The world goes through cycles of peace and violence.
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.
"The world at the beginning of the 20th century seemed for most of its inhabitants stable and relatively benign. Globalizing, booming economies married to technological breakthroughs seemed to promise a better world for most people."
From the description of Niall Ferguson's The War of the World.
> The next war will be (pretty much) the West against the Rest
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?”
If you haven't noticed by now, the world is a plutocracy/oligarchy.
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.
This comment seems strained. A history book would neither back up the claim about unfettered travel, nor the claim about corruption.
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.
> A history book would neither back up the claim about unfettered travel, nor the claim about corruption.
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.
Ah, okay. I thought you were referring to well-defined borders, and strict border controls. Both these were generally lax before the 20th Century.
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.
> 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 whole of the West has a smaller population and less manufacturing capacity than China alone.
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).
This sounds like FUD, and the more people believe it the closer it comes to being realized. It has been increasing lately. Some great times to push for new rules/censorship for the internet in the name of safety I assume.
Or maybe you guys in the Valley could stop offering your labour to FAANG, who then sell that information for profit to Intelligence agencies and go back to the cypherpunk and cryptoanarchist roots of the Valley and help create an alternative?
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.
Nylonkong are getting more attention with Trump, Brexit, and the protests. When was the last time you read an in-depth news about some under represented region, say, Nigeria? For a country experiencing population boom and worsening internal conflicts, 200 million people there ARE going to fight for fresh water and other resources if the rest of world just sit there and do nothing.
What is 'the rest of the world' supposed to do? It's not like they don't have access to internet or condoms (even free), not in 2019. It's a (collective) choice.
See [1]. It's about Niger (same largest ethnic group - Hausa[2]), which is also experiencing a population explosion, but the principle appears to be the same:
>“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.
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.
I don't know what the parent means however isn't it true that some cities in the US stopped prosecuting some crimes deemed "petty" such as theft, "hard drugs" dealing, …
Which would make crime statistics lower than they really are.
I think "under reporting crime" is not something very recent. But something that is usually not under-reported, is violent crimes like murder or assault resulting in severe injuries, because someone ends up at the morgue or in the hospital where they are definitely tracked and recorded. As far as I know this is where we are pretty much sure violence is decreasing over time.
I mean here in Greece violence is in the workplace (you can be fired just because) in the shops (they change prices just because) in the government (takes anti social measures just because) in the people relations (people play the emotional abuse game because law has not caught up) and the decline of our civilization is a result of the increase in violence. It just takes a peaceful face because the vast majority would like to have an opportunity to exercise their dark side but would like to play safe. So the silently agree what kind of violence is acceptable or not. Violence is not acceptable in any of its forms.
Violence as a contagious disease is a concept that isn't going to fare well in certain circles (of proponents of open borders, migration etc.). More research should be done in this area, if possible.
It requires violence on behalf of the authorities sometimes to keep violent intruders out, just like it's required to catch criminals or deflect a hostile army's attack. That doesn't make it bad. In practice, authorities exert no violence at borders e.g. in most European countries, even the threat of violent action is very low nowadays - that's why they are easily overrun.
> "Overrun" is a very extreme word to use here? Are you trying to suggest "invasion"?
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?
Speaking as a third-party reader, when you assert that borders require violence to maintain, then you disagree with lazyjones saying there are sometimes violent intruders, it leaves me confused about what argument you're trying to make?
Well if we want to be like that, then everything requires violence to maintain.
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.
That is basically just a snarky way of restating the premise of the monopoly on violence[0].
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.
Yes, in exchange for the people ceding their right to violence to the state, states are supposed to be trustworthy and neutral arbiters who follow their own rules and are subject to the will of the people. Both the people and the state are supposed to be limited in their power.
When that falls apart, and people decide to no longer participate in the fiction that is civil society, things can get ugly.
> That is basically just a snarky way of restating the premise of the monopoly on violence[0].
Theory? No, some of us find that behaviour abhorrent, the very notion that civility is borne from the threat of violence, often from a Nation-State who holds said monopoly, is not only antithetical to observation/practice but if Human progress and conduct and Nature itself. Collaboration, specifically non forceful, is what allowed the Human species to thrive and essentially conquer this Planet--and in time others as well. The ISS, which should be grounded if only for external political reasons, is the best example of that very notion.
Your (Statist) argument contends: Centralized violence is preferable because its obfuscated, and you can rationalize it should the need arise in which you may need it for my own ends.
I think you need to re-address and review some basic terms before you can have any validity in that statement; the first being 'self-defense,' which is not violence. Try using that when redressing the State, whether it be for corruption, misconduct, misuse of Force, outright retaliation or theft (all typical when dealing with LEO): even if you're right, you will still be imprisoned for challenging the notion of centralized violence you advocate for resisting an arrest under those grounds.
Privatization of Police sounds horrible on paper, given things enabled by the State itself: Blackwater, XE, misc rouge once State financed Mercenary groups turned rouge etc... But I'm open to the idea of how to move forward from this entrenched, expensive, and grossly corrupt system. Markets are efficient, but far from perfect, so I'm at least willing to explore the possibilities of access to the inherit need for conflict resolution.
And having been an activist, something that USED TO BE TYPICAL of People who were interested in what the Valley was but has since been displaced by greed and cowardice, I'm far more familiar with 'violence inherent to the system' than what you alluded to. If you're instead speaking about the typical FAANG employee sat behind a desk telling themselves they're a 'disruptor' or some other contrived narrative, than you're probably right... but, understand that wasn't always the case.
With that said, despite not wanting to live in any other period in Human History, the World is rife with Violence; Domestically and Internationally. The US penal system is on par with most dictatorship nations, it spends more in imprisoning and policing (local violence) than just about another developed country by a far margin, it also happens to spend more money on Military (which is the means international Violence) than most of the G5 nations combined. Furthermore, just look at Mainland China with the genocide, rape and suspected organ harvesting of the Uyghur People, and the violent occupation and suppression of basic Human Rights in Hong Kong.
Its an amazing time to be alive, there is no doubt about that, but violence is ubiquitous, the thing is now with the advent of the Internet we're seeing it in Real-time from the People themselves, rather than a skewed perception of it a History book, or a 20 second piece on the news as was typical only a few years back.
Edit: Keep downvoting; I held up a mirror and you didn't like what you see in the reflection, which is why you'd rather click a button than rebuttal.
Same for property rights. So get rid of property rights? But then that would have to include sexual access to other people, which would also be violence.
There's a difference between personal property and private property. It isn't violence to use a building that nobody else is using, and it is violence to force people to pay for that use - otoh, it is violence to use the home someone else is living in, take the food they eat, etc.
The equivocation of personal and private property only serves to legitimise a system of rentseekers and landlords.
Here in the Netherlands, crime statistics are declining, but many people suspect that the real reason is that the police often refuses to register declarations (or advises against filing declarations).
I bet the dutch central office of statistics keeps track of it. But then if you don't trust the one government body why should you trust another?
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.
Police stations are closed en masse. Police has been in reorganisation since forever. Personnel is over-extended to the point they are contemplating strikes.
Yes I do live in The Netherlands. Excuse me for not remembering a year old news item that didn't have any direct impact on me.
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.
This is long, and I suspect most of us have neither watched it nor read all the transcript; but from the parts of the transcript I have skimmed it seems to hit absolutely all the areas I would expect it to cover. Everything from evolutionary biology to memetics through colonialism, inequality, the epidemiology model for interventions, sports across cultural divides. I suspect most sentences are themselves summaries of a stack of investigations.
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.
54 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadWe 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...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hausa_people
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.
Which would make crime statistics lower than they really are.
> 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.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
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.
Theory? No, some of us find that behaviour abhorrent, the very notion that civility is borne from the threat of violence, often from a Nation-State who holds said monopoly, is not only antithetical to observation/practice but if Human progress and conduct and Nature itself. Collaboration, specifically non forceful, is what allowed the Human species to thrive and essentially conquer this Planet--and in time others as well. The ISS, which should be grounded if only for external political reasons, is the best example of that very notion.
Your (Statist) argument contends: Centralized violence is preferable because its obfuscated, and you can rationalize it should the need arise in which you may need it for my own ends.
I think you need to re-address and review some basic terms before you can have any validity in that statement; the first being 'self-defense,' which is not violence. Try using that when redressing the State, whether it be for corruption, misconduct, misuse of Force, outright retaliation or theft (all typical when dealing with LEO): even if you're right, you will still be imprisoned for challenging the notion of centralized violence you advocate for resisting an arrest under those grounds.
Privatization of Police sounds horrible on paper, given things enabled by the State itself: Blackwater, XE, misc rouge once State financed Mercenary groups turned rouge etc... But I'm open to the idea of how to move forward from this entrenched, expensive, and grossly corrupt system. Markets are efficient, but far from perfect, so I'm at least willing to explore the possibilities of access to the inherit need for conflict resolution.
And having been an activist, something that USED TO BE TYPICAL of People who were interested in what the Valley was but has since been displaced by greed and cowardice, I'm far more familiar with 'violence inherent to the system' than what you alluded to. If you're instead speaking about the typical FAANG employee sat behind a desk telling themselves they're a 'disruptor' or some other contrived narrative, than you're probably right... but, understand that wasn't always the case.
With that said, despite not wanting to live in any other period in Human History, the World is rife with Violence; Domestically and Internationally. The US penal system is on par with most dictatorship nations, it spends more in imprisoning and policing (local violence) than just about another developed country by a far margin, it also happens to spend more money on Military (which is the means international Violence) than most of the G5 nations combined. Furthermore, just look at Mainland China with the genocide, rape and suspected organ harvesting of the Uyghur People, and the violent occupation and suppression of basic Human Rights in Hong Kong.
Its an amazing time to be alive, there is no doubt about that, but violence is ubiquitous, the thing is now with the advent of the Internet we're seeing it in Real-time from the People themselves, rather than a skewed perception of it a History book, or a 20 second piece on the news as was typical only a few years back.
Edit: Keep downvoting; I held up a mirror and you didn't like what you see in the reflection, which is why you'd rather click a button than rebuttal.
The equivocation of personal and private property only serves to legitimise a system of rentseekers and landlords.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...