[2011-Jul-13] I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Blame Quintushalls for this.

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NumberFourtyThree
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Re: (7-13-11) I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Post by NumberFourtyThree »

I wasn't disagreeing that poverty is a major cause of violence, I was just saying it isn't the only cause of violence. Eliminating poverty would greatly reduce violence but wouldn't eliminate it entirely. As for hunter gatherer societies, warfare in them would often result in entire tribes being wiped out. As for non-warfare related violence, there don't really exist any reliable studies or good data about that, as it is difficult when those societies contain so few people and they aren't in regular contact with authorities that keep statistics.

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Re: (7-13-11) I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Post by gavin »

NumberFourtyThree wrote: As for hunter gatherer societies, warfare in them would often result in entire tribes being wiped out. As for non-warfare related violence, there don't really exist any reliable studies or good data about that, as it is difficult when those societies contain so few people and they aren't in regular contact with authorities that keep statistics.
Uh... where do you get that? I'm familiar with some middle eastern tribes that were killed off but there are huge numbers of hunter gatherer societies who glorified war and yet never got wiped out. Take Native Americans for example, their battles were carried out with minimal casualties (usually). It was more a thing of honor and some of their bravest warriors would go into battle with little more than a coup stick. It wasn't until they fought with the white invaders that the notion of wiping the enemy out came into play.

To say their wars often resulted in their tribe being wiped out is false.
;-)

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Re: (7-13-11) I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Post by DonRetrasado »

NumberFourtyThree wrote:Eliminating poverty would greatly reduce violence but wouldn't eliminate it entirely.
This kind of begs the question "how do you eliminate poverty?"
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NumberFourtyThree
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Re: (7-13-11) I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Post by NumberFourtyThree »

gavin wrote:
NumberFourtyThree wrote: As for hunter gatherer societies, warfare in them would often result in entire tribes being wiped out. As for non-warfare related violence, there don't really exist any reliable studies or good data about that, as it is difficult when those societies contain so few people and they aren't in regular contact with authorities that keep statistics.
Uh... where do you get that? I'm familiar with some middle eastern tribes that were killed off but there are huge numbers of hunter gatherer societies who glorified war and yet never got wiped out. Take Native Americans for example, their battles were carried out with minimal casualties (usually). It was more a thing of honor and some of their bravest warriors would go into battle with little more than a coup stick. It wasn't until they fought with the white invaders that the notion of wiping the enemy out came into play.

To say their wars often resulted in their tribe being wiped out is false.
There were fights that were mostly ritualistic with few casualties like you describe in some tribal societies, but there were in other cases real wars with extermination of some other tribe as the goal and sometimes result. I looked up a number of different articles on such subjects recently, but I haven't been saving the links and some of what I read disagreed with other sources on many points. In any case, you can find an example of one such battle here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hingakaka with unusual detail on the matter since it happened shortly after Europeans made contact with natives of New Zealand (though Europeans weren't directly involved, to the point the year of the battle is uncertain). In any case large scale warfare could only occur once sufficient population density was achieved, but there was small scale violence much earlier, as many prehistoric remains were obviously killed with a weapon.
DonRetrasado wrote:
NumberFourtyThree wrote:Eliminating poverty would greatly reduce violence but wouldn't eliminate it entirely.
This kind of begs the question "how do you eliminate poverty?"
That was addressed in the comic, as we simply need to have Superman provide the world with free energy and progress on that front will be greatly accelerated.

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Re: (7-13-11) I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Post by Kaharz »

DonRetrasado wrote:This kind of begs the question "how do you eliminate poverty?"
Unlimited resources. So we would basically need a Star Trek like set up. Freely available direct energy to complex matter conversion and effectively unlimited energy production. This is also why in Star Trek, earth can have what is effectively a functional communist system.
NumberFortyThree wrote:There were fights that were mostly ritualistic with few casualties like you describe in some tribal societies, but there were in other cases real wars with extermination of some other tribe as the goal and sometimes result. I looked up a number of different articles on such subjects recently, but I haven't been saving the links and some of what I read disagreed with other sources on many points. In any case, you can find an example of one such battle here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hingakaka with unusual detail on the matter since it happened shortly after Europeans made contact with natives of New Zealand (though Europeans weren't directly involved, to the point the year of the battle is uncertain). In any case large scale warfare could only occur once sufficient population density was achieved, but there was small scale violence much earlier, as many prehistoric remains were obviously killed with a weapon.
As far as the tribes being wiped out thing, the New Zealand tribes described in the linked article are all extant today. So they while there might have been huge causalities, the entire tribe was not exterminated. Extermination may have been the goal, but it was not the result. I wouldn't doubt that there are cases where entire tribes were exterminated, but any claims as to the frequency of occurrence of such grand acts of violence would be a shaky at best. The Maori are also regarded as very warrior centric society with a high degree of endemic warfare, so they are a rather extreme example. They also really can't be considered a hunter-gatherer society at the time of that conflict. They had permanent settlements, fortifications and fairly highly developed horticulture. The hunter-gatherer phase of Maori society was fairly brief due partially to the fact that they hunted all the large game to extinction.

There is some evidence of pre-historic warfare, but not much widespread evidence. It looks like there was not much large scale organized warfare until organized city-states came about with fairly permanent agrarian societies. It looks like most hunter-gatherer societies lived in areas with population densities to low for any kind of serious warfare to occur. A hunter-gatherer society would require a huge range to support a fairly small population, so it probably wouldn't work very well in a large hunter-gather society.
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Re: (7-13-11) I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Post by gavin »

NumberFourtyThree wrote:There were fights that were mostly ritualistic with few casualties like you describe in some tribal societies, but there were in other cases real wars with extermination of some other tribe as the goal and sometimes result. I looked up a number of different articles on such subjects recently, but I haven't been saving the links and some of what I read disagreed with other sources on many points. In any case, you can find an example of one such battle here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hingakaka with unusual detail on the matter since it happened shortly after Europeans made contact with natives of New Zealand (though Europeans weren't directly involved, to the point the year of the battle is uncertain). In any case large scale warfare could only occur once sufficient population density was achieved, but there was small scale violence much earlier, as many prehistoric remains were obviously killed with a weapon.
My disagreement was not that it did not ever happen, rather I presented tribal locations where it was known to happen from time to time. My contention was with the word "often". Tribal battles would often NOT result in the wiping out of an entire tribe. It did happen, but the wiped out tribe would have to have seriously messed something up.

That being said, I am primarily knowledgeable in Native American tribes and a number of Middle Eastern tribes (heavily focusing on Jewish and Muslim tribes). That is to say, I know almost nothing about islanders and several African tribes (Zulu excluded because they're awesome). I was taught that the absolute wiping out of a tribe was a rare event that could not possibly be categorized as the common outcome of a battle. Note that single battles often decided the winning side of their conflicts and so were most often the entire "war". As such, these miniature wars rarely warranted mention (especially since writing wasn't well preserved and oral tradition has to be important enough to remember, such as the wiping out a tribe). Any information to the contrary of this would be genuinely appreciated and could only serve to better educate me on this.
;-)

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Re: (7-13-11) I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Post by Smrt Man »

So basically you guys are saying we need to produce more hentai games featuring western characters. I think you're on to something.

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Re: (7-13-11) I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Post by smiley_cow »

Native Americans rarely actually wiped out entire tribes. There were usually survivors who just ended up getting absorbed into other tribes. A good example of this is the Huron and the Iroquois. History books often tell you the Iroquois wiped out the entire Huron nation, except for the fact that they're still around and have since reformed back into their own nation.

Not really entirely caught up on the debate, I just like talking about Canadian history when I get the chance.
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Re: (7-13-11) I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Post by gavin »

Touching on the comic for this day, I thought I'd say that the last bit with the thief keeping her mask warm with his face is one of the best bits I've seen for awhile.
;-)

NumberFourtyThree
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Re: (7-13-11) I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Post by NumberFourtyThree »

Also to bring up another issue, in the comics Superman didn't just save relatively small groups of people, on a number of occasion he prevented something from destroying the world entirely. He couldn't do that if society would collapse when he stopped cranking the generator.

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Eisbreaker
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Re: (7-13-11) I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Post by Eisbreaker »

With enough energy, they don't need superman's powers. They can laser that muthafukin asteroid headed for earth.
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NumberFourtyThree
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Re: (7-13-11) I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Post by NumberFourtyThree »

It's not just a matter of large threats coming from outer space. He has stopped villains on the Earths surface whose plans could have somehow destroyed the world, and even beings on other planets who threatened to unmake reality itself. In many cases a giant laser would not be able to substitute for his heroics.

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Re: (7-13-11) I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Post by Eisbreaker »

A large enough laser is always adequate substitute for heroics.
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Re: (7-13-11) I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Post by smiley_cow »

NumberFourtyThree wrote:It's not just a matter of large threats coming from outer space. He has stopped villains on the Earths surface whose plans could have somehow destroyed the world, and even beings on other planets who threatened to unmake reality itself. In many cases a giant laser would not be able to substitute for his heroics.
I'm pretty sure that it's already been pretty clearly established in this thread that if you got rid of poverty and energy needs there would be no more violence or crime, ergo, the only threat the world need actually worry about are ones from outer space.*

*I'm helping!
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Re: (7-13-11) I'm keeping it warm with my face!

Post by Gangler »

NumberFourtyThree wrote:Also to bring up another issue, in the comics Superman didn't just save relatively small groups of people, on a number of occasion he prevented something from destroying the world entirely. He couldn't do that if society would collapse when he stopped cranking the generator.
See, this has always been my biggest beef with Superman. He weakens the human race. We'd been getting along for how long without him and then he comes along and suddenly every time there's a threat to the world we need the kryptonian to deal with it. He breeds dependency.

You know what would have happened if Darkseid came along when there was no superman? We would have fought a war, stolen their tech, improved upon it, and then actually finished the job by bringing Darkseid's head on a pike to be displayed for the countrymen and earned ourselves a planet full of resources to harvest and cheap labor which would be easily accessible since we'd have mastered the boom tube tech.

The boom tubes would then be used in our intergalactic crusades as we conquered planet after planet, reverse engineering the power ring to create a variant of our own which would work from a more efficient fuel source than the emotional spectrum. Like perhaps the life force of our conquered races or something. Who knows? Take down the green lantern corp and rule the universe unopposed.

When Superman flies he binds man to the ground. I'm entirely in agreement with Luthor on that one. And yeah, if Superman was running the generator that might ease the process a little.
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