn’t have any more stories to tell.

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  4. So true, so true.

    I would be shocked if we didn’t all have at least one topic where we have seen lefties go, “If only everybody would do THIS, the world would be great.”

    Mine isn’t whirled peas, but there is just as much stubborn ‘if you don’t agree with me, yOu mUSt noT UndErstAnD!’ repetitive arguing.

    I need to just preemptively block people when they bring up a topic.

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    2. The Morlocks were the good guys. They kept the food coming, they kept the Eloi healthy.

      The Eloi? Dumb as a box of rocks, individually or collectively. Human-shaped pigs, without the pig’s or the human’s innate intelligence and common sense.

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  7. “These are just a few of the images we’ve recorded. And you can see, it wasn’t what we thought. There’s been no war here and no terraforming event. The environment is stable. It’s the Pax. The G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate that we added to the air processors. It was supposed to calm the population, weed out aggression. Well, it works. The people here stopped fighting. And then they stopped everything else. They stopped going to work, they stopped breeding, talking, eating. There’s 30 million people here, and they all just let themselves die.”

    -Serenity

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    2. “Sure as I know anything I know this, they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten, they’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people…better. And I do not hold to that. So no more running. I aim to misbehave.” — Mal Reynolds

      It is a fixed belief among Leftroids that they can force people to be ‘better’ and if we resist, then obviously we are Eeevul and more force is needed. The world is littered with the mass graves which are all that remain of their failed utopias.

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        1. Thank you. It’s a good feeling when somebody thinks I’ve written something clever or profound. 🧐

          After a bit more thought, I replaced ‘utopias’ with ‘utopian delusions’. Because real people can’t live in a utopia.
          ———————————
          How can imperfect people create a Perfect World? How could imperfect people live in a Perfect World? Nonetheless, there is no shortage of people convinced that they can create a Perfect World — they just have to eliminate all the imperfect people who don’t fit in it.

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          1. I just checked my 50 year old Webster’s, and they confirmed my recollection that the base word is from Greek, ie: No Place. Clever that.

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    3. Not to be cornfuxed with the small percent of the population who had a different adverse reaction to the Pax and became the cannibalistic Ravagers . . .

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  8. Then there’s the variant, “Of course, everyone wants peace!” which works out to, “We want peace, so obviously, everyone wants what we want!”

    And the business of projecting one’s 21st century assumptions back into the Old Testament. I’m afraid I made Sunday School rather….upsetting….last week.

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    1. “It takes two to make peace. Only takes one to make war.”

      If anybody doesn’t want peace, you’re gonna have war. A one-sided war of subjugation and extermination if you don’t fight back, but war none the less.

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      1. Ah but everybody “like peace”, it’s just that to some people “peace” means control of everybody else and/or everybody else being dead.

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    4. The notion that we all want the same thing is the root of a great deal of really sloppy, and ultimately fatal, thinking and it’s everywhere especially In academia/economics where what we all want always seems to be that which lends itself to simple linear -or linearizble — equations. To do otherwise would be irrational.

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      2. I know. You couldn’t get a group of 100 random strangers to decide on what flavor of pizza, bit we’re all gonna magically agree on every vitally important issue…🙄

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  9. You are absolutely correct Sarah humans like other species are hard wired to be aggressive, but we can control it and channel the aggression into building and creating a society and civilization that will benefit the population. All we have to do is say we will not kill today or be destructive and instead be the artist, builder, healer and move civilization forward it is hard but we can do it if we try.

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    1. And there will be conflict wherever people with differing opinions about what constitutes moving civilization forward actually means. Clash of cultures exemplifies this concept.

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                    1. Really? Want to check your bag of holding, and see if you have any creative insults in there? Or even interesting? Ones that make sense would help as well.

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                  2. To be fair, with this critter, we’ll end up with hotels of laughter.
                    It might interest you guys that we’re under an attempted DDS attack right now. Still not buckling, but the numbers don’t lie.

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                    4. Consider a hypothetical really salty Iran, or China, or France, whose regime is stressed, and thinks that if Trump operates via US politics unhindered for N more months, they are done.

                      UK has elections tomorrow.

                      US has some elections June or July, but the big one is November, six months out.

                      Anyway, if waiting six months could be fatal, the hope of that intervention might not save our hypothetical regime.

                      If so, the big problem for them is voices of sanity and stability, that point to minding one’s own business, self care, and patience.

                      I really dunno.

                      It feels like congressmen have recalculated after Cole Allen, but I maybe don’t know why, or what.

                      we shall see

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                  3. Hey, I vote for Sarah to block you-know-who from the blog. I’m bored. I’ve already “blocked”. Called “delete w/o reading”.

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    2. At least one of us failed in reading comprehension.

      It doesn’t matter if you choose not to be aggressive if the guy standing next to you chooses otherwise. Your options, at that point, are to either give in, and become complicit in their aggression (aggression rewarded is rarely satisfied,) or to fight back to keep what’s yours.

      The destructive, aggressive, taking desires are part of what makes us human. Sure, some of us can channel those impulses in useful directions. Others don’t care to, or just don’t see enough to go around.

      So, no we can’t do ‘it’ if we try. The most we can do is try to convince the covetous and ambitious that stealing and looting and the like are dangerous and unlikely to succeed. Both by prospering cooperatively and by proving ourselves able to stop their depredations.

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      1. My comment was if humans do not evolve to a point where killing each other does not stop then we are condemned to destroy ourselves, which my be the case but I will still hold out hope.

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        2. Sure, maaaaaagically we’ll be able to kill ourselves off, completely.

          Hasn’t happened yet, mind you, even when it was much harder to keep folks alive– but if it’s not stopped completely it’ll somehow crank up to where we are going to wipe out the species.

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          1. This nonsense really got started after we developed nuclear weapons but of course, we haven’t destroyed ourselves. [Wink]

            Oh, that nonsense is IMO the reason that some people believe in the “Glorious Elder Species” that can teach us to live in peace.

            IE The Elder Species didn’t destroy themselves in nuclear war and thus are so-much “moral” than humans.

            Slightly off topic but part of the “back story” of one of Chris Nuttall’s series is that first contact between humans and an alien species was when a human fleet allowed the alien fleet to fire first.

            The humans still had this crazy idea that any aliens “out there” would be peaceful “Elders” even though humans (in that story universe) had had wars between various human “star nations”.

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            1. “The Survivors” M.Z. Bradley

              One human (kidnapped from earth, by alien slavers on a flyby), one galactic human, two galactic saurians. Humans, even galactic space faring, are considered less able by the saurians because slaved to procreation biology. The four are sent to figure out how two different biologies, human, and lizard (saurian) developed on the same planet, at seemingly the same time.

              Hint. Didn’t. Same as earth only it wasn’t an asteroid hitting the planet that wiped out, or rather almost wiped out the original saurian civilization. Those survivors went underground, only to have a portion re-emerge later, to find humans evolved in their absence.

              By the time the four investigators are there to investigate, there are 3 civilizations, one human, two saurians, one of which lives on the surface, the other who lives in enclaves deep hidden underground. By the time the latter are discovered, the one earth human has all but figured out what happened (so should the reader by description), by some of the landscape. Been centuries since the cataclysm. Radiation long gone. But nature hadn’t erased all the effects. The hidden saurians when confronted with the earth human’s suspicion, admit the history.

              Naturally, before this is all admitted, our earth human is thinking, if not muttering “higher evolved, my ass-et.”

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        3. We don’t need to evolve beyond a point where we are capable of killing another human. We need to evolve beyond a point where we are capable of killing another human without cause. And that cause must be clear and present.

          Look, this world is fallen. The only perfect world is Heaven. There will always be evil among us to some extent or other; we’re just that way, sinful, flawed creatures. We’ll never erase that instinct from ourselves. What we can do, as much as we can, is control it. Guide it. Reserve it for those times where it is truly, truly necessary. But it’s never going away.

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        4. Nope. There are always going to be violent damaged people that can’t be reasoned with, and you’ll have to put them down, hard and permanently. Doing that isn’t Mutually Assured Destruction. It’s pest control, or maybe corrective surgery (pick your own metaphor.) I will say that if you don’t do it early enough, then you’re going to have a lot more damage all around.

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      1. Well then we are condemned to eventually destroy ourselves, which is at this point likely the case, so then I am wrong to hope.

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        1. That’s nonsense. SHOW YOUR WORK. I know the indoctrinates have yelled this from the rooftops my whole life, but what’s your proof? They want us disarmed so they can rule us, that’s their motivation. What’s yours?

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            1. Sir (and I use that term with all due reservations), telling Our Gracious Hostess what to do is a jackass move, and likely to get you the banhammer. Please clean up your act; teasing the chewtoy is fun, but if he (and I don’t give a leadplated damn about your pronouns) gets banned, we can live with that, too.

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              1. If you think I care what you pea brains think you are sadly mistaken. You started this crap.

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                  1. All perfectly normal and totally correct people go to new blogs to assert what they want and insult everyone who disagrees with them. And in other news, the Moon rose in the North and Jupiter transited the Sun.

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                2. You came here and made assertions, and refused to back them up.

                  Your continued presence indicates you care quite a bit. Your ego demands it, I guess.

                  Except your prowess is reminiscent of Wimp-Lo. You were deliberately trained wrong, as a joke.

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                3. -you- came here, picked a fight with folks -way- better educated, discovered you were -way- outclassed, tried to bluff, got beat repeatedly, redoubled futility, got beat more, then cried abuse.

                  So lame. You present like you were a slow 12 year old.

                  Earn your respect. You haven’t any basis to demand it.

                  (or, make the next predictable mistake)

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            2. If you won’t “show your work,” i.e. go into detail about why and how your claims would happen, then you have nothing useful to contribute to this conversation. Because you’re just repeating the same assertions over and over, without backing them up with any logic. And when someone asks you why you believe something, “because it’s obviously true” is not going to convince anyone who thinks you’re wrong.

              You need to either back up your assertions with reasoning, or accept that you’re not going to persuade anyone with your “I don’t jump on command” business.

              Because really, why are you here posting this? Do you actually want to persuade people of your point? Or do you just want to feel good that you’ve made your point, but leave people completely unpersuaded (and, in fact, thinking that you have no rational basis for your belief)? Because so far, you haven’t managed to persuade anyone, as you can see.

              So either write more than a paragraph at a time, so that you can actually lay out the logical arguments underlying your reasoning, or else accept that most of the people here are going to continue believing that you have no logical arguments underlying your reasoning, and that in fact you aren’t reasoning, but just knee-jerk reacting out of emotion.

              If you’re fine being thought of as an unreasoning, emotion-driven, illogical person, that’s fine by me. But if you don’t want to be thought of that way, then as a free piece of advice, let me tell you: show your reasoning, or you won’t change anyone’s mind about you.

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    4. “If only everyone would…”

      Not going to happen. Never has. Never will.

      What they want is “If you just surrender, we will have Peace!”

      No. No I wont. No they wont, either. Because you are quite provably wrong, about a great many things.

      No. No I wont. No they wont, either.

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      1. look if humans do not evolve to some point where killing each other is no longer a blood sport then we are doomed, which at this point is likely the case.

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        1. Where the hell is it a blood sport. It was and is and always will be serious business outside small, doomed subcultures.
          Again and again, show your work. Tell us step by step how you get from “Humans have been aggressive since they first stood upright — or likely before — to “we’re all doomed to self destruction.”” STEP BY STEP. LOGICALLY.

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          1. If you scare the chew toy off by demanding their tiny little brain actually and uncomfortably argue using fact supported logic instead of their feelz, then we lose the chew toy. Jus’ sayin’..

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            2. Life has been getting in the way, but isn’t this the first chew toy we’ve had in a while?

              I’m recalling (sort of) a ST-TOS episode where the Big Bad was “Doom, Doom, Doom“, while Bones had the crew dosed to the eyeballs with happy juice. Sulu: “He sure is gloomy.” (Maybe the Jack the Ripper episode. Been too many years…)

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                1. Could be. Too tired to look up the episode.

                  When my knees permit, I’ll have to see if I still have the ST-TOS episode guide. It’s in the shop/barn and only accessible via ladder. I have things I Must Do on ladders, and my knees extract a price. Too high for book searches right now. (I see the ortho surgeon in a week, where he gets to say “I told you so” when I declined total knee replacement last year.) Two ladder climbs today, and ouch.

                  Growing old has its problems, but it beats the alternative…

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                2. Nope, it’s ‘Wolf In The Fold’ season 2 episode 14. ‘The Naked Time’ was season 1 episode 4. Weirdly altered water makes everybody who contacts it act drunk. Sulu thinks he’s Zorro.

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              1. look I could care less what some pseudo intellectual like you thinks. Let me put it this way go kiss the center line on the nearest interstate.

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                3. But you advocate for peace. By making inept threats. In a forum that reveals you as impotent and ineffective.

                  Do go on trying to impress me with your incompetence.

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            3. Even as large of an asshole as I am I would never be that obtuse nor willfully blind as to the purpose of the Authors posts. Which is not to be insulted but to make the reader think and process what was written. Your insults doesn’t reflect upon the author but yourself. Thank you for identifying yourself Mr. Karen have a nice day.

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        2. Not at all. Our ability to kill wisely and to purpose is how we came up with both Liberty and the self restraint to make it work.

          The peaceniks want -that- eliminated.

          Proveably.

          No pacifist ever bought Liberty. Even Ghandi had plan B. Also, he wasn’t fighting Nazis.

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      2. Somebody shoulda flogged George Bush’s speechwriter who saddled him with the ‘Islam means peace’ pablum with a barbed wire cat-o-nine. No, Islam does not mean peace, it means submission. Salaam means peace. The only way there can be Salaam is if the whole world is under submission to Islam. Thus, to Muslims, there is the Dar al Islam (House of Submission) and the Dar al Harb (House of War).

        Please forgive if I am teaching your grandmothers to suck eggs, but this is a particular trigger of mine.

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        1. And a synonym for submission is surrender. I’m certainly not about to surrender to a philosophy based on 7th century barbarism. But then again, I’m one of those damn Yankees by choice.

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  10. The catalyst was the opening section, where the author told of seeing a bumper sticker saying, “I dont care about your (redacted) feelings!” The author then speculated – was the man angry and at what? Was he insecure and unable to face questions to his worldview? Etc. I commented the author was being passive-agressive because his theories postulated some character flaw in the other driver, when it might be a statement by someone who had been beaten up about what he “ought” to feel and believe until he blew up.

    Then the author stated the author of the Psalm that was the lesson source would have said, “I do care about your feelings,” and I said he might want to ask the Samaritans about that.

    We never got past the first part of the lesson.

    (We didn’t disaffiliate, so we’re getting United Methodist literature and it’s slowly moving back toward social justice lessons after a period of more traditional devotions. It will be interesting how the next set of lessons go).

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    1. Yeah, I’ve been eyeing askance the liturgical word-choice and rhetoric from time to time. I hear things like ‘equity’ sneaking back into sermons.. and pretty sure this is being softly, softly ‘fluenced downward.

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      1. I’ve even been wondering if there is a theological trap in changing the beginning of the Lord’s Supper from “On the night Jesus was betrayed” to “On the night Jesus gave himself for us”.

        Both are true, but considering the way the Methodists were going I don’t trust it.

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        1. Could be. This sort of thing can be insidious. For example, I’ve heard that there’s a version of Acts out there that’s basically the same as the one now in common usage among Christians. But every time a woman is identified in the version we use (and it probably happens more in that book than any other book), this other version just identified her as a generic member of the Church.

          Is it a big deal? It’s doubtful anyone would become an apostate due to using it. The principles of the Gospel found in it are the same. But it suggests that somewhere along the line, someone was pushing an agenda that was possibly aided by downplaying the role of women in the Early Church. And anyone pulling crap with a translation or transcription of holy writ should be smacked down hard, regardless of the reason why.

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          1. I saw an article about that recently. The issue wasn’t that it was all the women named, it was that the Greek name of one also had a translation that meant something generic. Like “beloved woman” but it was also an actual name—as though we looked at Amadeus and thought it was a generic title instead of a name. So there was a specific woman who had been turned into a generic instead of a specific.

            That was less of an agenda and more of a translation issue.

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        3. As a side note, have you ever noticed that while Jesus was, indeed, betrayed, He not only saw it coming but did everything to set up the precise timing of that betrayal? It’s not at all a coincidence that Jesus, the Lamb of God, died on Passover. He planned it that way. Let me explain.

          Notice how, when Jesus knew Judas was trying to betray Him, He never let His disciples (including Judas) know in advance where He was going to be? For example, when He told them “I want to eat the Passover meal with you,” He sent Peter and John ahead to prepare the supper… and didn’t tell anyone the address. Instead, Peter and John were supposed to meet a man carrying a water jar, ask him to show them to the house where they would meet, and follow him. Jesus knew the address, but nobody else did — so they could have the Passover meal without interrupted by Roman soldiers and Temple guards summoned by Judas. Instead, Jesus nearly finished the meal, then told Judas “Okay, go do what you’re going to do” right at the end.

          And then He cleared out of there to go to the Garden of Gethsemane, giving him an extra hour to pray before Judas finally found where He had gone. Imagine Judas’s surprise when he leads the Temple guards and Roman soldiers back to the house where Jesus was … and it’s empty. He must have run around the city in a complete panic for an hour before finally finding Jesus in Gethsemane. If Jesus had just cleared out and left town, Judas would never have been able to betray Him.

          No, as I said, Jesus knew Judas’s plans, and He made certain that they would happen on the timing that He chose, not that Judas chose.

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        4. On the night he was betrayed is scriptural. fairly literal translation at that: 1 Corinthians 11:23 quoniam Dominus Iesus in qua nocte tradebatur accepit panem. That the Lord Jesus, (on) the night he was betrayed took bread. The other, shall we say, not so much.

          The Roman canon has it as Qui, pridie quam pateretur, accepit panem, Who, on the night before he suffered took bread. this is the oldest usage in the church, but I suppose it’s not strictly scriptural. Even we RC’s don’t use it often, too long I guess. The shorter Eucharistic prayers start with on the night he was betrayed.

          Is there a theological change? I think so. It does rather tend to absolve the people involved in the betrayal, but I’m no theologian, just an ex Jesuit boy who likes to argue.

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    3. Not engaging in denomination bashing.

      Is your church bending its will to G-d’s Word, or attempting bending the Word to their own will?

      If the latter, and you call them on it, do they repent? Or defy?

      If the latter, it is time, and quite Biblical, to knock the dust from your sandals and depart.

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  11. People are not ever going to go along with the “if everyone” concept, it’s just not compatible with our nature. We can manage to get along fairly well when we set (and enforce) limits on what we will tolerate from others (don’t mess with me and I won’t mess with you sort of thing). As to aliens? I kind of doubt any species would manage to get off the planet they were formed on if they weren’t at least somewhat aggressive about life and determined to advance themselves and that means competition for whatever they need. I wouldn’t trust them if they showed up here either.

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  13. Humans need to strive. Ergo, we have a “warrior nature,” to use the words of my favorite anime. We need to fight something, if only the environment, or we just shrivel up and fade. Go extinct.

    The world’s not perfect. Wars are a fact of life. We don’t need to like it – “It is well war is so terrible, else we would grow too fond of it” – but we cannot “improve” it without making it worse. What we need to do is to stop thinking that peace means no more fighting or fractious nature. Our nature will always be with us. All we can do is prepare, pray, and hope we endure the test with honor. Is that so much to ask?

    For some, apparently it is. There but for the grace of God….

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    2. 2 Timothy 4:7 Bonum certamen certavi, cursum consummavi, fidem servavi.

      I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.

      Of course, the US Catholic Bishops can’t have people fighting, so they mucked it up in the current Lectionary. So much so that my children have said they’ll have it read at my funeral just to make me come back in fury to say there’s no “competed well” in the book. IYKYK.

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  14. Years ago, I read a review of a book collection with a theme of “how to create Utopia”.

    The reviewer was shocked that many/most of the stories involved Mind Control.

    While I don’t know the title of that collection, I’m not surprised about the Mind Control aspect.

    Of course, for me the question is “who is doing the Mind Control” and “who keeps the Controllers from being evil (besides the evil of Mind Control).

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    1. Yes and but also economics.

      I understand broad picture or big ten economics as being an alternative formulation for some things cannot happen even if everyone wants hard enough.

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  15. There is no completely peaceful organism that is alive today. Every organism is in competition. Sometimes the competition is quite overt and violent, an sometimes it’s more subtle and almost seems like nothing because the timescale is so long. What these people are asking for is not just the elimination of humanity, but the elimination of all life on earth.

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  16. LOL. I actually wrote a story, The Last of the Morons, that resembles that remark, but not in quite the same way.

    When I was in college, way back in the stoned ages, I observed that many of the students I knew who did marijuana had known people who were mentally retarded and seen how they always seemed to be happy and decided that the path to happiness was to become retarded. After all, they didn’t call it dope for nothing.

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  17. Today’s Quote of the Day on Wikiquote is from Horace Mann: “Let but the public mind become once thoroughly corrupt, and all attempts to secure property, liberty or life, by mere force of laws written on parchment, will be as vain as to put up printed notices in an orchard to keep off the canker-worms.”

    Note that he mentions property first. Because if we don’t have the right to own property, bought with our labor, we don’t own our labor either. We used to call that slavery.

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      1. It has occurred to me that “kindness” puts body armor and full MOPP gear on the societal canaries, and while that protects individual canaries for a bit longer than if unprotected, it endangers society quite effectively.

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    1. Both are images trolling the usual suspects on PJ Media and Townhall, to X JPG links, for “NICE”. The articles state and executive order won’t do it, requires act of congress to rename agency. The concept of “Defund NICE”, just tickles.

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  20. Take a gander at that plant in the picture. See those tendrils in the foreground? Those things will wrap around other plants and strangle them.

    So even pea plants are militant a-holes. 😧

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  21. It’s the PAX, Mal. (The PAX caused the Reavers, and everyone else to just lay down and die.)

    That’s what these morons are really asking for. And whirled peas.

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  22. As many respondents have already alluded to, most forms of “peace” in human history involved the extermination of one or more of the disputing parties.

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  23. I can’t recall exactly who said it–it was on Tumblr, after all–but I can remember what they said: “If your idea of Utopia begins with, ‘If everybody would just ____,’ shut up. Everybody will NOT just. Whatever it is. Never, in all of human history, has everybody just, and they’re not gonna start now.”

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    2. I have a problem with that, if they are a truly alien species, we would probably be poisonous to they if they tried to eat us.

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    1. This is close to my thought experiment: time machine, rifle, 100 or more years…what would do the most good? Of course now finding people who can do dispassionate allohistorical discussion is as rare as a working time machine.

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    1. A truly benevolent alien would just leave us the heck alone. Which argues that if we ARE being visited by aliens, per all these claimed UAP sightings, then it’s not for OUR benefit, but theirs.

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        1. I could go full conspiracy crazy and say they’re the ones who killed or disappeared all those scientists. I just know there’s got to be someone writing a book like that and it’ll probably show up on the NY Times Best Seller list in the next 5 to 10 months.

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    2. I can think of one exception and that’s Julian May’s Galactic Milieu trilogy (plus the prequel novel, Intervention). The Milieu consists of five species, with wildly varying temperments. The Gi, for example, look like Big Bird, aside from the, ah, prominent genitals and an extremely “gay,” temperment, while the Poltroyans are genial dwarfish humanoids, the Krondaku are tentacled logicians and the Simbiari are green, humanoid, slimy and a tad “difficult”. The Lylmik are almost immaterial and nearly extinct, but possess enormous psi powers.

      All these species, with the possible exception of the Gi, went through warlike/aggressive periods but transcended them, often quite painfully. They are now linked in a telepathic union that makes them interdependent. They have intervened in Earth’s history not because they want to but because humanity has huge potential for good or ill and they are gambling they can guide us into Unity. (And also because the oldest Lylmik they all respect most has, ahem, a hidden agenda).

      Note that while the Milieu is pacifistic, they are more than capable of self-defense if they have to. And individuals within the species can be driven by stress/pain into aggressive acts of violence.

      The conflicts within the series are between humans who wish to remain outside the system (again, the leader of that faction has a hidden, and ultimately evil, but well-intended agenda), those who see the Milieu as beneficial overall, and the Milieu itself.

      Went out of print ages ago, but an interesting read.

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  27. LOOK UP the Greek idea of thumos, the “spirited” part of the soul and its role in Plato’s thought. The attempt to eliminate thumos for the sake of peacefulness produces people without the capacity for a sense of honor or for holding oneself to a standard (because impulse control takes thumos too). It confuses peace with sedation.

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      1. They don’t believe in peace, but the word peace is a useful ruse of war against the people they are trying to deceive and destroy.

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        1. They believe in a thing they call Peace, which isn’t. By their actions, we see that they believe in infant sacrifice, torture, war to the knife, and various other evils. They also believe that human beings are moldable like clay, that their opposition is just as (if not infinitely more) stupid than their own brainwashed rank and file, and that they can keep pushing the envelope without repercussion.

          They might just be wrong about some or all of that, though.

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  29. Harry Turtledove came up with a plausible model for how a humanity where everybody just gets along might happen in “It’s the End of the World as We Know It, and We Feel Fine”.

    The alert reader will note that his characters are “Homo familiaris” not Homo sapiens, but his idea becomes scarier every time I pass a phone zombie on the street. Highly recommended.

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  30. Gentlemen, I love war.

    In fiction.

    In reality, I see no secular means of passivating humanity without also explicitly destroying humanity.

    I love war in reality, compared to the hypothetical of exterminating humans in order to accomplish the peace of the grave.

    Warfare are part and parcel of the costs of negotiating peace. Quite a lot of modern academic trained persons are using some careful definitions in their analyses, which amount to being a bit deceptive in the fraud implications of their policy proposals.

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      1. Quoting, yes, but very much explicitly not channeling.

        He’s on my list of bad examples if anyone ever wants to hear me use anime to talk about what I think an officer should and should not do.

        I basically haven’t watched enough anime, or really studied officering enough, to have much to say.

        Though, I read the original manga in unlicensed scanlation, I’ve only seen clips of Hellsing Ultimate and of that other lesser adaptation.

        The Major is basically a little more nihilistic than an injun or than a prehistoric hunter gatherer, or more or less at the level of an informed, thoughtful and knowingly evil communist.

        I would not enjoy losing a war, or wasting resources flagrantly.

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  31. I was going to pull up Serenity, but that has been done, but I will mention Dave Kellett’s excellent scifi webcomic Drive https://www.drivecomic.com/comic/act-1-pg-001/ in which a major menace of the galaxy is the Vinn. Not a species so much as a virus it seeks to infect all life and once it has taken over a world, aside from an ongoing compulsion to seek out more life to infect the Vinn are 100% peaceful. The infected just keep going on, working, eating, living; they only stop reproducing.

    The Vinn have wiped out uncounted civilizations.

    Also, I swear I read a scifi novel where humans met a peaceful alien race and then find out that every other race they have encountered is dead, and it wasn’t even on purpose, it was just a side effect. (I read it when I was a kid, I don’t remember how it worked)

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  32. We are the way we are because Earth is a Death World, almost everything on this planet will kill you and feed upon you if you let it. (Special note to Australia where everything will kill you given the chance) We are what we are because this Death World made us that way. Even the very ground we stand upon will try and kill you, Earth Quakes anyone? Lions and Tiger and Bears oh my, lest we forget about the flying monkees too.

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  34. Some people just want to watch the world burn.

    We call them villains, for so they are.

    Some people run into burning buildings to rescue others.

    We call them heros, for so they are.

    There are more heros in the world than villains. Look around you. You know it’s true. Don’t look at the propaganda. Look at the actual people you know.

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  35. A number of years ago I was out at the barn very early one morning with my son when we heard a distressed screaming in the near distance. My son, in an anxious voice, “Dad, what is that?”. I let him know something was eating a rabbit.

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