What is it good for? Absolutely everything apparently.

[P3nT4gR4m]

"How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certaintly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship and it's ghastly cargo.

So then, to end the misuse of force, only one solution was left, force itself."

-- Isaac Asimov


Here comes the war. Same as it ever came. Same as it always will. Here's why it like that and here's why it'll never change - violence is the only way to get shit done. Sure you can have committees and sure you can ratify and object and campaign and demonstrate peacfully. You can do all that shit and it'll work out just fine for you. Right up until the opposition pulls a gun.

War trumps democracy - Election results unsatisfactory? Military coup ahoy. War trumps capitalism - We don't like your prices, we're taking your country. Hell, war even trumps religion, that other great control mechanism. The power of god kneels before overwhelming firepower.

But isn't it wrong to fight? Didn't we all learn that violence is no way to sove a problem? Those nice people told us that, the ones who won the last war, by stamping on the heads of anyone who disagreed until the blood of dissent was washed away by the rain. Yes they told us that. They fucking had to. If we found out the truth we'd destroy them in a heartbeat. But we wont find out the truth. We're too fucking stupid to see it even when they wave it in our faces daily.

We killed Saddam and took his country. We're setting up a no-fly zone in Libya. Whenever there's a problem that isn't solvable by any of the "legitimate" means of problem resolution, they send in guys with huge fucking guns to employ the method that "solves nothing". I smell a rat. And if I can get enough firepower together I'll kill it. Til then I'll look over my shoulder and I'll watch my back, for smart, intelligent bipeds, who know the best way to earn an honest dollar is to prize it from my cold dead hands.

[Cain]

Genghis Khan is alleged to have said "violence never solved anything".  Unfortunately, it was drowned out by some of his other statements.

Nevertheless, there does seem to be this point of view that militaries are social Swiss Army knives.  Want to reconstruct a third world country?  Invade it.  Want to stop drug smuggling?  Send troops to the border.  Want to catch terrorists?  Sure, it'll be put on the list.  How about crime?  Well, if they had to do National Service...

There comes a point in every successful career punctuated by periodic violence where raw firepower overcomes the ability to think - tactically, strategically, what one is actually trying to achieve at all.  Napoleon's career is quite instructive on this point.  A talented, flexible, imaginative commander at the start of his career...by the end all he cared about was having more men and more guns at the battlefield before anyone else.

Winning makes people stupid, basically.  And the longer they've been winning for, the riper they are for a nice, hard fall...

[LMNO]

That sort of reminds me of Ender's Game, in that they constantly made Battle Training harder and harder for him, so he had to come up with new and unusual ideas for how to win.

And, of course, HP and the Methods of Rationality.  But that seems to be an obvious homage, anyway.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Winning makes people stupid, basically.  And the longer they've been winning for, the riper they are for a nice, hard fall...

yup. Then someone with a red scarfe will step in and kill all the bad guys and make it all "better" and revolutions will revolve. This is as good as it gets - buncha primates having this great idea to rip a bunch of other primates to shreds. This is humanity and all it takes is one fucking monkey with a pocketfull of bullets to make it all happen. Sometimes I turn on the teevee and look at a pile of dead monkeys on the 6-oclock news and it pisses me off that the only solution is to kill the fucking lot of them.

Here's what occurred to me. The "bad guys" the ones who mind-control everyone and make sure they don't get educated or properly fed, conditioned to be mindless automatons? They're the ones with the right idea. The only way this planet will ever work is if most of the creatures on it have an easily accessible killswitch.

I used to be an idealist - I used to think there was hope for humanity but the truth is - there isn't. Just go with the flow, play the game and, if you're lucky, you'll be the last man standing on a mountain of corpses, in the burned out ruins of "civilisation"

Our race has a hardwired defect. We're too goddamn retarded to survive. Sooner our species is wiped out, the better.

[Triple Zero]

Here's what occurred to me. The "bad guys" the ones who mind-control everyone and make sure they don't get educated or properly fed, conditioned to be mindless automatons? They're the ones with the right idea. The only way this planet will ever work is if most of the creatures on it have an easily accessible killswitch.

No.

I don't want people to be mindless automatons and that's why I came to Discordia in the first place.

Because I believe the right idea is to make people as much unlike mindless automatons as possible. It's hard, but by definition "as much as possible" is not impossible. We're also not there yet, seeing as how much been cut on education in the past decades (to name just one of many things).

It's the THINK FOR YOURSELF SCHMUCK part, evangelical style.

Some of us believe that this is not worth the effort because people don't want to think for themselves (and in a sad moment I sometimes even get the impression that some believe this is not worth the effort because others told them it is not worth the effort because people don't want to think for themselves).

The only way this planet will ever work is if most of the creatures on it have an easily accessible killswitch.

Either way, no I'm not 100% convinced this is the case. Arguments have been presented to me, but no. I don't see the point and I'd rather go see what is possible when you shake the monkeys awake ("they just start hollering" says Roger, but that's when he does it), than to give up and join the people that try to figure out how to best control the automatomonkeys by completely fucking them over. I'm a long long way from being convinced that is the only possibility. And the only possibility for what, exactly? From the alternative of being one of the automatomonkeys? Well Discordia already proved that line of reasoning wrong (among many groups in human history) because you don't need to get everybody or a sizeable group on the boat, just one is enough to show that some alternative is possible.

And even if somebody could convince me, this is absolutely the only way this planet will ever "work" (whatever that may mean), if most of the creatures are mindless automatons controlled by a minority ... Then I still might prefer the version of this planet that doesn't "work".

It'd had to be a pretty damn convincing argument, a pretty bleak alternative to contrast the planet of automatons that "works".

Even if someone told me "they'll blow themselves up, and there will be no Life in the Universe ever again, unless it's a planet of controlled mindless uneducated poorly fed automatomonkeys, it's the only thing that works"--even then I'd only allow it (assuming I was given the choice here) if I could entertain the hope that this would somehow be a phase, they'd somehow grow out of it and turn into something that doesn't need to be mindless or automatomoronic in order to survive.

Cause if not, why bother with the entire Life thing anyway? If it's just automatic, I'd say fuck it, let's not have the planet with all the suffering on it, a galaxy with a gas cloud in it is pretty to look at just as well.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I don't see the point and I'd rather go see what is possible when you shake the monkeys awake ("they just start hollering" says Roger, but that's when he does it),

Well, I admit my technique might be a little rough.   

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Reminds me of the Sermon on Ethics and Love... "everybody hates war" is a great meme... but out of "everybody" relatively few actually seem to want to stop.

[P3nT4gR4m]

The majority will never think for themselves because thinking for yourself requires effort and most of them are too fucking lazy. They want to be led, they want to be automonkeys. They might pay lip service to wanting Freedom^tm but that's just because they've been told to think that by the people who sell that particular brand of free (you know - the slave-brand) if they don't think for themselves their leaders tell them they are free the western democracy is free, the eastern theocracy, likewise - free. But it's just a bullshit word that means "slave" and, deep down inside, if you could ever get the stupid cunts to actually think, they'd realise that they know they're slaves and what's more they like it that way and that's why I've never had any interest in evangelising the "think for yourself" message. Because it's pointless. Thinking for yourself makes you an individual - you're practically a different species. If you like you can bend a bunch of the fuckheads to your will and go off on a power trip. They'll follow you to the ends of the earth as long as you deliver on your promise of unlimited death and destruction but they'll never buy into independent thought. They lack the faculty.