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The argument is that men are hard wired to create a splash, not to kill. Murder creates a huge splash, but you can do it in other ways such as saving lives, get
by username90 7y ago
The argument is that men are hard wired to create a splash, not to kill. Murder creates a huge splash, but you can do it in other ways such as saving lives, getting rich, becoming a leader, mastering a craft or furthering human knowledge.
- watwut 7y agoThe article is about extremists, not about mass shooters. Most of them wont murder, they do day to day organizing work for few murderers.
- marvin 7y agoBut even so, hard though it is to admit for us children of peace-time, being an accomplished killer of «the enemy» is a high-status achievement in itself, in time of war. Enough so that it’s easy to imagine an evolutionary tendency that can be triggered under extreme distress. You just have to go back to WWII (if that!) to find obvious examples of this. Killers such as Richard Winters and Ronald Speirs are celebrated in history and fiction even today, 70 years later. And convicted (male) mass-murderers have a tendency to receive an unexpected amount of attention from certain women, so even from that perspective this seems like an understandable evolutionary adaption. Certainly not morally defensible, but nature doesn’t give a shit. It’s horrifying, but not incomprehensible.
- watwut 7y agoWhat does that have to do with ordinary extremist that is cog in a machine, does no splash whatsoever and have no status whatsoever? And yes, in societies that reward cruelty and killing, cruelty will be high and so will killings. Convicted male mass-murderers and soldiers are not really comparable. Convicted male mass murderers were not all that succesfull in having and keeping girlfriends until caught and locked. Just about only having a lot of children were the ones that run cult too.
- Kaiyou 7y agoIt's two pressures meeting at an equilibrium of ordinary extremist. The evolutionary pressure to accomplish something and the social pressure to not break any laws.
- watwut 7y agoWut? What social pressure to not break laws when we are talking about terrorists? They are under social pressure to break laws, especially when otherwise isolated from non-terrorist social contact. Especially war killers you mention tend to typically be in group that reward killing and peer pressure each other into it.
- Kaiyou 7y agoSorry, I thaught we were talking about shitposters on 8chan.
- username90 7y agoThey still point to things like 9/11 and say "I made that happen!".