Open Thread – Weekend 21 Aug 2021
2,650 responses to “Open Thread – Weekend 21 Aug 2021”
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Take the electricity and food away, and your average punters will be killing each other in the street with mallets inside 36 hours
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Hurricane Katrina, the Superdome:Inside the Superdome, things were descending further into hell. The air smelled toxic. People had broken up into factions by race, separating into small groups throughout the building that the National Guard struggled to control. A few of these groups wandered the concourse, stealing food and attacking anyone who stood up to them.
The tiny jail cell down in the bowels of the Dome, which they kept for game-day security, was filling up. A man had been caught sexually assaulting a young girl. Reports of other rapes were widespread. Three people died in the Superdome; one apparently jumped off a 50-foot high walkway.
Supplies were running low, and as the National Guard began to ration things like water and diapers the crowd grew incensed and accused them of hoarding goods for their own use.
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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.
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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.
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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. -
Knuckle Draggersays:
August 28, 2021 at 12:29 am
The known history of human evolution points to ever increasing co-operation and a decline in violence on a per capita basis.I put that down to affluence. Nothing more. Humans are violent bastards. They have to be, in order to survive, and they will do anything to remove another food drain because if you’re hungry enough yu’ll do anything.
Take the electricity and food away, and your average punters will be killing each other in the street with mallets inside 36 hours.
During times of crisis the average punter will help put the pieces back together, there are a few who go berserk. There are examples of people being evil, there are many more examples of people choosing other ways to solve problems. I’ve read Milgram and Zimbardo, and I’ve also read how dodgy and suspect those social experiments were. 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.
Instead of good and evil, think of cost and benefit. In times of crisis violence is a short term solution adopted by some. The long term solution is co-operation, which requires delayed gratification. 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.
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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #207
Carl Benjamin , Lotus Eater , Jonathan Wong and Vicki CartnerPublished 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.
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Neil Thomas On His Book “Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design”
The Eric Metaxas Radio Show Published August 27, 2021
Rumble — From England, Neil Thomas, part of the Discovery Institute, looks into one of the sacred cows of atheists with his book, “Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design.”
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How I reconcile evolutionary theory and my believe in God as Creator | John Lennox
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cLFSzx7vsk
Aug 27, 2021
The Veritas Forum -
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.
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The irony of our search for super intelligence | John Lennox
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6lg25S-pzs
Aug 27, 2021
The Veritas Forum [shorts] -
Is artificial intelligence predicted in the Bible? | John Lennox
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkHv0SnGvM
Aug 27, 2021
The Veritas Forum [shorts] -
How can I be a scientist and a Christian? | John Lennox
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_FLodCu-EA
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] -
Where Christianity is utterly unique | John Lennox
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEUSQ8bEXdE
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] -
If you take the reductionist, materialist, atheistic view, you have a huge problem | John Lennox
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKuF_d2zLOQ
Aug 26, 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The latrine flushed early .. again .. LOL!
https://www.msn.com/en-au/sport/rugby-league/nrl-match-review-throws-book-at-latrell/ar-AANPkKz?li=AAgfYrC
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