In a lawless US, would people be cutting each others heads off?

I'm trying to figure this one out.

I'm reading all these stories about neighbor turning on neighbor in countries like Iraq. People literally being dragged out of their homes, into the street and having their limbs and head cut off. Horrific acts. Acts that I am finding hard to wrap my head around; assuming I even want to do that.

In a CNN story it says that " Iraqis turned on each other, neighbors slaughtered neighbors, friends betrayed one another. It was the sheer degradation of society on a shocking and utterly petrifying scale."

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/05/25/untold.stories.damon.iraq/index.html


So is this a universal human characteristic? In a similar social and political situation would Americans be killing each other on such wickedly grand scales? Or is there something specific to the cultural teachings of certain countries that ingrain a certain kind of violent behavior into its citizens?

We are a violent species...As much as I deplore violance, others do not...

Look at the eons of senseless wars, and violence over the ages..

I honestly believe that one day, we will end blowing whats left of the planet up.

violence.

what bullshit comment, we cant help it. we can more than help it.

we chose to be violent. it is simple as that. and the simplicity is we can chose not to be violent too. we all know that

You have it backward...

We choose to be CIVIL to one another..

EONS of human history prove me right.... our Relative peace, is a recent thing.

we dont have to be.

who cares if we chose to be violent or chose to be civil, ..... choice in and of itself tells us nothing is a have to be.

and no, i do not readily agree with you that the choice is civil.

regardless, ... you said we cant help it adn chosing to be civil alone states what bullshit that comment is.

false.

but cool to hear that you agree, we just cant help being violent as we chose to be civil

testosterone all to do with brain power and logic.

We choose to be civil just I choose to reply to you in a civil way.

That's why we have chippers.

Just seems that maybe preferred methods lie where they do.

When the laws and the law-enforcers fail... ANti-Flag and NoFx will have nothing on Los Gatos Locos Nothing like a good song about a serial killer... when you're Mad Maxing your way across town.

Without law, almost any society would devolve into chaos.

There would be a lot more gun violence in the US though.

uh, even more than we are already, I mean....

There are plenty of examples to back it up, even in this 'perfect' country. Take away food and other basic necessities and see what happens. To answer your question, Yes.

:rofl:

Most people are good.

Once oil prices rise to $7, $10 and $12 per gallon- no telling what Americans will do. Judging from the reactions to crime threads on this progressive site, it won't be pretty.

How do you think Australians would off each other once they lost law, creature comforts, electricity, gas, tv and football?

Boomerangs? Rabid Koalas? Attack Crocs? Vegemite? didgeridoo music blasted at lethal levels? How long before bush ranger is an envied job again? How long before rugby teams are roaming the streets looking for Aboriginals to beat to death?

Which one of your public figures would become Lord Humungus?

:rofl:

(Might be a bit more body line going on though).

Good old fashioned Baseball and golf is all I need.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_hqosNvv5E

(Games used to be on late nights in Oregon back in the 80's. Don't get 'em anymore. Not sure why, they had a bit of a cult following. Probably supplanted by mindless infomertials).

You should see me chuck my 9 iron when I get pissed.

Golf will surely cause me to die prematurely of high blood pressure.

My late father wasn't much of a golfer himself, but he liked to watch the game on Sunday afternoons with a scotch or two and fall asleep in his lazyboy chair.

But I love playing it more. It's a love hate relationship really.

I blame it on the equipment.

It's zen for me. Like i told walgreens, the moment of the swing is the only time the MS pain in my legs goes away. That few seconds is a moment of zen for me.
GAC

When I was in high school I was a pole vaulter on the track team. I think this "zen" of which you describe is what I felt as I vaulted. I would run down the runway, plant the pole, feel the energy as it bent, then I would rock back and point my feet skyward. I would feel myself rising up into the clouds. When I reached the zenith of my vault, I felt a weightlessness that can only be described as "floating." Flying 12 feet above the ground. Then in one smooth move I floated gently back to Earth to land in the pit.

I think it was zen for me.

Now back to the OP...

That sure can happen. Actually for me, it's different. I have MS, and i've found that the only time my legs don't hurt is during that 2 seconds i'm swinging the club. The whole world shuts off for that few seconds. So, even if i don't hit it the way i'd like, it's still a good thing.

Keeps my BP down!

How's your game? I'm down to a 2.8 so far this season.
GAC

Check here to see if there's an affiliate in your area: http://www.americaone.com/watchus/find_station.php

This week: Brisbane at St. Kilda, 5 p.m. EDT.

I fucking love footy, man. Started watching it on ESPN in the '80s. :headbang:



Edited to add "EDT."

In Sydney. Though some american bloke ruined it by baseball pitching instead of bowling. I use to follow it on BBC World Service when the Windies were top, and still trying to suss out all the rules.

But the barbarian would probably use the worse torture of forcing people to watch the matches! ;-)

there has been one murder in 10 years in the town I live in. Gun violence in New England at least is very localized to very limited areas and is usually associated with drug crime. Your premise that there is widespread gun violence permeating every part of America is stupid.

I did not know that.

/Johnny Carson

Having a firearm makes one neither invincible nor bulletproof.

What it often does do is make one feel invincible and bulletproof.

Iraq is fucking *awash* in powerful firearms and it hasn't stopped people cutting off heads among other gruesome means of execution.

If someone gets the drop on your loved ones and tells you they are going to kill them all very slowly unless you subject yourself to decapitation by them, what are you going to do?

A friend of mine from Iraq had an AK-47 in his house to protect his family, as they'd huddle in the dark at night in their home hearing screams and gunfire. They were lucky.

What would commonly happen is a militia would burst down the door, shoot the man with the AK-47, then do horrific things to the people still alive.

:eyes:

Or maybe I'm saying that being heavily armed made no difference whatsoever.

If you honestly believe that someone is going to come to my house with a knife and try to cut my head off and not be shot then you are living in a fantasy world.

David

The lack of a police force and laws would make things ugly. No matter how many "good" people have guns.

How the hell did you understand that I implied that knife nonsense?

The OP clearly, obviously, meant "societal collapse." The cutting heads stuff is just illustrative, colorful imagery.

But, of course, you knew that already.

And if you want to go on playing innocent and pretending you weren't peddling the fallacious "gun ownership is the solution for everything" argument, then go on, I don't care.

My responses to you aren't exactly for you, but rather for the benefit of other people who may be reading this exchange and erroneously thinking you may have a point. At this moment, I'm pretty convinced your attempt at an argument is demolished enough that my job here is done.

Where exactly did I say firearms ownership is the solution to everything? It is however the best available means of home defense when law enforcement is unavailable. Guns are not a very good solution to installing a garbage disposal or stopping an arterial bleed.


David

I have enough guns and know enough about guns to know that 1) the odds suddenly no longer weigh heavily in your favor if you opponent also has a gun, and drop dramatically if you have more than one opponent with a gun; and 2) guns are useful only so long as they are loaded and easy to access. Having them in your house isn't really enough, if you're on one side of your house and the baddies decide to come in the other, and that side happens to be where you keep your guns.

I guess you could have several people who are also armed live in your house. That would get crowded. Plus you would have to be sure that you could trust them in entirety. That's hard to do, really.

I guess you could always keep a gun handy in every room of your house, just in case. Gets kind of expensive after a while.

I guess you could keep a gun at your side at all times. Shame about it getting drenched when you're in the shower, though.

I guess you could completely give in to paranoia, and live in a bunker.

Nothing done by an individual alone is ever going to prevent something like a complete breakdown of society. The only way to avoid having a complete breakdown of society is to have a functioning society, and that means not focusing all your efforts on yourself, but also what you can do in conjunction with others.

I think people would kill by another means.

David

is a fast effective way to disconnect the hardware from the software.

together. In Occupation everyone is the enemy.

first its family groups, then tribal and geographic, a good example here in the US was during katrina how a lot of people started to defend what they had, others started to take what they wanted and then you had the people just trying to get themselves and others out of dodge. I dont think america is any different than any other society in the fact that people look out for their family first, then it radiates out to others.

because haven't all the precious little Indigo Children had a lot of practice cutting off heads (also disemboweling people) in the vidya games they love so much?

who, we made this mess, guns are not going to fix it.

;)

and trading great stock tips at the golf course, LOL.

Now, if you're talking absence of resources then it may well get very ugly.

It can also be found in Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion".

To summarize: Within hours of the police strike being announced the civil order completely collapsed. There was looting and rioting on a massive scale. Several murders were commited. It got so bad that after a short time they had to send the military in.

Broadcast Date: Oct. 8, 1969

Montreal is in a state of shock. A police officer is dead and 108 people have been arrested following 16 hours of chaos during which police and firefighters refused to work. At first, the strike's impact was limited to more bank robberies than normal. But as night fell, a taxi drivers' union seized upon the police absence to violently protest a competitor's exclusive right to airport pickups. The result, according to this CBC Television special, was a "night of terror."

Shattered shop windows and a trail of broken glass are evidence of looting that erupted in the downtown core. With no one to stop them, students and separatists joined the rampage. Shop owners, some of them armed, struggled to fend off looters. Restaurants and hotels were also targeted. A corporal with the Quebec provincial police was shot and killed at the garage of the Murray Hill limousine company as taxi drivers tried to burn it down.

As police returned to duty in the wee hours, the arrests began. By morning, the city's public buildings were under guard by the army, which was summoned by Premier Jean-Jacques Bertrand. At least 20 people have been injured, and damage from the riot has been estimated at $2 million ($10.7 million in 2005 dollars).


...and the taxi "union" was actually an arm of Front de libération du Québec:

"During the police strike of 1969, the "Taxi Liberation Front", a creation of the "Popular Liberation Front", which was itself the creation of Jacques Lanctôt and Marc Carbonneau, killed a police officer. Jacques Lanctôt is credited by Michael McLoughlin, author of Last Stop, Paris: The Assassination of Mario Bachand and the Death of the FLQ, with writing the FLQ Manifesto during the prelude to the October Crisis."


in short, it wasn't just ordinary folks doing the damage: it was an organized political action by a "terrorist" group.

and behind that may have been deeper deep politics.

But rather organisations struggling for dominance in a power vacuum. So in a sense also "deep deep politics". I think something similar would happen in the US. You would first have an increase in robberies, simple homicide and looting. Then rivaling gangs would go at each other and turn it large scale. Probably not so many severed heads though. It is not the preferred method of execution in our culture.

but the natural state of humanity isn't lawlessness.

The acts committed against African Americans were truly horrific.

fabric & killed lots of their people & set one group against the other.

so yes, under those conditions, people will cut each others' heads off.

no, it's not "cultural". cultures whose adherents routinely cut each others' heads off don't last long. which is the point when you wish to destroy a culture: to get them to attack each other instead of you.

it's how the powerful stay in power, & it's the main source of violence in history.

Tito had kept all the warring ethnic groups under a tight lid, but once he was gone, well, we all remember what happened to the multi-ethnic areas like Bosnia and Kosovo. Demagogues started inciting people to settle old scores from the seventeenth century.

"Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural, It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always inevitably triumph."

With reason, we can overcome Howards predictions.

If not more.

But yes, human beings are violent everywhere. We are all only a thin veneer of civilization away from a lot of ugliness.


On Edit: One word sums this answer up - Katrina

burning, pressing, drowning, and shooting. Possibly stoning and crucifying.

I'm sure we have our share of hackers, but culturally we're more likely to kill in other ways.

In a law-filled U.S., we kill more subtly; setting up an economic system that fosters poverty, homelessness, poor nutrition, and lack of accessible and affordable health care.

Beheadings are just too quick for most Americans.

We have more pistol-packing morons.

That's what lawlessness does to people--perhaps just a little sooner in cultures where the law consisted in part of cutting people's heads off.

Or the struggle?

White Americans dragged black Americans out of their homes and shot, hanged, or burned them, and law enforcement mostly looked the other way.

we have black and white, but they don't act like sects except maybe in Chicago in the 80's with Harold Washington and Ed Vrdolyak.

Count on it. There are people in your midst for whom the thin veneer of civilization is the only thing keeping them from all manner of unthinkable behaviors.

I'm not saying that's true of most of the people you know, but more than you're comfortable with and not necessarily the ones you might suspect either.

It's a cultural thing, I believe.

Whereas 0.02% won't. The 1.98% that will be deterred by a functioning police force make all the difference.

Yeah, I pulled the numbers out of my ass, but you get the idea.

I think our tradition of civil stability would preclude any short-term political and/or religious violence from becoming anything more than an cultural aberration (i.e., the series of lynchings at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries), at least in the here and now. It's been a pretty tumultuous past 100 years for the mid-east and the Levant, and I think that's the primary reason for the violence-- something we ourselves in the states have had very little experience with.

Given enough time with no governing body though, I imagine any culture, even one as homogeneous North America's, regardless its progressive and enlightened roots could eventually degrade to the point of actual violence as a commonplace source of justice, vendetta, or even entertainment.

Prior to the 1916 Sykes-Picot Accord, the mid-east and the Levant were very peaceful cultural backwaters-- two and a half religions, numerous clans, and a handful of minor states living in a relative (and relatively recent) historic peace based in part on this stability. Although a titular part of the Ottoman Empire, the Levant was no more than an afterthought of regional administration. It wasn't until after the west started grubbing around in the region's politics, industries and cultures, (and in doing so, destabilizing them to the point with which we're familiar) that local accords began to break down, factions became militarized, etc. resulting in the violence thaty now seems to define the area.

and law was not, in many cases, near by. I would say Americans would be more liable to use guns.

from a mile away. Or we would lob grenades or molitov cocktails at each other, we americans arent much for face to face killing.

Which leads directly to the conclusion that the present day cultures that practice or tolerate beheadings are based upon cultural evolutionary standards which place them very low on the culture ladder indeed!

Oh dear, will I have a fatwah laid upon me for saying that? Screw-em, people are what they are, if a barbarian then accept it or change.

Not exactly, the USA still has capital punishment.

And why is beheading lower on the "culture ladder" than shooting somebody? :wtf:

Who quit using madame guillotine in 1939.

No fatwa from me, just a loud sigh and an :eyes:

but by lynching. Shooting. Dragging behind vehicles. That sort of thing. Entire groups wearing sheets have ruled entire regions here for years on end.

I recall hearing a bear biologist say that the vast majority of grizzly bears are peaceable and not inclined to attack. But one out of eight bears are "rogues" that will rip off your head without provocation. I suspect that in every species, there is a rogue element that has no impulse control and no empathy -- in other words, the sociopaths. The only thing keeping them in control is law enforcement and societal rules. Take away both the police and the rules, and those sociopaths come out of the woodwork.

commune.

;)

No, that wouldn't come close to happening here.

We have our share of beheadings

I think our share is low enough to be considered aberrations-- variances from the statistical norm rather than embedded in national custom, cultural mores and legal sentencing; which is, I believe a precise and relevant difference.

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If you're saying that the Iraqi Sunni culture is inherently more brutal than American culture, you're way off base. If you're saying we both are equally then that's a different matter.

The vast majority of Iraqi Sunni's want what the vast majority of American's want. Safe neighborhoods, good schools, decent jobs, and a peaceful life. They don't want to hurt anyone, and don't want to be hurt by anyone.

How much time have you actually spent with Iraqi's outside a wartime situation? How much of what you know about Iraqi's has been learned from watching thew news networks? How do you think you're actually able to judge the culture being inherently brutal from your experience? What did you know of the culture 10 years ago? 20?

Even some normal people get put into weird places when you've been starved, burned out of your homes, had your daughters murdered and raped, taken to prison and tortured for months after doing nothing wrong...by the Americans.

So you want to label THEIR entire culture as inherently brutal. Please.

I could go through the list of major wars in the last half century, Rwanda, Zaire, Cambodia etc.

No culture has a monopoly on violence.

If we had chaos and anarchy we, as a society, would be come increasingly violent against one another.

Anyway, when you cut off someone's head here, you're called a serial killer rather than a sectarian militiaman. Other societies have different and more readily available outlets for their violence, not greater impulses for the violence itself.

no telling what would happen

there have many lawless places/times in usa, so we don't really have to debate this, the record of history is pretty clear on how we choose to dispose of those we don't like when nobody is going to stop us

acknowledgments and understandings of other nations are what g.w. bush et al had no curiosity to pursue. But the history of the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, Babylon...the region; is a brutal one. In one sense maybe not so unlike Uther Pendragon's, shall we say: single-minded resolve in Britain pulling realms together, ancient warlords operating in the Fertile Crescent were by some accounts quite barbaric and remarkable so in their beliefs regarding conquest and civil matters. Well...'civil matters', either way as I read it; it seemed a blueprint/primer for: How To Create Blood Feuds That Will Last Till The End Of Time

Cutting each other's head off, killing each other, violence upon violence. Read up on the Civil War in Missouri. Or better yet, Jim Crow and lynchings. We're perfectly capable and ready to kill our fellow citizen for reasons just as foolish as those that prompt killings elsewhere. It's not a ME thing, it's not an Islamic thing, it's a human thing.

We've got a long way to evolve.

after telling the white driver he should have yielded but didn't beat him up and while the black family and black female patient WAITED to be transported to the fuckin HOSPITAL.






:evilfrown: :evilfrown: :evilfrown: :evilfrown: :evilfrown: :evilfrown:

Only in them evil godless cities.

Also a cities might have a larger wealth imbalance, which in turn would lead to instability once the government wasn't there to protect the wealthy.

That makes sense. I'm afraid I've run into so much "cities are bad" prejudice I jumped the gun there.

Sorry to snap. :hi:

Happens to the best of us. :):hi:

Dunno 'bout you guys. :shrug:

Or hang 'em from trees. Or cut 'em up and put them in the refrigerator.

Did you really think Americans are morally superior, that they couldn't do such "horrific" acts?

What naive americo-centrism.

well put.

Our shit stinks too. Despite all the air-fresheners in the world.

People are people- it doesn't matter the geographical location-

well put.

Our shit stinks too. Despite all the air-fresheners in the world.

People are people- it doesn't matter the geographical location-

americans would do the same thing if left without law and order. hence why people who denounce any government doing anything for anybody are bat shit crazy. in a perfect world where people would act right, sure... complete anarchy or libertarianism would be great......but unfortunately we dont live in a world of intellectual giants whove moved past fists, hands, and whatever else they can use to hurt another human being if they arent satisfied.

I have asked a few times on DU what makes people capable of killing or hurting ANY living thing in any situation other than defense...
as i am not capable of such an act.

i never get a reply, im only told them im a tree hugger or a some psycho animal rights activist...

but its always been an honest to god question...

what makes me different from someone who kills things(whether it be animal or human)...


this will always baffle me as to how anybody could get any satisfaction or joy from killing anything.

i guess its just the god complex.