Word: bloodlusts
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...Catch a Predator. If the purpose of the Olympics is to make the world more peaceful, maybe the reason it hasn't succeeded is that the Games aren't warlike enough. The ancient Greeks got themselves oiled up to wrestle for a good reason: to channel their bloodlust into something meaningless. Also because they were crazy gay. Globalization has made getting along with countries we've never heard of more important, and the best way to do that is to beat the crap out of them in sports we've never heard of and then rub their faces...
...Even the most liberated humans would hesitate to have sex in front of complete strangers. And bonobos aren't likely to harness fire or invent the wheel or the Internet soon. Still, for too long the study of nature has been the study of zero-sum savagery--a universal bloodlust that allows us to shrug at our own brutality, reckoning that mere animals like us can hardly be expected to do better. Discovering such close genetic cousins who behave themselves so well--even sometimes--ought to give us pause. There are already plenty of reasons to save the Congo Basin...
That's why the campaign pledges that Obama will resist the inevitable calls of the political class for more conflict and will engage in what his chief political strategist, David Axelrod, euphemistically calls the "vigorous comparative processes" on its own timetable and in its own way. "There is a bloodlust out there. People want us to eviscerate her, if for nothing else than the sport of it," says Axelrod. "But how we draw the distinction is important, and we're not going to get pushed into gratuitous exchanges to satisfy the peanut-gallery pundits...
This morass has fueled the stunning ascension of mixed martial arts and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Though derided as "human cockfighting," the UFC feeds the video-game bloodlust of young fans and has ripped market share from the sweet science. "If boxing were a stock," says veteran boxing historian and television commentator Bert Sugar, "I'd sell it short...
Those cheers are just one sign of how much venom has seeped into Sunni-Shi'ite relations in the year since their simmering conflict was brought to a boil by the bombing of Samarra's golden-domed shrine. The bloodlust is no longer limited to extremists on both sides. Hatred has gone mainstream, spreading first to victims of the violence and their families--the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have lost loved ones, jobs, homes, occasionally entire neighborhoods--and then into the wider society. Now it permeates not only the rancorous political discourse of Baghdad's Green Zone...