Perhaps I need to look at stats to see if this is the case?

I feel like devoting the next several pages to me laughing.

i havent been been putting graphs down but maybe I should start doing that.  I’m not sure I know how.  You should genuinely read Steven pinkers “the better angels of our nature–why violence has declined.”  It’s an 800 pa…[Read more]

I have no looked at new Zealand.  Seems peaceful now.  I have considered tribal. Societies of today and what they likely were like in the past.  If the average holds true then new Zealand a few hundred years ago was much more violent than today.  Genocides were how tribal wars seemed to work. Get them before they get you. And no rescue team to sto…[Read more]

Here in Canada, our national sport is croquet. (Not hockey)  In the past it was played on horseback and covered many miles and lasted days.  And if a team mate wasn’t playing to his full potential he was beaten to death by his own teammates.

I think this illustrates nicely the difference between now and then.

In Canada go back just 105 y…[Read more]

mmm. No.  Death sentences for petty crimes isn’t common.  Death sentences for murder isn’t even that common.  In the US they still have the death sentence but in a land where there are 18000 homicides a year how many death sentences?  

And death sentences are different than torture.  Death by torture used to be common. Now it isn’t.  Sto…[Read more]

To nick I would say only the stupid welcome torture.  I’m not even talking about the kind of torture Jesus went through. I’m talking about the Middle Ages. These seems to perfect evil back the.   Tie a person to a plank. Cut a slit in his stomach.  Put a rat on the stomach with a metal cage on top.  Then heat the cage so the rat eats its way thro…[Read more]

Yes.  I’d maybe kill myself.  And you would maybe be tied to a large wheel for your beliefs and then beaten on the wheel until your body resembled a flailing puppet, with sinues  of flesh and bits of bone protruding from every part of your body.

Kerwin

I would say that in the Middle Ages you were less likely to be caught for a crime.  But if you were caught or just suspected (of witchcraft or heresy or anything really) and determined to be guilty, you would have suffered sadistic painful slow deaths.

Capital punishmnt itself can also be considered a form of violence   Today we say a…[Read more]

Less accountability?  People chopped off hands for theft.  Death sentence for petty crimes.  10 minute trial and then slow torture to death.

one reason there was more violence is because crimes ad punishment were not calibrated.  If a person is going to be torn apart slowly or have their organs burned in front of them, whether they steel a wag…[Read more]

KErwin.  H .  The very first time I mentioned to someone a cbc report that crime was dropping in my city, a friend who lives in the most dangerous part of the city refused to believe it and gave me a personal anecdote.

The thing about his anecdote is, I could equally provide my own that shows the opposite.

A person who wants to paint violence o…[Read more]

Ton of spelling mistakes I that last post.  Sometimes I write very quickly while at work.  Did I lose my editing rights?

So I didn’t make light of it.  I didn’t say it doesn’t matter.  I’m a imply familiar with the cognitive illusions people experience connected with this form of violence.

2500 per year on average are victims of domestic terrorism and 400 on average of international terrorism. (2011 stats going back a few decades) These numbers are 2 orders of m…[Read more]

I don’t remember making light of it.  I put it in its relative position.  Because of the availability heuristic cognitive illusion, people have a very disproportionate unrealistic view of how many people die from terrorism compared to other things.  This heuristic is a mental short cut for evaluating danger based on what is available in your mi…[Read more]

This is all I’m really trying to say:

“Since 9/11, foreign-inspired terrorism has claimed about two dozen lives in the United States. (Meanwhile, more than 100,000 have been killed in gun homicides and more than 400,000 in motor-vehicle accidents.) “–CNN

“How would the family members of terrorist victims respond to that-“terrorism kills almost no one”?”–Andrew

You seem to be using an appeal to emotion here.  I could similarly say that almost no one dies from drowning in bath tubs, or from bee stings, (but I actually think these numbers are higher than terrorism deaths if I recall) and then I co…[Read more]

“How would the family members of terrorist victims respond to that-“terrorism kills almost no one”?”–Andrew

You seem to be using an appeal to emotion here.  I could similarly say that almost no one dies from drowning in bath tubs, or from bee stings, (but I actually think these numbers are higher than terrorism deaths if I recall)! and then I co…[Read more]

a part of the reason this irks me is because a lot of people pla fast and loose with Jesus words.  He was fairly specific.

Great earthquakes.  Nation rising against nation.  Food shortages. Pestilence.

These are fairly specific things.  Maybe there are things in reflection that could be taken to mean the world would be in fear or let’s say ter…[Read more]

Homicide kills about 6.4/100,000 per year globally.

War deaths kill about 1/100,000 per year globally.

What do you think the terrorism numbers are?  The terrorism deaths are in the noise.  The tiniest fraction of these other things.

War deaths per hundred thousand used to be about 300 per year during the Second World War.  They dropped to…[Read more]

Hi t8

the bible says things like the “whole world” is lying in the power of  the wicked one.  I don’t know that the bible anywhere says violence would increase in the Middle East and not the rest of the world.  There seems to be this mental distortion or brain trick that things are getting worse and worse.  But infant mortality is vastly down glo…[Read more]

kerwin, yes, as you say, homicide in the U.S. has gone from 11/100,000 per year down to about 6/100,000 per year since 1980.  Yet I would guess if you asked, almost everyone believes it is getting worse and has been for decades.  The reason people feel this is because of the way the news works and a cognitive illusion called the availability heu…[Read more]

Poverty or extreme poverty is a good example. Imagine that it were to stay at 1 billion people as an example and not budge at all.  But in that time let’s say the earth’s population doubles.  This means only half as many people as a percentage of the world would be in poverty even if in absolute terms the number is the same.  An now imagine we gr…[Read more]