Tons of flaws in your arguments Batfink!
Originally posted by B@tfinkV
any ownership whatsoever causes many of the human sins.
No. Inanimate objects have no power over people's minds.
we should have developed our minds past violence before we even started developing weapons to steal other peoples cows.
No. If we waited for even the majority (nevermind 90-99%) of the world population to learn better than to be violent, we'd never have progress like we've had, nevermind what we're capable of. We'd have had WWII carry on beyond Aug. '45, we'd never have had electricity because serial killers somewhere out there were likely to drop toasters into people's bathtubs.. We'd not be learning how dangerous applications of useful things worked so as to prevent the dangerous applications, e.g. bio/chemical warfare, nanomanufacturing, IT security, cryptography.
Comatose peace - You said:
"if we cut everything completely so that all we could do was eat, sleep, reproduce and run around to get our blood pumping then there would be no more war."
Which is throwing the baby with the bath water. If your goal is to absolutely remove the risk of war, then you are better off putting everyone to sleep than leaving something as risky as "reproduction". That's still a significant cause of violence today,
technology or not.
you misunderstand. [...] i said limit to those four completely. not limit your surroundings.
See above.
one little kid gets the new power action figure for chrstmas but another doesnt and this makes him sad [...]
No, he gets sad on his own. The power action figure doesn't zap his brains into feeling sad.
angry, dishonest, vengefull or another emotion. it works the same when one nation all have acres of fertile land to share and plenty of wealth and luxury and another nation has much less.
No.. I want a whole planet to myself, with a full blown top of the line lab to experiment with, and all the tools that ever existed for me to build stuff with (e.g. warbirds).. It's completely unrealistic, all things considered, but that doesn't mean I suddenly "feel" anger and vengefulness for this un-satisfaction of my wants or needs. I don't go on a murderous rampage to steal the keys to the space shuttle for a joyride to the stars...
Since you like stories.. My dad was born in a stone house in the middle of nowhere, Venezuela's countryside, near the mountains. Podunk. The wealthiest thing about his family was his dad being the head of the local militia.
What did my dad do, stuck in poverty like that? Did he get all pissy that elsewhere kids his age were swimming in cash? No.. He scored high enough to get a scholarship to Europe, worked his bellybutton off for a bunch of diplomas in electronics and physics, and scored himself a job that's led him from being a brown-skin nobody in a french company full of racist bastards, to being one of the pillars of the american division of a company that's the best of its field worldwide (save for one or two extremely high end, very low output competitors)...
His capitalizing on opportunity means I and my brothers can stand on his shoulders and reach even higher.
every single person who spends a day emitting a happy persona cannot fail to grind into the skull of at least one very unhappy person.
Yeah, if "happiness" makes sense, people will buy it.
every person who enjoys owning something openly makes an equal emotion of jealousy in at least one person at some point.
No.. Did you forget what you wrote in the preceding sentence? How do you resolve someone who emits happiness at his ownership? How do you explain people visiting exhibitions like car shows and museums, or air races? Do you really think those kids that come back from seeing all that are poisoned with envy rather than inspired?
what have we really accomplished apart from making our own lives longer and more painfull in many cases.
Gee I dunno... This is taking too long so I'm just gonna rip a list off somewhere else, you can pick and choose what you think was a catastrophic development for humanity... :
1. Electrification
2. Automobile
3. Airplane
4. Water Supply and Distribution
5. Electronics
6. Radio and Television
7. Agricultural Mechanization
8. Computers
9. Telephone
10. Air Conditioning and Refrigeration
11. Highways
12. Spacecraft
13. Internet
14. Imaging
15. Household Appliances
16. Health Technologies
17. Petroleum and Petrochemical Technologies
18. Laser and Fiber Optics
19. Nuclear Technologies
20. High-performance Materials
And looking to the future, these were recently concluded to be the most important challenges we should overcome in the 21st century:
Make solar energy affordable
Provide energy from fusion
Develop carbon sequestration methods
Manage the nitrogen cycle
Provide access to clean water
Restore and improve urban infrastructure
Advance health informatics
Engineer better medicines
Reverse-engineer the brain
Prevent nuclear terror
Secure cyberspace
Enhance virtual reality
Advance personalized learning
Engineer the tools for scientific discovery
Do these make your skin curl too? The best way to get what you want is to work for it. The best way to make something work is to apply maximum force towards it and/or in a most efficient manner. Efficiency is a matter of engineering (i.e. wit), and that "brute force" can in most cases be manpower.
What am I on about? Given that everyone on the planet is human, there's some fundamental things everyone has in common, and those things which everyone commonly enjoys are things which everyone stands to benefit from working together on.
Living longer, better, and having more things to do and explore are indeed things worth striving for, and restricting ourselves to just eating, sleeping, reproducing and running around to get our blood pumping isn't going to get us those things. Nevermind the fact that doing those things or not isn't what causes war.
