The violence paradox: Is violence actually declining?
pbs.org
pbs.org
Stephen Pinker may get some flak for being a pop-science writer but this seems extremely thorough. It would be nice not to use this article as a platform for exercising our pre-existing prejudices.
> violent intruders
Very few of the people crossing the border are themselves "violent".
It's an appropriate word for what happened at several borders, fences that were erected were torn down violently and hundreds of people ran over them. What word would you rather use?
https://www.srf.ch/news/international/fluechtlinge-stuermen-... (this is from a failed attempt)
> A (successful) state contains violence, in both senses of the word.
(The two meanings of the word “contains” being “includes” and “limits”.)
The Empire State Building takes violence to maintain because without the threat of violence someone might carry away all the rocks. Your local library takes violence to maintain because without the threat of violence someone might burn all the books. Your own life requires violence to maintain, because only the threat of violence from the state prevents someone from killing and eating you.
And we do want to be like that, in theory, because violence cannot be avoided entirely in human interactions, and because violence as a regulated market is more humane than violence as a free market, and because that violence in the former case is mostly abstracted into the bureaucracy. For many people in a modern society the closest they'll ever come to seeing the "violence inherent to the system" is maybe a speeding ticket or misdemeanor jail time.
One problem is that the whole illusion of power a government requires to operate falls apart when this promise isn't kept in practice and a large number of people become aware of this failure through media. Perhaps the news and following public outcries about e.g. police violence in the US serve a (second) purpose.
When that falls apart, and people decide to no longer participate in the fiction that is civil society, things can get ugly.
The equivocation of personal and private property only serves to legitimise a system of rentseekers and landlords.
We know it is. Not in question at all. But we don't know for sure if war is declining since it's overwhelmed in large spikes.
Good doco.
I liked the theory good manners is one possible reason. It's cute but actually makes sense, although not a huge fan of the it works part of the brain more.
I'd go with a lot of violence is embarrassing and we are taught embarrassing is bad. Sit up straight, use a knife and fork and don't hurt people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...
Personally I trust the dutch police force and in fact admire them greatly. They handle dangerous and stressful situations much better than I personally ever could. That said I do see why you'd be mistrustful as average citizen, the most you'll have to do with police is reporting crimes such as broken windows or stolen bikes, in which case you'll probably get a shrug and a "we'll look into it" at most.
The police force is currently very well trained and adequately supplied, but as is the story in many places budget cuts are being made all over and I worry for the future.
In any case an independent research office looking into the crime stats wouldn't be a bad thing, but I suspect it's a rather tricky thing to gauge in the first place.
A third way crime rates are independently checked in the UK, is hospital admissions statistics for shootings and stabbings.
I can't find any info on that for the dutch police, do you have a source?
> Police has been in reorganisation since forever. Personnel is over-extended to the point they are contemplating strikes.
Yep. And it's getting worse. For now it's all still operating well enough but we're at an inflection point for sure.
Are you actually living in NL?
Thanks for the source, closing police stations is definitely not a good sign. I hope that that's a trend that has reversed since that news article came out.
Which would make crime statistics lower than they really are.
We are due for the next cycle of violence to rival WW2, if not even more so. We have forgotten and are unable to imagine when more than a hundred thousand are killed in a single day. But those days will come again and very soon.
The next war will be (pretty much) the West against the Rest. The whole of the West has a smaller population and less manufacturing capacity than China alone.
I think it's more likely the next big war will be fought over fresh water.
From the description of Niall Ferguson's The War of the World.
Because all the countries of the West think alike and because everyone who isn’t thinks alike? This sounds like those politicians who ask “but what do the minorities want?”
It hasn't been about nations for a long time, but the rich and powerful people who influence them. Many of them aren't even elected officials.
See Trump and Russia, Saudi Arabia and Khashoggi, the American citizens beaten up by Erdogan's bodyguards on American soil, the UAE and Sheikha Latifa, American corporations kowtowing to China, the US ambassador's wife who got away with murdering a UK teen, Jeffrey Epstein and his private island of underage prostitution for the cream of society's crop, and the many other cases where the personal whims of the elite few override sovereign laws.
Those people literally have access to everything that human civilization has to offer, and they're not going to ruin their playground.
But this is the first time in human history, when they can go anywhere, do anything, to anyone, at anytime, without having to worry about national borders etc.
Money is the universal differentiator now, and anybody of any nation or race can have it.
Until you piss off someone else who also has money, then connections come into play, then the might of arms.
The parent comment actually seems reasonable to me. It really wouldn’t take much escalation for a trade war to turn into a shooting war between, at least China and America.
I don't think any ruler would have been able to easily hop to another continent on a whim for an orgy with a wide selection of sex slaves and be back home by next dawn, before the advent of instantaneous communications and jet planes.
The point was that the people who command nations have access to a previously unprecedented level of luxury which would be ruined if the world wasn't largely at peace.
I don’t see how this poses much of a safeguard, in any event. If millions of Chinese wind up starving due to a trade war, for example, a shooting war is almost inevitable.
It doesn't.
A shooting war has already commenced by the CCP in Hong Kong because they refuse to acquiesce to the dominion of the PRC's illegal dictates, so what you should be worried more about creating a 'shooting war' is China's economic turmoil (much by the machinations of the CCP/PRC) having a spill-on effect outside of its borders than within. Moreover, a correction is long over-due, just to be clear, the US shouldn't be a super power anymore, either; nor should any nation if we've seen what they do with said power.
While I agree the World is under a kleptocractic-plutacracy, the emergence of the Nation-state was only ever just that; there was no 'Golden era' of the State, it was only forced down the serf/peasant class' collective throats and legitimized under a thinly-veil scam called an election process which promotes division and mob-justice. One in which can be altered/manipulated in masse and in certain cases outright removed as it sees fit.
The US + Germany have a larger combined manufacturing capacity than China does, in a population about 30% that of China. With the population gap you can then throw in France, Britain, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Canada and far exceed the manufacturing capacity of China (which has about 20%-22% of global manufacturing output and declining as a share).
The recent episode of Silicon Valley was so typical of my short stay there of the collective mindset (#Tethics) in the Valley, which was just a summer; my family is actually from San Jose (multi-generational), but they have since divested and left to the South (where I'm from) for good because of the BS politics and police state that emerged from what was once a really awesome culture in the late 60-80s and less so but still decent mid to late 90s.
I personally moved to Boulder and rode a decent wave, but to be honest with Google coming here and a lot of its cohort following in masse with the large campus it feels about the same now.
>“I just pray to God to bless those three babies I have,” she says. The local health centre in her village of Darey Maliki offered her free contraception, which they get partly from the NGO Pathfinder, but Hamani declined. “Maybe [my in-laws] would tell my husband to marry another woman to have more babies,” she says. “If they want me to have another pregnancy, I can do it just for them to feel happy.”
Perhaps that culture changes in the future generations, but for now Subsaharan Africa is on track for 2B+ in 2050, and nothing short of starvation or violence can change that.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...