Take the electricity and food away, and your average punters will be killing each other in the street with mallets inside 36 hours

I think you’d find that most of them will wait for someone to tell them what to do and look for some authority to do the telling. If they don’t find anyone, they’ll starve to death. Meanwhile, Arky will be out with his mallet inside thirty six minutes.

It’s very distasteful, but I might have to start telling ppl what to do. First we’d establish some corp d’ esprit by lynching politicians. Then we’d offer our services to a farmer or two, food in exchange for protection.

It’s a well travelled route.

So after only a relatively minor year or so of petty tyranny, you’re already wanting to murder people and stand over some peasants.
That didn’t take long.

Sure. I never said I was a nice guy, just nicer than you. And I shan’t do it unless faced with starvation.

And I shan’t do it unless faced with starvation.

And I wouldn’t enjoy it. I hate telling ppl what to do nearly as much as I hate being told what to do.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #207
Carl Benjamin , Lotus Eater , Jonathan Wong and Vicki Cartner

Published 27th Aug at 01:00 pm

https://www.lotuseaters.com/the-podcast-of-the-lotus-eaters-207-27-08-21

Carl and Callum discuss the recent terror attack in Kabul, the descent of Afghanistan into chaos, and the profound weakness of the Biden government.

Isaiah 5:20
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

Mark Knight.

Christian Adams.

Andy Davey.

A.F. Branco.

Al Goodwyn.

Ben Garrison.

DrBeauGansays:
August 28, 2021 at 1:30 am
During times of crisis the average punter will help put the pieces back together, there are a few who go berserk.

It depends on the nature of the crisis.

Let us know your address, some of us might want to eat you. You’ll doubtless cooperate.

Please come. We’ll have whole place will be booby trapped and I’ll guarantee a slow painful death for anyone who dares cross the threshold. Co-operators are better at killing. You are confusing co-operation with passivity.

Arkysays:
August 28, 2021 at 1:31 am
John H.says:
August 28, 2021 at 1:26 am

..
Unicorn shit.

You’ve already proven you believe in fairy tales so no need to invoke more fairy tales. Obviously you are too stupid to understand how evolution works.

Is artificial intelligence predicted in the Bible? | John Lennox

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkHv0SnGvM

Aug 27, 2021
The Veritas Forum [shorts]

The world is bigger than natural science can reveal to us | John Lennox

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov5-kIdDWbA

Aug 27, 2021
The Veritas Forum [shorts]

Sure, God can exist. But is the Christian God the one who is the one true God? | John Lennox

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjz1vV67gEc

Aug 27, 2021
The Veritas Forum [shorts]

Well, this forum has really come into its own now. The discussion above was just like ole times. I found it most enjoyable, about what we know of human nature, the human mind and its evolution under the circumstances of small group survival. Obviously a range of pressures, some of them contradictory to each other in results, produced the complex mind/body mechanism that is the human species. And many would say that God intervened there somewhere too, introducing self-knowledge and a conscience; others might say that pressures just produced survival aggression, especially but not entirely in males, tempered by in-group sympathies and recognition, especially but not entirely in females, which evolutionists suggest explains our at times ‘inexplicable’ altruism putting group before self.

So groups of co-operators emerge. Groups of violent individuals also emerge but don’t tend to last because as a whole they lack delayed gratification and hence tend to tear the group apart. That in part explains the changes in the human brain over the last 2 million years because frontal lobe maturation is critical for delayed gratification, impulse control, and understanding other people. The smarter and productive people demonstrate better delayed gratification.

But the chimp brain still survives, because aggression can have survival value. As can empathy.

The ‘mouse’ experiments could be illustrative for us too. When there are too many in a confined space, then chaos and decline eventuates, even if food is plentiful. When food is not plentiful then only the strong elite survive. As Dr. BG says upthread, history is replete with the failure of stable wider cultures and the resultant rise in warlordism. It is the usual way of things. Read Gildas for his account of the rise of warlordism as Rome loosed its hold on Britain from the 4th century onwards.

I am not fond of ancient South American civilisations; mostly they showed how cultures living on an environmental precipice, where a storable food surplus resulted in many people, existing marginally. But as these places also suffered regular droughts and famines, the situation produced a bloodthirsty culture where elites used surplus population for extensive human sacrifice. The more pain in the sacrifice, all the better to appease the weather gods.

As someone said quite a way upthread, no wonder Christianity, which stopped these sacrifices, was a choice many readily accepted. It also tended to ‘civilise’ warlordism. See King Alfred for that. Note I said Alfred, not Arthur. Arthur in my thesis was the ancient god Odin, god of the European Iron Age, and also of warlord Vikings.

John H, overnight:

If you going to argue that all hell breaks loose when crises because of some inner demon within us, as if you subscribe to the Calvinist concept of original sin, you need to explain why so many do not fall prey to unbridled violence in times of chaos.

It’s not about original sin or inner demons. It is in our nature. To eat, to not be eaten, to make more of us (by fair means or foul) and not to die. That’s it.

We do not, as a general rule, capture and eat other people’s children to survive because we undoubtedly live in the most affluent period in human history.

As a species, we are the equivalent of coddled rich kids. When the slightest blip appears on our otherwise untrammelled existence of long life, comfort, shelter and food it becomes a monumental, Mount Everest of an issue that the people of only a couple of centuries ago wouldn’t have blinked at.

Stephen Meyer—Return of God Hypothesis: 3 Scientific Discoveries Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On-4lOWuWQQ

May 29, 2021
Skeptic
Beginning in the late 19th century, many intellectuals began to insist that scientific knowledge conflicts with traditional theistic belief — that science and belief in God are “at war.” Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer challenges this view by examining three scientific discoveries with decidedly theistic implications. Building on the case for the intelligent design of life that he developed in Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, Meyer claims that discoveries in cosmology and physics coupled with those in biology help to establish the identity of the designing intelligence behind life and the universe. Previously Meyer refrained from attempting to answer questions about “who” might have designed life. Now he provides an evidence-based answer to perhaps the ultimate mystery of the universe.

Shermer responds to each claim and a stimulating and enlightening conversation ensues.

Note: It is Dr. Shermer’s intention in his podcast to periodically talk to people with whom skeptics and scientists may disagree. In some episodes Dr. Shermer tries to “steel man” a position held by someone with differing views — that is, he says in his own words what he thinks the other person is arguing — but in this case the other person is in the conversation and can represent his own position clearly, which is what happens. As well, such conversations enable principles of skepticism to be employed in ways constructive to those who hold views not necessarily embraced by skeptics and scientists. Such principles should be embraced by all seekers of truth, and that is why we want to talk to people with whom we may disagree.

Megan, I too have had occasional thoughts about how the world might cope with a huge electronic pulse that puts out our digital civilisation. It doesn’t present a pretty picture, for many would die and violence would at first prevail, but as in the best dystopian novels small pockets of c0-operating people would come together under weapon-wielding warlords to rebuild again into new forms of wider civilisations based initially on tribal affiliations. That is what one might call the longue duree.

Egypt didn’t die after the Santorini blowout sent a tsunami crashing into Crete and the Egyptian Delta, but it had to suffer ten years of Akhenaten’s single sun-god appeasement before rising slowly again. And in 536AD a world-wide volcanic winter from an Indonesian volcanic major (one theory) changed a lot (Arthur the sun-god for instance is recorded in the Annales Cambrae as dying then), but it didn’t wipe out all human life and cultures.

Gotta go, dance class starting online now.

Lol, Top Ender, I think I must have scared them away. Too serious. Hope not. The conversation was flowing well before that and interesting.

Perhaps they all went searching for online exercise and dance classes. They won’t find ours though as we are a self-selected private paying group. Joining them in real time three mornings a week is a great way to exchange a few pleasantries and keep the sense of doing something together. Today the dance leader’s cat came ambling in and did a tummy presentation to her as cats are wont to do when they are happy and in the middle of their own living room. Attapuss did the same to me. A routine using some high kicks seems to have sent them both out, hitting the identical cat vibe.