julia

sick of other thread on top

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The candidate does not speak for the campaign.

Kanadesaga

I have to say that the European peoples have certainly dominated the world, so far. They accompished that domination due to technology and religion. I would not say that the European is, by nature anymore warlike than any other groups of people. Even the Yamamano of the Amazon built their villages in defensive terms. Man is warlike. I believe that if the technology had been in African hands they would have been just as much rape, pillage and plunder in Europe as that visited on the Third World.

That being said, no one is innocent in this. If you want to, you can find complicit individuals in every country. This is a dog eat dog eat world. The idea of a one world, all kumbya-y, is a very recent social developement. and will take centuries to achieve, if ever. Until then, all you can do, is what you can do. If you want to perpetuate the hate, that is easy, if you want to proactively pursue the peace, that is much harder row to hoe.

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lrrp

When he reached the new world, Cortez burned his ships. His men had 2 ways home, victory or death, this made them focus clearly on the job at hand. Religion and technology played a part, so did disease...like the American Indian, small pox, chicken pox, and the other European native diseases took an incredible toll among the Myans, Toltecs and Incas. Mankind's killing nature might be mother nature's way of trying to cull the herd, we are living longer, finding cures for diseases, and reproducing faster than we have the means to support ourselves. The good ship Earth is getting to be a crowded place, good planets are hard to find...and we don't seem to be looking very much...

BillCosby

Well a very cynical outlook for mankind... & I agree w/ almost all of it..lol

From as far back as you can go it was about war......... If you read the bible (believing it or not as literal or whatever) you take the first two idiots born & one kills the other one...wtf.........

Recently I heard comments from Howard Zinn stating that he no longer believes that mankind is prone to be war like.... But rather that we are taught, forced & coerced etc into it........

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Preventive war is not war!!!!Counter-terror is not terror

Brainpolice

One thing I've always rejected is Hobbes's arguement that people are naturally in a state of "war of all against all". Hobbes depicts an extremely negative view of human nature. Most certainly, human beings have the propensity for conflict, but conflict is by no means inevitable. There are natural incentives towards social cooperation and relatively voluntary interaction. In either case, Hobbes makes a huge mistake in assuming that it is impossible to escape a "state of nature" in the first place. We are always in one. His own arguements work against his proposed solutions, since he puts the fox in charge of the hen house. He assumes that the establishment of a monopoly "sovereign" will somehow hold back people from conflicting and acting out on the more base aspects of their nature. The problem is that if he was constant then his same pessemistic views should apply to this "sovereign" as well as the capacity for the "evil" commoner to act through this "sovereign".

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cheapseats

I would argue that man DOES seem to be naturally acquisitive at the same time that he is vulnerable-read-that-insecure. Having acquired whatever, his insecurity in heightened by possessiveness/fear of theft.

This little loop, I believe, DOES make conflict inevitable.

Personally, I am unpersuaded that an absence of all conflict-read-that-utopia might not be as boring as watching paint dry.

Natural incentives? If it were natural, it wouldn't need an incentive.

There not only are, there MUST be, intervention/regulation...be it Law or Law Enforcement for steady, dependable, consistent conflict resolution.

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cheapseats

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

That is why We the American People have consistently rejected a monarchy, once throwing off the British Crown. That is why George Bush et al AND US, WE THE PEOPLE, are such a weep-caliber disappointment to We The People and the rest of the world.

That is why three equal branches of government. That is why checks and balances. That is why our Congress mainly needs to go on home and let some Regular True Americans take a whack at this.

Congress itself has become sovereign. So, too, the Courts.

Though lesser sovereigns. They are not the pigs on Animal Farm but, rather, the Courts are like the dogs and Congress is like whatever marched uselessly out front of Napoleon's self-congratulatory parades. Was it a raven, or a crow?

American Government is EXACTLY like the royal courtly imperial stranglehold that once we overthrew.

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kblair7

The courts are bound to interpret the laws the LEGISLATOR codifies. They do not make the law.

The role of the courts is highly misunderstood as some monolithic institution, shrouded in mystery, that makes decisions based on whim. No. Judges as are lawyers, bound by the substantive laws and procedures currently in activity. There is no mystery to it, if you want changes go to the legislator. People make the mistake of petitioning the courts and are then disappointed when the results are less than what they expected. Going to the courts should be the last resort if all else fails.

People need to use more common sense, and stop trying to use the legal system as a medium for political change.

Furthermore, who are these 'people' to who you refer? I wouldn't trust the "people" to do anything.

kblair7

Perhaps, however the entropy of life is that all systems of organization, especially political, will eventually descend into chaos or a state of disorganization. They will then, though conflict (usually war or revolution), reorganize into a new order or hierarchy. Nature is conflict, its violence of survival, even at the genetic level. Hobbes's argument is right on par, that it is human nature to be in constant conflict with the natural world, and between each other. Basically, as long as we have divergent perspectives on how the human race should be organized, (religion, race, politics, sex) there were always be conflict, and that is how we evolve.

mentor

I think our evolving understanding of nature changes our philosophy, and in a sense, our relationship with it. We have long believed that we are separate from nature, and therefore in conflict with it. But there have long been those who understood that we are a part of nature. Still, nature is not all conflict. It is a story of cooperation as well. It seems to me that schools of thought or political systems are like species in punctuated equalibrium. Once they have adapted into their niche, they become rather fixed, and usually fail to adapt to new circumstances. Then new, more nimble ideas and systems replace them (usually with new, young minds), while the old ones continue on their course, guided by their inertia alone.

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