I don't remember the title, but I read a book that had that exact theme. England had an island where they put the worst of the worst offenders. As you would expect there was two camps and the ongoing power struggle between them. I didn't pick up that anything about that island was enjoyable.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
It would help if you were a little more direct in your communication. I had no idea who that lady was. I had to click "REPLY WITH QUOTE" and parse the URL to discover that she is a character in a movie I never saw.
It's a permanent ban - I don't believe it shows up on the traditional ban list, could be wrong though. As for freedom of speech, an interesting part of our freedoms and our legal system: Once you infringe on the rights of others, you forfeit your own (hence, prison and other penal-system punishments). This is no different - he made many other people feel unwelcome or unwanted through his actions - it's a simple case of the rights of the many outweighing the rights of the one. He was given multiple chances to shape up - instead, he chose to turn his first (rather minor in the grand scheme of things) slap on the wrist into a "oh me oh my I'm a victim" ploy and take every chance he could to thumb his nose at the administration, skirt the rules, and generally be a degenerate. I'm sorry but after a while, enough is simply enough. I reckon he would be rather proud though... he went out with a bang for sure.
Mod Note I understand a lot of people have questions and wish to discuss Gustav's permanent ban. If you feel the need to do so, please take it to the appropriate forum. I contemplated moving the posts made here to a separate thread in the appropriate forum, however many involved in this discussion also discussed the thread topic in the same posts as the ones they were discussing Gustav's ban, which would leave the thread disjointed. Having said that, any further commentary on that ban will be struck from this discussion. Thank you.
No I have not. Didn't hear of it till now. And I see this as a Sci-FI movie. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stepford_Wives_(2004_film) I would suggest this is a little off topic and to post this "stuff" in the movie thread. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
The biggest failure on OBL's part is not caring enough that the last futile refuge of the failure is violence, not unlike how Fraggle was talking about thrashing-out types of suicide. Suicide bombers are one of those. But, though such types are sociopathic, they could be reacting to injury with a feeling that they lack ability to compete according to the going set of rules. They decide that in a contest to beat the other guy, why let rules other people made prevent them from winning? This is why I say it is unethical to want to compete against anyone in the first place so that they haven't grounds for justification. If the guy on the other end feels disadvantaged unjustly, he might decide to disregard rules he sees as unfairly advantageous to the competitor, maybe even in a last-ditch act of desperation. I am reminded of Robin Hood, though that was an ongoing struggle he was involved in. I wonder how far removed the conscientious person is from the sociopath. I'm consciously not using the term psychopath right now. Sometimes this thing just goes ahead and decides to post on its own while I'm still typing.
Absolutely. History is littered with evil people. Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Dahmer and the like. You might even have one for a neighbor. For that matter, you might be conversing with one right here in this forum. I am not sure. It probably is complicated. I doubt very much that it worries them. Evil people are predators. They should emulate Hitler and commit suicide
One of the paradoxes of this question is that there can be a manifestation of evil in the search for it in other people. As a corollary, if each us were perfect, we would be continually seeking to root out every vestige of evil within ourselves, holding it in check, and realizing that this is the only practical way to diminish the sum of all evil in the world. The worst example of the search for evil in others is the witch hunt, the mob lynching scene, or genocide.
No, although like most Americans I'm familiar with the story. "Stepford" has made its way into American English as a prefix or adjective meaning conforming, submissive, robot-like, as a "Stepford employee," or bland, as a "Stepford community." Even if I had seen it, I would not recognize a movie poster from forty years ago. And I'm an American. We have quite a few non-Americans on this forum who probably have no idea what we're talking about. It's always wise to keep that in mind. One standard definition of "terrorism" is: "the use of violence of military or paramilitary scope against civilian targets, in an attempt to extort a civilizan population to lobby its government to adopt a policy so abhorrent that it could never be convinced to adopt it by other means." Terrorism rarely works, but the one instance in which it did work was the U.S. government using nuclear weapons against Japanese civilians in WWII, breaking their resolve to keep fighting until the last six-year-old girl was gunned down by a batallion of Marines while charging them with her dead daddy's samurai sword. (Yes I know some of you don't agree with this analysis of history, but how do the terrorists see it?) Every terrorist on earth since WWII has been encouraged by our success. Because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they do not believe that violence is a futile refuge. But, especially in the case of OBL, the religious aspect cannot be ignored. This new crowd of terrorists is killing "infidels," after all. Regardless of the second-order effects of those deaths on the rest of the civilian population, these religious warriors believe that these deaths alone are admirable successes: reducing the number of people on earth who disagree with them and spread our poisonous doctrines of tolerance, secularity and women's rights across the entire planet. Again, they do not see their efforts as futile. Every dead American (or American stooge) is one step closer to their ideal world. Indeed. As I have proposed, the fundamental rule that underlies all civilization is: You may never kill another human being unless he broke the rule first by attacking you. Therefore, sociopathy can be redefined as "opting out of civilization." I have pointed out that sociopaths harken back to the Paleolithic Era, when people distrusted anyone outside their own extended-family unit because in a lean year there wasn't enough food to go around. Today sociopaths even wreak violence on their own family, but we have to admit that for an adult in today's society, family ties aren't quite as strong, or as vital to survival, as they were 12,000 years ago. I supppose it depends on what kind of "competition" you're talking about. Sports, for example, can be seen as a sub-lethal outlet for our Stone Age instinct to wreak violence on other tribes or "teams" as they're now called. Competing for a prize in poetry or photography enriches civilization. Even entrepreneurs competing with each other for a contract to build a shopping center do so by finding new, better ways of doing things we've always been doing. We have the competitive instinct. Why not channel it for good? As I've often pointed out, our uniquely enormous forebrain gives us the unique ability to override instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior. Often this comes down to merely re-channeling our instincts in positive ways. I think that's a gap that cannot be breached under ordinary circumstances. A sociopath, whether by an unusual combination of genetic programming, by deficient parenting, or by overbearing trauma, does not have the re-programmed instinct for civilization that we all have. This is what keeps us from becoming sociopaths, even under the worst circumstances. As I say, it would take an unspeakable trauma, such as watching your entire family being murdered by terrorists. That is how far removed the conscientious person is from the sociopath. And even then, most people survive with their civilized instincts intact, although they may be psychologically damaged in other ways. Just look at the murder trials after which the loved ones of the victim speak out against capital punishment for the murderer. They realize that killing him after the deed is done will have no positive impact on civilization, and instead will simply burden his loved ones with the same pain they now feel. Now these are the ultimate civilized people! One of the ways we keep our evil nature from taking control is by not suppressing it. If we do that, it festers and grows larger, angrier and stronger, until one day it bursts out at the worst possible moment, like when we're under stress. So listen to gangsta rap. Watch those movies in which self-appointed commandos destroy entire villages in Afghanistan in order to wipe out the Taliban. Cheer for the "wrestlers" who hit each other over the head with furniture. Break something if you're angry--preferably not your wife's good china. Yell at your dog--but please don't hit him. (This is one of the wonderful things about dogs: they love the attention. To them, it's all just barking!) Give that part of yourself an outlet so it doesn't become too frustrated. Depends on how you feel about the people you leave behind. Suicide will invalidate your life insurance policy, leaving your wife with no breadwinner and no payout.
I have no idea if you have been on the verge of suicide, nor do I know how you think. I can only tell you about me, and when I was at my lowest, my very lowest, I didn't really think about other people when it came time to die. I will say once I hit a certain point of clarity and I truly could see the image of my children crying beside my casket, I didn't want to kill myself anymore.
Indeed, barbaric war. Hopefully more than offset by the reality of the repulsive nature of the act causing general lost support. Nukes became pretty discredited, maybe as kind of a proxy. Being religious fanatics makes their judgment questionable. I guess I view taking of life by degrees something to be done away with and not just quick killing. i hope humans get smart enough to compete against the harmful things out there that we can face together, like diseases and asteroids that threaten us. I have determined that competing against past accomplishments can be a replacement for competing against other people. Also, attitude can be adjusted by focusing on the self-performance rather than the intention of depriving someone of something. I too think that was pushing things a bit. Yet, I see a lot of disadvantaged people aspiring to do things well and make it in life eventually snapping and committing the thrashing-out types of suicide or even more ill-advisedly going on a suicidal shooting spree. i think they are generally mutually exclusive characteristics yet the former might change to the latter. That sounds right, though they might withdraw from society and that could be a type of sociopathy. They do well, indeed! I'm not sure about this. I think learning to be nice from an early age can lessen the drive to experience aggression either actively or by watching a film. I have the impression that practitioners of reformed Judaism are relatively nice, and as children they were trained to be nice. Fighting against our poorly performing selves, and leaving others as unharmed as possible, physically and psychologically, is an outlet for that aggression, I think.
Untrue statement. Disregard this line. Not all soldiers have killed. And All soldiers are supposed to only shoot if shot at, or if there life is threatened. If they take a life mostly 90 something percent of time its because if they don't they will lose there's or risk a "friend" dying. If they break laws and rules established by military like a unlawful killing, rape, or what not there are consequences. Soldiers are not serial killers. This untrue statement does not belong here, maybe in its own thread.
Are you kidding? Soldiers are given rules of engagement and these generally include killing people who will not comply with their demands. Killing is their job; a soldier who kills as efficiently as possible, and kills a lot of enemies, does indeed face consequences - he is given medals and promoted.
Sorry, I did not mean reviewing the decision to commit suicide and possibly changing your mind. I was referring to the "plan" you referred to: How you're going to do it so as to minimize the second-order effects. You may accept the fact that your wife will be heartbroken, but that doesn't mean you also want her to be destitute. You must be a soldier. To the rest of us, when we see two giant groups of soldiers facing each other with hatred and shooting each other, they look exactly like serial killers. They have lost all connection to civilization and are behaving exactly like cavemen. You can't pull the trick of invoking my own Fundamental Rule of Civilization, that a person may only kill when someone else broke the rule first and is trying to kill him. When you have two groups of people trying to kill each other, it's not possible that in both cases they're justified because "the other guys tried to kill us first." No sir, they both broke the rule. War is not civilized. Perhaps they forgot to mention that in your military brainwashing.
Not caring about others and not wanting to leave your family destitute is why many suicides are made to look like traffic accidents, where other get killed also. It's always hard to say why a head on crash happens.
