You are discarding your opinions on the side of the road as if this has been some personal form of idea masturbation for you.

Normally I'd tell people that you would have to be stupid to think the way you were broadcasting that idea would ever be effective but these forums seem to have a pretty high ratio of people who will believe anything compared to rational ones so fine, keep doing exactly what you're doing. I'm sure it will be satisfying and effective for you.

ummm actually Bush and the neocons are old news, they are gone and retired and irrelevant

but the violence around the world continues

From an anthropological point of view, because we're territorial animals. If you go as far back as the Australopithecus Afarensis, groups would have territory of their own, and if another group wanted it they would come in and threaten the original group with violence until one of the two groups was forced to move on.

We do exactly the same thing. It's an instinctive drive to have the largest, richest territory you can find, so people try to have exactly that. Members of our line have been fighting and killing each other for land, resources, females and whatever else they wanted because they were territorial, social animals .

That's exactly what we are, so we do exactly the same thing.

But, because of our increased intelligence, we're able to have larger, richer territories, larger societies and therefore larger armies.

We do exactly what our ape-like ancestors have been doing for millions of years but on a bigger scale, because we can.

But twice (at least) you have started arguments with "The US, Nato, and Israel ...". Just who do you think "you" is?

Not exactly. All kinds of animals solve those disputes with less extreme contests than outright violence. While rams butt heads they don't try to trample the loser if he falls down (and even wait courteously for him to get back up to continue.) Others don't even so much fight to that degree instead performing dances at each other to just display that they are tough. In both cases the contest shows who is stronger and the loser gives up territory/females (or in rare cases females give up males,) and lives to try again another day. This is how most territorial animals handle it.

There's a much smaller group that will hit an opponent when they are down and otherwise act homicidal, or whatever type-of-animal-icidal. To try and summarize it the species that don't get a second chance at reproduction do this. That's easy to understand with insects who only have a few weeks to live as adults before their generation dies off but not so easy to understand with humans since we often reproduce anywhere from our teen years up to late forties (mostly around the middle of course.)

So the more precise way of describing it is a little bit mathematical. Animals probably don't do this math any more than a dog thinks about gravity equations when he catches a frisby but they end result is the same.
So, animals are willing to kill each other when the outcome of the fight outweighs all future mating opportunities. Going back to the insects if your options are die tomorrow childless or risk dieing today with a 10% chance of getting a lucky blow on the other guy and mating with the fine lady insect watching... well, the gamble option is obviously worth it.

So, the reason humans fall in the range of this equation is obviously not some short reproductive window but the very long process of child rearing. The average woman will be going into menopause close to when their first child leaves the nest (there are very few siblings with a twenty year age gap,) and if they struggle economically they might not have favorable enough options to successfully raise a whole new heir from scratch, not to mention all the other pitfalls of having children near menopause.

So the way we were able to get the way we are started when the death of our children was worse for our survival than our own deaths. This also factors into why humans live to be grandparents (in most species death comes at the age of menopause. Eating food your children could be eating isn't a good thing when they no longer gain anything from having you around.)

With our preference for our own death over that of our children this causes the problem of children lacking parents. Aunts and uncles will often take care of such orphans but their own children take priority. Each grandchild works out to the same 25% of the DNA of a grandparent so there's no innate reason to disfavor the orphans.

Since these things popped up we've added some auxiliary functions since these are such large, complex features, but this stuff is pretty well the reason these things started happening in the first place.
(Though maybe the extra stuff that we do with these things are the reasons we stuck around while neanderthals and so many others perished.)

I am trying to answer questions raised by some posters .
Also the core of the issue in front of us is how we can put an end to domestic and international violence in general . Of course wars and civil wars are violence .

I wasnt talking about animals

just primates

chimpanzees wage war against neighboring tribes. They will stalk and ambush and kill chimpanzees from rival tribes

the monkeys on the streets of India organize themselves into "north side" and "south side" of the street tribes and fight each other

i find this amusing considering this reply of yours to another post discussing ideas and facts:





perhaps you can esplain how your caustic and insulting tirade incourages open discussion on ideas and facts.

Does the truth hurt....?.
I am just staying the facts as they are .
Now if you excuse me , can we try to find some solutions instead of attacking one another ?.

You are stating lies and pretending them to be truth.

You are attacking the best of humanity and excusing the worst. Where are your comments about the actual terrorists? Why is there no description of the constant bombings and rocket attacks on Israel?

However, you are exposing the heart of the problem. There will always be war as long as people like you exist to spread hate.

The US and NATO are terrorists nations as they kill innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan.....etc . If you do not like the truth it is YOUR problems .

Supporting unjust wars is stupid and oxymoron too .

Anyone who supports G.W. Bush and his neo cons should be ashamed to be called a human . Yet Bush got 8 full years of tyranny .
If you are uneducated it is your problem .

i attacted no one. i brought to your attention your uncalled for and highly unfair attack. no worries though. i'm only here for my amusement. it's a dating site you see and i find personal inuendo exceedingly amusing. no solutions to be found here. just entertainment.

more views and facts and you personally attack the poster yet again? and but minutes after you asked that we get on with finding solutions. you don't think these childish schoolyard bully tactics promote reasonable disscusion of veiws and facts do you? do you really?

As you pointed out, the animal kingdom has various means of competing, ranging from simple displays targeted at the prized female, to fights-to-the-death targeted at the other competitor.

Which points out that there are two different types of competition, with the differentiation being determined by the target of the competitive actions.

One is targeted at the prize, with the purposed of attracting the prize to you. The other is targeted at the other competitior, with the purpose of repelling the other competitor away from you and the prize.

And I think that is a fairly workable standard for differentiating between a “violent” and a “peaceful” competition. Violence is centered around repelling and peacefulness is centered around attracting.

Now it obvious that some things, such as natural resources, cannot be “attracted” because they have no volition.

If you have the prize and want to keep it, and I want it, then we must look at the difference between obtaining the prize through “peaceful” means and obtaining the prize through “violent” means.

The “violent” means of obtaining the prize is to take it without your consent – i.e. repel you away from both me and the prize.

But the prize can’t be attracted to you because it has no volition.

So how can the prize be obtained through “peaceful” means?

This is where the “other stuff that popped up” comes in.

Consider the concept of “exchange”.

By offering you something in exchange for the prize, the whole interaction focuses on attracting instead of repelling. In other words, I am attempting to “attract you to my prize” as opposed to “repel you away from me and your prize”.

And if we both decide that the other’s prize is at least as valuable to us as our own prize, we exchange prizes. This would normally be called a “fair trade” wherein we both get what we want (In contrast to the “violent” means where there is no “fair trade” and only one person gets what they want.

And as I see it, the concept of exchange (or “fair trade”) can be (and actually is) applied as a universal rule in determining any question of morality – from “war” to “personal insult” and everything in between. If there is a “fair trade” then it is “moral”.

JMHO

Ya but you said it was because they are territorial. Territory disputes clearly do not initiate war and crime activities alone.

If you act like humans got to be this way from some common simple trait the people who are rational but don't just trust science by default can tell that there is something wrong: many, MANY species should have wars and there should probably be other species around with big brains, societies, tools, etc.

And besides, other primates are territorial but without the whole raiding party behavior. Gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos are the main apes to be concerned with when looking at humans, and gorillas only make it onto the list because of all their differences making them useful as an outgroup.

You seem hurt enough by the truth.
Looking at the full behavior of the Bush administration it's clear that they were just stupid. That is certainly a kind of corruption but you need to dial down the evil intent about 90% and recognize that poor judgment was at work there.

Yes, he graduated from a prestigious institute of higher learning but that cannot counteract the supreme ignorance of the "God is on my side" mentality. There's not a single word of praise to intelligence in the Bible but that doesn't give leaders a free pass to abandon it, Christian or not.

So solution? Don't elect people for saying they have Christian values- elect them for good judgment, clout, or anything else that has to do with leadership and elect people with policies that are in your best interests instead of just promising that they'll spread your religion.

I'm going to try to get off of the bitching about religion track though. I've probably said enough about that by now.

You're a fascist. Don't like the truth huh?

See what I did there? Negative word to describe people branded on you without it having anything to do with what you stand for.

I'll make this simple for you. EVERYONE ELSE IN THIS THREAD THINKS YOU SOUND CRAZY OR STUPID. Instead of reading those capitals as shouting read them as me talking slowly with emphasis on every word.

Repeating that is not going to change anyone's minds. We're rational thinkers so instead of trying to convince us that you feel so strongly about this that we should agree and feel strongly the same way what you need to do instead is present your reasoning every time and then we say things like "there are gaps in your logic" you can go into detail there and at the end there will be a very convincing argument and we will have run out of good ways to resist it.

I know that the reason you can't do that is that people you trust, probably close friends and authority figures, gave you that idea and if they were talking to a lot of people they had this kind of argument and nobody around could keep fighting it. They won and you trust them so you agree with that. The problem is that you didn't remember their argument and even if you did we're probably not raising exactly the same objections to it so the full comprehension of the person that your idea came from was never even shown to you except in that they were able to defeat all challengers back then.

Go learn WHY they are terrorists or give up because we're deaf to what you're doing right now.

Attracting what you want is the preferable option when you can afford to lose because taking what you want is dangerous. This if those mating rituals just went until one of the two was too injured to continue.

Whereas with the relatively nonviolent competitions they can walk away and potentially compete again as soon as they find another female to compete over if they are physically incapacitated they have either died and lost everything or have suffered a lesser injury and lost the weeks it would take to recover, or in some cases the injury will never fully recover and they are permanently handicapped to some degree.

Even in the case of choosing to trample the opponent that falls down there is only a chance of crippling them and from that point they have no reason not to retaliate with the same force so the gain from acting by lethal intent first is small and there is a nearly equal chance that the opponent will instead be the one to cripple you. This is especially the case in animals that can assess their opponents because in stand offs where one animal is a much fitter competitor than the other the weaker of the two will just give up right away instead of wasting time and energy that could be spent looking for an opportunity where there's a good chance of winning the competition or perhaps even finding an uncontested mate.

Again, it's only when the reward has become everything that the scales tip and lethal fighting becomes the better strategy.

The idea of trade is less useful in looking at nature because of the scarcity of societies that make much use of it besides our own. Once again imagining bugs it's easy to see the simplicity in the "am I gaining more than I am losing?" thinking and how it requires very little comprehension of what the other participant is doing. It would be much like what we would think if we frequently encountered simple robots with small behavioral patterns we had recognized- it's mechanical, do this get that.

It's only even in the last few centuries that humans have picked up on the reality that through this kind of trading action is not zero sum. Today it's common knowledge that by working together often both parties end the task with more than they had when they began but ages ago people thought that in order to gain any anything someone else must be diminished.

Ok, that view is actually still kicking around quite a bit today but for people lucky enough to receive better information or who have actually had a formal education on economy matters it's immediately clear how wrong that is.

Yet economy so readily and repeatedly proves to us that we had no idea how it works. The monarchs of long ago hoarded their money in castles instead of having it flow around and be exchanged for things. Early on the British would impose intense taxes on their many colonies to try and pay off bonds early (that's like paying off a loan early and not having to pay as much interest,) and then we lent money to countries that wouldn't be able to pay us back* and we did things like trying to spend less while printing off more money and then recently we let computers automate the stock market to wring money out of stocks when there wasn't really any change in their value and, well, basically every time things go terribly wrong we learn that way to make money that didn't seem to have consequences basically make the castle of cards fall flat.

*speaking of that I guess that means if our country tanks at the right time China will have a depression...

impossible

two many people,not enough land or money or power...

We have lots of violent criminals. Many other countries around the world have magnitudes fewer violent criminals than us.

Therefore it is possible to reduce that behavior a whole lot.

We can rule out genetics for the most part because people mostly fit the violence profile for where they grow up.

Is it culture? Probably a little bit but a lot of countries were very violent in some generations but much less in others.

Well, this is getting annoying so I'll rush to the end: Canada is very similar to America in most of the ways you would think matter but they have much less crime. What they also have less of is a difference between the most wealthy and the most poor, or in other words the do more dirty socialist stuff like that medicare our old people like so much and that whole "poor people can get medical treatment" thing.

It like if everyone thinks they are for some reason they stop mugging each other... oh wait, no, haha, I see now.
It's a trap!

Exactly. Any time there is an unqeual exchange, the consequences of that inequality will always show up sooner or later.