Well, here's a news flash: Putin told the truth. Cannibalism is very common in African war zones. Trevor should read the news from places like Congo more carefully, like this story carried in the Economist a few weeks ago:
"Zainabo Alfani:was stopped by men in uniform on a road in Ituri [in NE Congo] last year. She and 13 other women were ordered to strip, to see if they had long vaginal lips, which the gunmen believed would have magical properties. The 13 others did not, and were killed on the spot. Zainabo did. The gunmen cut them off and then gang-raped her. Then they cooked and ate her two daughters in front of her. They also ate chunks of Zainabo's flesh. She escaped, but had contracted HIV. She told her story to the UN in February, and died in March."
When she regains consciousness, she sees her attackers sharing the piece of flesh they cut from her loins. They cut into her right foot, her left forearm, and underneath her right breast, in order to extract her blood. Five among her attackers, no doubt the leaders of the group, shallow a mixture of her blood and water, along with pieces of her flesh. After this ritual, they take her and her three children farther into the brush, some 2 kilometers away. Zainabo is totally lost. They arrive somewhere that seems to serve as a sort of kitchen, where she sees human bones. A "cook" is skewing pieces of a human body over an open flame. Meanwhile, more cooks are heating up oil and water.
The men in uniform seize Zainabo's two girls, 10-year-old Alima and 8 year-old Mulassi, and submerge them, one after the other, in the barrels. They mix them with a large iron rod used as a spoon and pierce their stomachs in order to ensure a proper "cooking". They eat one of the bodies with foufou (a Congolese specialty, dough made of manioc) and they save the other body for later in the night.
Geebs wrote:Well, it's largely in their former colonies
I know. My point is that if there is anywhere on the planet where militants need a severe asskicking its the Congo. But theres no resources there so nobody is going to step up.
What puzzles me is how these people that kill children and EAT them manage to continue living. If you have any intelligence at all you would think the remorse or guilt those guys that do those things must feel would drive them to suicide.
That remorse or guilt in part was conditioned into us based on the societies we live in. Wouldn't it be safe to say that their society may have conditioned it out of them?
[quote="YourGrandpa"]I'm satisfied with voicing my opinion and moving on.[/quote]
I don't think it's society at this point that makes us feel the way we feel for committing an atrocious act I think it's more like instinct....
Well you're right it is social reasons but regardless of what social upbringing you were brought up in I just can't picture a sane human being thinking it's acceptable to skewer a child, or cut pieces of flesh off of living people for food, it's absolute insanity on a regional scale.
Well I agree it's fucked up, but my point is that I think part of it comes from just how we are hardwired as human beings, but part of it is society. For most of us, society reinforces nature, but for others, society took a polar opposite turn, maybe? At least enough to cancel out basic instinct and put cannibalism at neutral ground. After all, there are a lot of cannibals out there, and people will do some crazy things to survive.
Hell, lots of animals cannibalize their mates/young. The other day I was watching a Discovery Channel program on ocean life, and there's this one type of shark whose young that matures the fastest, while STILL IN THE WOMB, will eat its siblings for nourishment. Now THAT is sibling rivalry!
[quote="YourGrandpa"]I'm satisfied with voicing my opinion and moving on.[/quote]
Kracus wrote:I don't think it's society at this point that makes us feel the way we feel for committing an atrocious act I think it's more like instinct....
Well you're right it is social reasons but regardless of what social upbringing you were brought up in I just can't picture a sane human being thinking it's acceptable to skewer a child, or cut pieces of flesh off of living people for food, it's absolute insanity on a regional scale.
You will never recognise your own closed-mindedness will you?
Furthermore, instinct is BUILT from your exposure to your environment.
If someone put a gun to the back of your head, you duck, scream and shit yourself
If you put a gun to the head of someone who was too young, or hasn't had the exposure to know what a gun was, they would do nothing
Well first off you should read what I posted again.
Second that's an entirely different type of scenario. I'm not talking about an object here I'm talking about the act of ending someones life and eating them. A child at that, and there is proof that a there is a biological reaction in anyone that looks at a childs face in your body automaticaly changing a persons mood, even if you yourself don't notice it. That's biological, nothing you learn causes that to happen.
What I'm saying is that just like what I described above when seeing a baby I imagine there is somekind of instinct in a person that would cause you to not want to kill people but that nature obviously can be changed based on your upbringing. Still though, even if you're brought up in that fashion and turn out completely remorseless for acts as horrific as the ones described in that article you would think an intelligent person would understand what they are doing is wrong.
Kracus wrote:Still though, even if you're brought up in that fashion and turn out completely remorseless for acts as horrific as the ones described in that article you would think an intelligent person would understand what they are doing is wrong.
as for killing babies - not that unusual. I'm sure some of you have heard the stories of the japanese playing bayonet volleyball with babies during their brutal invasions.
While we have the capacity to engage our "biological instincts", we also have the remarkable capacity to dehumanize our enemies.
They're no longer worthy of expending empathic energy on them, so they're just objects to be done away with basically.
