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biological contributions to violence may be greatly outweighed by the sociological.
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To reduce male violence, it is not sufficient to reform men, as the defenders of the male warrior hypothesis recommend. Nor will it suffice to empower women. This will reduce domestic violence, but not war, because women can be as aggressive as men. Warfare did not decline precipitously with women's suffrage, and during recent conflicts with Russia, 43 percent of Chechen suicide bombers have been women. Crucially, we must reduce the incentives for violence.
Back in June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Californian law banning the sale of violent videogames to children was unconstitutional because it violated the right to free speech.
However, the ruling wasn't unanimous. Justice Stephen Breyer filed a dissenting opinion. Unfortunately, it contains a whopping misuse of neuroscience.
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Breyer says (on page 13 of his bit)
Cutting-edge neuroscience has shown that “virtual violence in video game playing results in those neural patterns that are considered characteristic for aggressive cognition and behavior.”
He then cites this fMRI study from 2006. It's from the same group as this one I wrote about recently. -
does this study show that playing violent games causes aggressive brain activity? Not exactly. By which I mean "no".
They scanned 13 young men playing a shooter game. The main finding was that during "violent" moments of the game, activity in the rostral ACC and the amygdala activity falls - 1 more annotation(s)...
"[On miracles supposedly being existence for a good god] Suppose that the evil-god hypothesis is true. This malignant being may not want us to know of his existence. In fact, it may help him maximize evil if he deceives us about his true character. An evil and omnipotent being will have no difficulty duping human beings into believing he is good. Taking on a ‘good’ guise, he might appear in one corner of the world, revealing himself in religious experiences and performing miracles in response to prayers, and perhaps also giving instructions regarding what his followers should believe. He might then do the same in another part of the globe, with the exception that the instructions he leaves regarding what should be believed contradict what he has said elsewhere. Our evil being could then stand back and watch the inevitable conflict develop between communities to whom he has now misleadingly revealed himself, each utterly convinced by their own stock of miracles and religious experiences that the one true all-good god is on their side. Here we have a recipe for ceaseless conflict, violence and suffering."
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Following on the Problem of Good (past post):
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One may still raise this objection: ‘But surely nothing could be worse than hell as traditionally conceived? Why doesn’t an evil god just send us straight to hell? ’ However, as already noted, a mirror puzzle faces those who believe in a good god. Given that a heavenly environment would be profoundly more joyful than this, why doesn’t a good god send us straight to heaven? Why are so many of us allowed to go through such appalling suffering here?...
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The Supreme Court has struck down a California law that would have banned selling "violent" video games to children, a case balancing free speech rights with consumer protection.
The 7-2 ruling Monday is a victory for video game makers and sellers, who said the ban -- which had yet to go into effect -- would extend too far. They say the existing nationwide, industry-imposed, voluntary rating system is an adequate screen for parents to judge the appropriateness of computer game content.
The state says it has a legal obligation to protect children from graphic interactive images when the industry has failed to do so.
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"The First Amendment does not disable government from helping parents make such a choice here -- a choice not to have their children buy extremely violent, interactive games," he wrote.
At issue is how far constitutional protections of free speech and expression, as well as due process, can be applied to youngsters.
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Justice Clarence Thomas also dissented, saying the law's requirement of having parents purchase the games for their underage children was reasonable. "The freedom of speech as originally understood, does not include a right to speak to minors, without going through the minors' parents or guardians," he said.
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Gay rights campaigners have urged mosque leaders in east London to ban homophobic clerics from using their premises, following a 21% rise in gay hate crime in the area.
Activists, including journalist Julie Bindel and Pride trustee Colm Howard-Lloyd, said some preachers at the East London Mosque and the London Muslim Centre had "created an atmosphere in which hate is socially acceptable; they have spread a message in which maiming and violence is the most dutiful, honourable, devout thing to do".
Their concerns follow the £100 fine given to Mohammed Hasnath, who put up "Gay-Free Zone" stickers in the area; the case of Oliver Hemsley, who was paralysed from the neck down in August 2008 following a vicious attack; and Metropolitan police figures showing that gay hate crime had risen in the borough of Tower Hamlets – where the mosque and adjoining centre are located – from 67 attacks to 81 in a year.
The knowledge that the protesters in Egypt were equipped with hand held video cams and cellphone cameras is thought to have prevented brutality in many instances. And certain nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations have deemed distributing cheap video-recorders like Flip-Cams and helping to train citizen journalists in desperate parts of the developing world a priority. Cisco donated 1 million of its Flip-Cams to NGOs around the world to do exactly that. Bill Clinton has even endorsed the idea.
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people are more prone to despicable behavior if it’s masked by a crowd. So could widespread knowledge that the identity of mob participants might be made known via portable technology help reduce crime?
religion is encouraged when people feel threatened. You can see this clearly in some new research from a team at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan.
They interviewed 291 students from 4 different universities in Karachi. Almost all (90%) had been exposed to terrorist violence on the television or in conversation with their parents. A staggering 46% knew someone who had been injured or killed in a terrorist attack, and 26% had actually been personally exposed to such an attack.
When asked what strategies they used to cope with the stress, the most popular answer was that they increased their faith in religion (the table shows average scores on a 0-4 scale).
Given that so much of the violence has religious overtones, such a response may seem paradoxical. On the other hand, it may help to explain why such violence perpetuates.
It is not that the media is not covering the protests in Wisconsin at all – but effective media coverage in the US at least, in my view, is as much about volume as it is about substantive coverage. That week, more prime-time slots and the bulk of the US national attention were given to Charlie Sheen and his crazy antics (whatever they were about, I am still not too sure) than to Libya and the rest of the Middle East, or more significantly, to a pertinent domestic issue, the teacher protests - not just in Wisconsin but also in other cities in the north-eastern part of the US.
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I return to the Guardian online site expressly to search for those elusive articles on Wisconsin. The main page has none. I click on News – US, and there are none. I click on ‘Commentary is Free’- US, and find one article on protests in Ohio. I go to the New York Times online site. Earlier, on my phone, I had seen one article at the bottom of the main page on Wisconsin. By the time I managed to get on my computer to find it again however, the NYT main page was quite devoid of any articles on the protests at all. I am stumped; clearly, I have to reconfigure my daily news sources and reading diet.
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It is not that the media is not covering the protests in Wisconsin at all – but effective media coverage in the US at least, in my view, is as much about volume as it is about substantive coverage. That week, more prime-time slots and the bulk of the US national attention were given to Charlie Sheen and his crazy antics (whatever they were about, I am still not too sure) than to Libya and the rest of the Middle East, or more significantly, to a pertinent domestic issue, the teacher protests - not just in Wisconsin but also in other cities in the north-eastern part of the US.
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the power of dictatorships comes from the willing obedience of the people they govern
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Gene Sharp is no Che Guevara but he may have had more influence than any other political theorist of his generation.
His central message is that the power of dictatorships comes from the willing obedience of the people they govern - and that if the people can develop techniques of withholding their consent, a regime will crumble.
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Sharp provides in his books a list of 198 "non-violent weapons", ranging from the use of colours and symbols to mock funerals and boycotts.
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Have you heard about Vakkali, the Buddhist sage who attained Nirvana while slicing his own throat? Of all the major faith traditions, Buddhism is often seen as the most peaceful, but Buddhist Warfare exposes its darker side. The eight essays in the collection describe twisted teachings on phenomena such as “Soldier-Zen”, and atrocities carried out by groups such as the Buddhist cult army of Faqing. In 515 AD, Faqing declared the arrival of the new Buddha and led more than 50,000 men to war. “When a soldier killed a man he earned the title of first-stage Bodhisattva (Buddha-to-be). The more he killed the more he went up the echelon towards sainthood . . . the insurgents were given an alcoholic drug that made them crazy to the extent that fathers and sons no longer recognized each other and didn’t think twice before killing each other; the only thing that mattered was killing.” Buddhist Warfare forms an accurate history of violence in the name of religion. Its most shocking material is the studies of various sutras that justify killing with detailed reference to the Buddha’s central philosophical tenets. The book therefore presents a uniquely Buddhist “heart of darkness”.
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Bernard Faure states that the aim of the collection was to press Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism to face up to the worst aberrations and silences within the tradition. Faure accuses many contemporary Buddhist apologists of taking the “high metaphysical or moral ground” rather than recognizing that in Buddhism, as in all the faiths, there is a constant struggle between light and darkness, between the promise of release and “the violence that lies at the heart of reality (and of each individual)”.
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A Culture of Poverty
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When we talk "culture," as it relates to African-Americans, we assume a kind of exclusivity and suspension of logic. Stats are whipped out (70 percent of black babies born out of wedlock) and then claims are tossed around cavalierly, (black culture doesn't value marriage.) The problem isn't that "culture" doesn't exist, nor is it that elements of that "culture" might impair upward mobility.
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It defies logic to think that any group, in a generationaly entrenched position, would not develop codes and mores for how to survive in that position. African-Americans, themselves, from poor to bourgeois, are the harshest critics of the street mentality. Of course, most white people only pay attention when Bill Cosby or Barack Obama are making that criticism. The problem is that rarely do such critiques ask why anyone would embrace such values. Moreover, they tend to assume that there's something uniquely "black" about those values, and their the embrace.
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November 25th is "The International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women".
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With the emphasis on men's violence against women, this campaign discursively reinforces the stereotype of men as iniquitous aggressors and women as helpless victims and threatens to replace the complex picture violence between and within genders with a simplistic view.
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