My main point is, all the pain we administer to one another, legal or otherwise, all hurts us, angers us, and statistically drives us to violence and group conflict. Abuse does this, and the abuse component of our intended deterrents also does this, because pain is pain like water is water and things like pain and water have real world properties beyond our desires for them.
Perhaps my largest iteration of this is that societies that are hardest on children are the most fearsome at war, illustrated by parables like the Spartan mother who kills her son when he returns home with a wounded back, suggesting he had retreated. The real-world display of this principle is that that the current Spartans, the current world empire with an unbeatable military is the last country of the former First World that is not signing the UN Rights of the Child Charter, America.
The extreme case is that the Nazi and/or neo-Nazi groups are filled with angry young men, abused by their mothers, fathers, and their surrogates and directing their anger to strangers from other cultures, strangers with different skin tones or churches.
I was busy on a project, replacing the tuners on my guitar recently and didn’t change the TV channel all day and wound up watching one of the expose/infomercials about American white supremacy groups and the police who infiltrated them. At one point, an officer tells us he messed up, potentially ruined his cover by starting a story with “When I was in college,” – a major red flag in that world – and scrambled to cover it with the story that his dad had made him go, he’d gone one year and gotten booted for some racist violence. That got him through, because his dad made him do it, and he hated his dad for it, he hated his dad . . . they all understood that. And they all agreed that brown people and Jews would pay the price, that hunting down their own white fathers isn’t how it works.
If that isn’t the power of antisocialization theory working like bloody magic, wind them up and let them go, and they never seem to make the connection.
Enough, isn’t it?
Jeff
May 10th., ,2109
Abuse with an Excuse 
I just want to say that I’m certain this is the dynamic for extremists the world over. To blame the “other guy’s” church is to condone child abuse at home, and more than a personal avoidance, to ignore the real common cause of it for all humanity is bad, irresponsible thinking. Worse if it’s supposed to be science.
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I think herein lies the answer to the Fermi paradox – pardon me for high-jacking your blog btw… I’ve been working for a year and a bit now on various projects that stare into the rest of the cosmos and there is not a wiff of other civilizations, if we deserve that moniker.
Why? Perhaps the thing that brings us here is the thing that ends us, violence, dominance, the idea that there is fault in the actions of others if it isn’t a direct and instantaneous mirror of what our whim is at the moment we have it.
It is, as far as I can tell from my reading intrinsic to our nature to feel so small that when we are given the ability to exert authority that we make the leap to godhood. Even if the god of whatever people you like to point out is a pacifist the zealots weaponise some part of the faith and say that that peace comes after utter submission.
I was an angry kid, I became a more angry teen but it never had expression so it built, perhaps I was fortunate in that I sought reason to defuse that rather than some way to unleash it. I can relate this until I am blue in the face and it’s dismissed out of hand. Our culture is built on violence and the weak just want their go, they see it as their right. Look at the people you’re highlighting here, same thing. Same thing goes for the trolls who fuel this online.
Some time ago one of those Men’s Rights wankers had a go at me on my blog demanding that I produce evidence of women being paid less, when I did he vanished, not apologised or changed his views. He then buggered off to harass a minority blogger, classy move.
How do we overcome that? I must admit I have no idea, to me reason and evidence is enough to change my mind.
x
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OK, first, my brain is mush, I’m having some low days. Your comments seem light years over my head, but I’ll try.
Whaddyamean fermi paradox – zero evidence and maximum confidence? I guess.
Yes, the fighting I’m trying to stop is called “life?” I guess that too. I keep having this awful thought – the book’s been written, right, and the film made? Where the last few humans are trying to get off of earth before it’s all gone and some hero sabotages them, thus dooming humanity to extinction and so saving the rest of the cosmos? If not,maybe it should be the sequel to Ishmael. (Daniel Quinn.)
It makes sense that it’s dominance and fighting at the bottom level, but what I’m resisting is that it has to be everywhere all the time. That it seems no-one wants it any other way.
yeah. “Sure there can be peace, just as soon as you stop fighting me.” You know, I got as far as Leviticus, and in the first few books, the first few times we meet “the Lord” in the Bible, there are no special effects, he just seems like a dude, the local chieftain or something.
Yes, I unleashed until sometime before, maybe the start of puberty, then I didn’t want to fight anymore. – yeah, I got that too, I bragged about my pacifism since puberty and what I got from the young fembot that is my progeny, was “Oh, but you WANTED to.” I say this like you meant “talk diffusion and pacifism till I’m blue and no-one hears it,” maybe I got that wrong.
Yes, I think of the MRAs the same way, of course poor men could use more rights – but blame your boss, not your wife. And get your rights back from the rich, not from the poor. That’s some polarizing shit, and on a personal level, partly because of these idiots, my complaints can never be voiced or heard. Just say a love song line, a girl broke my heart, and you’re picking sides.
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Thanks for the book, I’ll read that – the last two I read were disappointingly average.
Well, we have brains that evolved at a max 50k years ago, the problem is that now we’ve eaten the food chain and we have nothing to fear so we fear each other. And then there’s the innate want to fuck everything metaphorically and not. Fixing – or curing the innate is what you are trying to do and that requires both reason and discipline. I recently saw some violence, and most people either turned from it or heckled at a distance. Stopping it requires risk and people have little balls when it comes to that.
It’s so much more orgasmic to wear a red hat and jerk off under a spar dangled manor.
Struggle is tough work and often both unnoticed and unappreciated.
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