Would you like to shoot somebody?

Would you like to shoot someone?

  • yes

    Votes: 15 42.9%
  • no

    Votes: 20 57.1%

  • Total voters
    35
Good points again major liability.
It's what I say about pacifists really.
"If I smash your house and rape your daughter, will you call the police?"
If they do, well, they're not much of pacifists then are they? Although they may not engage in violence, they are certainly willing to delegate it to others.
 
The newest neurological research shows that if you DON'T want to kill someone at one point or another, you're probably abnormal. Remember, our brains have been evolving since long before civilization, and existence back in the day was the definition of brutal. Vengeance has been shown to activate the same part of the brain as sex in men. Recent studies have shown that as much as a fifth of the U.S. population may be psychopaths, people who are not necessarily evil, but feel no empathy.

A lot of people like to think we're inherently good because of their own feelings and experiences. But they have lived their entire lives with the support network of modern civilization and the regulation of law enforcement. Imagine the place you live in total anarchy with no tech more advanced than a stick with a rock tied to it: daily life for our ancestors. It's not hard to see why such obsolescent defense mechanisms are built-in. Survival of the fittest was the only rule back then.

While I completely agree with your reasoning, especially with your thesis of sentence 1:

Personally, I always have said to whoever wanted to hear it, that I *do not need* any laws. If they did not exist, I would not behave differently from what I behave like now.

I seem to recall this is called "personal ethics"?

Rattler
 
It's what I say about pacifists really.

"If I smash your house and rape your daughter, will you call the police?"

If they do, well, they're not much of pacifists then are they? Although they may not engage in violence, they are certainly willing to delegate it to others.


That is why (and I am basically a pacifist, probably we have different ideas about what the word *means* really?) I do not like police, lawyers or else in the middle.

You do that to me, you will have me on your heels for the rest of your life. I will not even kill you, but I might plant 5 kgs of coca in your car with your fingerprints on, or I might leave you tetraplegic. Enjoy! (...been there, done that).

I see no contradiciton to being a pacifist there, it is simply different levels of approach to a COA (see my sig for details).

Rattler
 
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It is, because again, you involve the police.
If you are a pacifist, you are against violence in any shape or form. That means, you will not engage in violence, and that includes delegating violence to others.
By planting the cocaine in my car, you are in fact inviting the police to intervene, but in a different way. By being a pacifist, you would also not seek revenge, because violence does not only exist as a physical activity, but also as a psychological entity. By even coming to me and saying horrible things about me, you are engaging in verbal violence. You are failing as a pacifist.
A true pacifist will have to forgive, love and move on even after I've smashed his house and raped his daughter.
But it fails.
They think they can be pacifists because the police and other organizations restrict people from doing bad things to them. We certainly think about doing bad things to some people at certain points in our lives, but the consequences of our actions (state sanctioned violence) usually motivates us to have restraint.
Actually by doing the whole cocaine thing, you'd be engaging in both violence and blackmail.
 
...If you are a pacifist, you are against violence in any shape or form...

Well, here is probably where we have different ideas of the word´s meaning: For me it means that I dont believe in violence being a strat to solve problems. Tactically, I will beat whatever out of you if you touch my private area.

...By being a pacifist, you would also not seek revenge, because violence does not only exist as a physical activity, but also as a psychological entity.

Indeed. This is where male and female violence in the family is treatd (from my POV) way too differently.

Psychological violence is violence all the same.

OTOH, just to explain things a bit, here is my background:

When I was young (first class in school, at 5: One yr earlier for being talented), I was not only the shortest in class, but also red haired, 1 year younger, and knew to read, write and calculate already while the other mates didnt. I was completely bored, the green monkey, and socially inept.

This did not fare me well, for 4 years consecutively I got beaten up *every* day on my way home. I looked for alternative ways to home, but in general thi only offered hort relief periods, I had to swallow it, no way around. I did *not* like that (actually, it was quite traumatic and has marked me forever).

At 10, starting college 5th class, as I had changed schools, I expected things to change, but some of my old class had also changed school, and after 2 month or so we were back to the same routine, for another year or so (and I did less like it).

Then, when I was 12, we had this big guy repeating course in our class, intelligent and, for some reason, taking concern for my woes (buddy ever since), and he told me: "Why do you not simply everytime they beat you up answer to them: Break their pens (in the ´50s those were *really* expensive and the parents gave you a beating if you broke them), tear their clothes apart, through their soccer balls to the neighbous dogs, etc?"

My answer was: "Look, I am afraid like hell that they will beat me up..." to which he replied "...but they do that anyway, don´t they?".

This was the moment something clicked and my life changed:

From this moment on I would answer every assault with a revenge act, with open visor, in front of everybody and being castigated by the teachers for it many times.

You beat me? I slit your bycicle tubes.

You think you need to beat me more? Fine, I will douse your bicycle in gasoline and burn it. etc, etc., sometimes I went way out in the revenge scale compared to what someone had done (and said, I also applied it there).

Suffices to say that, while I did not make friends that way, after 2 mont the harrassment had stopped and has never started again afterwards.

Now, where is the pacifist angle? Here:

As I have suffered in my deepest soul a lot of violence through many years, and as my values tell me "Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you", I am absolutely against violence as a general strategy. The receiving end hurts, and there is no compensation for the damgae done, if there are other ways to reach goals.

OTOH, my call sign in the AF was "Rächer" (i.e. more or less "avenger"), and I had chosen that on purpose. I have decided long ago that NOBODY will *ever* do something harmful, hurting or otherwise humiliating to me or mine w/o getting the adequate response. I learnt that at 12, am proud of it, and have always stuck to it (and it works while I dont get killed in the process).

I am a pacifist in that *I never start a fight*, no matter what adrenaline has built up.

I am a pacifist in that I have taught my kids to look for other solutions than violence (I never touched them) and tried to show them that this works (and it does, actually).

I believe in that we pacifists can make the world a little better every day just by *deciding* when we have to fight and when not, but, as pacifists, we also have this reponsibility of making such decisions, it is a bit more complicated as for the non-pacifist.

I am a pacifist in that I have no prob at all to turn the other cheek to a minor offense, I will even buy you a beer if it is you who offended me.

Up tp a point: I also became a soldier because I believe you do not *ever* have to suffer violence from others without returning the favor, you need to know when and how to counter them idiots that do not understand other means of communication.

And when you need to swing into action because someone starts a severe attack on you, yours or your values, when you *do* respond, it better be not a few slaps but one decisive punch: Give all, shut the other guy down, terminally, instantly. All means to reach that goal are fair game, he asked for it.

Dont know if I made myself clear here, but that is how I feel and think. Revenge in this respect is fine with me.

And I consider myself a pacifist.

Rattler
 
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Actually you're not a pacifist, rather just a sensible person.
A pacifist must shun violence in any shape or form, regardless of the situation.
And don't take what I said personally. It's just a scenario. It's what I ask people (except normally I leave out the raping the daughter bit) when they say that violence solves nothing and that it is never justified no matter what.
That's when I ask, "What if I came over to your house and smashed everything?"
Normally they reply that they will call the police.
Then I tell them that they are delegating violence to others and therefore are participating in violence.
And there, they are stuck.
 
...Normally they reply that they will call the police.
Then I tell them that they are delegating violence to others and therefore are participating in violence.
And there, they are stuck.

No offense taken whatsoever.

Actually, what you describe is what we have opted fo in our demcratically legitimated justice states: Violence is a goverment monopoly.

Despite what I have stated for myself (and for what in case I had to display it again seroiusly - so far always got away with it - I would take full penal and social responsibility, do not take me as an example because what I advocated in my other post is not only illegal but also not very civilized) I think this is one of the base pillars of our social Western structure:

You do not go lynching ppl anymore, you hand them over to the courts. Perfect, and very well fine with me.

Rattler
 
I would never wish harm on anyone unless they wronged me in a major way, and you're a pacifist, but what about those without the personal ethics you mentioned?

PopSci said:
In a recent issue of the scientific journal Homicide Studies, criminologist Kenna Quinet wrote that conventional calculations seriously underestimate the number of serial murder victims. “The problem may be 10 times worse than we imagined,” she says. Instead of 180 victims a year in the U.S., there may be as many as 1,800. Quinet, a nationally renowned homicide expert at Indiana-Purdue University Indianapolis, bases her conclusions on simple arithmetic. According to the Department of Justice, up to 40,000 sets of unidentified human remains sit in police-evidence lockers and medical examiners’ offices across the nation. If resolved cases are any guide, the majority are murder victims. Against this, Quinet factors the homicides suspected in a significant proportion—as much as 20 percent—of missing-person cases, more than 100,000 of which remain open at any time in this country.
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-01/anatomy-serial-killer?page=1

These are the folks I'd worry about in that situation.
 
My dear young Sky, THAT is one of teh BEST movies EVER made :)
For onwe with no total world destruction that is
 
My dear young Sky, THAT is one of teh BEST movies EVER made :)
For onwe with no total world destruction that is


You got it :wink: my childhood memories....hahahhahahahha, I love it!!! REDRUM, REDRUM, REDRUM.....HAHAHHAHAHHAHA!!!
 
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