totm nov 2023 Thread to discuss negative things in a very general way, just see where it goes y'know?

[ColdJ]

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

hunting is a sport

You may not realise just how much that statement points to the culture you have been brought up in.

In the most broad definition of sport. All participants know they are playing, all participants have access to the same type of resources and equipment.

If it was 50/50 whether it was you or the animals who were going to end up as dinner that night, and they had access to the same weapons that you do, that is about as close to being a sport as it is likely to come.

If food is scarce where you are, then carefully managed hunting is an option, but sneaking up on an animal with a gun is not sport.

Sadly this reminds me of  October 2002 when in Washington D.C 10 people died and 3 were wounded when 2 men set up a blind in the trunk of a car and went on a shooting spree.

People in the area were terrified for weeks, not knowing if they might be next. The murderers thought of it as being a sport.

In a setup where almost everybody has easy access to a gun, guns don't make you safer. Guns don't stop bullets, peoples bodies stop bullets.

So in a world where more and more people are angry and feel like know one is listening, them having easy access to something that you can just point in a general direction and pull a trigger to kill people. Is the sort of thing that makes people who take notice, very nervous.

 

[AlamoVampire]

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[SunlitZelkova]

23 hours ago, Mr. Kerbin said:

One reason may be it’s ability to destroy a large country

The U.S.’ position and power could potentially cause another world war, and at worst endanger humanity.

(Saying this as I live in the USA)

Arguably, at least for me,  we don’t hear much about the rest of the world- probably because “local” news is easier than “global” news.

That doesn't really have to do with humanity as much as it does a small number of humans though.

You also don't see people talking about the state of humanity when it comes to other countries that have the ability to kill millions of people in the span of an hour. In fact, it tends to be them against humanity. Whatever humanity is supposed to be defined as in such discussions, I don't know.

2 hours ago, ColdJ said:

You may not realise just how much that statement points to the culture you have been brought up in.

In the most broad definition of sport. All participants know they are playing, all participants have access to the same type of resources and equipment.

If it was 50/50 whether it was you or the animals who were going to end up as dinner that night, and they had access to the same weapons that you do, that is about as close to being a sport as it is likely to come.

If food is scarce where you are, then carefully managed hunting is an option, but sneaking up on an animal with a gun is not sport.

Sadly this reminds me of  October 2002 when in Washington D.C 10 people died and 3 were wounded when 2 men set up a blind in the trunk of a car and went on a shooting spree.

People in the area were terrified for weeks, not knowing if they might be next. The murderers thought of it as being a sport.

In a setup where almost everybody has easy access to a gun, guns don't make you safer. Guns don't stop bullets, peoples bodies stop bullets.

So in a world where more and more people are angry and feel like know one is listening, them having easy access to something that you can just point in a general direction and pull a trigger to kill people. Is the sort of thing that makes people who take notice, very nervous.

 

Err... hunting is a sport. Or rather can be. It just has to involve two people competing for kills. Like shooting hoops, but the basketball is a bullet and the hoop is the body of a different species.

I don't think having a culture of hunting has that much correlation to crime. I've been reading about the Fertile Crescent about 10,000 years ago. Up in the highlands of what is now Turkey there were some people basically treating human remains in the same way as they did animals, which they hunted. These were very violent people, and their art attested to this. But down in the lowlands, you had people living much more egalitarianly (at least in the sense the male reproductive organs did not symbolize power...) and raising some domesticated animals, but still retaining a value of hunting. Homes were decorated with elaborate monuments to a person's hunting prowess, using bones of the slain animals. Yet they did not do the same thing with human bones. The average dead died natural deaths, and were honored (albeit in ways very different from 21st century humans) rather than being regarded as part of the hunt's yield.

I don't think any particular weapon has any connection to crime either. At the end of the day, if someone really wants to hurt someone they are gonna find another way to do it. As an example: Japan still has murder, and sometimes even attempts at serial murder. People just use knives to do it. Japan's low murder rate* has more to do with the way Japanese people tend to think about how a person ought to be treated than what weapons they have or don't have physical access to.

*It should be noted crime statistics in Japan are somewhat unreliable because of general, institutionalized incompetency and deliberate skewing of statistics on the part of its police and justice system.

Note that all this is coming from someone who doesn't hunt and was raised in a suburb by a family with little to no interest in hunting.

EDIT- Also @Nuke is from Alaska and Fallout-level ridiculously high super market prices are real! Not sure about the southern part, but at Utqiagvik a pound of ground beef is like $60 dollars a pop (at least it was when a couple motorcycle YouTubers rode/flew up there a couple years ago). In Oregon it's 1/10 that price.

Edited yesterday at 01:48 AM by SunlitZelkova

[Nuke]

1 hour ago, ColdJ said:

You may not realise just how much that statement points to the culture you have been brought up in.

In the most broad definition of sport. All participants know they are playing, all participants have access to the same type of resources and equipment.

If it was 50/50 whether it was you or the animals who were going to end up as dinner that night, and they had access to the same weapons that you do, that is about as close to being a sport as it is likely to come.

If food is scarce where you are, then carefully managed hunting is an option, but sneaking up on an animal with a gun is not sport.

Sadly this reminds me of  October 2002 when in Washington D.C 10 people died and 3 were wounded when 2 men set up a blind in the trunk of a car and went on a shooting spree.

People in the area were terrified for weeks, not knowing if they might be next. The murderers thought of it as being a sport.

In a setup where almost everybody has easy access to a gun, guns don't make you safer. Guns don't stop bullets, peoples bodies stop bullets.

So in a world where more and more people are angry and feel like know one is listening, them having easy access to something that you can just point in a general direction and pull a trigger to kill people. Is the sort of thing that makes people who take notice, very nervous.

 

this may come as a surprise to some but i had no real introduction into gun/hunting culture until i moved to to my present location some 15 years ago and my sister's husband at the time took me hunting a few times. i successfully bagged a deer a duck and several grouse. so it came as a bit of a shock how respectable that way of life is. up till that point i didn't own any firearms (and still dont mind you), and hunting is a lot of work that i dont think i can do anymore. prior to this i had mostly lived in cities and grew tired of the way they suck the life out of you. doing things as nature intended feels very natural. i expected to see a bunch of sociopaths taking bites out of still beating hearts. there was none of that, lots of stuff to learn, about nature, about gun safety, about how to maintain healthy game populations, and to respect nature. many life lessons were learned that i wish id learned growing up.

you can argue whether or not hunting is a sport, i just know what it says on my hunting license. predation is never fair. it could be me or a wolf. a bullet is a lot better than having a wolf pack gnaw and your legs until you drop and then go for the jugular at their leisure (or more likely taking chunks out while its still alive before the alpha demands exclusive rights to the carcass). the deer dont exactly have fangs, so the wolves aren't playing fair either. this is the natural order of nature, we may have significantly better tools than the wolves do.  urban consumers of meat simply put this responsibility onto others, animals grow in confinement, loaded with all kinds of antibiotics, often in not so good conditions and then are essentially shipped to a murder mill. you will never find healthier meat than wild game. you have some control over the process and you need not make the animals suffer any longer than necessary (intentionally cruel hunters may exist, but ive never met any).  one or two successful hunts a year is more than enough to feed a family for a year. a moose covers your extended family as well.

this has nothing to do with the mental health issues that cause gun violence. if anything it gives a person a modicum of agency in a world that wants to decide everything for you. sure beats getting caught between employers who dont want to hire mentally unstable people and the bureaucratic hellscape of public assistance services that say they will help and then dont all while wasting time with applications and endless denial letters. then the prospect of becoming homeless on top of all that.  but its easier to take away guns from innocent people in the hopes of  keeping an unstable person from having access than it is to solve or lessen those people's problems.

[Nuke]

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

EDIT- Also @Nuke is from Alaska and Fallout-level ridiculously high super market prices are real! Not sure about the southern part, but at Utqiagvik a pound of ground beef is like $60 dollars a pop (at least it was when a couple motorcycle YouTubers rode/flew up there a couple years ago). In Oregon it's 1/10 that price.

im a fair bit further south in se alaska, more of a rainforest climate than arctic. its still somewhat harsh with freezing  rain which is a bane to anyone who works outside in the early winter or late spring, when you not only have cold temperatures but have to deal with being wet most of the time. rain gear is a must. in the arctic there is nothing, no trees, only source of food is caribou, fish and various marine mammals.

down here ground beef is like $6 (though i did recently buy a dozen eggs for $10), milk is about $8 a gallon. worst prices are in the arctic or in western alaska. around anchorage there is farmland, though thanks to regulation any local livestock has to be shipped down south for inspection (there are no local usda inspectors), and then shipped back here, at which point its no cheaper than import meat. in se we mostly get it shipped up from the western costal states.

Edited yesterday at 03:05 AM by Nuke

[Superfluous J]

6 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

You also don't see people talking about the state of humanity when it comes to other countries that have the ability to kill millions of people in the span of an hour. In fact, it tends to be them against humanity.

But I don't want humanity against me, especially based simply on where I live.

[ColdJ]

9 hours ago, Nuke said:

you can argue whether or not hunting is a sport

Yes I can. Most of what you wrote is about how you were introduced and going hunting. If you reread my previous you will see that I said that going hunting when there is need is fine. And from what you have written, you did it in a responsible manner and ony hunted for what you needed. That is the act of aquiring food, that is not sport. And people can argue that in America the agencies that regulate such things, call it a sport. But that is a cultural thing, Just like the aristocracy in the UK thought it was sporting to have people mounted on horses and a pack of dogs chasing a lone fox that was scared out of it's wits, desperately trying to escape. So no matter what the culture in America use in terminology, the act of hunting and killing other living things is not something that should be considered an entertaining pastime. Other than hunting and fishing is there any other legal sport in where a player ending up dead each time you play is considered the norm?

10 hours ago, Nuke said:

this has nothing to do with the mental health issues that cause gun violence

The only reason it is called GUN violence is because of the ease in which guns can be obtained. In other parts of the world it is probably knife violence, because people who go on killing sprees will chose what ever will cause the most damage in the shortest time. If they can't get a gun then they will pick what they can get.

Hunting happens in my country, but the places where you can buy a gun are heavily secured, only sell guns and you need to have gone through a complete background check and provide a legitimate reason for needing one. So 99% of gun crime is organised gangs that have smuggled guns in to the country. We don't have school students with access to guns going on rampages.

 

11 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Err... hunting is a sport. Or rather can be. It just has to involve two people competing for kills. Like shooting hoops, but the basketball is a bullet and the hoop is the body of a different species.

Considering how philisophical you are, this statement chills me. Especially since reading your stuff makes me miss @kerbiloid most of the time.

Not having empathy for any living creature but Humans, does not make it a sport.

If two radicalised teens with semiautomatic rifles enter a school and bet with each other who can kill the most people, that doesn't make it sport.

11 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

You also don't see people talking about the state of humanity when it comes to other countries that have the ability to kill millions of people in the span of an hour. In fact, it tends to be them against humanity.

I am lucky enough to live somewhere where information and news about what is happening in the world is freely available. So here we do talk about the state of humanity of the entire world. If we narrow it down to just those known to have access to nuclear missiles. Then America, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and even the UK are all talked about constantly. If we widen it to those who don't have nuclear missiles then we could be here for some time. The average person doesn't even realise just how many armed conflicts are going on in the world at any one time, they just get the ones that the news cycle deems to be important. No person on this forum has lived in a time when there hasn't been a hand full of small wars going on, somewhere on the planet.

 

So back to what I originally said, being able to go into a open to the general public, sporting goods store and gain easy access to a rifle or shotgun, when more and more people are getting angry and loosing it, makes those who would like to grow old and die of old age without seeing the end of human civilisation, very nervous.

[Mr. Kerbin]

1 hour ago, ColdJ said:

Considering how philisophical you are, this statement chills me. Especially since reading your stuff makes me miss @kerbiloid most of the time.

Not having empathy for any living creature but Humans, does not make it a sport.

If two radicalised teens with semiautomatic rifles enter a school and bet with each other who can kill the most people, that doesn't make it sport.

I’m sorry but…

Quote

Yes, hunting can be a sport, but it's a controversial topic that involves ethical considerations

says Google AI

and Link

although Wikipedia disagrees.

[ColdJ]

3 hours ago, Mr. Kerbin said:

says Google AI

Really @Mr. Kerbin, did you actually read the whole of that link?

And asking an A.I is like asking a 2 year old, they don't think for themselves, they just compile what they have been given and attempt to find links.

I made it clear that this was not about terminology but about ethics.

If you read the article you linked, you would see that the idea of hunting as a sport was created by rulers who got their power by invading and oppressing the general populace. For those that would wholesale slaughter settlements to get their way, the idea of killing for fun was nothing.

Everyday people hunted in order to feed and cloth themselves. It was not an entertainment, it was a serious necessity.

If you insist on consulting an A.I, try asking it how many legal sports expect the players to die as part of the game?

[Mr. Kerbin]

2 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Really @Mr. Kerbin, did you actually read the whole of that link?

And asking an A.I is like asking a 2 year old, they don't think for themselves, they just compile what they have been given and attempt to find links.

I made it clear that this was not about terminology but about ethics.

If you read the article you linked, you would see that the idea of hunting as a sport was created by rulers who got their power by invading and oppressing the general populace. For those that would wholesale slaughter settlements to get their way, the idea of killing for fun was nothing.

Everyday people hunted in order to feed and cloth themselves. It was not an entertainment, it was a serious necessity.

If you insist on consulting an A.I, try asking it how many legal sports expect the players to die as part of the game?

no

it was the AI summary

[AlamoVampire]

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[SunlitZelkova]

18 hours ago, ColdJ said:

I am lucky enough to live somewhere where information and news about what is happening in the world is freely available. So here we do talk about the state of humanity of the entire world. If we narrow it down to just those known to have access to nuclear missiles. Then America, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and even the UK are all talked about constantly. If we widen it to those who don't have nuclear missiles then we could be here for some time. The average person doesn't even realise just how many armed conflicts are going on in the world at any one time, they just get the ones that the news cycle deems to be important. No person on this forum has lived in a time when there hasn't been a hand full of small wars going on, somewhere on the planet.

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.

18 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Considering how philisophical you are, this statement chills me. Especially since reading your stuff makes me miss @kerbiloid most of the time.

Not having empathy for any living creature but Humans, does not make it a sport.

If two radicalised teens with semiautomatic rifles enter a school and bet with each other who can kill the most people, that doesn't make it sport.

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.

Quote

Example 1: Person A and Person B live in a valley. Person A finds a shiny rock in the river that runs through the valley. Person B wants it, but Person A says he can not have it. So Person B climbs into a tree and drops an anvil on Person A (I'm using a cartoony method here to avoid making this too morbid... I did say I prefer to be blunt but I'm not sure where the forum rules are when it comes to such language, so because I want to share my thoughts I'm forgoing my desired manner of writing). Person B now has the rock.

Example 2: Person C and Person D live on the coast. Person C finds a shiny shell on the beach. Person D wants it, but Person C says he can not have it. Person D asks if they can share it, but Person C says no. So Person D gives up.

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:

Quote

Person A and Person B live in the valley and Person C and Person D live on the coast. An earthquake occurs, destroying the environment that Person C and Person D depend on for food. They head to the valley and ask Person A and Person B if they can begin to live there and gather food, but Person A and Person B say no.

There is no other location where food can be found in this hypothetical world. Person C becomes sick and needs food to get better. Person D's understanding of ethics is that it would violate ethics to not take action to improve Person C's health. Person D believes that Person A and Person B have violated ethics by refusing to offer them food. Therefore Person D reasons it does not violate ethics to kill them and begin living in the valley. And so he does.

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:

Quote

Violence is thus less so a specific set of physical actions rather than 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 pain on a person so that they will change their behavior in one way or another.

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 11 hours ago by SunlitZelkova

[Superfluous J]

Me watching my very first KSP YouTube video from 2013: "Man I can't believe how often I called them 'Kerbins' instead of Kerbals. What a goof I was!"

Me watching one of my most recent KSP YouTube videos from 2021: "Wait... I STILL call them 'Kerbins' what is wrong with me!"

Edited 7 hours ago by Superfluous J