human nature to war?

[Syne]

human nature to war?

It's human nature to eat to survive. By survive I mean procreate, pass on the genes. I'm thinking that perhaps early on that food was worth fighting for, the first reason for killing another human being. I don't have proof but I wonder if anthropologists have ever determined whether we began our tour of Earth in hierarchic groups. I mean its so prevalent among species that its hard to ignore. I would have no trouble believing an alpha human would dispatch a low rank just for want of a meal.

is it human nature to procreate ?
i suspect not.(casual speculative opinion)
i think procreation is just symptomatic of the desire to copulate.

That's not how evolution works. Evolution does not select for a behavior for its own sake...especially when the cost to the organism (female) is so high and may include death.
Sexual selection would have no concern for survival traits if copulation were the only goal.

it appears that the majority of parents in non westernised civility use their children as slaves.
to the point where they keep breeding and sell their own children.

And? Not every culture is moral.

soo... it would lend to the idea that there is no innate drive to parent otherwise the majority of the instinct would propel the accumulation of children rather than just those produced by their own copulation... AND ... more soo i ponder, children would be gathered by adults regardles of being their own and a general sense of parenting of all children would be normalised.

Evolution does not establish a universal drive to parent...as many species abandon their young immediately. Evolution promotes survival and reproduction...and the strategies for each depend on the species as well as the environment. In cultures that do not value life, you'd find that adult life is also significantly devalued....while a sufficiently nurturing environment can also lead to lax parenting instincts.

probably not what the majority of literate western adults want to beleive or hear, none the less it certainly raises some questions.

What I've said is probably not what homosexuals with little to no interest in children want to believe or hear, nonetheless, it is true.

[C C]

[...] I wish we would begin with county land and our own homeless!  I wish we would plan a historical community and allow a set number people to live there, who were willing to live as people did in the past.  This would be both an experiment and a tourist attraction.  Using tourism to pay for the town. [...]

Secular communes or ecovillages like Twin Oaks have been around for decades. They're inspired at least partly by B. F. Skinner's ideas. Isolated religious fellowships and cults who have a bent for living low-tech long preceded that trend. Yazata offered Odiyan, which might be considered a hybrid of the two. If supporting them with tourism is desired, then just adjust or re-engineer them accordingly (granting that some aren't already doing that).

The current epidemic of modern homelessness (something other than classic hobos, winos, etc) began with the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Which coincided with the eradication of cheap, single-room housing for that vast number of discharged patients to live in. As well as high standards for admission to mental health care being implemented that put an end to the once easy ability to be committed.

Clyde Median: "Yah, I remember our weird great-uncle Ezekial back then. A wandering outcast who lived outdoors, collected deposit-refund bottles, and mowed people's lawns. He would just sign himself in at Southeast State Hospital whenever winter came around. Those white-coats never met a nut that they didn't want to crack open and look inside."

The program that Utah implemented to reduce homelessness is roughly just going back to those old days of state hospitals absorbing the armies of dysfunctional people who would otherwise have been living on the street slash in jail after being kicked-out by their families. But instead of housing them wholesale in an institution complex, the Utah system seems to provide shelter and basic resources at the individual or family-unit level.

Natasha Bertran: "Between shelters, jail stays, ambulances, and hospital visits, caring for one homeless person typically costs the government $20,000 a year. Providing one homeless person with permanent housing, however - as well as a social worker to help them transition into mainstream society - costs the state $8,000, The New Yorker reported in September."

Those who aren't mentally ill, substances abusers, or perpetually doomed screwups -- those who have just had bad luck -- eventually get back on their feet in a self-supporting way once they have that stability and transitional help. The latter would also be that part of the homeless fit for the communal experiments, if the latter weren't so hidden, protective of themselves, and regulative of their populations.

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[RainbowUnicorn]

DPRK issue threat to guam

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/08/politi...l?adkey=bn

US response

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/08/politi...index.html

[Carol]

I agree that something akin to the Holocaust would test my moral fibre immensely. Would I be so angered knowing the atrocity is taking place and would I pick up arms to stop it? Or would I be comfortable feeling just as guilty as those committing the actions if i did nothing? By not doing anything would future genocidal actions be encouraged? What do you do?

In the case of WW2 at least (if I / we had been around then), most of the public wouldn't have even known that the Holocaust was transpiring till circa the end, or more afterwards yet. Though that Jews (etc) were being mistreated / persecuted in assorted ways, which didn't quite clang the Obliteration Bell, was well printed and broadcast. The obvious cause for the fleeing / attempted exodus from Europe including before the war, often barred by immigration quotas.

For decades the governments of the Allies also historically got off the hook for similar reasons of "not knowing", or of not taking the "rumors" of genocide seriously enough. (On the flip-side, many Jewish communists in the US refused to believe the "rumors" about Stalin's practices in Russia: The Horrible Irony.)

But actually the leaders of the Allies were aware of the Holocaust, and it just wasn't a priority. Speedily rescuing the "Jews, Romani, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, Freemasons, Spanish Republicans, Serbs, disabled, etc" from the Nazis wasn't an all-consuming priority. And needless to say, nary the point for declaring war on the Axis (whether one was directly invaded / attacked or not by them).  

Allies knowledge of the atrocities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibi...atrocities

EXCERPT: The Allied Powers were aware of the scale of the Jewish Holocaust two-and-a-half years earlier than is generally assumed, and had even prepared war crimes indictments against Adolf Hitler and his top Nazi commanders. Newly accessed material from the United Nations – not seen for around 70 years – shows that as early as December 1942, the US, UK and Soviet governments were aware that at least two million Jews had been murdered and a further five million were at risk of being killed, and were preparing charges. Despite this, the Allied Powers did very little to try and rescue or provide sanctuary to those in mortal danger. Indeed, in March 1943, Viscount Cranborne, a minister in the war cabinet of Winston Churchill, said the Jews should not be considered a special case and that the British Empire was already too full of refugees to offer a safe haven to any more. [...] Mr Plesch, a professor at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS University of London, said the major powers began drawing up war crimes charges based on witness testimony smuggled from the camps and from the resistance movements in various countries occupied by the Nazis. Among his discoveries were documents indicting Hitler for war crimes dating from 1944.

Allied forces knew about Holocaust two years before discovery of concentration camps, secret documents reveal: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/...88036.html

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https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/mobile/en/arti...d=10005182

EXCERPT: [...] In August 1942, the State Department received a report sent by Gerhart Riegner, the Geneva-based representative of the World Jewish Congress (WJC). The report revealed that the Germans were planning to physically annihilate the Jews of Europe. Believing the news to be a rumor-and feeling that any rescue action was impossible even if the report was true-State Department officials did not forward the report to its intended recipient, American Jewish Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was President of the World Jewish Congress. During World War II, rescue of Jews and other victim groups persecuted by Nazi Germany was not a priority for the United States government.

[...] After World War II began in 1939, American consuls abroad also screened refugees on national security grounds, making an already difficult immigration process even harder. Nevertheless, in 1939 and 1940 more than half of all immigrants to the United States were Jewish, most of them refugees from Europe. During those same years, a majority of all immigration to the United States came from Nazi-occupied or collaborationist countries. In 1940, for instance, 82% of immigrants to America came from these countries, most of them refugees seeking asylum. But by the time the United States entered the war in December 1941, American consulates had already closed in most of Europe and it became nearly impossible for refugees to escape the continent. Despite many obstacles, however, more than 200,000 Jews found refuge in the United States from 1933 to 1945, most of them arriving before the end of 1941.

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Auschwitz Bombing Debate
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwit...ing_debate

EXCERPT: [...] Auschwitz was first overflown by an Allied reconnaissance aircraft on April 4, 1944, in a mission to photograph the synthetic oil plant at Monowitz forced labor camp (Auschwitz III). On 26 June, 71 B-17 heavy bombers on another bomb run, had flown above or close to three railway lines to Auschwitz. On July 7, shortly after the U.S. War Department refused requests from Jewish leaders to bomb the railway lines leading to the camps, a force of 452 Fifteenth Air Force bombers flew along and across the five deportation railway lines on their way to bomb Blechhammer oil refineries nearby.

[...] Since the controversy began in the 1970s, a number of military experts have looked at the problems involved in bombing Auschwitz and the rail lines and have concluded that it would have been extremely difficult and risky and that the chances of achieving significant results would have been small. It appears reasonable to assume that John J. McCloy was accurate in his early statements that the idea was never discussed with President Roosevelt. Later in life John J. McCloy may have found it expedient to share with FDR the blame heaped on him by average people and by those who seek to blame somebody in addition to the Germans for the Holocaust.

More recently we had Sadam and the gassing of Kurds and the conflict between Kurds and the Turks.   The tribal warfare of Africa and the conflict in Seria and the failure of the UN and Peace Keepers to bring peace in Isreal and its surrounding neighbors, and North Korea behaving very provocatively.  Knowing the history of Germany and what is happening today, what is the best way to handle such human rights violations?

---

[...] I wish we would begin with county land and our own homeless!  I wish we would plan a historical community and allow a set number people to live there, who were willing to live as people did in the past.  This would be both an experiment and a tourist attraction.  Using tourism to pay for the town. [...]

Secular communes or ecovillages like Twin Oaks have been around for decades. They're inspired at least partly by B. F. Skinner's ideas. Isolated religious fellowships and cults who have a bent for living low-tech long preceded that trend. Yazata offered Odiyan, which might be considered a hybrid of the two. If supporting them with tourism is desired, then just adjust or re-engineer them accordingly (granting that some aren't already doing that).  

The current epidemic of modern homelessness (something other than classic hobos, winos, etc) began with the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Which coincided with the eradication of cheap, single-room housing for that vast number of discharged patients to live in. As well as high standards for admission to mental health care being implemented that put an end to the once easy ability to be committed.

Clyde Median: "Yah, I remember our weird great-uncle Ezekial back then. A wandering outcast who lived outdoors, collected deposit-refund bottles, and mowed people's lawns. He would just sign himself in at Southeast State Hospital whenever winter came around. Those white-coats never met a nut that they didn't want to crack open and look inside."

 
The program that Utah implemented to reduce homelessness is roughly just going back to those old days of state hospitals absorbing the armies of dysfunctional people who would otherwise have been living on the street slash in jail after being kicked-out by their families. But instead of housing them wholesale in an institution complex, the Utah system seems to provide shelter and basic resources at the individual or family-unit level.

Natasha Bertran: "Between shelters, jail stays, ambulances, and hospital visits, caring for one homeless person typically costs the government $20,000 a year. Providing one homeless person with permanent housing, however - as well as a social worker to help them transition into mainstream society - costs the state $8,000, The New Yorker reported in September."

Those who aren't mentally ill, substances abusers, or perpetually doomed screwups -- those who have just had bad luck -- eventually get back on their feet in a self-supporting way once they have that stability and transitional help. The latter would also be that part of the homeless fit for the communal experiments, if the latter weren't so hidden, protective of themselves, and regulative of their populations.

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That is helpful information and discussion of the problem.  I am gaining more knowledge of the screw ups as that runs in my family.   In my family, there is a spectrum from low wage earners needing assistance to actual mental disability qualifying grandchildren for SSI, and of course, those who are normal and holding regular jobs, but not professional jobs with high wages.   My son and daughter came of age when meth was the new drug and it was the thing to do, so their children are struggling.   It really makes me mad when someone thinks getting drunk or doing drugs is a personal choice.  Our "personal choices" affect everyone in in our lives and until society as a whole starts saying that, I don't think we can blame the young for their poor choices.      That is the moralist in me.  As the question of what to do about groups of people who violate human rights, what might we do about masses of individuals making bad choices and affecting the lives of others in negative ways?   This question is what began education in ancient civilizations and again at the beginning of the Renaissance when people realized religion and worshipping a god is not the answer.  Education is a pretty important part of avoiding problems, and education for technology is not doing the job that needs to be done.  I very much regret giving up my fight with the schools and letting them educate my children as the system dictates they be educated.  Anyway, here we are with a huge problem, and it is a very serious problem when considering any group effort, especially something like starting a self-supporting commune with people who can not compete in mainstream society.

I will follow your links and hopefully get in touch with local people working on the homeless problem.  I say hopefully because I have been hijacked by a medical problem and it is really hard for me to focus anything else.

[C C]

[...] I am gaining more knowledge of the screw ups as that runs in my family.   In my family, there is a spectrum from low wage earners needing assistance to actual mental disability qualifying grandchildren for SSI, and of course, those who are normal and holding regular jobs, but not professional jobs with high wages.   My son and daughter came of age when meth was the new drug and it was the thing to do, so their children are struggling.   It really makes me mad when someone thinks getting drunk or doing drugs is a personal choice.  Our "personal choices" affect everyone in in our lives and until society as a whole starts saying that, I don't think we can blame the young for their poor choices.      That is the moralist in me.  As the question of what to do about groups of people who violate human rights, what might we do about masses of individuals making bad choices and affecting the lives of others in negative ways?   This question is what began education in ancient civilizations and again at the beginning of the Renaissance when people realized religion and worshipping a god is not the answer.  Education is a pretty important part of avoiding problems, and education for technology is not doing the job that needs to be done.  I very much regret giving up my fight with the schools and letting them educate my children as the system dictates they be educated.  Anyway, here we are with a huge problem, and it is a very serious problem when considering any group effort, especially something like starting a self-supporting commune with people who can not compete in mainstream society.

Some general characteristics have been abstracted from countries which have very low civil unrest, crime, and drug abuse rates:

(1) Strong cooperative community relationships; uniform population that shares common identity in terms of culture, ethnicity, politics / beliefs, etc.

(2) Relatively small differences between the economic classes; little tension between the rich, middle class, and poor. Respect of most if not all job types; class self-esteem.

(3) Transparency of business and government; all transactions and communications open to public scrutiny.

(4) Sturdy network of supportive systems and social welfare which minimize reckless despair.

(5) Aggressive pre-empting of drug and crime sources; early dismantling of organized crime network attempts.

(6) Great emphasis on capturing and convicting perpetrators of serious crime (even if it takes years), so that they know such is inevitable.

(7) More emphasis on ending crime rather than punishment (rehabilitation, teaching criminals how to integrate and function in society, extensive transition assistence, ensuring they avoid recycling back into the penal merry-go-round).

Iceland is flooded with firearms (relative to the small population), but few crimes involving them. Rigorous gun ownership process involving tests and medical / psychological examinations.

How China got rid of opium addiction
http://www.sacu.org/opium.html

EXCERPT: [...] By this time, there were literally millions of addicts in the country. The new government immediately set about coping with the monumental problem. Peasants were persuaded to plough in their opium crops and sow wheat or rice instead. Neighbourhoods were mobilised in a massive educational programme. The street committees which governed the neighbourhoods held study groups in which the evils of opium and heroin were discussed. Families of known addicts were educated not to blame their addict members, but to encourage them to seek help. Addicts themselves were impressed by the fact that they were not blamed for their addiction, since they were considered victims of foreign governments and other enemies of the people. After their cure, they were given training and then placed in paying jobs. Many of them were hired by the government to work with other addicts. At the same time, pressure was placed on the dealers. Those who surrendered were accepted by the community, re-educated, trained for meaningful work and given jobs. The rest were packed off to prison, and the worst offenders were executed. By 1956, the People's Republic of China had virtually eliminated its drug problem.

Conservative slant: "Mao Tse-tung was by far the greatest therapist of drug addiction in world history. He threatened to execute opium addicts if they didn’t give up. Threats to murder were about the only utterances of Mao’s that could be believed, and 20 million addicts duly gave up." https://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/11/is-a...a-disease/

I will follow your links and hopefully get in touch with local people working on the homeless problem. I say hopefully because I have been hijacked by a medical problem and it is really hard for me to focus anything else.

Best wishes there. Hope it's not really ALS.

---

[...] More recently we had Sadam and the gassing of Kurds and the conflict between Kurds and the Turks. The tribal warfare of Africa and the conflict in Seria and the failure of the UN and Peace Keepers to bring peace in Isreal and its surrounding neighbors, and North Korea behaving very provocatively. Knowing the history of Germany and what is happening today, what is the best way to handle such human rights violations? [...]

But do those very failures indicate that there's something wrong with the "human rights" approach itself -- that a remedy would be to abandon a universal plan (ideology) for practical efforts contingent on and customized for the complexities of the particular situation? Let's take a step back momentarily from atrocities to the West's approach to poverty.

(The Poverty Puzzle): In "The White Man's Burden," [William] Easterly turns from incentives to the subtler problems of knowledge. If we truly want to help the poor, rather than just congratulate ourselves for generosity, he argues, we rich Westerners have to give up our grand ambitions. Piecemeal problem-solving has the best chance of success.

He contrasts the traditional "Planner" approach of most aid projects with the "Searcher" approach that works so well in the markets and democracies of the West. Searchers treat problem-solving as an incremental discovery process, relying on competition and feedback to figure out what works.

"A Planner thinks he already knows the answers," Easterly writes. "A Searcher admits he doesn't know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors." Planners trust outside experts. Searchers emphasize homegrown solutions.

Now we can proceed to Eric Posner expanding that to the human rights idiom:

(The Case Against Human Rights): [...] In his influential book "The White Man’s Burden," William Easterly argues that much of the foreign-aid establishment is in the grip of an ideology that is a softer-edge version of the civilising mission of 19th-century imperialists. Westerners no longer believe that white people are superior to other people on racial grounds, but they do believe that regulated markets, the rule of law and liberal democracy are superior to the systems that prevail in non-western countries, and they have tried to implement those systems in the developing world. Easterly himself does not oppose regulated markets and liberal democracy, nor does he oppose foreign aid. He instead attacks the ideology of the “planners” – people who believe that the west can impose a political and economic blueprint that will advance wellbeing in other countries.

[...] It is time to start over with an approach to promoting wellbeing in foreign countries that is empirical rather than ideological. Human rights advocates can learn a lot from the experiences of development economists – not only about the flaws of top-down, coercive styles of forcing people living in other countries to be free, but about how one can actually help those people if one really wants to. Wealthy countries can and should provide foreign aid to developing countries, but with the understanding that helping other countries is not the same as forcing them to adopt western institutions, modes of governance, dispute-resolution systems and rights. Helping other countries means giving them cash, technical assistance and credit where there is reason to believe that these forms of aid will raise the living standards of the poorest people. Resources currently used in fruitless efforts to compel foreign countries to comply with the byzantine, amorphous treaty regime would be better used in this way.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the human rights treaties were not so much an act of idealism as an act of hubris, with more than a passing resemblance to the civilising efforts undertaken by western governments and missionary groups in the 19th century, which did little good for native populations while entangling European powers in the affairs of countries they did not understand. A humbler approach is long overdue.

And yet this view (of the West still sub-consciously deeming itself to be playing a patronizing Big Daddy role of forcing its ethics on a barbaric world) set aside... Perhaps what's fallen out of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" has been misinterpreted as something that was supposed to be like a robust and fast "world police operation", when that's actually not how it works.

Even those who tout UDHR as having been successful acknowledge that its effects and indirect influences are a slow, incremental process of chipping away at many obstacles and challenges. It has arguably hindered greater proliferation of potential atrocities rather than accommodating quick, Rambo-like solutions to whatever current outbreaks of an era. Criticism of human rights might be metaphorically compared to a gardener complaining that his security measures are ineffective because some of the tomatoes, watermelons, etc have fallen to racoons -- when without such protections at all the whole garden would have been destroyed.

(How Human Rights Became Our Ideology): [...] Whether states actually implement these commitments has become the subject of a cottage industry in political science and international legal studies. One view is that states [regimes, countries] accede to human rights treaties either because they already comply with their provisions or because they are such pariahs that they need to sign a treaty or two to improve their reputations. Besides, states can file “reservations, understandings, and declarations” (RUDs) when they accede to most human rights treaties, declaring either their own interpretations of certain treaty provisions or their intention to exempt themselves from certain articles. As a result, not much changes in the actual behavior of states. A second view is that treaties, along with customary international law and soft law, provide an opening wedge that global civil society can use to push a regime toward greater compliance with its international legal obligations.

[...] Although [...] one can never quantify the precise contribution of human rights work to such historic events as the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union or the end of apartheid in South Africa—or for that matter to small advances in the treatment of women, sexual minorities, the disabled, and others in specific countries, cities, or villages [...] the international human rights movement has often been a significant factor in changing the behavior of states.

It is not treaties, however, that change state behavior. It is the use of those treaties by a global movement that is politically agile, opportunistic, and even ruthless. [...] however, the global movement could not have achieved what it has without the existence of international human rights law and international humanitarian law to serve as tools to attack its targets. Although in recent decades states have not ceased to violate rights, they have no longer been able to think of justifications for doing so that are widely accepted as valid. International human rights and humanitarian law have increasingly become what Ronald Dworkin called “trumps".

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