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81
Religion and Philosophy / Re: Are there active members here?
« Last post by RavynousHunter on April 05, 2022, 07:29:52 pm »
Yeah, that bastard still owes me $5!
82
Religion and Philosophy / Re: Are there active members here?
« Last post by davedan on April 04, 2022, 08:47:49 pm »
If this is what I think it is, then...


83
Religion and Philosophy / Re: Are there active members here?
« Last post by Not Jacob Harrison on April 04, 2022, 05:32:44 pm »
Personally, I think the forum went downhill after Jacob Harrison (who I'm not, for the record) was banned.

On an unrelated note, never trust Art Vandelay.
84
Creative Outlets / Re: The King of England's blessing
« Last post by davedan on April 02, 2022, 04:40:07 am »
That's actually superb
85
Creative Outlets / The King of England's blessing
« Last post by Not Jacob Harrison on April 01, 2022, 07:03:37 pm »
As you can tell by my username, I'm quite literally Not Jacob Harrison, so don't accuse me of secretly being him.

With that out of the way, I have a story to tell.

*

"Remember when we all thought you were secretly a man?" Jacob asked Lana. "Turns out, it was just really thick down there."

"Yep", Lana answered with a laugh. "And I'm glad I'm no longer evil. Turns out I just needed treatment for my multiple personality disorder."

"Those were some stressful therapy sessions."

"We should also be glad you finally decided what religion you were. What was it again?"

"...If I told you I forgot, how would you react?"

Lana burst out laughing. Jacob didn't.

"So what do you want to do now? Finally finish that 57-hour Skyrim stream?"

"No. First we need the King's blessing to get married."

"Why?"

"Well, not strictly need it, but it's traditional."

"Oh right. Good thing you decided not to have yourself castrated after all."

"That's because I learned loving denim was normal."

The young couple approached their destination, where the King of England was talking with President Barron Trump.

"Jesus, he's even bigger in person", Lana said.

"No blasphemy", Jacob playfully scolded.

"Come on, Jake, you know I'm not like that".

As the newest rightful King exited, he turned to them. "Fancy seeing you here."

"Well, we'd like something?"

"What is it? Do you want me to go to yet another parallel universe with you, like that time we wiped out the Nazis in Equestria?"

"No, we want you to give your blessing for us to get married."

"Of course. It's the least I could do after you proved I was the really real for reals rightful king of England. And how you proved that Spanish guy was the Antichrist."

The two embraced, Lana softly caressing Jacob's neck with her cheek.

"I'll wear my special jeans tonight", she whispered in his year, provoking a pig-like grunt of anticipation.

*

Well, what do you think?

Oh, and niam? If you know what's good for you, you'll stay away from my cous- I mean Jacob's cousin.
86
Governments don't willingly sacrifice their own youth, since it leads to long-term demographic decline. As I've seen it observed, the casualties suffered by Russia in WWI and then the USSR in WWII among men around the ages of 18-25 have led to reverberating effects, whereby there is a marked decrease in birthrates every 20-25 years, since those young men who died in war didn't have children, and since those children never existed, the children they would have had a few decades down the road don't exist, and so on.

I'm not sure if that's necessarily true, especially in pre drone times, the very act of war presupposed some casualties on your own side. Of course a particular dominant class or caste may not view it as necessarily sacrificing their own youth but those of the lower classes. Even if the children of lower classes are viewed primarily as assets to be used there's still some sacrifice involved. As you said, those men won't be able to father children or be productive in other ways if they're dead.

Sacrifice isn't the point of war, I think it's more of a cost/benefit equation where the probable sacrifices are seen as an investment in a greater reward. In the case of the Soviet Union that greater reward was continued existence.

True, but looking at WWII, you had, on the Axis side (Japan and Germany particularly) countries assuming that their wars would be short and victorious so that they could get down to the business of dominating East Asia or murdering Jews, Romani, homosexuals and many other groups respectively.

On the Allied side, you had countries that were being attacked, and so the cost of fighting back, in terms of number of lives lost, was almost certainly lower than the cost of not fighting back. (This was especially true for the Soviet Union since Hitler had made no secret of his desire to subjugate Slavs, whom he viewed as sub-human.)

Germany and Japan undoubtedly expected some casualties, though not as many as they ultimately suffered, while for the Allied powers, their wartime casualties were taken in the interest of not taking even more upon being defeated.
87
Governments don't willingly sacrifice their own youth, since it leads to long-term demographic decline. As I've seen it observed, the casualties suffered by Russia in WWI and then the USSR in WWII among men around the ages of 18-25 have led to reverberating effects, whereby there is a marked decrease in birthrates every 20-25 years, since those young men who died in war didn't have children, and since those children never existed, the children they would have had a few decades down the road don't exist, and so on.

I'm not sure if that's necessarily true, especially in pre drone times, the very act of war presupposed some casualties on your own side. Of course a particular dominant class or caste may not view it as necessarily sacrificing their own youth but those of the lower classes. Even if the children of lower classes are viewed primarily as assets to be used there's still some sacrifice involved. As you said, those men won't be able to father children or be productive in other ways if they're dead.

Sacrifice isn't the point of war, I think it's more of a cost/benefit equation where the probable sacrifices are seen as an investment in a greater reward. In the case of the Soviet Union that greater reward was continued existence.
88
Governments don't willingly sacrifice their own youth, since it leads to long-term demographic decline. As I've seen it observed, the casualties suffered by Russia in WWI and then the USSR in WWII among men around the ages of 18-25 have led to reverberating effects, whereby there is a marked decrease in birthrates every 20-25 years, since those young men who died in war didn't have children, and since those children never existed, the children they would have had a few decades down the road don't exist, and so on.
89
Should we stop using war as population culling of our young people?

Anything starting off with a classic loaded question can't be good?

For most of our Godless history, governments and religions have used war to reduce the population of their unruly men and women. This is understandable for those times, as tribes, governments and religions would have wanted to reduce the overrepresented male numbers, as compared to much fewer female numbers. Population balance, unfortunately, was required.

What Godless history? Some Marxist Leninist states might have had "godlessness" as a tangential goal but they never actually achieved it. Most of them did war for plain old-fashioned reasons of self-preservation and/or strategic and economic self-interest. The only one of those states to ever enact a policy aimed at population control was China which went down the much more practical route of family planning. The Soviet Union in contrast gave medals to women who had lots of kids. On the other side of the materialist fence, the "west", including the US and its allies had a lot of wars, even though the reasons for those were sometimes a bit murky (Vietnam, Iraq) they either weren't done to reduce the population or they were really terrible at achieving those ends.

Ancient tough love from the Gods.

Dunno what they had to do with it.

Modern wars seem to be designed to continue that vile policy.

You mean the wars fought with hypersonic missiles, drone strikes and aerial bombardment? The wars where, when troops are deployed they tend to be crack commandos and other specialist units as opposed to waves of conscripted youth? Sure, not saying gnarly, low tech battles don't take place anymore, but I never heard any of the leaders in conflicts in Sudan, Burma, Rwanda, the Balkans or India/Pakistan say the point of those long, drawn-out, ugly skirmishes was to have less of their own young people. That might be a result, but it's not a motivation.

Should we ask our political and oligarchic masters to stop wasting our young people with ancient ways?

Yep, less war is great. Just...don't be our spokesperson. We don't want to give them more reasons to go all war-war on us.

If we are not to change our ways, cull the old. We are living too long, and the joys are fewer, as we watch the young be buried before the old. The opposite of what nature wants to see.

Culling the old is the moral thing to do. Our ways of culling the young are not natural.

Ah, "culling" the old is exactly what happens in war - it just so happens that the young get plenty "culled" too, that's why war is...bad. It's the killing culling, less of that is good.

But your weird desire to kill the oldies for whatever gnostic diety it is you worship is duly noted!
90
What a vile load of nonsense.

1) War might've had the effect of reducing the male population, but it is rather a stretch to say this was its purpose. People have, unfortunately, always had any number of reasons to kill each other.

2) Modern war is not "a continuation of that policy", the concept is absurd. If claiming our ancestors had the deliberate goal of losing young men is a stretch, claiming it for our contemporaries is just entirely ridiculous. You cannot end war by appealing to politicians to end a policy they are not pursuing.

3) "Culling the old is the moral thing to do"? No. It isn't. There's no moral group of people to "cull", which is to say murder. There is no tradeoff where we need to kill someone so might as well kill the old.
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