161–170 of 188 posts
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One person's killing is another's murder. The act is the same regardless. There is no innocent self defense in war.
> "The act is the same regardless." I think most would say context matters.
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Taleb seems to be criticising stuff Pinker didn't really say. Pinker's arguments are mostly look at this graph / dataset, haven't the numbers gone down, maybe this is why and he isn't really trying to do sophisticated statistical analysis generally. Taleb then attacks and says he hasn't done sophisticated statistical analysis but that's not really Pinker's point.
But isn't Taleb's core criticism precisely the lack of rigorous statistics backing Pinker's claims? I mean you can't just write a book with claims in it backed by pretty graphs and data and then go "sorry, was never meant to be hard science lol". Because then we're in bullshitting territory, unless I missed your point?
You can get his argument in about 10 mins in his talks - here's one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjT4HlNJNgI The book is much the same argument but with more data.
Taleb has an argument that purely doing stats on war deaths we could be in a quiet patch before carnage as usual. The arguments against this are qualitative stuff like the spread of democracy, the internet, cellphones, the global economy etc which Pinker deals with and Taleb kind of ignores.
As an aside https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/25/skin-in-the-ga... is quite funny on taleb/pinker if you like that kind of thing
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I'm not talking about whether or not people enjoy the act of taking another person's life. Obviously, some people do. I am talking about bragging about it. If you ever hear someone making these kinds of claims loudly at a bar, you can bet your next paycheck they never left the FOB.
I don't doubt that betting against it is a good bet. But I do doubt there is zero intersection between braggart and people who enjoy killing.
Theodore Roosevelt, an admitted war enthusiast, once said: "A just war is in the long run far better for a man's soul than the most prosperous peace."
Do you have any insight or references I could read that would help me understand why someone would feel this way?
The work is flawed, and I believe one passage had a disputed claim of plagiarism, but this work still explores these issues better than I have seen elsewhere.
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I don't doubt that betting against it is a good bet. But I do doubt there is zero intersection between braggart and people who enjoy killing.
Perhaps you would accept essentially zero in that case.
I don't mean any offense by this, I'm trying to say it delicately, but I think "anybody who brags about killing in combat is lying" is something of 'white lie', probably earnestly believed by most who repeat it, meant to preserve the reputation of combat veterans as a whole by discrediting any veteran who would be so tactless as to brag about killing. I believe it's basically a way of credibly stating "this person who's making the rest of us look bad by association does not represent us."
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Jordan Peterson has said similar along the lines of "we are all capable of becoming a guard at a Nazi concentration camp".
That's largely a different issue, isn't it? The excitement of war isn't involved in being a prison guard.
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Perhaps you would accept essentially zero in that case.
I think it's a small minority, but probably not as rare as you make it out to be: https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-people-are-psychopa... I don't mean any offense by this, I'm trying to say it delicately, but I think "anybody who brags about killing in combat is lying" is something of 'white lie', probably earnestly believed by most who repeat it, meant to preserve the reputation of combat veterans as a whole…
This article resonated with me. I was a Marine (no combat), didn't like it, but knew and respected the hell out of people who made a career out of it. I learned several lessons in the service, many of which people don't want to talk about. It takes only a few armed and motivated men to dominate hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. So disarmament and pacifism is not a workable strategy until the day we start program…
Statehood and by extension society is pretty much defined by the "monopoly on violence" [1]. As much as I dislike it, it is a pretty much a law of physics, if you you don't have a monopoly on violence someone else will, some one must wield it, power vacuums will be filled. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
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That's largely a different issue, isn't it? The excitement of war isn't involved in being a prison guard.
Nobody signs the dotted line to sit in a tower or stand around at a checkpoint for twelve hours a day, but even the gunners have to go to the motor pool to PMCS the vehicles every once in a while. Perhaps the specific, historical role of "concentration camp guard" was a job fulfilled by a specific section of the SS, but the underlying point remains. They were not any less human than you are. This makes people uncomfo…
Few people sign the dotted line for what's described in the article either, it's something that happens after they get there, and doesn't happen to a guard in the middle of controlled territory.
> They were not any less human than you are.
But for completely different reasons than the thrill of violence and war-fighting.
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The same phrase you quoted resonated with me. South Africa does have some violent crime. I don't know how it relates to other countries. We are fourth on the list when it comes to expenditure on private security per capita[1]. That's not all we spend money on. Next week a contractor is coming to fit an electric fence around our block of flats. Most homes now have high walls, alarms, sensor of all sorts. I grew up in…
Why don’t vigilantes solve this, assuming the State refuses to do so? It would certainly be cheaper to redirect some of the passive and defensive security expenditure to intelligence and targeted killing.
More to your question. Occasionally frustrations boil over and communities take the law into their own hands [1][2]. This is the other extreme to the criminals.
[1]https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/limpopo-mob-kills-su...
[2]https://www.iol.co.za/news/suspected-thief-dies-in-hail-of-s...