T. Greer:

November 28th, 2015 at 6:17 am

Re: the Cicero article:

Anyone who has read even a few books about ancient India, imperial China, or Sengoku Japan cannot take it seriously. This is what happens when try to compare entire civilizations without knowing their history.

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Lets review a bit: The central religious text of Hinduism is a dialogue where Lord Krishna justifies Arjuna’s decision to join in a world war and kill his brothers, uncle, and grand-father.

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Since 180 AD China has suffered from dozens of rebellions with millions+ causalities, most of which were tied up into millennian Daoist and Buddhists beliefs.
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Confucianism, especially after the Neoconfucian revolution, was a totalizing ideology that promulgated social absolutes–absolutes that naturally led to state persecution of other religions, sects, and heterodox beliefs in every country it was institutionalized.

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In medieval Japan differences between different Buddhist sects were absolute, and just as violent and fractious as the sort of the seen in Protestant England. During the Sengoku era some of the strongest military organizations in the country were leagues of warrior monks and the peasants who supported them. These warriors ran into battle crying that any death for the cause meant rebirth in the Pure Land paradise of the West.

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We could add to this the many warrior cults and sacrificial demands of all sorts of ‘Pagan’ religions, from the Romans to the Aztecs.

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In the long run of history there just isn’t much evidence that the Abrahamic faithful are more violent than the religious–or heck, the entirely secular–people from the rest of the world.
Dreamtimer:

December 8th, 2015 at 5:23 am

A comment on the John Robb piece about supersoldiers and autonomous weapons. Could be that they will be plagued by this type of camouflage:
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http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/9090-the-flaw-in-every-neural-network-just-got-a-little-worse.html