Justice as fairness: we can do better than we are

[SoNotHer]

"Now that my brain is functioning again, I can address the things above.

I'm about three hours from finishing up Stephen Pinker's latest book The Better Angels of Our Nature. The core of the book is that as time has passed humans *have* become more compassionate and less violent. Yes, LESS, violent. Consider the following:

AJ, I think you may have to be my go-to person for injections of optimism. I've added the book to my wish list, and I'll wait for the soft cover. Thank you for the reference.

1) It is vanishingly improbable that anyone reading this knows someone who was burnt at the stake as a witch. I'm not saying someone in your lineage, I mean someone you've met.

But you have heard of "water boarding" and you may well know one of the 400K in the United States who have been victims of political torture, which, it turns out, is still sanctioned in 100 countries.

https://www.ncjrs.gov/ovc_archives/r...e/welcome.html

2) No one here has ever been to a live bear-baiting.

I have seen a toothless, chained bear in Russia used for panhandling. Certainly we know other acts of animal cruelty exist everywhere, such as the release and termination of an exotic animal zoo in Ohio last month.

3) It is vanishingly improbable that anyone here has ever had to fear being stabbed at the dinner table by someone wielding a steak knife.

:-)

4) No great power has shot at any other great power since the end of WW II. I'm not saying that there's been no wars, but no *great power* wars. China and Japan fought multiple wars in the past but haven't fought one in 65 years. France and Germany, England and France, Germany and Russia *all* had periodic bouts of warfare through the 17th, 18th, 19th and the first half of the 20th century. In fact, Europe is now experiencing the longest contiguous peace since, get this, the height of the Roman Empire! WW III never happened, sometimes despite all efforts to make it happen.

Greece is at a tipping point, and much of the EU could follow if the economic situation grows worse. Just because an active volcano has a long period of dormancy does not mean it can't or in fact won't erupt.

5) The number of crimes that could earn one the death penalty in western nations has gone from a whole raft of items to a very few (murder, possibly treason, possibly child rape). And in most European nations you simply can't *get* the death penalty no matter how heinous the crime. A century or two ago, you could get the death penalty for insulting the crown!

True. But we are still in fact using the death penalty as the final act of insult and injury in a series of injustices.

6) In the west, marital rape has gone from 'just the way things are' to a criminal offense. Spousal abuse has gone from a punchline on 'The Honeymooners' to something no sit-com would *ever* put in because it is socially unacceptable (again, that doesn't mean it never happens just that when it does, the abuser is not going to find a sympathetic ear when he claims that 'she had it coming').

You do know that marital rape and spousal abuse continue in large numbers and most likely affect/have affected someone you know, including yours truly. "One in four women (25%) has experienced domestic violence in her lifetime."

"Between 600,000 and 6 million women are victims of domestic violence each year, and between 100,000 and 6 million men, depending on the type of survey used to obtain the data."

http://www.dvrc-or.org/domestic/violence/resources/C61/

7) Spanking, in the west, has gone from 'this is how you raise children' to child abuse. If half of what I endured as a child happened to a kid today, that kid would be removed from the home.

Funny, one of my students is writing about this (others have). It's clear she's struggling with whether or not to continue this with her own children.

8) War has gone from something noble and 'the aspiration of every man and nation' to something repellant to large numbers of people.

As much as I really want to believe this, how can I when main stream films now resemble a hybrid of video games and porn films - thread bare, derivative and scant dialogue and character development for the sole purpose of taking the viewer to each new orgy of violence (war-driven or otherwise). For example, I just saw the trailer for Immortals last night at the gym. It seemed to me like one extended battle scene that picked up where 300 left off. Please tell me how many top grossing straight-dramas (adult and not a comedy) you can find that don't have at least one act of glorified violence in it:

http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2011&p=.htm

If the military branches have started to capitalize on gaming technology and the gaming mindset. The ads now make it seem as though the transfer from basement Xbox or Wii to live military engagement is seamless or perhaps the video game done one better.

So yes, I think that human societies can become more compassionate and peaceful, up to a point. I do not think we can nor do I think we should try, to have any kind of utopia. We *know* what happens when people try to create utopias and we should not trust anyone who suggests we should do so. I do think humans are moving to a stage in our cultural development(s) that violence is increasingly being constrained. The circle of moral concern has expanded to include more and more groups of people.

Has it expanded, or have alternate realities allowed us to detach from violence and its consequences even more? Whether or not we want to claim an absolute state of paradise, if we don't pursue Utopia, is dystopia always the default? And does dystopia, or the idea of it, scare us less? Does it feel more comfortable and more in sync with our natures?

As far as your paradise or purgatory question, I think neither. But I do think that now is a better time to be alive, for larger numbers of humanity, ever. Even in poor nations the average life expectancy has crossed over the 40 year mark and in rich nations it is pushing up toward 90. At the end of the 18th century the average lifespan was ~37 years. At the end of the 19th it was about 45. At the end of the twentieth it was about 75. We have almost *doubled* the number of years people live on average in about a century and almost trebled it in about two centuries.

Actually, that trend is reversing and will no doubt continue to reverse, "particularly among women."

http://www.americanscientist.org/iss...sal-of-fortune

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/201...h-inequalities

Literacy, is spreading so fast that we notice illiteracy but not literacy. Two hundred years ago we would take illiteracy for granted and notice literacy.

Well, we know literacy is tied to crime, and we know we are filling prison beds with amazing numbers here in the U.S. "One in every 31 adults, or 7.3 million Americans, is in prison, on parole or probation, at a cost to the states of $47 billion in 2008, according to a new study....Only Medicaid spending grew faster than state corrections spending."

I've been teaching since 1985 (another frightening statistic in itself), and those is purely non-scientific and empirical, I am seeing problems with vocabulary, reading levels, understanding grammatical concepts like fragments and run ons and other issues that I have not seen to this degree of seriousness. Whether it's in offering the correct pronunciation of the word "library" (not lie-berry), or the introduction of a word like "gist" or simply explaining to my students that cutting and pasting from an encyclopedia is not researched writing, I am amazed at the education my adult students didn't get and what the implications are for this going forward.

I'm really most curious about this question of designing ourselves out of our natures. I'm curious about the purpose and power of visions and alternative presentations of "reality." Can we redesign ourselves? Should we? And are our visions like Rawls' intrinsically important to growth evolution, or are they just another alternate reality, another distraction?

And on that note, I'm more than ready for lunch. Now where did I leave that steak knife? ;-)

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by SoNotHer

1) It is vanishingly improbable that anyone reading this knows someone who was burnt at the stake as a witch. I'm not saying someone in your lineage, I mean someone you've met.

[B]But you have heard of "water boarding" and you may well know one of the 400K in the United States who have been victims of political torture, which, it turns out, is still sanctioned in 100 countries.

But that is not witch burning. It isn't. That isn't any of a number of tortures used by, just to pick an example, the Inquisition in Western Europe. It also isn't widespread. It is vanishingly improbable that anyone reading these words lives in fear that the church will burst through their door and drag them kicking and screaming to their doom with no due process of law just because someone said "my dog died, she's a witch!"

Please, please, please understand that violence or other social unpleasantness isn't a binary switch. The logic you appear to be using above is that if there is ANY violence or torture then violence and torture have not been reduced. But that doesn't work. Let's say that there were 15K homicides in the US last year and 10,000 this year. Would that not be an improvement? Or should we say that 10,000 murders is the same as 15,000 and so nothing has improved? I would argue that the fact that witch burning is *unknown* in the West and hasn't happened either in Western Europe or North American in about 200 years! This can be true even IF water boarding is still going on. What's more, look at the difference of reaction--in the West--to water boarding now and witch burning (or lynching) in the past. I'll take lynching first. Within the lifetime of my parents (born in 1922) lynching went from a Saturday or Sunday afternoon diversion for the whole family (presuming the family was white) to a *crime*. People used to send *postcards* of lynchings and now anyone even suggesting doing so would regret it immediately. Consider that the men who killed James Byrd in Texas were convicted of murder while their grandfathers would have walked for the same crime (probably their fathers as well). That is vast improvement. Isn't one lynching in 1997 an *improvement* over 10 lynchings in 1907? I would say that is a fantastic improvement.

2) No one here has ever been to a live bear-baiting.

I have seen a toothless, chained bear in Russia used for panhandling. Certainly we know other acts of animal cruelty exist everywhere, such as the release and termination of an exotic animal zoo in Ohio last month.

Much the same applies here. Again, I am not saying that violence or cruelty has disappeared. I AM saying that it has *drastically* been reduced and become far *less* socially acceptable. Michael Vick went to jail for dog fighting. In 1940 he would never have even had a run-in with the law over dog fighting. Does dog fighting still go on? Regrettably, yes. Is it legal in the United States or Western Europe? No. Is it socially acceptable? In most communities, no. Does that mean that dog fighting never occurs anywhere on the planet? No. Does that mean that dog fighting is socially unacceptable *everywhere* on the planet? No. It doesn't have to be either there's no murders or there's a bloodbath, there's either no animal cruelty or it is rampant, there's either no witch burning or torture is ubiquitous and socially acceptable.

4) No great power has shot at any other great power since the end of WW II. I'm not saying that there's been no wars, but no *great power* wars. China and Japan fought multiple wars in the past but haven't fought one in 65 years. France and Germany, England and France, Germany and Russia *all* had periodic bouts of warfare through the 17th, 18th, 19th and the first half of the 20th century. In fact, Europe is now experiencing the longest contiguous peace since, get this, the height of the Roman Empire! WW III never happened, sometimes despite all efforts to make it happen.

Greece is at a tipping point, and much of the EU could follow if the economic situation grows worse. Just because an active volcano has a long period of dormancy does not mean it can't or in fact won't erupt.

Wait, are you putting the potential economic collapse on the same category as war? Sure, this long peace *may* end in 5 minutes but every minute that it continues is *still* the longest contiguous peace that Western Europe has seen since the height of the Roman Empire. I'm not talking about internal harmony nor am I talking about economic prosperity, I'm talking about war. Could an economic collapse bring war to Western Europe again? Yes, but I doubt it will happen. No one has anything to gain from a great power shooting war in Europe that can't more easily be gained through trade.

5) The number of crimes that could earn one the death penalty in western nations has gone from a whole raft of items to a very few (murder, possibly treason, possibly child rape). And in most European nations you simply can't *get* the death penalty no matter how heinous the crime. A century or two ago, you could get the death penalty for insulting the crown!

True. But we are still in fact using the death penalty as the final act of insult and injury in a series of injustices.

Okay but that doesn't change the fact that Western Europe, to a country, has abandoned the death penalty. Nor does it change the fact that number of crimes for which one could get the death penalty has gone from multiple to a very few.

6) In the west, marital rape has gone from 'just the way things are' to a criminal offense. Spousal abuse has gone from a punchline on 'The Honeymooners' to something no sit-com would *ever* put in because it is socially unacceptable (again, that doesn't mean it never happens just that when it does, the abuser is not going to find a sympathetic ear when he claims that 'she had it coming').
[COLOR="DarkOliveGreen"]
[B]You do know that marital rape and spousal abuse continue in large numbers and most likely affect/have affected someone you know, including yours truly. "One in four women (25%) has experienced domestic violence in her lifetime."

Yes, I'm aware of it but it is no longer socially acceptable. The point isn't that marital rape *never* happens or that spousal abuse *never* happens. It is that it is no longer socially acceptable in the English speaking world or Western Europe *at all*.

7) Spanking, in the west, has gone from 'this is how you raise children' to child abuse. If half of what I endured as a child happened to a kid today, that kid would be removed from the home.

Funny, one of my students is writing about this (others have). It's clear she's struggling with whether or not to continue this with her own children.

Okay, here's an example of what I'm talking about. Your student is struggling with this, my mother didn't struggle with it. She made me walk into a hospital on a broken leg because I had a hairline fracture and I could not tell her what I had done. If she had pulled that kind of stunt just 10 years later (this was 1981), chances are the doctor would have reported her to CPS.

8) War has gone from something noble and 'the aspiration of every man and nation' to something repellant to large numbers of people.
[B]
[COLOR="DarkOliveGreen"]As much as I really want to believe this, how can I when main stream films now resemble a hybrid of video games and porn films - thread bare, derivative and scant dialogue and character development for the sole purpose of taking the viewer to each new orgy of violence (war-driven or otherwise). For example, I just saw the trailer for Immortals last night at the gym. It seemed to me like one extended battle scene that picked up where 300 left off. Please tell me how many top grossing straight-dramas (adult and not a comedy) you can find that don't have at least one act of glorified violence in it:

I didn't say that people weren't getting vicarious thrills from violent movies, I said that, for instance, Western Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia no longer consider war part and parcel of their national pride. At the start of WW I, young men poured out to fight seeking glory they were *eager* to sign up and go fight. That doesn't happen as often any more. All of this can be true even IF the top grossing movies are all violent. Would you rather have people watching violent movies or playing violent video games or engaging in actual trench warfare? Another item. Consider the body counts of wars. While American presidents are too eager to send kids into combat, they are also VERY sensitive to the body counts in ways they weren't before. We are also far more restrained in warfare than we were.

Consider that no President could survive an American casualty total like WW II (407K), the Civil War (650K) and Vietnam (58K). An American president who sent kids into combat and broke the 10K casualty mark would probably be in for a very tough election cycle unless the US had been attacked. Also consider that nothing like the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo could happen again. Yes, I know, lots of people were killed in both the Second Gulf and Afghanistan wars but no Iraqi or Afghani city was bombed anywhere *near* what Dresden or Tokyo endured in WW II. Nothing even close. Dresden was reduced to rubble. Then there's this number--zero. That is the number of times a nuclear weapon has been used in anger since the August of 1945. We *could* have used them in Korea but we didn't. We *could* have used them in Vietnam--and even considered it--but we didn't. We *could* have used it in Afghanistan-and yet again we didn't. Neither has anyone else. Israel could solve its Iranian problem with a nuclear bomb but it has restrained from doing so. India and Pakistan have fought three wars in just over 60 years and have managed not to go nuclear. Then there's the war that *didn't* happen--the Soviet Union never crossed into West Germany which almost *certainly* would have resulted in a nuclear exchange. Have there been wars between 1945 and 2011? yes. None of them have involved nuclear weapons even though the United States has lots of them.

Has it expanded, or have alternate realities allowed us to detach from violence and its consequences even more? Whether or not we want to claim an absolute state of paradise, if we don't pursue Utopia, is dystopia always the default? And does dystopia, or the idea of it, scare us less? Does it feel more comfortable and more in sync with our natures?

I think that if you want a dystopia, work for a utopia. It's not that dystopias scare me less, it's that dystopias *terrify* me because my reading of history is that if you really, really want to get people to do absolutely horrific things to other people all you need do is convince your people that there's a plan that will make it all right, that the land of milk and honey is just over the hill and as soon as the people standing in the way or resisting the glorious plan to take us to utopia are removed from the scene, then paradise will be here on Earth.

Alexander Solzhentisyn, who knew a thing or two about what happens when nations become gripped by ideological fanatics said it best:

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.


This is not a dystopia, not even by half. How do I know? George Bush was a warmonger who approved the torture of people in contravention of international law. Barack Obama, for all his virtues, is a little too conciliatory to deal with the madness that is the Republican Congressional majority. John Boehner is a little tin-post oompa-loompa. Eric Cantor is a smarmy little twit.

Now, one of two things is going to happen. Either I'm going to be arrested and put in prison for those statements or I'm not. In a dystopia, I would NEVER write those things about the national leadership because I know what would happen to me. People in North Korea, if they *had* Internet access, would never dare to say something like that about either Kim the Elder or Kim the Younger. America is far from a perfect society but I'll take the US over North Korea, Iran or Saudi Arabia.

[quote]
As far as your paradise or purgatory question, I think neither. But I do think that now is a better time to be alive, for larger numbers of humanity, ever. Even in poor nations the average life expectancy has crossed over the 40 year mark and in rich nations it is pushing up toward 90. At the end of the 18th century the average lifespan was ~37 years. At the end of the 19th it was about 45. At the end of the twentieth it was about 75. We have almost *doubled* the number of years people live on average in about a century and almost trebled it in about two centuries.

[B]Actually, that trend is reversing and will no doubt continue to reverse, "particularly among women."

Actually that trend is reversing in the United States. The trend continues in Japan, Canada, Germany, England, France, Spain, and Belgium. It is reversing in the United States and it is doing so for reasons that are both predictable *and* fixable.

[COLOR="DarkOliveGreen"]Well, we know literacy is tied to crime, and we know we are filling prison beds with amazing numbers here in the U.S. "One in every 31 adults, or 7.3 million Americans, is in prison, on parole or probation, at a cost to the states of $47 billion in 2008, according to a new study....Only Medicaid spending grew faster than state corrections spending."

I've been teaching since 1985 (another frightening statistic in itself), and those is purely non-scientific and empirical, I am seeing problems with vocabulary, reading levels, understanding grammatical concepts like fragments and run ons and other issues that I have not seen to this degree of seriousness. Whether it's in offering the correct pronunciation of the word "library" (not lie-berry), or the introduction of a word like "gist" or simply explaining to my students that cutting and pasting from an encyclopedia is not researched writing, I am amazed at the education my adult students didn't get and what the implications are for this going forward.

Again, happening for very predictable reasons and of the major industrialized nations ONLY in the United States. We are the outliers in the overall trend.

[B]I'm really most curious about this question of designing ourselves out of our natures. I'm curious about the purpose and power of visions and alternative presentations of "reality." Can we redesign ourselves? Should we? And are our visions like Rawls' intrinsically important to growth evolution, or are they just another alternate reality, another distraction?

I do not think we can, nor do I think we should try. I think we reform what we can and ameliorate that which cannot be reformed for whatever systemic reason.

Cheers
Aj

[SoNotHer]

I appreciate your comments and your perspective. And I think many would cheer the "glass half full" pov. I do not have time today to respond again. Unfortunately, I have something rather unpleasant and unavoidable to deal with right now. But suffice to say, counter claims can be made.

One specific point of order - yes, life expectancy is decreasing in the United States (where I live), but it has long been decreasing in other countries like Russia. And after the Fukushima Daiichi explosion, I would withhold any proclamation about life expectancy in Japan. The short and long-term effects of that melt-through are far greater than we know.


"But that is not witch burning. It isn't. That isn't any of a number of tortures used by, just to pick an example, the Inquisition in Western Europe. It also isn't widespread. It is vanishingly improbable that anyone reading these words lives in fear that the church will burst through their door and drag them kicking and screaming to their doom with no due process of law just because someone said "my dog died, she's a witch!"

Please, please, please understand that violence or other social unpleasantness isn't a binary switch. The logic you appear to be using above is that if there is ANY violence or torture then violence and torture have not been reduced. But that doesn't work. Let's say that there were 15K homicides in the US last year and 10,000 this year. Would that not be an improvement? Or should we say that 10,000 murders is the same as 15,000 and so nothing has improved? I would argue that the fact that witch burning is *unknown* in the West and hasn't happened either in Western Europe or North American in about 200 years! This can be true even IF water boarding is still going on. What's more, look at the difference of reaction--in the West--to water boarding now and witch burning (or lynching) in the past. I'll take lynching first. Within the lifetime of my parents (born in 1922) lynching went from a Saturday or Sunday afternoon diversion for the whole family (presuming the family was white) to a *crime*. People used to send *postcards* of lynchings and now anyone even suggesting doing so would regret it immediately. Consider that the men who killed James Byrd in Texas were convicted of murder while their grandfathers would have walked for the same crime (probably their fathers as well). That is vast improvement. Isn't one lynching in 1997 an *improvement* over 10 lynchings in 1907? I would say that is a fantastic improvement.



Much the same applies here. Again, I am not saying that violence or cruelty has disappeared. I AM saying that it has *drastically* been reduced and become far *less* socially acceptable. Michael Vick went to jail for dog fighting. In 1940 he would never have even had a run-in with the law over dog fighting. Does dog fighting still go on? Regrettably, yes. Is it legal in the United States or Western Europe? No. Is it socially acceptable? In most communities, no. Does that mean that dog fighting never occurs anywhere on the planet? No. Does that mean that dog fighting is socially unacceptable *everywhere* on the planet? No. It doesn't have to be either there's no murders or there's a bloodbath, there's either no animal cruelty or it is rampant, there's either no witch burning or torture is ubiquitous and socially acceptable.



Wait, are you putting the potential economic collapse on the same category as war? Sure, this long peace *may* end in 5 minutes but every minute that it continues is *still* the longest contiguous peace that Western Europe has seen since the height of the Roman Empire. I'm not talking about internal harmony nor am I talking about economic prosperity, I'm talking about war. Could an economic collapse bring war to Western Europe again? Yes, but I doubt it will happen. No one has anything to gain from a great power shooting war in Europe that can't more easily be gained through trade.



Okay but that doesn't change the fact that Western Europe, to a country, has abandoned the death penalty. Nor does it change the fact that number of crimes for which one could get the death penalty has gone from multiple to a very few.



Yes, I'm aware of it but it is no longer socially acceptable. The point isn't that marital rape *never* happens or that spousal abuse *never* happens. It is that it is no longer socially acceptable in the English speaking world or Western Europe *at all*.



Okay, here's an example of what I'm talking about. Your student is struggling with this, my mother didn't struggle with it. She made me walk into a hospital on a broken leg because I had a hairline fracture and I could not tell her what I had done. If she had pulled that kind of stunt just 10 years later (this was 1981), chances are the doctor would have reported her to CPS.



I didn't say that people weren't getting vicarious thrills from violent movies, I said that, for instance, Western Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia no longer consider war part and parcel of their national pride. At the start of WW I, young men poured out to fight seeking glory they were *eager* to sign up and go fight. That doesn't happen as often any more. All of this can be true even IF the top grossing movies are all violent. Would you rather have people watching violent movies or playing violent video games or engaging in actual trench warfare? Another item. Consider the body counts of wars. While American presidents are too eager to send kids into combat, they are also VERY sensitive to the body counts in ways they weren't before. We are also far more restrained in warfare than we were.

Consider that no President could survive an American casualty total like WW II (407K), the Civil War (650K) and Vietnam (58K). An American president who sent kids into combat and broke the 10K casualty mark would probably be in for a very tough election cycle unless the US had been attacked. Also consider that nothing like the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo could happen again. Yes, I know, lots of people were killed in both the Second Gulf and Afghanistan wars but no Iraqi or Afghani city was bombed anywhere *near* what Dresden or Tokyo endured in WW II. Nothing even close. Dresden was reduced to rubble. Then there's this number--zero. That is the number of times a nuclear weapon has been used in anger since the August of 1945. We *could* have used them in Korea but we didn't. We *could* have used them in Vietnam--and even considered it--but we didn't. We *could* have used it in Afghanistan-and yet again we didn't. Neither has anyone else. Israel could solve its Iranian problem with a nuclear bomb but it has restrained from doing so. India and Pakistan have fought three wars in just over 60 years and have managed not to go nuclear. Then there's the war that *didn't* happen--the Soviet Union never crossed into West Germany which almost *certainly* would have resulted in a nuclear exchange. Have there been wars between 1945 and 2011? yes. None of them have involved nuclear weapons even though the United States has lots of them.



I think that if you want a dystopia, work for a utopia. It's not that dystopias scare me less, it's that dystopias *terrify* me because my reading of history is that if you really, really want to get people to do absolutely horrific things to other people all you need do is convince your people that there's a plan that will make it all right, that the land of milk and honey is just over the hill and as soon as the people standing in the way or resisting the glorious plan to take us to utopia are removed from the scene, then paradise will be here on Earth.

Alexander Solzhentisyn, who knew a thing or two about what happens when nations become gripped by ideological fanatics said it best:

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.


This is not a dystopia, not even by half. How do I know? George Bush was a warmonger who approved the torture of people in contravention of international law. Barack Obama, for all his virtues, is a little too conciliatory to deal with the madness that is the Republican Congressional majority. John Boehner is a little tin-post oompa-loompa. Eric Cantor is a smarmy little twit.

Now, one of two things is going to happen. Either I'm going to be arrested and put in prison for those statements or I'm not. In a dystopia, I would NEVER write those things about the national leadership because I know what would happen to me. People in North Korea, if they *had* Internet access, would never dare to say something like that about either Kim the Elder or Kim the Younger. America is far from a perfect society but I'll take the US over North Korea, Iran or Saudi Arabia.

As far as your paradise or purgatory question, I think neither. But I do think that now is a better time to be alive, for larger numbers of humanity, ever. Even in poor nations the average life expectancy has crossed over the 40 year mark and in rich nations it is pushing up toward 90. At the end of the 18th century the average lifespan was ~37 years. At the end of the 19th it was about 45. At the end of the twentieth it was about 75. We have almost *doubled* the number of years people live on average in about a century and almost trebled it in about two centuries.



Actually that trend is reversing in the United States. The trend continues in Japan, Canada, Germany, England, France, Spain, and Belgium. It is reversing in the United States and it is doing so for reasons that are both predictable *and* fixable.



Again, happening for very predictable reasons and of the major industrialized nations ONLY in the United States. We are the outliers in the overall trend.



I do not think we can, nor do I think we should try. I think we reform what we can and ameliorate that which cannot be reformed for whatever systemic reason.

Cheers
Aj

[Apocalipstic]

Any thoughts on whyyy the rate of violence is going down in the US? I think it because abortion is legal. If the Repugs get their way and it becomes OK to deny people bortions and birth control, will violence return in pre 80's numbers per capita?

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Apocalipstic

Any thoughts on whyyy the rate of violence is going down in the US? I think it because abortion is legal. If the Repugs get their way and it becomes OK to deny people bortions and birth control, will violence return in pre 80's numbers per capita?

Actually, the reason is that the United States is simply following the trend, albeit slower, that has been going on in Western Europe since the Enlightenment. For certain cultural reasons (some of it having to do with the Westward expansion) the United States has held on to its reluctance to surrender the legitimate use of force to the government longer than other nations. The United States is the only major industrialized nation that seems to still believe in 'frontier' (read ad hoc) justice. In Canada and Western Europe people have accepted that if someone breaks in your house, you call the cops. You don't go hunting for them and you don't pull out your hand cannon and start blasting away. In the United States, non-trivial numbers of people still live 'as if' they are on the frontier where there might not *be* a sheriff. They believe this even *if* they live in a major metropolitan area.

While the overall trend is downward in the nation whose geographical center is 38 00 N, 97 00 W, we will still lag behind Western Europe probably for the rest of my life.

Cheers
Aj

[Apocalipstic]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

Actually, the reason is that the United States is simply following the trend, albeit slower, that has been going on in Western Europe since the Enlightenment. For certain cultural reasons (some of it having to do with the Westward expansion) the United States has held on to its reluctance to surrender the legitimate use of force to the government longer than other nations. The United States is the only major industrialized nation that seems to still believe in 'frontier' (read ad hoc) justice. In Canada and Western Europe people have accepted that if someone breaks in your house, you call the cops. You don't go hunting for them and you don't pull out your hand cannon and start blasting away. In the United States, non-trivial numbers of people still live 'as if' they are on the frontier where there might not *be* a sheriff. They believe this even *if* they live in a major metropolitan area.

While the overall trend is downward in the nation whose geographical center is 38 00 N, 97 00 W, we will still lag behind Western Europe probably for the rest of my life.

Cheers
Aj

I wonder of that has anything to do with who settled this country and the mentality passed down.

Very interesting! TU for the thread!