"In a certain light, wouldn't nuclear war be exciting?"

[unnamed]

I think you'd lose that bet. People who are against nuclear war (which should be all of us, when considering this issue in a concrete sense) are typically against it no matter who the target is.

Imagine the target is a group you really hate, they attacked the nation you love.
It happened in human history.

 

[Ivy]

Imagine the target is a group you really hate, they attacked the nation you love.
It happened in human history.

Did you think restating the same scenario would change deeply-held beliefs against nuclear war? I don't care who the target is. No nukes.

 

[Kalach]

Yeah, but if it is exciting to you then you're discussing at least one aspect of nuclear war, so it's natural that we'd arrive at this juncture so long as they be crazies like me here.

Actually, no. You'd be discussing the form of a concept and how and when it can apply. Very likely you'd end up with a picture of how elements of the situation do take the same form as those seen in times and places and events that excite, and that probably--and as far as the discussion goes, uninterestingly--those elements would be significantly outnumbered by forms that horrify or just plain kill.

How people are unable to see that concepts have parts... I am shocked and amazed. All the terminological hairs the logicians will split, and the feelers will endlessly categorise, and still there is no room for skinning conceptual imagery and looking at its jiggly bits?

FOR SHAME, TYPOLOGISTS! FOR SHAME!

 

[Ivy]

For once I'm totally following Kalach.

Edit: except these days I mostly tune out when people talk about se/si/ne/ni/fe/fi/fo/fum. Just don't care anymore. But in terms of the concepts in the thread divorced from the type slapfighting (and concepts can indeed be divorced from one another)... yeah. I don't know how to end this edit.

 

[PeaceBaby]

It is damn too.

The pattern of responses does not support this as a conclusion. I don't think this is about Ni vs Si.

Here's what you don't understand: I face everything I strongly care about Fi-first.

And being Fi first you have the right to argue in the manner most rational to you. Therefore:

I also think you might be arguing in bad faith marm.

This is an irrational statement.

The more I look through this thread, the weirder it gets. Those among you who cannot see the fun side of death and destruction are... odd. There's an almost puritan concern for mortification of the flesh. You can't look away from the dirt.

That is why I say Si. You've deified the concrete, which is what Si does, more or less. Indeed, it does it to the point where Ni cannot exist. Thus and therefore and ergo to boot, Si vs Ni.

Look into it. You'll be glad you did.

No, the only way your argument works is if the poll respondents change their type to match your assumption. There's no pattern at all so far.

While we're here, what do you suppose Fi works with? It's a judgment that uses feeling as reason, but we've all heard again and again how feeling is fleeting. So what is it that Fi stews upon to create that judgment?

Feeling is not fleeting to an Fi dom. An Fi dominant makes feeling judgements every second of the day, for example from how I feel about the orange juice I am currently drinking for breakfast to how I feel about the thread evolution here.

if the OP comment is a prompt to consider aspects of sudden upheaval and massive destruction in terms of *any* possible positive aspect that could arise, then yes, in a certain light, why not ask such a question and ponder on it.

If it were meant rather as a prompt to investigate just how devastating destruction can be, then likely all sorts of talk of horror and moral indignation should ensue.

But it says "a certain light". It's outright demanding you talk about what excitement really is. NOT WHAT NUCLEAR WAR REALLY IS. It asked you to discuss excitement in conceptual terms with reference to one aspect of excitement, that it includes danger and potentially very dangerous action with significant negative consequence.

And so many went for the moral indignation instead. Who wouldn't try suggesting there is some failure to meet on a perceptual plane here?

Some are focussing on "certain light" whilst others are focussing on evaluating "exciting". Therein lies the sticky point. To me, those two juxtapose each other in such a way that I have to choose to give one more weight than the other in deciding how to respond to the question. I then focus on "exciting" rather than "certain light". Exciting does connote pleasure, to some degree at least, and thus leads me to evaluate the question from the perspective of taking pleasure from the subject of human suffering. It's not about taking a moral position so much as which aspect of the question is more difficult to reconcile with internal belief.


Another issue with this thread is that thoughts do precede actions. Too much mental masturbation on such topics truly does lead people to horrific action in the "real world". Just as surely as craving pizza for dinner causes you to pick up the phone and dial Dominos.

 

[011235813]

Another reflection: of course it's exciting "in a certain light" or games like Fallout wouldn't exist. They're basically giving people an opportunity to fantasize about scenarios like this without having to confront the consequences in a more realistic way. Which, in turn, seems to have led to an acute lack of imagination regarding the concrete.

I don't know. I don't think this question is correctly framed if it actually intends to refer to scenarios that involve fantastically extenuating circumstances. It pretty much enters the realm of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction at that point. Which I usually enjoy, but it's FICTION. If I had to apply those situations personally to myself and the world I live in, I highly doubt that any part of me would go "Oh, yay, fun!"

 

[prplchknz]

no, because no matter how angry i get at the world their still would be immense guilt if i was solely responsible for destroying it. Trust me I know this for a fact.

 

[unnamed]

Did you think restating the same scenario would change deeply-held beliefs against nuclear war? I don't care who the target is. No nukes.

No,but the majority of human are not that kind of deeply-held believer.

For once I'm totally following Kalach.

Edit: except these days I mostly tune out when people talk about se/si/ne/ni/fe/fi/fo/fum. Just don't care anymore. But in terms of the concepts in the thread divorced from the type slapfighting (and concepts can indeed be divorced from one another)... yeah. I don't know how to end this edit.

When I understood these types,if everyone know who they really are, I firmly believe the "type slapfighting" is inevitable...

 

[Kalach]

Some are focussing on "certain light" whilst others are focussing on evaluating "exciting". Therein lies the sticky point. To me, those two juxtapose each other in such a way that I have to choose to give one more weight than the other in deciding how to respond to the question. I then focus on "exciting" rather than "certain light". Exciting does connote pleasure, to some degree at least, and thus leads me to evaluate the question from the perspective of taking pleasure from the subject of human suffering. It's not about taking a moral position so much as which aspect of the question is more difficult to reconcile with internal belief.

Yeah. I know. You and everyone else read the sentence wrong.

Discussing how much less than perfect nuclear war is, is fine. In context though, point: missed. I know, right? How could that possibly happen? It's not like different priorities and perceptions exist, is it?


There wasn't an argument, btw, about it being Si vs Ni. I didn't argue. I stated. Enthusiastically. And reasserted several times, while adding in suggestive explanatory outlines. IT"D BE STUPID TO ASSERT INDIVIDUAL FUNCTIONS CONTROLLING PEOPLE TO THAT EXTENT, WOULDN"T IT! It'd be alarmingly reductionist.

However, I'd be willing to bet a dollar that heavy on the side of people who got outraged was a focus on "nuclear war" in its concrete image terms, with those terms understood to NOT admit division of images into any category other than the physical (the factual, the concrete, the holistically realistic). Those persons getting outraged without Si present in their mental clown suit were doing so for god only knows what reason, but if that proves Si people don't do Si, then perhaps we shouldn't believe typology after all.


There's an intensity to the conservatism here.... it is both frustrating and uniquely exciting. If Jung was right, it should be nearly impossible for a person to see themselves from the outside. If everyone knew entirely how their own minds worked, Jung would be wrong.

Meanwhile, gaah, you guys, grow your conceptual schemes a little.

 

[Coriolis]

I spent my entire formative experience with constant references to nuclear war, both political and artistic; when I was in high school some of my older friends hung out at a place called The Fallout Shelter.

I know all of the songs about the Cold War, and it had a huge impact on my personality, to be such an impersonal world event.

It was clearly impressed upon me by someone or something that this wasn't funny, probably the least funny thing possible, and this was real life.

You can't tell people they're weird because they were traumatized as children by U.S. and Soviet propaganda, and the cultural reactions to that propaganda, and then as an adolescent and an adult found sufficient information to prove that yes, all of my worst fears are real, in fact nuclear destruction is even worse than what I imagined, when I see photos from Chernobyl.

I grew up with all these influences as well, but it didn't traumatize me, or impact my personality much. The reverse is more true, in that my personality shaped how I processed and viewed events. I suspect the same is true for you. We can see the same thing, but interpret and respond to it very differently.

Now get off your high horse and acknowledge that there's an INTJ in this thread that used Te better than you did to address this problem.

But there is also at least one INFP agreeing with Kalach. Not everyone with a given type will have the same opinion; we are not groups of paper dolls, cut on the same template.

Of course fantasy has value. I just do not think that nuclear war has any good qualities for fantasy, since it destroys everything I hold dear, including my life and the life of other humans I love, humans I am indifferent to who are innocent, and also the existence of other living things such as plants and animals.

The nuclear war scenario is not fun or funny to me in any way. There would be so much suffering, human and animal, that I can't justify it.

How about asteroid impacts? Global greenhouse effects rendering much of the earth inhabitable? New viruses that kill large segments of the population? Even alien invasions? All of these scenarios involve the destruction of many of the things you mention. Are they more acceptable fodder for fantasy, perhaps because they lack human agency?

Even when I watch horror movies, I like movies about killers with interesting psychological profiles, where there are specific victims, or people can get away, or there's just a supernatural element.

Nuclear war is too random, too wide-spread, and too destructive to the undeserving. It is effectively the end of the world, and even in cases when it is not the end of the world, the suffering is too on-going and distributed too long-range.

This is called Fi. Deal with it.

It is also called personal preference. Some people have no stomach for horror movies, and find fiction about individual killers, eg. serial killers, up-close-and-personal to be too creepy. It is silly to criticise people for what comes down to a matter of taste.

I think about the eco-system, and I don't like the idea of large groups of innocent people suffering. I learned to stop watching the news because it bothered me so much, and the only other option is to become desensitized to the point of some of the unfortunate members of this thread.

I don't like the idea of senseless suffering any more than you, but no amount of hypothetical consideration of destructive events on my part is going to precipitate a nuclear war. Moreover, if one is unable to distance oneself from the emotional response produced in a crisis situation, it can be more difficult to respond constructively.

I really don't care what you think my type is, but I'm not going to sit here and let you lie to people on this forum about Ni being "what if," because it isn't.

It may be easier to think of Ni in terns of "if . . . then . . . ". As in: if we had a nuclear war, then this is what would happen. Ni envisions a single integrated answer to the Ne open-ended question, all of it hypothetical, impersonal, and separated from any moral considerations.

 

[Kalach]

It may be easier to think of Ni in terns of "if . . . then . . . ". As in: if we had a nuclear war, then this is what would happen. Ni envisions a single integrated answer to the Ne open-ended question, all of it hypothetical, impersonal, and separated from any moral considerations.

It does if attached to Te.

But it's interesting how the if-then comes to be. Or more exactly, how the person sees there is a movement from the if condition to the then result. How does one get to imagine that one set of images plus an if condition gives rise to some other set of images? A shitload of coherence testing that looks a hell of a lot like "WHAT IF".

Actual conscious operation of Ni has a lot more heuristic devices than what if. The range of possibles is cut down dramatically by the existence of schemes that have been worked out (again and again) in the past. But the lifeblood of Ni remains what if. For instance, "what if I'm wrong?" The what if happens in a different place though. Ne What if works on an environment (I guess). Ni what if works on inner combinations. What if I put these together. What if I imagine a world where nuclear war produces candy floss for children? what if...


But then again, what if I'm wrong.

 

[kyuuei]

Some things just aren't romantic.

I DO, however, easily see war and war-time and war zones being romantic. We see that all the time. Deadly situations, morality judgments and decisions, the stereotypical dude meeting the civilian innocent from the other side and falling for her...

... Nuclear war sort of takes away from romantic aspects. I have seen some people try to make it more romantic with pictures of people dancing or walking the beach in radioactivity suits... but I just don't see it. The suits take away from person-to-person interaction, it creates a bigger wedge between people whom are alive (mutated and radioactive people vs people far enough away), and there is no personality in the way people are killed--a bomb is dropped or launched, no one goes up to the people themselves. It's so... cold, and distant, and absolutely sudden. People don't even have to know what hit them.

I read a manga one time about the Japanese dealing with the aftermath... and it was a love story.. this young girl fell for this young guy, and then she slipped away from the world because of radiation. There was nothing romantic about it.. it was just sad, and awful.

I can see where people would try to make it romantic.. but it is just not for me at all.

 

[PeaceBaby]

Yeah. I know. You and everyone else read the sentence wrong.

No, I don't think I read it wrong. I made a choice to not enter any debate on the topic itself, so to me, that means I think I've read it right.

Discussing how much less than perfect nuclear war is, is fine. In context though, point: missed. I know, right? How could that possibly happen? It's not like different priorities and perceptions exist, is it?

I don't think you should dismiss the quick gut-reflex to simply say "No" in answer to this question, by any type. The prospect of nuclear war really isn't exciting to the majority of people unless you change the parameters of what nuclear war might mean. So, contemplating the nature of the question or the composition of the question doesn't even enter into the equation - it's overridden.

Those persons getting outraged without Si present in their mental clown suit were doing so for god only knows what reason, but if that proves Si people don't do Si, then perhaps we shouldn't believe typology after all.

Maybe you're just wrong about Si. How about that for a paradigm shift?

This is somehow missing the whole point.

Probably.

Meanwhile, gaah, you guys, grow your conceptual schemes a little.

pot - kettle - black

 

[prplchknz]

pretty evenly split #captain obvious

 

[Kalach]

I don't think you should dismiss the quick gut-reflex to simply say "No" in answer to this question, by any type. The prospect of nuclear war really isn't exciting to the majority of people unless you change the parameters of what nuclear war might mean. So, contemplating the nature of the question or the composition of the question doesn't even enter into the equation - it's overridden.

If you like.

Let's all then be surprised there're types, some people even, whose opportunities for living expression dwindle the closer they are urged to this wretched past-staring literalness.

I didn't have to contemplate the nature of the question to know it could be answered, easily and without moral difficulty, yes. And I was actually gigantically wise enough to know there's a way to answer yes and be right and answer no and be right. It follows, more or less, from the very simple axiom, gifts differ.

Who knew, right? I'm here to claim that not many here did.

Maybe you're just wrong about Si. How about that for a paradigm shift?

Maybe I'm just not. How's that for a fully complete answer to a worthless statement of bias.

pot - kettle - black

Uh, no. The simple minded approach of "maybe it's not what you think, and we should all leave it open to whatever possibility may arrive" works for you. And it means nothing for the adequacy, appropriacy, and accuracy of cognition that doesn't work that way.

The only way you can get away with such an approach is to have some library of concrete facts that you treat as containing more of the substance of the world than the world itself displays from moment to moment.

And which changes, among other things, what elements of some internet question will strike you immediately as constituting the substance of that question.


I'm disgusted you people know so little of how to set yourselves free.

 

[En Gallop]

I don't think there's any question a nuclear war would be exciting. How could it not be? However, I'm using the word "exciting" to basically mean the opposite of "boring", not with any positive aspect to it. It would be a horrible world to live in - but that's exciting (for a while anyway, until it becomes normality, then it's just a boring struggle for survival)! The fact that it is an exciting topic explains why so many people have replied to this thread to disagree or agree. The results are in, I'd say...

 

[Society]

the nuclear war itself wouldn't be exciting in particular, though if i manage to survive alongside every loved one intact, then at least for that time, i would be too happy about that to be horrified about everyone else.

after, yes, it depends on the scale of the nuclear assault:
- if the disaster is in ecological scale, then no, growing old in some bunkers i've managed to crawl into is not going to be particularly stimulating.
- if the disaster is centered around the world's major cities, civilization is gone as we know it but humanity survived... then yes, the rebuilding can be very interesting.

people here are underestimating themselves: under the circumstances, if it happens, most people will eventually find the positive spin, whether it exists or not, because in that scenario it fucking happened, their entire world shaped by it, and they had to live with it - whatever life they rebuilt, they built on it.

 

[En Gallop]

And when Ne people go what if, is that what they're doing too? Are they moving through permutations of background ideas or are they adding a layer to what's outside of them? Does their what if stay interesting to them if it produces no noticeable result in the environment?

My "what ifs" certainly stay interesting to me (daydreaming about "what ifs" is pretty much all I ever do), regardless of it becoming externally real or not, and I'm an INTP. So yes. And what effect have INTP's ever directly had on the external environment lol?

 

[En Gallop]

the nuclear war itself wouldn't be exciting in particular, though if i manage to survive alongside every loved one intact, then at least for that time, i would be too happy about that to be horrified about everyone else.

after, yes, it depends on the scale of the nuclear assault:
- if the disaster is in ecological scale, then no, growing old in some bunkers i've managed to crawl into is not going to be particularly stimulating.
- if the disaster is centered around the world's major cities, civilization is gone as we know it but humanity survived... then yes, the rebuilding can be very interesting.

people here are underestimating themselves: under the circumstances, if it happens, most people will eventually find the positive spin, whether it exists or not, because in that scenario it fucking happened, their entire world shaped by it, and they had to live with it.

Exactly. In fact there's a very real possibility that in the 2nd option you give nuclear war (or any other major disaster) could have a beneficial impact on mankind. Not sure anyone's mentioned that yet.

 

[lowtech redneck]

Yes, and the question reminds me of the old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times". And obviously, for those taking this question far too seriously, the misery, despair, and heartache involved would vastly outweigh the excitement, except for short, isolated instances where survival mode triggers an adrenaline rush that pushes aside all other considerations.