81–90 of 102 posts
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I'm not a historian but isn't there some ambiguity here? If war hadn't already been declared by the relevant governments, you can't be killing in the name of war.
You don’t want to open up that can of worms. Thousands of war deaths would qualify as murders if you used a declaration as the deciding factor.
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I once described the caste system as “racism invented by people who look alike” and my girlfriend from Madya Pradesh (Central Indian Province) thought that was very apt. Humans are great, until you let them form groups, once that happens you’ll get tribalism and prejudice almost every time as far as I can tell. Even sports’ fans will beat eachother up sometimes.
I'm increasingly hearing the idea (from Hindu nationalists?) that the caste system was the invention of the British, not anything indigenous. If anyone's in the know, I'd be curious to hear what's broadly accepted among historians nowadays.
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wait till you learn how the same stories are told in different countries. its different everywhere.
...like when you see German museums talking over and over about the "period of migration". First time I saw that it took me a while to understand what they were saying... "Oh, that's what the Anglosphere calls //the barbarian invasions//". (...or, I think every country has a statue of its native son who invented the television. Some are people I'd never heard of.)
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I'm not a historian but isn't there some ambiguity here? If war hadn't already been declared by the relevant governments, you can't be killing in the name of war.
You don’t want to open up that can of worms. Thousands of war deaths would qualify as murders if you used a declaration as the deciding factor.
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TBH in many places in the US you still have regular shootings, and bullets also do get into homes. Residential homes are also built way more crappily now than the log cabins of old times. So nothing much changed about the shooting part. Compare it to Europe which has deweaponized itself.
Compare it to what? People are going to people. Just because your continent doesn't have the same gun laws as the US doesn't mean there's any less crime - gun related or otherwise. There are quite a few Europeans that wish they had guns so they weren't stabbed, dashed with acid, or beheaded.
There isn't a pro-gun-rights movement to speak of in the UK. Not sure about the rest of Europe.
As JacobSuperslav said, acid attacks and beheadings are extremely rare events in Europe, and aren't at all representative of the average murder. This is why they make international news. Stabbings are of course more common.
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> And they are concentrated in certain types of places (e.g., poor urban ghetto) such that the parts of the country that aren't these places have vanishingly small probabilities of being hurt by a shooting. I said "many places" not "all places". Indeed, shootings are concentrated to a few areas with high crime rates. Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out. I replied to an anecdote abou…
> I said "many places" not "all places"... Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out. I agree that there is some non-zero number of people in the U.S. who have to watch out for gun murder. The point I'm trying to make is that they make up a really small proportion of the population. Anecdotes are fun. > As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges…
That is correct, but please note that it's still a significant component. In the 15-24 age group, the top 1 cause has 13.4k deaths, the top 2 has 5.7k, and homicide has 5.1k. That's not very far away in relative terms.
i would enjoy a VR game where i could sit in an old tavern while i drink an actual beer
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You don’t want to open up that can of worms. Thousands of war deaths would qualify as murders if you used a declaration as the deciding factor.
What's the danger in "opening that can of worms"? IMHO the world might be a better place if there were a lot less killing, whether it's in the context of a war or not. Some killings throughout history are certainly justifiable or excusable, but it seems far more dangerous to me to stick one's head in the sand and avoid reflecting on whether each killing really needed to happen, or if the victim could reasonably have…
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acids and beheadings? these happened a few times in the last decade on the entire continent
Stabbing is fairly frequent though, given that you can use basic tools or kitchen utensils for it. The main point still stands though; guns don't cause violence and death, people do. It's the attitude and circumstances, not the tools.
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Nobody is doubting it was an act of violence. The oddity is that they're calling it an act of murder as opposed to an act of war. Murder sounds like a bunch of criminals, which is a really one sided take. The british soldiers were there to destroy colonial military supplies. It may be technically correct, but you don't hear about how the GIs murdered a bunch of Nazis on the beaches of Normandy or whatever other war s…
I'm not a historian but isn't there some ambiguity here? If war hadn't already been declared by the relevant governments, you can't be killing in the name of war.
And by the way, when the British seized a Spanish fleet--which had imagined itself to be neutral--during the Napoleonic wars, their government stated that the United Kingdom had never been in the habit of starting wars with a declaration.