Members UstadKhanAli Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 In the latest issue of Newsweek (May 12 2008), Fareed Zakaria writes: A team of scholars at the University of Maryland has been tracking deaths caused by organized violence. Their data show that wars of all kinds have been declining since the mid-1980s and that we are now at the lowest levels of global violence since the 1950s. Deaths from terrorism are reported to have risen in recent years. But on closer examination, 80 percent of those casualties come from Afghanistan and Iraq, which are really war zones with ongoing insurgencies Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rasputin1963 Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 Visualise whirled peas! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rasputin1963 Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 Why does it not feel that way? Why do we think we live in scary times? Part of the problem is that as violence has been ebbing, information has been exploding. My old NoCal New Age gurus would say that this violence-in-the-news thing is a necessary part of the collective healing process.... We have to hold up our various insanities to The Light of consciousness so they can be acknowledged, purged and healed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 Calm before the storm? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members nice keetee Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 Maybe Newsweek has an agenda ie mediaspeak. So maybe the violence is less organized. More of the "give me a cigarette" oh no, pull out a gun and shoot the non-cig giver in the head and kill them... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ermghoti II Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 Maybe Newsweek has an agenda ie mediaspeak. So maybe the violence is less organized. More of the "give me a cigarette" oh no, pull out a gun and shoot the non-cig giver in the head and kill them... Uh, no. Murder rates are not particularly high right now, and at their worst, criminal killings couldn't hold a candle to politically derived mass murder, which is what the quoted text was very clearly referring to. Stalin killed something like 100 million people during his reign. That's roughly equivalent to 5,000 years of US murders. Also, the mass media never, ever, under-report violence. Bad news sells. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members dahkter Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 Good post Ken, Definitely some food for thought.I think one of the sad things about the onslaught of violent news reporting is that acute paranoia has set in with the general American populace. On a nice evening, it would be nice if everyone turned off their TV's one night a week and took a walk around to meet and talk to their neighbors.I hear a lot of stories of people living somewhere for ten and twenty years and meeting virutally no one, it's sad (and definitely contributes to the general sense of mailaise and depression in American society IMO). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Billster Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 They say that one of the things that turned the American public against the Vietnam action was the nightly news showing the horrors of war. So of course the pentagon got around that idea and made the first Iraq war look like a video game. OTOH, the outbreak of global communication has made it harder on the despots of the world. Everyone knows the leaders of China are despots, even some of the people living in China. Whether or not anyone does anything about it is a separate question. :-| Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Geoff Grace Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 In the latest issue of Newsweek (May 12 2008), Fareed Zakaria writes:Looking at the evidence, Harvard's polymath professor Steven Pinker has ventured to speculate that we are probably living "in the most peaceful time of our species' existence." What does he mean by that? Surely, with more people alive in the world today than the number of people who have ever lived and died, there must be more total violence than when humanity was a burgeoning species. Perhaps he means there are fewer people per capita committing violent acts than ever before. If so I can believe that, simply because there is a much higher percentage of the middle-aged and elderly alive today than ever before; and as we all know, people are much more likely to commit violent acts when they are young. Best, Geoff Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members nice keetee Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 Uh, no. Murder rates are not particularly high right now, and at their worst, criminal killings couldn't hold a candle to politically derived mass murder, which is what the quoted text was very clearly referring to. Stalin killed something like 100 million people during his reign. That's roughly equivalent to 5,000 years of US murders. Also, the mass media never, ever, under-report violence. Bad news sells. You misread my post or mis-understood. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Anderton Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 Ken rocks. One reason why there is less violence in the world is because he exists. This is not a joke. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Magpel Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 Interesting. I'm not sure if its anything to feel good about--both because it is probably just a multi-factoral and somewhat aribitrary fluctuation and because the other side of the story--the hyper awareness of violence via the media--is not a happy story either! Noam Chomsky (Dittoheads, prepare to deploy...) wrote a good bit about the political uses of fear, didn't he? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Lee Knight Posted May 7, 2008 Moderators Share Posted May 7, 2008 Ken rocks. One reason why there is less violence in the world is because he exists. This is not a joke. This is true Craig. The article is something I've felt in my gut for a long time. I do believe we need to be aware of how much "news" we take in. Being aware of the world around us. It's issues, it's ailments, it's obstacles... this is something we all need to participate in. But getting bogged down in the reality of human nature on a mass scale, this can be overwhelming. Like doing yoga or lifting weights or working on Hanon's piano excercises... we need to listen to our bodies, or in this case or minds and hearts. Be aware. Seek the truth, but listen to you heart and make sure you're not hurting yourself in the process. My father is in a perpetual state of panic due to the news. It's a sad thing to see such an incredibly intelligent man go too far with his quest of the truth. As if he's been lifting weights beyond his capacity and he's hurt. It's tough to go to the gym the next day. Pace yourself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members jackcheez Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 Ken rocks. One reason why there is less violence in the world is because he exists. This is not a joke. Wow. That's like the highest praise a person could get. The world is the LEAST violent it's ever been??? I recon "we still got a long way to go", to quote Alice Cooper. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members nat whilk II Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 Well, organized violence is not the only kind of violence by a long shot. But also, it's obvious that organized violence comes in waves, makes a sort of oscillation up and down through time. That means that, whenever history is at the bottom of the wave, it looks like a new trend towards perhaps unprecedented territory if the trend continues. It just depends on the window you put over the data - if you start at the highest prior level (just after WWII) and end at the current lowest level, then, viola! you have a newsworthy trend! And if this "discovered trend" continues (say the statistical prophets) then we're on the verge of a new world order! Take these two factors: 1. the dousing effect that increasing news coverage might have on people's willingness to kill in wars, and 2. the increasing power, efficiency, and automation of technological killing weapons... I can't feel that factor No.1 has any more power than perhaps a temporary political effect in certain countries. TV could just as easily be used to pump up pro-war rah-rah as provide any anti-war reality check. But factor No. 2 - that's where a few button pushes and the "deaths by organized violence" will pin to the top of the throw - so much for any prior trends towards peacefulness. If there's a trend, it's towards the normal expressions of human nature which have always included wars and killings alongside the better expressions of human nature. It's always seemed to me that "technological advance" and "historical trends" and "social evolution" etc etc are just distractions from the real source of history's miseries and ecstacies - the human soul. Which I don't think can be statistically proven to have changed much. In the long run, our best hope is probably that the good guys win - if there are any good guys - and if they can stay good once they win. nat whilk ii Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ermghoti II Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 You misread my post or mis-understood. I'm not sure you understand the original post, my post or, possibly, your post. The article states that violence due to wars and other campaigns of violence are down, by historical comparisons. You suggested the article was concealing real violence levels by ignoring random street crime. I pointed out that all criminal violence combined does not register as a rounding error on large scale organized violence, which, again, is what the article referred to. Then you posted the hilarious rolleyes emote. Did I miss anything? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members UstadKhanAli Posted May 7, 2008 Author Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 Wow. Uh, first of all, thank you very much for the compliments, Craig and others. Like Lee Knight, I had long thought that violence was actually lower than previous centuries, and lower than what it actually appears to be. However, the thing that really blew my mind was the Harvard professor speculating that violence may be at its lowest point. Evaluating violence through what we receive in the news is a difficult thing to accurately achieve. We get so much more information due to 24-hour news channels, the internet, mobile phones, and other sources than ever before. If Chairman Mao were to have killed tens of millions of people like he did last century, but with China's current technology nowadays, can you imagine what horrors everyone around the world would see? Or what happened in Rumania or with Hitler? The article even mentions how relatively little information we received when millions in the Congo were killed just a decade ago. I think that those of us who live in Western countries are unaccustomed to the violence being brought to our doorstep, having our train stations and tunnels and buildings blown up. And when this happens, and then we're fed the endless amount of information on YouTube, CNN, Fox News, blog sites, Yahoo News, and other places on the internet, we're far more aware of what happens and the endless speculation that goes on when a NY airport is shut down or Orange Alerts, we in the West may feel like there's much more violence than before. But I've long suspected that there's not, despite the great anger towards the U.S. right now in the Middle East. In fact, a lot of Americans may not realize that a lot of cities, including large cities in Third World countries, are actually much safer than American cities. I think another thing that gets people in the U.S. deeply concerned is the faltering economy, and I mention this because I think it kinda feeds into this paranoia about danger and terrorism and violence. But largely what is happening is not just the recession. It's the rest of the world catching up to us economically. It's not just India and China, either. It's not just Asia. Much of South America, including Brazil and Peru and other places, are enjoying prosperity and stronger economies. Peru's GDP has been growing by 9% for the last several years. But in the U.S., I think the perception is that we are sinking economically. Whether that's true or not, I'm not sure, but what is at least partially happening is that the rest of the world is growing economically stronger. So even if our economy is going down, it might look like it's going down much faster because everything else is coming up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members UstadKhanAli Posted May 7, 2008 Author Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 Interesting. I'm not sure if its anything to feel good about--both because it is probably just a multi-factoral and somewhat aribitrary fluctuation and because the other side of the story--the hyper awareness of violence via the media--is not a happy story either!Noam Chomsky (Dittoheads, prepare to deploy...) wrote a good bit about the political uses of fear, didn't he? Good point. I think that's capitalized upon a great deal in politics, where people prey upon fears. The hyper-awareness of violence in the media....I've been finding that it stresses me out. I don't like it, so yeah, I'm not sure if it's a wonderful thing, although I would also not think that it's a good thing to plug that up since that'd be censorship. We have to be our own censors, ultimately. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members fetishfrog Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 I don't think it's too terribly surprising. The standard of living has largely risen around the world (notable exceptions do exist), making it harder for people to justify violent acts. Aslo, due to the overwhelming influence of the information age, the rules of engagement in war are far more different now, so even war is less violent. War gets brought home everyday and now you don't see the U.S. carpet bombing Iraq and Afganistan the way we would have during WW2, and I think these are good decisions. Surgical strikes are politically and morally way more justifiable than mass killing, so the ovrall amount of violence goes down. That fact that it's in our face 24/7/365 makes it seem so very violent though. Intersting article. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Super 8 Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 The article makes sense to me. So why does our music tend to be so much more violent now? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Jon Gnash Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 I think that's capitalized upon a great deal in politics, where people prey upon fears.I think you might be overlooking an even more insidious fear monger. Deciples: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Super 8 Posted May 7, 2008 Members Share Posted May 7, 2008 Btw, there are similar statistics that show that earthquakes are not on the increase. Not even around areas with high gay concentrations??? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Lee Knight Posted May 8, 2008 Moderators Share Posted May 8, 2008 Not even around areas with high gay concentrations??? Hurricanes! Hurricanes are God's prefered method for lowering the gay population. Katrina proves this right? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members UstadKhanAli Posted May 8, 2008 Author Members Share Posted May 8, 2008 So it wasn't Mother Nature's attack on poor people? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Lee Knight Posted May 8, 2008 Moderators Share Posted May 8, 2008 No. It's George Bush against poor people and blacks. God is against gays. Bush uses inaction. God uses... uh... acts of God! Hurricanes in this case. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.