-- 'cause the mullahs are such lovely peaceful people, always so cooperative...
]]>-- yup, pretty much. Ask a Pole about it.
]]>-- dang, Radio Moscow on repeat...8-).
]]>-- true, you don't need to be a sociopath to kill, though sociopathy does make it much harder to condition you -not- to kill.
Forensic archaeology indicates that like most social predators, intraspecific violence was a major cause of death for humans at pre-State levels of social organization. That's remarkably consistent. The default state for human beings is to kill easily and on little provocation as long as the target is outside their in-group and they feel it's safe.
Sociopaths, of course, don't -have- an in-group, since that's their distinguishing characteristic.
"So in the long run, stress is likely to lead to depression in some."
-- in some, to be sure. Depends how stressful the individual find violence as such.
Plenty of people find -danger- exhilarating. Whole industries are based on that -- surfing, rock-climbing, skydiving. Arguably a lot of professional soldiers who seek out spec-ops jobs are too.
The major adaptive advantage of sociopathy would seem to be the ability to "change face" very rapidly.
The father of a friend of mine was, I'm convinced, a sociopath. I've read the report which lead to him getting a medal in Korea; it involved creeping up to and rolling into a Chinese-held trench while the rest of his unit staged a diversion.
He then went down the trench (it was quite dark)with a sharpened entrenching tool and killed between fifteen and twenty men in less than five minutes. Just went down the trench killing at every second stride.
That's not why I think he was sociopathic; it's the reason he gave for always volunteering for stuff like that: "I was bored."
Also the fact that he tossed a CPO who rated him about his uniform overboard on the way back. Didn't say anything, just looked around to see if he was under observation, grabbed the man and tossed him over the rail. Someone on a lower deck happened to see him falling, and gave an alarm. When the man was pulled out of the water he calmly denied having anything to do with it.
]]>-- well, sure, but the reference was to violence in general.
]]>BTW, why should violence cause depression? Not in my experience. It's -frightening- and unpleasant, but not particularly depressing.
]]>Smart sociopaths have very good impulse control and are good at long-term planning; that's why they survive, and in fact often achieve positions of power and wealth.
If they didn't, the genes for sociopathy wouldn't have achieved a stable equilibrium in the human population, which apparently they have.
]]>Two reasons:
a) there's no way to tell how many -other- 9/11 style suicide-hijackings there would have been without the locked, strengthened doors.
It's inherently impossible to quantify that, but we do know they kept trying.
Eg., the "flaming scrotum" or "great balls of fire" underwear bomber. They're not very bright, but they're persistent.
b) people quite rightly make a sharp distinction between accidental harms and deliberate ones, particularly if they're done with a collective/political intent rather than a criminal one.
Accidental harms... well, we're all going to die someday. You take reasonable precautions and hope for the best. It's impossible to guard against every chance, and sort of discreditable to get bent out of shape over astronomically small chances.
But when someone attacks you for a collective/political purpose, they're doing more than mere harm. They're attempting domination, conquest, rule in one way or another -- they're trying to -force you to do something-.
That is quite properly another kettle of fish altogether and a different calculus applies.
]]>For starters, it assumes that there is a possible state of affairs -without- privilege.
That is, without privilege (some people being advantaged over other people in one way or another) as a general concept, rather than some particular form of privilege enjoyed by some specific people in a unique time and place.
My own take is that this hardy hubristic perennial is roughly equivalent to a belief that everyone could obey the Golden Rule if they only tried really hard (or we made them do it). Or that you can fly to the Moon by putting your head between your knees and spitting really hard, and if it doesn't work you're just not spitting hard enough.
You can modify or eliminate -specific- privileges which reside in -specific- people, but you can no more get rid of the general phenomenon among human beings (or the closely associated phenomenon of hierarchy) than you can outrun your own sweat. Chase it out the door and it'll climb back through the window; meet the new boss... This has been exhaustively demonstrated by experiment.
You'd think, after the events of the last couple of centuries -- cut off Louis' head, get the Terror and Napoleon, kill the Czar, get the commissar, expel the Kaiser, get Adolph, dethrone the Son of Heaven, get the Great Leap, abolish hereditary status and get a competitive meritocracy, which of course inevitably means rule by hyper-ambitious psychopaths -- that a degree of modesty would be in order, some caution, less assumption that one possesses a hegemonic meta-narrative.
But you always get people who assure you that -this time- it'll be different, because this time they have the handy dandy magic decoder ring which -explains everything- and it'll all go as planned.
Rejoice, for the Law of Unintended Consequences has been repealed...
]]>One literate New England farmwife of the 1820's whose diary I read made a habit of calculating how many -thousand- miles she'd walked with a yoke over her shoulders and 90 lbs of milk or water in the buckets on the ends of it.
]]>Up until the Early Modern period, there was huge cultural/political/social variation across time and space, but it operated within certain fixed constraints.
Eg., most people had to be poor, and had to spend their lives producing food and handicrafts. Politics was essentially about the control of land and the people who worked it. This was as true in Tokugawa Japan as in Plantagenet England.
The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions are swords across the history of humankind. They drastically change the outer parameters of what's possible. Eventually, they may even change human nature, the most fundamental of fundamentals -- which previously "didn't have a history", but in the future, may.
I think both were also very low-probability accidents, the products of extremely specific political/economic/geographic/cultural/religious/philosophical circumstances, which if you rewound and started over again would be extremely unlikely to occur again.
(This is my beef with "Years of Rice and Salt").
]]>It's my experience here in the US that many conservatives and libertarians in SF have a more accurate view of people to their left, and are more tolerant of them, than is typically true vice versa.
There's nobody so arrogantly tribal-parochial as your Yupper West Side/Bay Area type, who tend to be not only ignorant but misinformed about people outside their social reference group. (With some exceptions, of course.)
I don't have a dog in that fight -- I don't fit on the American political spectrum at all. Eg., I'm a monarchist, am pro gay marriage, and am what might be described as a howling-mad veins-in-my-teeth imperialist hyena on foreign affairs.
]]>I really don't think so.
I've been writing time travel since the 1990's, lo these 20 years or so, and my protagonists were always about equally split.
]]>-- as opposed to, say, the Trotskyite labor activist Eric Flint? He really is an unrepentant old-fashioned Trotskyite, you know. And he spent years and years doing labor union work.
The "1634" series is -saturated- with Marxism -- it's a Trot wet-dream, in some respects.
Doesn't stop me enjoying it. 'twould be a dull world if everyone saw through my eyes.
Incidentally, Jim Bane essentially canned -me- for being too lefty on cultural issues (the gay black protagonist of a certain novel really got his goat) and then brought Eric on board. Who he knew to be an outright Red.
It's wise to avoid stereotyping people.
]]>