Mar
Sep
Why Violence is Vanishing - Steven Pinker
A superb article. Some highlights:
The rate of documented direct deaths from political violence (war, terrorism, genocide and warlord militias) in the past decade is an unprecedented few hundredths of a percentage point. Even if we multiplied that rate to account for unrecorded deaths and the victims of war-caused disease and famine, it would not exceed 1%.
Another contributor was the expansion of international peacekeeping forces, which really do keep the peace—not always, but far more often than when adversaries are left to fight to the bitter end.
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The most obvious of these pacifying forces has been the state, with its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. A disinterested judiciary and police can defuse the temptation of exploitative attack, inhibit the impulse for revenge and circumvent the self-serving biases that make all parties to a dispute believe that they are on the side of the angels.
It is probably no coincidence that the Humanitarian Revolution came on the heels of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, that the Long Peace and rights revolutions coincided with the electronic global village.
Jun
Supreme Court Actually Does Something Right, Prevents Video Game Ban
Despite the fact that children have been playing violent games since the days of Cowboys and Indians, a few lawmakers in California thought it necessary to ban “ultraviolent” video games to kids under 18. Apparently, the age at which one can join the Army and train to kill actual people is also the age at which blasting the heads off zombies becomes an appropriate recreational activity.
Why are lawmakers allowed to prohibit violent video games without any evidence that doing so would decrease crime rates? The myth that violent media can transform people into sociopathic serial killers simply will not die.
