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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (4253)	12/3/2004 1:30:31 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

The vast majority of humanity accept the fact that they should not kill anyone else. I don't think that is true. The majority, maybe the vast majority of humanity accepts the fact that they should not kill anyone else under normal circumstances, but I'm not even sure that majority is vast. Some things are just obvious. If you are in an elevator and the elevator is in a free fall, you don't have to know anything about elevator mechanics to know that the elevator is broken. To continue with the elevator analogy its not reasonable to assume that the elevator will keep falling forever, or that it will fall to the 0 point in terms of earth's gravity (the center of the earth). Something will cause the current trend to stop. In the case of the elevator that something might be the bottom of the elevator shaft, it also might be some emergency device installed to stop the elevator if the cable breaks. I just know that eventually everyone will buy into it just like I know that any kid, from any culture on this planet, will like ice cream once they try it. (of course there will be some kids that will not like ice cream - but that is not normal). Some kids will not like ice cream, others might not like the flavor that they are offered, others will be told not to eat it, others might like it but might like other desserts a lot more, others might not be able to afford it. You'll never get every kid to be a regular ice cream eater. The ability to plot a graph showing the percentage of people killing people over time is not rocket science. Using that graph to do mathematical analysis may be a little more difficult, but its still not rocket science. Plotting graphs or analyzing equations based on graphs doesn't mean that projections of the graph in to the future are accurate. Projections of population growth at one time showed continual exponential growth. Those could not be accurate because eventually some limit would be reached where the increasing population could not be sustained. Also even projections to the limit (like projecting that the elevator would hit the bottom of the elevator shaft) turned out to not be accurate as fertility rates have been declining (analogous to the safety devices in the elevator cutting in and stopping its plunge). Making reasoned projections from that analysis make take a little bit more work, but again the math needed for that is probably in existence. The assumption that trends will continue indefinitely is most of the time wrong. This is esp. true when projecting from a large number to 0 or from low numbers to astronomical numbers. All of this doesn't show that violence will not reach 0 or near 0, but the current trend is almost meaningless in terms of proving that it will reach 0. Tim