Search the Community

As an attempt to not derail other threads, I am starting this new one, so that those who think deeply about Life, The Universe and the Awareness Thereof, have somewhere to put their well thought out views on all topics that don't violate the Forum guidelines. Rule 1: There will be no posts stating that someone else's post is wrong. Rule 2: In any post you make you make it clear that it is your opinion and the way you feel about the subject matter. This is not a thread to have a fight. If you disagree with what is said in a previous post then you make a post expressing how you see the subject from your point of view. To start I am copying in a post by @SunlitZelkova that I would like to express my point of view on, in relation to the subject matter. As I like to take my time to make a well considered response, and reread what I have written before I post, this may take several hours. So if you see this before I write my view, just know that it will appear at some time. The number of countries that has nuclear weapons is so small that their actions can't be said to be representative of humanity, assuming humanity is defined as all human beings and not "this subset of human individuals arbitrarily designated as humanity." To make a statement in such a way is very inaccurate. Much in the same way that the behavior of countries with nuclear weapons is exaggerated to represent all of humanity, encapsulated in statements like "humanity points nukes at each other," one could also exaggerate the number of countries that have signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (a majority of them!) and say "humanity does not point nukes at each other." Neither statement is accurate, but the former is extremely common for some reason. It's very dramatic and not very observant, IMO. I have grappled with the issue of violence for a while. The second line in your quoted reply is correct. I never stated that lack of empathy for non-human animals is what made hunting a sport. The third line in your quoted reply is also correct, but confusing to me, as no one here has claimed that humans killing humans is a sport. The reason my example was so blunt is because in dealing with the issue of violence, specifically killing, I find that people tend to use too many euphemisms that hide what they are actually doing. Take nuclear war for instance. Both academic and layman's discussion of the subject is littered with words like "countervalue," "deterrence," "force multipliers," and "strikes." Only in very limited instances is the actual, specific concept of killing ever brought up. The attitude of people to nuclear weapons would be very different if people were to use different language. I prefer to talk about it in terms of toddler killing, as I was very affected by the story of Tetsutani Shinichi. Obviously, no nation is going to give its enemy a heads up it is going to massively use nuclear weapons and give them days or weeks to evacuate children. Because one of the subsets of targets for nuclear weapons referred to as "countervalue" involves bombing places where civilians live, using nuclear weapons inherently is going to involve killing "some" toddlers. There is no nuclear strategy that involves solely targeting remote areas and even then these areas aren't really that remote. Civilians will die. Taking into account that that is what "nuclear weapons use" really is, that anyone might go "but..." and still advocate for such weapons gives a much better idea of what kind of problem nuclear weapons are. It has nothing to do with the physical weapons, it has to do with people. An ICBM does not launch without someone (technically two someones) to turn the key(s). I'm going to set aside the issue of nuclear weapons because my method of thinking about them is so morbid it might violate forum rules if I expand on it in length. ------ I will instead turn to my own thoughts and beliefs about violence in general. I do so not to convince anyone to change their opinion, but simply to shed more light on why I was able to create the sentence "Like shooting hoops, but the basketball is a bullet and the hoop is the body of a different species." Violence is a very vague term. An action that might be violent in one context can be "peaceful" in another context. Take for instance pinning someone down and injecting them with a tranquilizer. A random person doing this against a random person would be regarded as violence, but a paramedic using specially designed techniques to do so on a person in danger of harming themself would be regarded as "peaceful" (or at least, beneficial to the "victim" in a way the former example does not possess). Violence is thus not really a specific set of physical actions but rather a conceptual action. This conceptual action is use of physical means to change the state in which someone else is in. At its most extreme, this means changing the state of a living person into that of death, but more commonly it involves attempting to inflict less-than-lethal pain on a person so that they will change their behavior in one way or another. People who commit violence and people who aim to stop violence have existed for thousands of years. They have come up with hundreds of thousands of explanations as to why either they themselves commit violence or, why those who do commit violence "actually" do so, as part of an explanation as to how violence can be stopped. Explaining violence in either way raises some issues. For one thing, it involves splitting the whole human population into "violent people" and "non-violent people." This is bound to make any explanation wildly inaccurate because it involves trying to simplify the behavior of billions of people. There is no "violent people club" or "non-violent people club" where everyone gets together and makes a final decision on whether to act in either way. Individuals are making their own decisions, using their own methods of calculation, weighing their own values, influenced by their own personal perception of the world, which is influenced by a myriad of varying factors. This of course just isn't satisfying. No one sees an act of violence and comes out of it unchanged, not now wondering about why such a thing would happen. Some might fall back on their preconceptions about violence and say something very simple like "Oh yeah, that's just the way the world is!" but on the other end of the spectrum people will be left spending their entire lives trying to decipher why such a thing happened. Trying to explain "bad" things and "good" things in the world is a massive subject that encompasses much of the intellectual heritage left behind by now deceased generations of humans. Some explanations catch on and spread around the world, in rarer cases people come up with their own explanations. There is no true, concrete explanation for such things. Although one can put much pageantry into their explanation, in reality it is all just individuals doing their own thinking about the question and then settling on one answer and declaring it to be true (although it may not be true, because they themselves made it up). I will share my explanation, or rather understanding, of the questions: Why do people commit violence and can it be stopped, and if so, how? I shall answer the first question first. I have spent much time racking myself over the question of why people commit violence. My understanding of various subjects does shift as I gain new information, but my current understanding is that violence is just a choice and nothing more. This is best explained using two examples. The most classical explanation of why the situation in Example 1 evolved the way it did is that "Person B is evil" or "Person B has no ethics," while the most classical explanation of why the situation in Example 2 evolved the way it did is that "Person D is good" or "Person D has ethics." Such classical explanations come with very, very dangerous implications. "Ethics" are implied to be the reason, or logic, that should govern an individual's thinking about things, including (and sometimes especially) violence. Ethics dictates that it is not right to kill someone to get their shiny rock. Seemingly unbeknownst to champions of ethics, this explanation just justifies violence. If the only reason someone should not kill someone is because "it violates ethics," that implies that it is okay to kill someone if it does not "violate ethics." Now let's illustrate how this is dangerous by putting our alphabetical characters into a single scenario, Example 3: Ethics, or rather, "reason" and "logic" are somewhat like violence in that they are concepts, with the sole difference being that violence reflects a concept put into physical action committed by an individual, while reason and logic don't automatically dictate the physical action an individual might commit. Reason and logic can be used to explain physical phenomena happening outside of the individual's control, or might dictate what an individual does not do. This can be as extreme as dictating that a person not think in a certain way, rejecting entire lines of thought (in fact it might be said this is a characteristic of "reason" and "logic," to sort out what should be thought about and what should not be). Although differing, "reason/logic" and "violence" are both alike in that they are simply ideas in the mind of the individual. On average, people will tend to think about these very basic concepts in a grandiose fashion. As I said earlier, people like to put a lot of pageantry into their explanations about the world. Even without this pageantry, in reality, "reason/logic" and "violence" are just thoughts in an individual's mind. Lack of reason/logic, or "ethics" in individuals is not a credible explanation for why people commit violence, because reason/logic, or "ethics" can be used as a justification to commit violence. Because of this, my understanding is that violence has nothing to do with what people think about it. It is simply a choice to move one's appendages about in a manner that can be causally connected to the death of another individual. Asking "why" people commit violence is not a question of what their "reasoning" was, or whether they had "reasoning" at all, but if it is even a question to be asked at all, it can really only be truly answered in terms of physical phenomena ("why is the duck not moving?" as a literal question of what is going on in the duck's body that is causing it not to move). Because any "reason" that one finds is completely made up by whatever individual being is examined. It doesn't have any correlation to reality. So now for the second question: Can violence be stopped, and if so, how? The answer to the first question is disheartening. If there is no true reason why people commit violence, if it is all in the heads of individuals, surely it can never be eliminated? "There will always be wars," "History is just a long saga of people knocking other people over the head," etc. etc. Is that all we are left with? No. I don't believe that. Violence can be stopped by interrupting the process that it is. What does that mean? Recall my definition of violence: Does anything in this definition lend credence to the conclusion that violence is "inevitable" or "can't be stopped?" "Use of physical means to change the state in which someone else is in" is essentially what violence is. That is two objects: 1) use of physical means 2) changing the state in which someone else is in. It should be obvious, but there is nothing "inevitable" or "unstoppable," or even "natural" (as many who try to downplay the problem of violence will claim violence is) about "changing the state in which someone else is in." This may seem hard to fathom. Isn't it natural for humans to try and control each other? Whether we do it out of hubris or for genuine protection, it is a human trait! Such an assumption does not lie within reality. Humans do not try and control each other as a matter of course. After all, rarely if ever does the guy over on the other end of the counter at the sandwich shop pester you to the point of inflicting violence on you so that you put ketchup on your sandwich. At a much more lofty scale, in the present day humans do try and control other things other humans do: how they go about getting food, how they go about thinking about the world, and so on and so on. But like the choice of condiment to put on a sandwich, these things are not "actually" important. They aren't real. Or rather, the idea that one person ought to decide how other people should engage with these topics is not real. It is simply something that someone thought of. This again, may seem hard to fathom. So much of the present day world is built on people trying to make everyone else think or do things a certain way. Looking back into history can help to understand how such a trend is not inherent to human behavior. Archaeological evidence has revealed that the "revolution" of agriculture did not consist of hunter-gatherers throwing down their bow-and-arrows and planting roots (literally and figuratively). In many cases, it involved people simply leaving these communities for different places where they could live the way they wanted to (that is, subsisting off agriculture instead of hunting and gathering). The first serious farmers did not feel the need to threaten their neighbors into also adopting the same way of life lest they kill them, and likewise hunter-gatherers did not feel a need to kill those who desired to go somewhere else and cease hunting. Early farmers and hunter-gatherers existed alongside each other in Europe for thousands of years. That's not to say the past was a utopia of respect and civility. Because hunter-gatherers occupied the most bountiful parts of the environment, in some cases farmers would inadverdantly settle in poorer areas that couldn't indefinitely sustain their communities, resulting in their collapse. Hunter-gatherers did sometimes raid farming communities. But this death and violence was not caused by people hurting each other specifically because some of them wouldn't act the way others wanted them to. Early farmers did not settle in bad places because hunter-gatherers literally forced them to (told them to or threatened them to do so), and neither did hunter-gatherers raid farming communities "because they were farmers." It should also be noted I am not talking about a universal "war" of farmers and hunter-gatherers, I'm just citing examples of how bad stuff still happened despite the main topic (physical coercion over thoughts and ideas) not being a factor in it. I'm not trying to paint a picture of a happy State of Nature. Anyways, how exactly does all that translate into stopping violence? What it means is that humans do have the capacity to not attempt to "change the state in which someone else is in." There is no "law" or "behavior" that dictates that humans must do that: it is an idea and a choice, and nothing more. Unfortunately, most people are completely unaware of this. They feel they "have" to do things, or they "have no choice." This is in fact a common explanation cited by those who do commit violence about why they did it. This goes both ways however: not only do those who might commit violence have a choice to "not change the state in which someone else is in," but so too do those who do not commit violence have a choice to "not change the state in which someone else is in." Wait, what? People who don't commit violence have that choice too? Yes, they do, particularly those who don't commit violence and also oppose others doing it. Because "opposing others doing something" is also an attempt to "change the state in which someone else is in." This goes back to what I said about trying to use "reason/logic" to justify non-violence or explain why people shouldn't commit violence. That is an example of trying to "change the state in which someone else is in." At best, further attempts to "change the state in which someone else is in," even when advocating for people to not do something like commit violence (which in theory should "give people the right to be in the state they want to be" and thus be good, right?) further propagates this "culture of control" that makes people think they must control others, and thus results in individuals thinking they "must" do things or "have no choice." At worst, it can escalate into trying to "change the state in which someone else is in" using physical means... maybe using restraints, but most catastrophically, using violence to "stop violence:" in which case people just end up committing violence and forfeit their original goal. All of this is not reason/logic explaining why one should not commit violence (and of course, also not explaining why they should commit violence!). Violence is a simple choice. The only way violence can be stopped is by individuals making the choice not to commit it. Nothing more, nothing less. Taking away a weapon and making up grand narratives about why violence should not be committed will not stop violence. Because human appendages are weapons and we can't ban arms (pun intended), and individuals have their own minds they can use to make up their own narratives. Prologue This all sounds very incredible (in the sense of "not credible") from a secular point of view. I'm basically saying that unless people who do commit violence choose not to do it, they can't be stopped, and that the "correct" way for anyone to stop violence is to not commit it. This implies sitting back and letting others commit violence. Using animals because I'm getting into territory that for the forum, is too morbid to talk about using humans... Should a mama wolf let her cubs be killed by a bear so that she can "stop violence?" is perhaps a question that might be posed to counter my understanding. I know because I posed myself this question. Personally, I still am not convinced that committing violence to stop violence is worth it. This just propagates the "culture of control" and obsession with "reason/logic." At the very worst, trying to categorize between "good violence" and "bad violence" can lead to all sorts of nasty ideas like dehumanizing categorizing between "valuable people" and "targets." I am aware this is simply viscerally unacceptable to the average person. I believe my conception of how violence ought to be stopped is not so much an obvious "fairytale for children" as a lot of moral arguments tend to go, but more so an enormous challenge for the individual. I myself can only take my own belief so seriously and sincerely because separately, my understanding of reality and the nature of life and death is radical and wildly incongrous with present day mainstream conceptions of these subjects. As I said, only individuals can make the decisions needed to stop violence. Not a subset of individuals making decisions for other people or ordering them about. The power to figure out one's own path to peace with all individuals, not just "nice guys" to the exclusion of "bad guys," only lies in their own minds. Not in someone else's "reasoning" or "logic." EDIT- And I'd like to share that for me, that means valuing and holding in high regard even the people who do fail to find that path or have already failed to find that path. EDIT 2- Just to reiterate, this is intended to shed light on how I was able to write the sentence "Like shooting hoops, but the basketball is a bullet and the hoop is the body of a different species." I hope it is of use in providing some understanding of my thought processes. Edited 1 hour ago by SunlitZelkova

Lets see what the community has to say, with these three questions: Are you happy with KSP 2 so far? (from release to current version) Are you excited and hopeful for the future of KSP 2 and its upcoming planned updates? When the game was first released, what was your opinion of the game? (multiple choice) Not a debate and there is no right or wrong answer(s) I like polls

Thinking about grabbing a gaming controller for use with KSP, but not a full blown joystick. Does anyone have any thoughts or preferences on their gaming controllers of choice? This is the one I'm thinking about grabbing: Logitech F310 PC Gamepad.