The common cold has been with us as long as there has been an us. The average adult has between 2 and 5 colds a year. Colds last longer than flu, typically 7 days but may take weeks. Best thing for you is an anti inflammatory, lots of fluids and rest. When you have a cold, you feel like shit.
So, the cold has been with us a long time and something else that has been with us for just as long is organized warfare.
One thing that we've had forever that is relatively harmless and can cause you to lose time at work, vs another thing that we've had forever that is lethal.
Now in our infinite humanity we have decided that we cannot drop cold germs on enemy factories so that their workers would miss a few more days of work and make less precision death instruments. That is not nice. What we have to do instead is mass produce precision death instruments ourselves so that we can blast them into eternity and cause them to miss the rest of their life. This is much more humane.
We have kept war right where we want it - front and center and bloody. Nukes are no fun, at least we had the common fucking sense to be scared shitless of that. We want to see people blown to pieces, missing pieces and being pieced back together. Always been that way, right from Moonwatcher on down. The Romans aint got nothin on us. Not only do we mass produce it, we mass distribute it.
We make movies about real wars, we make up places just to have wars so we can make movies about fake wars, we make movies about future wars where at some point in our future an intelligence smart enough to figure out interstellar travel and (since we are talking about war) is able to get enough of his killing gear into place and take on a whole planet. A whole planet who have not yet got the hang of interstellar travel, and has only ever been able to organize their killing gear against each other, but also whole planet that is so bored by peace and quiet that they have to run around killing each other, and if they live in a place where this is not currently happening have high tech proxies for them that can put them right there, these same high tech proxies that they also use to stream images of themselves fucking so that they can sit alone and jerk off. Sex and Killing, since forever and forever.
You could see why an intelligence as advanced as ours would think that we would win.
There's only one movie I ever heard of where everyone dies. I saw the remake. It's depressing.
Look at how many movies that have been made about war have our highest artistic awards.
Most of our oldest and greatest monuments to ourselves are when we got together in large organized mobs and rampaged across, above and beneath the face of the earth to kill people just like us.
Why?
Killing has always been a most satisfactory way of having the last word. Permanently. History books are written by killers and not the killees. You heard it here first. (Seriously, check out quotables).
In Addition, dead people do not argue, they do not get in your way (well, after you get rid of them that is, and as good as we are at organizing the stuff we do like, we spend as much time organizing that which we don't - death and shit. Armies on the move are really good at dealing with lots of both - both manufacture and disposal), and dead people have a really nice trophy value.
Ask the President.
"Here was a man, a man like you or me. Someone who had a mother, someone who may have had a lover, someone with dreams, fears and appetites. Someone who has the same organizational skills, someone who has the same physical capabilities, someone with the same physical experiences of fighting. A nasty little ambush predator, and I killed him."
This dead person also has material things. Things that he cannot defend. This is free shit that you can do what the hell you like with, which is probably going to be more Sex and Killing.
Plus, it feels so good. Hurting people and killing them, really fucking up their program. We are into sex because it keeps us alive - any species that does not have some sort of sex is an evolutionary dead end. We have taken our big brains and created certain rules about it. Sex in humans feels unbelievably good. it's cheap and easy.
Killing humans feels unbelievably good and it is cheap and easy. We have created certain rules about it, and just like sex we can make it really expensive and complicated.
Here's what I can figure out the rules are so far.
You can pretty much do whatever you want, but certain things are frowned upon at different times in our history. Torture, poisoning and rape of men, women and children have at times been the actual objectives of war.
There is only one thing that you cannot do in a war and that is that you cannot kill everyone.
At our present time in history our (the USA) preference tends toward 1 to many but not all in body count and in ways that are quick and kinetic. We will torment you to death over a long period of time if necessary, but the expense of all this equipment means that we just wanna do it how we've always done it, get in there and start swinging and slinging shit. Quick kinetic deaths are messy - lots of blood and snot, and we loooooove that shit and as much fun as this is to do, like sex, it's nearly as stimulating when it's recorded, played back and fantasized over.
It looks like all IS equal in love and war, at certain times it has been permissible to torture, poison and rape men women and children and just like in war, you cannot fuck everyone. It's just against the rules.
(Yes, I have a cold. I spent all day today asleep in my jammies, I am awake now (3:00 AM) and bored out of my mind. After I did email, I started googling the common cold)
