You forgot swords and maces and lances, going back to spears and arrows of crude stone and stick... We can go back, way back before the artificial horizon you p

You forgot swords and maces and lances, going back to spears and arrows of crude stone and stick... We can go back, way back before the artificial horizon you place on it, and see that people have been killing - and in the most gruesome ways - since the beginning of humanity. If you really want to engage in a philosophical discussion, do include all the history. It has always been about protecting resources that are deemed important. At some point, someone wants what someone else has. I suppose we could maybe stop the horizon at explosives. Once it went from melee to ranged combat, things really changed. So, "who could make the bigger boom?" became the defacto leader. The problem is that nuclear weapons are as big as it gets, at the moment, with more and more organizations wishing they had them too. Being a strong arm in the weapons race is very important. But using them is atrocious. The destruction is beyond the pale. And it affects those that used to be meaningless: us, the commoners. Killing uninvolved people is a hard pill to swallow, so it is hard to be the one to pull that trigger. I hope to hell it never happens. And I worry, a tiny bit, about people with the stupidity to think that their beliefs "command them" to use them to prove a point.