Todd Suomela's Library tagged violence →  View Popular, Search in Google

Treads familiar ground but has some interesting references.

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"Battle Royale and The Hunger Games are young adult novels in which governments force teenagers to kill each other. Comparing these books to classic works by William Golding and Robert Sheckley suggests that, while becoming more skeptical about governments, we've become more trusting about our own nature."

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"Even if we don’t fully understand the reasons for the decline in rates of violence, the decline is real, and Pinker describes it vividly and lucidly. He nonetheless worries, as well he should, that his audience will not remember this Good News. Some parts of it have been told before. For instance, a commission appointed by Lyndon Johnson to explain the civil disorders of the 1960s reported that violence in the United States had dropped greatly over the course of its history. Though noted by the media at the time, that information was soon forgotten, and so the surprise on Pinker’s book tour. "

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How strong can anyone defending those causes be? These people are weak and pathetic, and they’re getting weaker. And boy, are they showing it. Way to gear up with combat helmets and the submachine guns, fellas, to take on a bunch of co-eds sitting Indian-style. Maybe after work you can go break up a game of Duck-Duck-Goose at the local Chuck E Cheese. I’d bring the APC for that one.

Bravo to those kids who hung in there and took it. And bravo for standing up and showing everyone what real strength is. There is no strength without principle. You have it. They lost it. It’s as simple as that.

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This week the London School of Economics, Goldsmiths, the Imperial War Museum, British Academy together with openDemocracy are launching a series of lectures, film shows, book launches and discussion to explore and commemorate the fact that one hundred years ago this November, the world was irrevocably and significantly altered. The development of aerial bombardment, initially over Libya by an Italian pilot, would create and routinise a new kind of warfare. The character of violent conflict was transformed along with the legal and moral systems that made it intelligible.

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interview with Steven Pinker

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“Money is overthrown and abolished by blood.”

Oswald Spengler wrote these words more than a century ago in The Decline of the West. And while the imagery here may be a bit much, there’s something of it in the Occupy Wall Street protests.!"

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" The Bystander Effect is sometimes called The Genovese Syndrome, named for Kitty Genovese, a young woman who was murdered in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York 45 years ago this month. Her death wasn't just tragic. It was an indictment of humanity, as issued in the lead of The New York Times story.

Quote: “For more than half an hour, 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.” That story set the template for the tale of Genovese, irrefutable evidence of the dehumanizing effects of urban life.

But subsequent investigations have shown that story to be greatly exaggerated, and one of the most indefatigable investigators of the Genovese murder is Joseph De May, a lawyer, historian and resident of Kew Gardens. He’s studied the legal briefs and the court transcripts. He’s walked the scene of the crime. And he’s convinced he knows what really happened."

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"he shooting in Tucson was not an anomaly. It was an inevitability, and as long as we play this foolish game of "both sides are just as bad," it will be inevitable again. "

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"If you’re a minority within an aggressive majority that controls the military, being armed with small arms isn’t going to stop an all out assault. It might deter occasional forays (as it did in the south), but framing gun rights as a way to help ensure protection from racism as a community is just not an argument I can buy after reading about Tulsa. Because ultimately, as a minority, you’re in a smaller number, and if the greater majority is also armed, there’s a pretty good chance an all out war means the smaller band is at a tremendous disadvantage."

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"When Americans begin routinely complaining about how they hate their government and don't trust their leaders, it may be time to look warily at the homicide rate."

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"Dr Steve Hall and Dr Craig McLean, claim in the latest international journal Theoretical Criminology that homicide rates are significantly higher in nations in neo-liberal politics where free market forces are allowed free rein, such as the USA, but are significantly lower in nations governed by social-democratic policies which still characterise most Western European nations."

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Contrasting the virtue of the rule of law with the idea of civility?

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"The primary problem with the political discourse of the right in today's America isn't that it incites violence per se. It's that it implants and reinforces paranoid fears about the government and conservatism's domestic adversaries."

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"The tea party and the loudest, most strident voices of anti-abortion politics love to flirt with the idea of armed revolution. This is, for the most part, just adolescent foolishness -- a kind of fantasy play-acting that can be summed up in a single word:

Wolveriiiiiines!

By pretending to believe that America is on the verge of collapse into a totalitarian tyranny, they can pretend to themselves that they are the vanguard of a courageous resistance. The Red Dawn fantasy isn't all that different from any other childhood fantasy about what if there were dragons? And what if I was brave and good and strong? And what if I slew the dragon and everybody cheered for me because I was brave and good and strong and I slew the dragon? Wouldn't that be cool?"

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