War on Terror - and disorganised rambling...

I actually stole this from a friend's blog:

US Army at its finest...

If you're interested, and can stomach a lot of complete stupidity, the comments are somewhat interesting in a "Holy shit, I can't believe you said that" sort of way. Every so often it seems someone says something intelligent in the sea of moron.

I'd like to stipulate that in essence, I don't see war as such an inherently bad thing: I think it is an outpouring of our territorial instincts as animals, and has become a worse problem than it should be because we have managed to create technologies that make killing far too easy for us. Killing someone should never be easy. I do not think that as a society, or even "civilization" we can ever manage to eradicate war. In a world where there is only a finite amount of resources, as well as a population too large for those resources, we must accept that war will be a reality. The problem I have with war as we know it right now is our level of technology. We have proven, time and time again, that we have the technology to kill thousands more of "them" than "they" can kill of "us". (And, yes, I am talking in terms of Us and the Others). It is the fact that we participate in unfair wars that make us such terrible creatures. It is the fact that the populations our armies are keeping down are already being kept down by politics, by economics, by our own actions in the past...

It is sad that although we are such intelligent creatures, we will still fall prey to the natural laws of populations: we have allowed our population to expand over the limits of resources available, and, as such, we are going to experience (eventually) an incredible population drop due to starvation, because we lack resources. Naturally, this is likely to affect those of us living in the West less than it will affect those people living in "third world countries" (and I don't think many of them would be "third world" if not for the economic sanctions that we use to keep them down). (This, by the way, has absolutely nothing to do with the video linked to up above). Sadly, it is also likely that populations that are traditionally subjugated (like women) are probably also going to get the raw end of the deal.

I don't really have a solution, nor do I feel like going on about this for much longer right now. All I'm really trying to get across here is how sad it is that for all the intelligence, all the design, all the progression that our population has gone through, we are still animals. We must remember that we are still a part of the natural world, and we cannot remove ourselves from it. We can speak of enlightened ideals, of philosophy and art, of gods and spirituality, but when it comes down to it, we must eat and drink and breathe to survive, and we are creatures of the earth. What I am trying to say is that maybe we should accept that we are animals. We are not perfect beings, and anyone claiming sainthood is likely a hypocrite - we should recognize our own sins (not to suggest that I am a believer, I am, in fact, an athiest) and struggle to control them for the sake of ourselves as an entire population. If we have a defining intellect, why the hell can't we use it for something other than technologies that simply inflate our worst instincts (war, greed, being territorial) to a point where they are obviously uncontrollable?