@chenobble

Riposte Alert, Sound the Klaxons!

"There are a number of countries with no standing armies."

A quick perusal of the Wikipedia list of countries without armed forces (admittedly hardly a fantastic source) reveals that the only countries without a defence force are a smattering of islands largely the responsibility of the United States, Andorra, which is protected by the French and the Spanish because it's full of French and Spanish people, and Liechtenstein, which has so few natural resources that the reason they don't have an army is because they can't afford one, making them not a great candidate for invasion.

"The idea of world peace may be a pipe dream right now but the point is, rather obviously, that campaigning for world peace helps reduce the likelihood of world war. It was the constant anti-war campaigning, for example, that helped end the Vietnam conflict."

Politicians shat themselves the first time people started protesting against Vietnam, because it had never happened before. Now the politicians have learned that, for all our shouting and screaming, we generally do bugger-all when it comes to actually getting rid of them. They are well aware of this, which is why records were smashed and then smashed again in the numbers involved in the protests against our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet we're still there. Personally I didn't protest against the war, because frankly I didn't care, but millions of people did and the government roundly ignored them. Don't even get me started on the hundreds if not thousands of minority groups with guns and bombs that definitely don't give a toss about protests.

"Cynical, defeatist attitudes just make you a pathetic doormat for the next self-serving politician. I'd rather be an idealist than a doormat."

Then you are going to have your ideals jumped up and down on by everyone, at every turn, forever. The entire point of my post was that I am jealous of people who are still young enough not to have learned that your ideals do not matter, and still think they, personally, can change the world for the better.

"And the idea that the human race owes it's dominance to warfare is a ridiculous over-simplification. It owes it's dominance to tool use and the increased brain power that came with it."

Tools like rocks, spears, crossbows, trebuchets, flintlocks, muskets, cannons, machine guns, howitzers, tanks and tactical smart bombs? You are right, the human race does owe it's dominance to tool use, but a large amount of that tool use is, was and always will be for killing things. We're good at it, it's what we do, and it's the reason why the human race, while not particularly 'built' for being a dominant species, have managed to get there and stay there - because we will take our tools and we will use them to kill anything that threatens that dominance. The downside is we also use them on each other at a phenomenal rate.

"After that humans are probably best served by their ability to trade - you know, the thing that you can only really do successfully in peacetime."

My point was not that there will always be conflict between everyone - in fact I specifically said there wasn't - but the fact remains that if you think there is a way of making everyone on the planet happy enough for there to never, ever, be another war, you are deluded, because there's plenty of people out there who's ideals clash horribly with one another (fundamentalist Islam and revisionist Zionism for one, I'll let you think of some others).

"I fucking hate the 'ooo look at me I'm so wise and cynical' attitude that seems to pervade the western world. I bet your attitude would chance somewhat were you to be caught up in a real war."

I'm not saying war's great, I'm saying that it's inevitable. If one erupted outside it would just prove my point. Churlish teenager? No, even if I was apparently compared with Limp Bizkit. Depressed? I'm too busy to be depressed about it, same as I'm too busy to think I can change the world.

Melancholy, because I remember when I wasn't, and life for me was also wine, women and song? That'd be about right.
( Shegetz Chris Kamara's comedy moustache, Mon 30 Jun 2008, 13:28, Reply)