On the other side of the coin those ethical principles that you decry as making us weak are what allows society to function peacefully. Yet these principles are not applied to everyone equally are they? Our nation finds itself in a state of fighting in foreign conflicts roughly every new generation. I think it's reasonable to infer that fighting without regard for human life or insight into the reasons why we are fighting doesn't work either.

Yeah, good thing we arent doing that.

Why do you get to pass judgement and assume what the guiding principles behind each soldier's actions are? Who says every conflict involves a blatant disregard for human life? Just because a life is taken doesn't mean it's discounted as unimportant. It means that those are the consequences of war. Those are the consequences of providing YOU with freedom.

The irony is that it is done to spread the very ideals which we believe are correct in a society. Sound famliar?

anyway survival of the fittest is and always will be, we evolve and are subject to it nothing will change that, with or with out war

I have never stated anything of the sort. I take issue with this notion being perpetuated that Genocidal Warfare and a doctrine of Survival of the Fittest are excusable or even worse; good concepts to integrate into our foreign policey.

I don't believe we said anything of the kind. It's common sense that the strong reign over the weak. Strong can mean economically, socially, mentally, physically. That doesn't condone genocidal warfare.

Survival of the fittest is not only excusable.. it's a fact of life. I repeat, your standard of living would not exist were it not for the strengths of the ones that came before you.

Have you ever considered it possible that we owe it the advancement of our species to attempt to trancend such a base concept?

Hey egghead, even if we fucking evolve past NATURE (which is impossible so long as we have physical bodies) it wont effect us here and now or even for 100s if not 1000s of years. So there is no point in fucking worrying about it. If we are to advance beyond warfare then it will be in the same fashion that we advanced from biting and clawing at each other to using spears and arrows. With 1000s of years of evolution, billions upon billions of calories from protiene sources to increase our ever evolving brains sizes, the same we we did once before. NOt by fucking sitting around and jerking each other off. Because when you do that, you lose. Because noone else in their right fucking mind is willing to do that. The fact that you can spew such stupid crap is a testimate to the standard of life you fucking enjoy DUE the efforts of the people you hate IE military and people willing to fucking fight for something. Moron.

It has been kind of interesting though, how this topic with some suggestions of direction but no clear thesis to speak of has actually come to a debate of core foundations within people that arent going to change, the outcome and the manifestations of them are just secondary and are what gets to be argued. It's complained that i had no real....planned thought (and rightfully said) but even those after saying that a few times have returned because its fun to argue semantics for the hell of it. ha, so the thread is actually a success in spite of my failure. : P

....and social darwinism is a lot like freudian theory in how it's viewed. Some good ideas there but they need altering to really work. And if we were truely under the sole discresion of nature on who got to live and pass on their genes that are more suitable for the environment at the time...thus "superior" since that's the word thrown around in this one, then we wouldnt have people who pass on dominant genetic disorders. We are the only species that can manipulate our environment to the extent we do.

Talking about things being superior and natural selection does not transfer directly to people for these reasons. The mechanism of natural selection was proposed to understand how things work in responce to their environment and yes, to intraspecific competition too in regards to rescources. Homo sapien sapiens do not have the same relationship to their environment as other animals but it is going back a few hundred years in thinking to say that we are completely unaffected by such things simply because we are human.

There is no doubt in my mind that a day will come when it's us(the West and the civilised world) against a united Islam. The only question is when, and where will it start? Anything we do to prevent it will only delay the inevitable, it will come down to waging something that might resemble genocidal warfare, and it will be necessary for the aforementioned us to survive.

everybody can keep talking about freedom, what's right and wrong, humanity, etc. i personally try to leave the specifics behind and focus on the general... and i suppose the real question here is whether the means justify the ends? that's what it all boils down to. i personally don't think any of it needs justification, but if anything does, the end certainly is justified by the means. especially the ends of survival. survival is the ultimate end to which we as individuals and we as the human race must strive. failure to survive is oblivion. genocide is good if it helps our chances of survival and bad if it hurts them. genocide which does neither is (a) practically impossible and (b) theoretically negative, as it is a waste of time which could be better spent. i don't think accepting the nature of the world makes us any less human. i think it makes us more human to accept our faults (the beast within, if you even consider that a fault) than to stubbornly deny and suppress them. war can be good, war can be bad. it's hard, if not impossible, to know for sure ahead of time. human life is precious, but our individual lives are ultimately that which we must preserve. if others choose to respect our right to life, good for everybody. if they don't, they should be kept from denying us our right to life at all costs. including their deaths. including the deaths of their family, friends, city, province, nation, race. death ruins everything. as a society, we have an obbligation to work together to protect each other's life. that's the purpose of society - not the betterment of mankind. society allows for the betterment of mankind, but that is neither its scope nor its backbone. does any of this make any sense?

You're such a god damned idiot it astounds me. Why dont you go play pirate some more and leave the adult topics to the people who arent blinded by bigotry.

$10 says Iron's Rite warns you before I leave the office for lunch today.

The thing is I can almost agree with him on principle-- religious wars-- but not in the capacity of one against one as he sees it. It would probably involve dozens of religions.

Religion breeds animosity.

Noone is getting warned as long as people can ignore the side taunts. If it comes down to mindless bickering I will shut down the thread and that will be that

Some people seem to punctuate thier argument with taunts. You can ignore it or play into it and destroy the argument

The environment is deemed to be that in which the species exists it does not mean the idea of a "natural environment" in other words if our environment becomes one room and a computer we will evolve to best pass on our genes within that enviroment.

I challenge you find me a dominate gentic disorder that is passed on that is a detroment to the evolution process (remember it must effect the individual in such away that the indivdual is incapable of repoduction/rerearing offspring). Dont forget if you do find one it probably is undergoing the selection process as we speak. time - mutuation - reproduction - enivromental change

[quote=theburningbush;1565690]The environment is deemed to be that in which the species exists it does not mean the idea of a "natural environment" in other words if our environment becomes one room and a computer we will evolve to best pass on our genes within that enviroment[/endquote]

Sure that would be true. But the thing about it isnt that its a man made enviromnent, its that it can be manipulated by that person to an extent that animals cant. That room with that one computer and one chair, should it stay like that without changing directly and consciously due to the person in it it would apply. But people can go in and out of that room, they can tear it down and make a park or whatever. Social darwinism doesnt directly apply is all i'm trying to get at here.
Try reading it again with that perspective b/c replying futher i feel i'd just be repeating myself.

And i really hope you aren't asking me to find a dominant genetic disorder in humans that if it were a non man manipulated environment that they would die in? The reason i used dominant vs recessive is that well dominant is always shown and most of those diseases self select themselves out in a natural setting. They dont survive as well, they die and dont pass on a gene that codes for an harmful abnormality. Recessive ones are trickier to get out of a population as they are less frequent in phenotype (expression) and therefore can be passed down.

So knowing this, do you still ask what disorders humans perpetuate that would have been killed off if we did not have the capability to manipulate even our present environment of a chair an