The Old Hack

So? The absence of "any" in this case implies "all."

You are not alone in that attitude. And to be fair, I think you have a point. But I still think the result is entertaining so I like the rifftrax anyway. I guess I am not averse to the occasional low blow when it comes to commentary.

Allow me to quote you a quote: This was in response to someone who effectively said, "I can't see why I have to kill her just because she tried to kill me." So yes, I am serious. You posited a pure 'kill or be killed' mentality, disallowing flight, counterintimidation and submission as options. And did so with a, "if any ancestors in your entire family tree did not have the 'kill or be killed' mindset, you would not exist" argument. That is all.

LMAO. This reminds me of an incident that once occurred with my friend Liz who is also Canadian. One of the sweetest and gentlest people I have ever known, I once happened to be present when another friend of mine asked her, "So do you speak English with a British or an American accent?" And I swear to God, she bent her head back, looked down her nose at him and in a very offended tone told him, "I speak English with a Canadian accent, thank you." She is normally so mild-mannered that seeing her offended was actually scary. I actually cringed at her tone of voice.

Well, they are kind of odd because they are very deliberately made to be bad. I personally don't care much for the sheer stupidity level either, but the rifftrax version made by the MST3K crew is really quite entertaining.

Fight, run away, posture, submission. This is a pattern that repeats intraspecies in many different animals. Wolves being an obvious example as well as any of the primates. Often it will never even come to a fight as both parties will puff up threateningly and one then either displays submission or flees. Mind you, this is usually only seen within the same species and is probably an evolved response to aid species survival.

That's really rude, you know. I have it on good authority that nine out of ten elder gods consider her one of the hottest eldritch horrors around.

Good Lord, the TRS-80s! I remember these. I once had a Tandy Whiz Kids comic advertising the darn things. (I wonder if my iPad Air 2 stands up to that Cray XMP?) I still want Ashley to reappear as the topic in her own thread, so now I wonder if she likes computers and if she has an iPad. I think she at least may have a smartphone, but whether it is an iPhone, who knows.

I'm not sure how worried Pandora is at the thought of losing her license to serve alcohol. I'm actually not even sure she has one.

Too bad. I shall resolve this by means of simple logic. Let us posit this 'killing gene' exists -- a tall order, but I shall let you have that much. Some combination of genes makes it easy for a human to kill other humans. Or alternately, some form of training exists that allow humans to overcome their reluctance to kill. We shall label this condition A. Next, we have the absence of this attitude or conditioning. These humans can still kill but only do so accidentally or in utter extremis; otherwise they are too restrained to actively seek the death of fellow humans. First, let us posit a humanity in which the existence of A is ubiquitous and omnipresent -- this is the state you insist on. From there, there is a sliding scale going from large majorities possessing A existing towards the opposite end where it is either rare or nonexistent. Let us ignore the sliding scale and look at the murderous monsters inhabiting a planet where only A exists. Every time they enter conflict, they are satisfied only with the death of their opponent. Evolutionarily speaking, how well does this hypothetical species do? I shall present the following hypothesis: not very well. This species would self-destruct in an orgy of violence very, very quickly. If we go downwards on the sliding scale, it does better, of course. But as soon as we do, I am allowed ancestors that do not end all their conflicts with killing, and your original position falls apart. The End.

Codswallop. Your original argument was that it couldn't be done. I showed that it could be, and was. Also, I posit that where the Vikings were met with answer from professional militia, they either learned to attack easier targets or switched to trade... and historically, they did both.

Hm. Apparently Immortals have different rules than the Egyptian Gods did. I understand mummification was invented after Osiris TPed the then reigning Pharaoh as a prank.

To be fair, in Methuselah's Children one of the main reasons Lazarus Long started to feel worn down by his centuries wasn't because he had gotten bored with life but because of the constant and repeated injury of outliving the people he loved. This, at least, is what I see as a main danger of near immortality -- once you have lost someone close to yourself again and again and again, you start to grow wary of getting that close to people. Maybe it is because I've just lost a close friend of my own. But it seems to me a more likely factor than mere boredom.

So what sort of processor does Ashley have, and does she have USB 3 ports?

Neither -- in fact, none -- of your arguments negate my main point, which is that this absurd kill or be killed mentality you seem to posit as a necessity for survival is the exception and not the rule. As to professionals arriving in minutes, why not? Much smaller communities then. All you needed was a good alarm bell and the help would be there quite speedily. In fact, a rather famous militia in the early days of America was called 'Minutemen' for precisely this reason...

*groans* Not THIS again. Look, Robert E. Howard wrote some cool fantasy books, but the entire POINT of society -- any society -- is banding together for mutual protection. This notion of an ancient barbarian world where men were men and could stand tall and proud in their loincloths whilst in the middle of a howling blizzard, holding their swords aloft in one hand and the severed head of an effete virgin-sacrificing sorcerer in the other, a just barely not-sacrificed virgin clinging to their leg, may all be well and good but it has very, very little to do with reality. If you look at history and take a close look at the bits that don't get as much attention as the others -- that is, the boring bits without war in them -- you will see long stretches of time in which hunters hunted, farmers farmed and (eventually) craftsmen crafted. They certainly didn't walk around killing one another on a daily basis. In fact, it was even hard to kill one another if you didn't have a good weapon, and weapons might well be frowned on by society or monopolised by whatever ruling power held it together. These days it is appallingly easy to kill. Even in societies where firearms are controlled, nearly any adult can become a lethal killer just by taking the wheel in a car. Drive half a ton of automobile into someone at sixty kilometers per hour and see how good they look afterwards. Or you can go to a hardware store and buy a good steel steak knife. How available were these some three thousand years ago? The answer is: not very. But let's totally drop the 'society that turns us into effete civilised people' and look at some ten thousand years ago. Did people kill one another back then? Sure they did, but murder was still an aberration. Normally fighting only led to someone giving up. But even if you wanted to kill someone, this was actually hard work and might take time -- and the other members of your band of hunter-gatherers might well be spoilsports and try to stop you. Remember the movements of tribes a few thousand years ago? Some three thousand years ago a bunch of bloody immigrant refugees arrived in Denmark and immediately started to act like they owned the place. Why did they do that? Well, the main reason was that they had lived somewhere else and then been forced to relocate when another bunch of people moved in where they used to live. Note that phrase -- FORCED TO RELOCATE. That's not quite the same as being systematically killed. Anyway, these buggers (my ancestors on my mother's side) took over, absorbed the less technologically advanced tribe that used to run the place and started to establish an agrarian culture. And that agrarian culture turned out to be pretty boring, all about getting harvests in and very little about killing one another for fun on the weekends. How effete they must have been, what has the world come to.

Hm. I think a visit to the opthalmologist may be in order, just in case. Hopefully it won't be bad, but if there is a real problem, the sooner it is caught the better. I hope it will turn out to be manageable!

Or tiring him out? My main point is: I refute this ridiculous assertation that 'kill or be killed' is the only method that works. Inside the same species there tends to be several ways a confrontation may be resolved. Fight, flight, posture and submission. The same goes for humans, to a large degree. Have you ever seen a burgeoning fight where one side clenches their fists and the other responds by throwing up their hands and saying, "Hey, I didn't want a fight!"? I have. Several times. In fact, I would say that actually resolving every fight with killing would be contrasurvival. You very quickly get an awfully shallow gene pool that way...

He hadn't ever been a Dane, either! Him and his rot about something rotten in Denmark. Sure, our current government is rotten as all out, but what did HE know about it?

Not solely. My father's side of the family came from Russia. I have mentioned that they were refugees. And there is a difference between pacifism and merely being reluctant to kill when there is no need to. It is possible to defend oneself nonlethally. I have done so myself. An ancient martial technique called 'running away.' Admittedly it is not flashy but it can be quite effective. There are other methods too, including but not limited to responding with no more force than is needed to end the threat. This may be done without necessarily ending a life, though it is a risk one always takes when employing force. (In that regard, running is better as a nonlethal response. The biggest risk to the enemy is if they suffer from a heart attack trying to run you down, in which case I wash my hands of responsibility.)

Some of mine did. I still exist.

What, like Microsoft?

Duh. An Elder God of dubious sanity. It was you the dishwasher was trying to summon all this time.

The Moderator: I am very sorry but I am afraid that I have to lock the thread for now. It has always been complicated for me to moderate and these days it is especially so. I believe I have previously mentioned that I am from a refugee family. My father's side of the family escaped the extermination camps only by the thinnest of threads. This makes it incredibly difficult to observe the discussion of refugees and the attendant problems with them. I still feel I should not actively participate here but the nature of current politics make it all but impossible not to mention those and similar issues. And I am simply not certain that I am capable of fairly judging when I am this intensely emotionally involved. For that reason I am locking the thread. I realise this will be a disappointment to many but I do not see any good alternatives. Maybe it will become possible to unlock it again sometime.

http://www.egscomics.com/?id=2216 This does not bode well.