Remove the debuff for killing zombie children!

People think that, and sometimes they can do it, but without feeling anything? With no regret? It’s far less common than you think. Even in cases where killing is totally justified, people will find they hesitate at the last second, because it’s NOT a rational part of your brain that you’re dealing with, it’s a deep-seated instinct that has to be overcome, and even if you manage to do it, guilt is liable to follow no matter what.

Again, if someone can kill someone and feel absolutely nothing, then they’ve either been extensively desensitized (which military and police have detailed procedures for training – and it still doesn’t work 100%, lots of them wind up wracked with guilt for the rest of their lives) or those instincts just don’t function in them because they are sociopaths. Either way, they are not normal. Something happened to make them that way, or they were born different.

Read my edit. Just didn’t feel the need to debate reality with you further.

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I am working from evidence and research, not anecdotes.
Try Grossman’s On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society

Your moral compass is what you are projecting onto other people and making amusement of what I say out of context isn’t helping you either.

To explain more simple:

Your feelings, as you sit in front of your computer typing is nothing going to have any bearing whatsoever on those living through some ordeal. Some people have no moral problems or mental problems and can in uncommon but not RARE situations find the act of killing guilt free.

What I say or you say in each our own opinions on the matter is moot. There are billions of our species and I’m not convinced you are going to have everyone lumped into having a mental disorder because they killed people without remorse or regret.

If you think you can prove this. You and anyone thinking so is not looking at reality. Irregardless of some bozo who wrote a book.

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If research and evidence doesn’t mean anything to you, then I don’t think there’s any point in continuing discussion, because you have abandoned rationality for prejudice and ignorance. Anecdotes don’t convince people, so I’ve declined to offer up my own, but rest assured I have plenty and this notion that I’m idly projecting from my feelings is horseshit.

Try reading what I said dispassionately. I’m not ignorant. You are. You didn’t seem to recognize I wrote myself into what I was suggesting to you.

People are not what you want them to be and some one writing an analytical social commentary in a book is no different than anyone writing their opinion. Such as we could. This isn’t ignorance to site this and dismiss it any more than you just did to me.

I quite clearly state people are able to be more. Cut and dry categorization garners and propagates ignorance.

That said. Perhaps we should chill on a different thread.

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Says the man with zero facts. Opinions are not worth anything unless they’re backed with evidence. Grossman is an acknowledged expert in the field of military psychology and has loads of carefully cited evidence, which you’d know if you didn’t write him off immediately.
You, on the other hand, have given me nothing but some “I don’t need to listen to people, I already know everything” attitude and some snide insinuations about who I am, what I know, and what I’m doing, all of which appear to be pulled straight from your butt.
Which all adds up to jack squat.

Fact:

World War 2 happened.

So we can follow your opinion a little, shall we?

All of Germany follow Adolf and while we can also debate him being mental unbalanced. That isn’t going to be my point. Everyone followed him. Whether they liked it or not. Killed for him. So let us infer that all of those people were mentally insane(judging them as psychopaths and sociopaths).

Well then. Everyone now in Germany must be pretty fucked up because they came from an entire nation of lunatics.

I was making a point of contention that people are more than what we project onto them. Like you getting pissed off that I can disagree with you using logic instead of opinions of people who write books. One person looking at the topic or another is no different. You just don’t see from a neutral perspective. You are saying “evidence” like you have it in hand by siting a paper. That was no less an opinion than what you wrote or I did. How is this so easily avoided for you to understand?

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Logic in the absence of empiricism can lead you all kinds of astray, man. That’s how you get Aristotle’s “Ice floats because it doesn’t break the surface of the water” and four elements nonsense.

The Nazis were experts at crowd manipulation, and they still weren’t much better at getting their soldiers to kill than we were, otherwise we would likely have lost badly, what with studies showing only about 25% of our soldiers ever fired at the enemy in combat.

Also you keep using “projection” but I don’t think you know what you’re doing there, because it’s not an argument, it’s barely an ad hominem.

Yes. In most stories “The Other” is a biblical reference to which even in the Quran it is sited numerous times. To always put The Other on the outside of ones self and to make assertions and assumptions to make them different as to make OTHER people hate them.

I just keep pointing out, that we cannot place people into a judgement so easily as having a mental disorder. It makes for very bad results. Such as war.

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In medieval times a fun family outing was to see someone get beheaded.
Oh, and can’t forget to bring the baby.

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Engage with my argument, or don’t, but passive aggressive sniping is out of line.

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Okay, this seems to be an important point, but I’m not sure what you’re getting at. What do you mean by “placing into a judgement?”

He wasn’t sniping. He was understanding my perspective and noting how people in history have done what you and I today would consider morally wrong. But then, in another time was normal as breathing.

You don’t need some cite of a person and their opinion in a modern setting. You can infer most as I have through looking at history of the human species in general.

Sorry for this edit. Just adding and reply to what your question is:

Sometimes I cannot think of certain verbal path ways. It comes out…strange.

Lemme try another way; I wanted to get across that being either indifferent too or guilt free of an act of killing isn’t a fundamental disorder. It should be looked upon with each situation and billions of those situations crop up all the time. Such is to make what WE discuss unimportant and moot. People being judged and made out to be “crazy” because they were given a moniker of a mental disorder(a psychopath). Will allow for peers in society to disregard these people as people. Disregard these people in more than one way.

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I wasn’t trying to be passive aggressive. But I’m also human.

Inferring is dangerous and prone to cause mistakes. Also history books are full of lies. Be careful what you draw from them.

Fair enough, it has gotten a bit heated in here.

Joking:

Yeah. I may learn something :wink:

Edit; especially stuff I wasn’t expressly told to think lol

When I made this thread I certainly hadn’t thought it would become focused around murder (and depatable murder) and morals to this extent.

In the interests of furthering discussion about the actual subject, let me type up a few salient tidbits from Grossman’s research:

There is an instinctual resistance to killing other humans within our psyche. When confronted with any other obstacle, fight or flight is the response, but when the obstacle is another person, fight and flight are lowered beneath two other responses: posturing and submission. This allows fights to be settled without losing members of a tribe, which is vital when your paleolithic tribe is struggling to survive and needs every spare hand it can get.

This instinct can be overridden, but it requires desensitization. Historically, militaries relied on the fact that many people would be desensitized to death and violence just by the horrific nature of their day-to-day lives, but as civilization has advanced and life has been made less awful, people have become less regularly desensitized and so formal methods for desensitization have had to be added.
These have become very advanced, getting the weapon-fired rate from ~25% in WWII battles to ~50% in Korea and ~90% in Vietnam.

This desensitization, however, is not all that’s needed. He also suggest careful exposure of justifications to the soldiers, because after the events are over and things calm down, soldiers will have to reconcile their actions with their moral compass, and if they are unable to justify their actions, they will suffer badly for it.
(This is when “it was a zombie, I had to kill it” comes in, and should reduce or negate the morale penalty.)